Is Trump Defying the Courts?

Maybe the foremost concern of the Trump 2.0 era is the question of whether he will, at some point, start defying the courts. I’ve written about it, as has just about everyone else. Now that we are nearly two months into his term, with many of his orders and initiatives tied up in litigation, it’s probably worth revisiting the issue.

Chris Geidner, a legal reporter who tracks high-profile litigation better than just about everybody, recently posted a thread on BlueSky arguing that the administration is generally following court orders, and that the persistent belief that they can and will ignore the courts risks undermining legal efforts to rein Trump in.

Rolling Stone, on the other hand, just reported that Trump officials were, on the express orders of the administration, ignoring a court order concerning anti-DEI initiatives.

So, who’s right? Are the institutions holding, or is this the constitutional crisis we all feared? The answer, unfortunately, is a little bit of both. To really understand it, you need to ask yourself: what does defying the courts actually look like?

A lot of journalists (and lawyers) seem to think that Trump will engage in a grand display of defiance. A big press conference where he announces that he will no longer be obeying court orders. Trump might fantasize about that sort of thing, but he probably doesn’t have the political capital to pull it off. 

Instead, he is taking a subtler route: what the Trump administration has done, fairly consistently, is move so fast the courts can’t keep up.

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