President Donald Trump‘s sweeping use of executive power since returning to office has quickly hit a roadblock in the courts and sparked a showdown over presidential authority just four weeks into his second term.
Federal judges have temporarily blocked many of Trump’s actions around immigration, federal spending and other issues, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle and raising alarm over the looming power struggle between the executive and judicial branches.
The showdown has intensified in recent days as the president and other senior administration officials and allies step up attacks on federal judges. Critics warn of a potential constitutional crisis.
Trump has “a far, far more powerful vision of the executive, and it’s without precedent in our history,” said Adam Pulver, an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, which has sued to block several administration executive orders.
Trump has signed dozens of executive orders since taking office for a second time, and many haven’t been challenged. But some of Trump’s more controversial executive orders have encountered resistance in court from legal rights advocacy organizations, government watchdog groups and other opponents.
Lawsuits have held up a wide range of executive actions, including measures to crack down on illegal immigration, freeze federal funding, cut federal jobs and dismantle or eliminate agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
A White House spokesperson said the administration would prevail in court because all of its executive actions are “completely lawful.”
“Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful. Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people,” Harrison Fields, the White House spokesperson, said in a statement to Newsweek.
But Trump and some of his top advisers and allies have openly criticized court rulings in recent days, leading to speculation that the administration might defy decisions it disagrees with in legal battles that could go all the way to the Supreme Court.
In a recent social media post, Vice President JD Vance said “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Hours after Vance’s Feb. 9 statement on X, Trump criticized a federal judge’s decision to block the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a White House-endorsed initiative led by tech billionaire Elon Musk that is not a formal government agency—from accessing sensitive data at the Treasury Department.
“These statements from Trump and Vance, acting as if what the courts are doing are illegitimate, that’s a form of defiance,” said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Musk, who owns X, has also waded into the fray by criticizing the judge who blocked DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department. Musk called U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer “corrupt” and said the “worst 1 percent” of appointed judges should be fired every year. Republican Representative Eli Crane of Arizona said Tuesday on X that he was drafting articles of impeachment against Engelmayer.
The attacks on the courts from Trump and other Republicans have created “the specter of a lawless presidency that doesn’t want to comply with any kind of court measures restricting the executive branch,” said Harold Krent, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Conservative legal scholars and other experts dismissed concerns about a constitutional crisis, arguing that legal battles over executive orders happen in every administration. The Trump administration seems prepared to defend its executive actions in court, said Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“They anticipated that there would be legal challenges,” Jipping said. “Liberals and Democrats are going to challenge what Trump is doing.”
Adam White, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Vance’s criticism of the judicial branch was “quite disconcerting.” But he said it was too early to claim that the Trump administration was above the rule of law.
“It’s too soon to say that the Trump administration is actually defying anything. We have to let the process play out,” White said.
On Monday, a federal district court judge in Rhode Island ruled that the Trump administration defied his previous order to unfreeze billions in federal funding. The administration responded by appealing his Jan. 29 order to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Now we’ll have to see to what extent the courts can back up their orders, to ensure this government stays within legal boundaries,” Gerhardt said.
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