“there is extraordinarily little support for the idea that the president could simply disregard orders from the courts. That is true across the public, according to recent polls, with more than 80 percent of Americans rejecting the idea.
I also found similar responses from an informal survey of conservative legal thinkers, including from those generally sympathetic or otherwise open to the administration’s legal positions.
“The Constitution implicitly requires the executive branch to … comply with judicial judgments when the executive is part of the case,” Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia and onetime clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told me.
“It’s never permissible for a president to defy a court order,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and legal analyst at the Manhattan Institute.”
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“There are other practical reasons for the Trump administration to stay on the right side of the courts.
“What’s laying in the background is that they probably perceive, rightly or wrongly, that they’re going to win 70, 60 percent of the time in the Supreme Court,” Prakash told me, referring to the array of ongoing disputes that may wind up before the justices. “So why would you want to trash the judiciary if you think you’re ultimately going to win most of the time?”
Just as important, if not more so, is that a confrontation between Trump and the courts would imperil the successful, decades-long project by Republicans and conservatives to shift the Supreme Court to the right. In just the last few years, the six GOP appointees have revamped constitutional law in a host of areas — from abortion to affirmative action to the administrative state — but there are plenty of issues that are still on conservatives’ wish list and facing action at the Supreme Court.”
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“None of this works particularly well if Trump ends up antagonizing potential swing-vote justices like Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett. As former Gov. Chris Christie recently noted to ABC News, “He’s going to tick off the Supreme Court so much that they may not give him everything he wants.””
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/28/trump-defy-courts-risk-00254813