The Opposition Is Already Growing

During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to the president.  

Read alongside Elon Musk’s and Vice President J. D. Vance’s apparent willingness to defy the courts, Trump’s rhetoric is a concerning sign about where this administration might be headed. But there is significance to the fact that the administration already has a hefty stack of court orders it might want to defy. Despite Trump’s effort to present himself as an agent of overwhelming force, he is encountering persistent and growing opposition, both from courts and from other pockets of civic life.

Litigants have sued the administration over the seemingly unlawful freezing of federal funds, the deferred-resignation program for civil servants, the destruction of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the handling of sensitive government data by Musk’s aides, the removal of scientific data from government websites, the attempt to write birthright citizenship out of the Constitution, the barring of transgender people from military service, the transfer of undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, and more.

[Read: The tasks of an anti-Trump coalition]

And now the court orders are coming, blocking the administration from pushing forward, or at the very least slowing its speed.

Courts have prevented Trump from dismissing a government watchdog without explanation and granted restraining orders barring the administration from slashing funds for crucial scientific research. They have prevented Musk’s team from meddling with Treasury Department systems and insisted that the government halt its transfer of an incarcerated transgender woman to a men’s prison. Four separate judges have issued orders requiring the government to stand down on its effort to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Litigation has also proved to be a valuable tool for prying loose key information from the administration, like the specifics of just what access Musk’s aides were given to the Treasury Department, and as a means of making legible to the public what Trump is trying to get away with. “It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Judge John Coughenour commented when issuing an injunction against the birthright-citizenship order. But, he went on, “in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

So far, there’s no indication that Trump has attempted to ignore Judge Coughenour’s injunction. In other cases, though, troubling signs have emerged of the administration’s laxity in following court orders, including multiple instances in which judges have found agencies to be in defiance of the court’s instructions and attempts by the government to find work-arounds. It’s not yet clear how much of this stems from chaos and incompetence and how much is a strategy by Trump and Musk, however clumsy, to force a confrontation with the judiciary. Either way, this approach endangers the health of the constitutional order—which may well be the point.

If the administration decides to launch an assault against the judiciary, it will be all the more important that a strong response comes not only from the courts themselves, but from Congress and the public. Trump is skilled at presenting himself as the indomitable voice of a true American majority, creating a facade of consensus aided by the startling quiescence of congressional Republicans. Dissent, both loud and quiet, can crack that facade and make an illegitimate power grab apparent for what it is.

Some of that dissent is already coming from inside the executive branch. Over the course of a bizarre three weeks, the administration encouraged federal workers who had not yet been fired to depart their posts under a “deferred resignation” program clearly modeled on the buyouts Musk offered to Twitter employees after his takeover of that company. (The program closed on Wednesday after it was briefly frozen, and then unfrozen, by a federal judge.) But if the goal was to persuade federal workers to depart on their own, the slipshod rollout and smarmy, dismissive tone—one FAQ provided by the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find “higher productivity jobs in the private sector”—may have backfired. The Subreddit r/fednews is buzzing with government employees expressing defiance. “Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit,” wrote one user. “I took an oath under this position to the American people.” In reference to OPM’s description of the program as a “fork in the road,” some federal employees adopted the spoon as a symbol of their opposition. Earlier this week, federal workers rallied at a protest outside the Capitol holding signs that read Public Service is a Badge of Honor!

In Congress, the Democratic minority, which entered this second Trump era cautiously, seems to be waking up. “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times in an interview published on February 2. Just two days later, though, Schumer was standing outside the Treasury Department leading a rally to protest Musk’s apparent takeover of the department’s sensitive payment systems. Democrats held the Senate floor for 30 hours to drag out the confirmation of Russ Vought, the architect of many of Trump’s most aggressive schemes, to head the Office of Management and Budget, and senators such as Brian Schatz of Hawaii have hinted at plans to escalate to even more dramatic procedural measures. “The roots of democracy are still strong,” Schatz told The New Yorker recently. “It depends on not just members of the legislative branch fighting back but there being a mass movement to back us up.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

This opposition movement will try to build on itself. The Democratic Party is taking more aggressive action in part because of an outraged constituency demanding that it speak up; that, in turn, may encourage Americans to push the party further. Spoon emoji, court orders, protests—all of these serve as indications that those who dissent are not alone. True, courageous leadership can emerge unexpectedly. Within the FBI, Acting Director Brian Driscoll has become a folk hero of sorts for his refusal to provide Justice Department leadership with the names of FBI agents to potentially be fired. Six Justice Department officials resigned yesterday rather than follow orders to dismiss the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: Granting the mayor a political favor would constitute “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent,” the acting leader of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued in a letter to Justice Department leadership, writing, “I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor” as an attorney. During a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a U.S. military installation in Germany, an eighth grader organized a walkout at her middle school to protest Hegseth’s attacks on diversity efforts within the military.

The fact is that Trump is an unpopular president who eked out a razor-thin plurality of the popular vote and whose party holds the slimmest of majorities in the House. So far, he has been able to avoid that inconvenient reality by relying on executive orders. But March 14 is approaching, when the federal government will run out of money and House Republicans—never a compliant group at the best of times—will need to organize to pass a funding bill in order to avoid a shutdown. The limitations of Trump’s attempts to rule by decree, and the inability of his party to govern, may then become unavoidably apparent.