We are moving into the next phase of Donald Trump’s presidency. Phase 1 was the blitz of executive actions. Now comes the response from the other parts of the government — namely, the courts.A slew of judges, some of them Republican appointees, have frozen a number of the administration’s most aggressive actions: the destruction of U.S.A.I.D., the spending freeze, DOGE’s access to the Treasury payments system and the executive order to end birthright citizenship, to name just a few.The administration has largely — though not entirely — been abiding by these court decisions. Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance suggested it might stop. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he posted. Down that path lies a true constitutional crisis.So what happens if the Trump administration simply tells the courts to shove it? And what other pushback and opposition is the administration beginning to face across the government? Quinta Jurecic, a senior editor at Lawfare, joins me to talk it through.Mentioned:“The Situation: What’s Going on at the FBI?” by Benjamin WittesBook Recommendations:A Survivor’s Education by Joy NeumeyerThe Rebel by Albert CamusRace and Reunion by David W. BlightThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Why is the Trump administration facing court challenges?
I think we're beginning to move into the next phase of this Donald Trump term. Remember what Yuval Levin said in our episode last week. There's a rhythm to the presidency. Presidents begin their terms by unleashing their plans. For weeks and maybe months, the world is responding to them. They set the pace of events.
But soon, because they have exhausted what they can do unilaterally, or because they begin facing events and actors they do not control, or because of the very things they have done begin creating uncontrollable backlash, they must begin responding to the world. Donald Trump's second term began at, remember Steve Bannon's term here, muzzle velocity.
They acted and the world watched, its mouth agape. But actions create reactions and we're beginning to see them and to see how the Trump administration responds to those reactions. Trump delayed his tariffs after markets shuttered. So far, we are not seeing mass deportations.
We're seeing immigration arrests running at roughly Obama era levels, but being marketed and conducted with a gleeful cruelty. And we are now seeing the courts respond.
Tonight, a federal judge temporarily blocking President Donald Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it blatantly unconstitutional. Tonight, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from transferring three transgender women into a men's prison.
A temporary block on Trump's order to freeze federal grants and loans.
Temporarily blocking its buyout offer for federal employees. Is also pumping the brakes on Trump and Musk's plans to dismantle USAID.
The federal judge blocking Elon Musk's Department of Government efficiency from accessing sensitive Treasury Department records. I'm recording this on Monday, February 10th. All of this is moving extraordinarily fast. By the time you hear it, some of it may have changed. These freezes are not the final word. There are pause on the administration's actions while those actions are being litigated.
So far, the Trump administration is largely abiding by the court orders. If they began simply saying the court's authority is illegitimate, that would throw American politics into a genuine constitutional crisis. Can the president simply ignore the courts? Can he decide for himself what his powers are? And what can or will the courts do if he tries? Over the weekend, Vice President J.D.
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Chapter 2: What are the potential consequences if Trump ignores court orders?
The problem is that you actually have to bring the lawsuit after you've been fired. And that takes time. And then the lawsuit has to be litigated. And it takes time to put that together. It takes time to move it through the court. And so what has held back other presidents is really the fact that, you know, you try to fire this person, you're going to be...
grinding it out in court for a really long time, this is going to take up a lot of resources for the administration in litigating out these cases. They may be doing it because they don't care. They may be doing it because they want to argue. that these legal restrictions are actually unconstitutional in some way. That would not surprise me at all if they made that argument.
I think they are absolutely trying to set up some of those cases. And so it's really a question of previous administrations having been agreeing to be bound by the existing framework, if that makes sense. Whereas the Trump people have decided that they simply don't care and are going to smash through it. And the problem, as we've been discussing, is that that has a lot of follow-on effects.
But let's say the court cases come and you have a lot of these court cases succeed. What is the recourse? These people were fired. What, they get back pay? Do they get reinstated? Yeah.
I believe that they can receive their job back. So it is a question of, on the part of those people, do you actually really want to fight it out? All of these people are people who have... They have kids in school, kids in college. They have, you know, they have to worry about having insurance, right? Maybe they're having a baby. They have obligations. They have lives.
And so the question of how you should respond, I think, is necessarily for everyone going to be this balance of how do I weigh this? I mean, there were reports with USAID of the agency calling back people who have been stationed overseas within days. They have kids in school. They have families. They have lives.
And now everyone is just, their lives have been completely upended and they're struggling to figure out what is next. And it may well be that a significant number of these people say, you know, I'm just going to move on with my life. I don't want to spend, you know, the next five years of my life litigating my firing. Is it worth it as a matter of principle to fight this out?
I suspect for some people it will be. But again, you're going to have a lot of time that is elapsed in the interim.
It reminds me a little bit of the way that corporations fire people who are organizing on behalf of unions and know that they might lose a case at the NLRB later. But they've done the damage in the meantime, right? If they have to pay the cost of doing business and they have to pay a fine and maybe when the person gets their job back, so it goes, right?
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Chapter 3: How has the Trump administration's approach changed in its second term?
and get ready for this fight, which may not really start today, I think what you see happening here is early information and coordination movement to get ready for something like this a little bit down the road.
My one quibble with that is that I'm not sure I would say it is the sort of conservative legal movement that is spinning itself into that. I would say, you know, far right radical, because there is a more traditionally conservative legal movement that is very much not on board with this, in part because the conservative legal movement has been focused on, well, law, right?
You know, putting judges in these positions, and judges tend to like it when courts are powerful. I do agree with you that it seems like there's this sort of frenzy being spun up on Twitter among the sort of intellectuals in this corner, egging themselves into this position of real defiance.
And yet, as you say, when you actually look at the stuff that the administration has filed in court, it is way less gung-ho on that motion that I mentioned to allow Secretary Besson access to the Treasury systems, rather to clarify whether he does have access. The Justice Department actually notably included multiple paragraphs saying, we are complying with your order.
We would just like you to change it. And that is a real distinction from how Vance is talking. And I think what that points to is, you know, these are big, complicated organizations. There are a lot of points of friction along the way. This isn't a situation where Vance or Trump or Musk can kind of wave their hand and say, go ahead, defy a court order.
You need a Justice Department attorney in the courtroom or filing those briefs to, you know, be willing to stand there and get chewed out by the judge and potentially lose their bar card over these things.
And so while I don't think that that will, you know, save America in the grand scheme of things, I do think that it is a point of friction or of resistance, not in the hashtag resistance sense, but just in the sense of making it more difficult to push through that is really worth keeping an eye on here.
I guess we're really about to find out if Twitter is real life for this particular administration.
I think, unfortunately, the answer, we already know the answer is yes.
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Chapter 4: What legal and constitutional issues arise from Trump's executive actions?
Immediately after the Civil War and in the sort of subsequent years, Americans worked through their memories of the war individually and kind of collectively as a polity. The reason that I'm thinking about it right now and I've returned to it in recent days is because it's really about how
Americans struggled to build a multiracial democracy in the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and then how that fell apart during the redemption years, and how the memory of the war was rewritten and overridden by white Americans who essentially tried to write Black Americans out of that story. And again, I think in this moment where we are...
thinking and talking a lot about what it means to be American, what the American story means. I've been thinking about this more immediately in context of January 6th, that keeping in mind how these sort of dynamics of memory and politics have worked out in the past is a useful...
reminder that this is not the first time that we've gone through this it doesn't mean that it'll turn out particularly well but I do think that Blight does a really astonishing job in kind of setting out how that worked in the past in a way that at least for me has been comforting is not the right word perhaps but there's something that we can draw on there and knowing that this is not the first time that this has happened Quinta Jurassic thank you very much thanks for having me
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
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