President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders seems destined for a showdown at the Supreme Court. Members of Trump’s administration — including Vice President JD Vance and tech billionaire Elon Musk — are already raising the possibility of defying the court should it rule against the administration. This raises the stakes for the court: a ruling against Trump risks the executive branch’s defiance, which could damage the court’s legitimacy.

Will Trump comply with its rulings? What will be the consequences of defiance? These are questions not only of law, but also of politics.

There are many historical examples that shed light on what the political fallout might look like, but perhaps the best comes from the final months of Richard Nixon’s presidency, in 1974.

Forced into a corner, Nixon complied with the court’s ruling.

Nixon had secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office, with some of the recordings containing evidence about the Watergate cover-up. In April 1974, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski subpoenaed the recordings as part of his investigation. In U.S. v. Nixonthe Supreme Court ordered Nixon to hand over the tapes.

The court’s opinion, written by Nixon-appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger, left the president with two options. He could comply with the court and deal with the fallout. Or he could defy it and send the country into a constitutional crisis — something he apparently did privately consider.

The political context is important. By the time of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Nixon’s political capital had collapsed. His approval rating hovered around 24%and his fellow Republicans in Congress had abandoned him. Everyone — including the justices — knew that ignoring the court would probably result in Nixon’s impeachment and removal.

This put the court in a strong position politically, and Nixon in a weak one. Forced into a corner, Nixon complied with the court’s ruling. He reluctantly handed over the tapes and resigned two weeks later.

Nixon’s story makes clear that, in a possible confrontation between a president and the Supreme Court, public approval and congressional support are enormously important. Nixon had neither: everyone knew that defying the court would likely have led to impeachment and removal. Trump, on the other hand, retains strong support from Republican voters, even as his overall favorability has declined since assuming office. While Nixon’s co-partisans on Capitol Hill hung him out to dry, Trump’s are standing behind him. Congressional Republicans have bent the knee time and time again, seemingly allowing his administration to exercise even those powers, such as the power to appropriate funds, that the Constitution grants to the legislature.

Unlike Nixon, Trump will not face the threat of congressional impeachment and removal if he defies the court. Barring an extraordinary political event — such as an unprecedented rout in the 2026 midterms — that will remain the case for the rest of his term. That reality could embolden him.

If public consensus remains firm, a blatant defiance of the Supreme Court could be politically perilous for Trump.

But there is a second important issue: people’s expectations. Not only did Nixon have abysmal public support, but roughly half of Americans wanted him to leave office entirely. Fast-forward to today, Trump himself is not unpopular, but many of his policies are not particularly well liked. Ending birthright citizenship, abolishing executive agencies and expansions of presidential power have proved unpopular. And large shares believe that Trump is overstepping his presidential authority. Would enough of the Supreme Court’s swing votes, such as Chief Justice John Roberts, stick their necks out to save policies that Americans dislike?

Most important is the fact that Americans firmly believe that presidents must obey Supreme Court rulings — for example, a recent poll showed that 83% of Americans(including 77% of Republicans) believe this. That is a striking level of bipartisan public consensus in a deeply polarized era. People want the president to comply with rulings, and they fully expect him to do so.

If public consensus remains firm, a blatant defiance of the Supreme Court could be politically perilous for Trump. This expectation may also influence the court itself, making it feel more emboldened to rule without fear of being ignored.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does offer guidance. Nixon was a politically weak president pushing unpopular views; he could not realistically survive a conflict with the court given the credible threat of impeachment from Congress. As for Trump, even though his policies are not popular, Congress is currently no check on his power. This all suggests that if Trump defied the court, he would probably survive in the sense that he would not be impeached. But it could be a pyrrhic victory: he could emerge severely politically damaged, perhaps cripplingly so.

The deeper worry is this: Trump has tested the boundaries of executive power like few presidents before him. Even if defying the Supreme Court carries significant political costs, those costs may be relatively meaningless — especially if the standoff involves elections or an expansion of his own authority. Political damage after the fact would mean little if defying the court works to secure more presidential power at the expense of democratic norms. And in the end, the most significant check would be a credible threat of congressional impeachment and removal — something that was historically present, but for now remains absent.

Maya you

Maya Sen is professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“Can you explain what SCOTUS can do about birthright citizenship when it’s in the Constitution? How are they able to overturn the 14th Amendment?”

— Peggy Giegucz, Pittsburgh

Hi Peggy,

The Supreme Court can’t overturn a constitutional amendment. But it can interpret the Constitution to make it seem like it’s overturning or at least contorting it. In other words, when the court hears an appeal involving the Constitution, it analyzes how it applies in a given case — whether that’s what the First Amendment means for speech, the Second Amendment means for guns, and so on. Throughout the court’s history, dissenting justices have accused majorities of construing constitutional provisions contrary to their meaning and purpose.

When it comes to birthright citizenshipwe might soon learn what the justices have to say about that provision of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Cases on the subject are making their way through the nation’s courts. So far, judges have roundly rejected the Trump administration. Just this week, a three-judge panel of the Boston-based federal appeals court handed the government its latest lossafter appellate panels based in San Francisco and Richmond likewise declined to lift trial court rulings against the administration while it appeals.

On Thursday, Trump asked the justices to halt the nationwide scope of those trial court rulings, which are keeping his policy on hold nationwide. To be sure, the justices could resolve this pending appeal without weighing in on the ultimate question of what they think the 14th Amendment protects. But how they address Trump’s procedural challenge could provide clues about how they would decide the underlying merits of his executive order.

If the Supreme Court eventually rules — contrary to longstanding precedent and historical evidence — that the Constitution doesn’t protect birthright citizenship, then whether the court would be literally overturning the 14th Amendment as opposed to gutting, betraying or undermining it could be a semantic argument, given how difficult it is to further amend the Constitution.

In theory, of course, the people and their elected representatives can vote to amend the Constitution in response to an unpopular Supreme Court ruling. In fact, the 14th Amendment did just that, effectively overturning the infamous Dred Scott ruling that affirmed slavery. But even if Americans somehow passed a new constitutional amendment making birthright citizenship clearer than it already isthe Supreme Court could attempt to undermine it through a creative interpretation.

Have any questions or comments for me? I’d love to hear from you! Please emaildeadlinelegal@nbcuni.comfor a chance to be featured in a future newsletter.

Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

About a week into his second term as president, Donald Trump announced a plan that he seemed rather excited about. Reversing several years’ worth of progress, the Republican began a process that would detain tens of thousands of migrants at the U.S. military camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Republican assured the public that the facility would detain “the worst criminal illegal aliens,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted soon after that Guantánamo Bay was “a perfect place” for migrants.

In hindsight, perhaps “perfect” wasn’t an ideal choice of words. The Washington Post reported:

The article dovetailed with a related report from The Wall Street Journal that noted there are still hundreds of U.S. troops guarding an empty and unused tent city, although they’ll soon be redeployed. The Journal added, “The operation has so far cost at least $16 million, according to lawmakers who recently toured the naval base.”

There are several recent examples of the Trump administration reversing course and abandoning controversial ideas, but in nearly all of those instances, those reversals came in response to court rulings, political pressure, embarrassing news coverage or some combination thereof.

The collapse of Trump’s Guantánamo Bay policy, however, is qualitatively different: The administration is backing down, not because of a judge or public backlash, but because its own officials grudgingly acknowledged the unavoidable fact that the misguided policy was a poorly thought-out disaster.

As NBC News reported last week, “[A]s agencies spar over responsibility for operations [at the base] and over blame for what has gone wrong, there is a growing recognition within the administration that it was a political decision that is just not working.” The report added:

There is no reason to spend American taxpayer money so ridiculously. I realize that the camera-ready trips made for a few dramatic segments on Fox News, but there was no substantive or security need for these incredibly expensive flights.

The entire policy was mired in bureaucratic and logistical challenges from the outset, which was probably inevitable given that the entire idea apparently stemmed from one of Trump’s hollow impulses and subjected to no serious governing analysis.

This isn’t the White House’s only fiasco, but when drawing up a list of head-shaking debacles, be sure to keep Guantánamo Bay near the top.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”