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.

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.”

A recent audit found that Medicare may have made up to $454 million in improper payments to providers for 38.7 million Covid tests.

In another casea multiagency investigation found that a former U.S. Air Force employee and the owners of government contracting firms conspired in a bribery scheme that spanned more than a decade and involved more than $400 million in government contracts. The investigation led to six criminal convictions, more than $88 million recovered for the government and more than 34 years of jail time for the defendants.

IG oversight has collectively resulted in potential savings of about $93.1 billion in FY 2023.

A 2023 report revealed that the Small Business Administration had decided to stop collecting on certain delinquent loans — totaling roughly $62 billion. After the report was issued and congressional Republicans “blasted the [Biden] administration for its leniency,” the SBA reversed course and announced plans to pursue those deadbeat loans aggressively, and could recover as much as $30 billion for American taxpayers.

The reports mentioned above represent just a handful of the times inspectors general, the independent watchdogs inside the various agencies of the federal government, have either called out fraud or waste or saved the American people money. IGs have also improved the federal government’s performance on a wide variety of critical issues, from combating violent gangs to preventing veterans’ suicides, from uncovering cyberfraud to fighting cyberstalking, from overseeing U.S. aid to Ukraine to evaluating the evacuation from Afghanistan, from exposing border corruption to analyzing bank failures.

That’s why President Donald Trump’s decision to fire 18 inspectors general in the first week of his term is so puzzling. According to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, IG oversight has collectively resulted in potential savings of about $93.1 billion in FY 2023. With the OIG community’s aggregate FY 2023 budget of approximately $3.5 billion, these potential savings represent an approximate $26 return on every dollar invested in inspectors general.

IGs should be a natural ally in the president’s effort to make the government more efficient; “Efficiency” is literally in our name. IGs ultimately share a mission with the rest of the executive branch, which is to improve the federal government for the American people. And the IGs’ track record makes clear that IG oversight is a good investment for the American taxpayer.

Even if it’s true, as some have argued that the White House fired me along with my IG colleagues because the president does not want independent oversight into the executive branch, here’s why President Trump should want independence for his inspectors general.

If IGs are not independent — if they can’t make findings of waste, fraud, abuse or misconduct about government programs, without fear of being fired, disciplined or reprimanded and can’t be objective in their assessments of government programs — then their oversight will be worthless.

The programs that President Trump cares about most are precisely the ones in which he should want the straight scoop.

To use a business analogy, President Trump would likely avoid investing in a company whose auditors were hopelessly conflicted, and he wouldn’t trust the financial audit of the company’s balance sheet or cash flow statement if the auditor would have gotten fired for anything other than a clean opinion. Surely, he wouldn’t trust a bond rating if the rating officials would have been fired or reprimanded for anything other than a AAA rating.

Similarly, who would believe any findings of any office of inspector general if IGs can be removed for any negative findings? The programs that President Trump cares about most are precisely the ones in which he should want the straight scoop.

This is not a hypothetical. In 2022, when I was inspector general of the U.S. Interior Department, my office found that the department’s Bureau of Land Management, which administers oil and gas leasing programs on federal land, was failing to conduct a necessary step to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the leasing program. BLM was awarding leases for the mineral extraction, including oil and gas, without confirming whether the entities and individuals were prohibited from doing business with the federal government. After our report, BLM began immediately checking the list of prohibited entities before issuing those leases. That is a great example of government oversight at its best.

Here’s the catch: I don’t know that such a report could be issued today. There’s reason to believe that a negative report on a sensitive program, regardless of how true it is or how helpful it is to the American taxpayer, would be viewed as disloyal and cause for termination.

The chilling effect on IGs seems already to be occurring. Paul Martin, who served as inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development was fired last monththe day after releasing a report that cautioned that the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid, as well as its efforts to cut USAID’s staffing, made it harder to ensure billions in U.S. funding were being spent properly. Roughly two weeks later, The Washington Post reported that his successor, the acting IG at USAID, had been accused of holding “two critical reports on the consequences of President Donald Trump’s funding freeze on crucial services in Africa and the Middle East, amid fears of retaliation from the White House.”

That is the polar opposite of what President Trump should want. He should want to know if there are problems in the federal government, so he can fix them for the American people. IG reports are a tremendous tool to do just that, but only if the IGs are empowered to call it like they see it, without the proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

President Trump is famously adamant about loyalty. Well, it’s not loyal to bury bad news. To the contrary, allowing decision-makers to waltz down the primrose path, unwittingly blind to the realities on the ground, is the ultimate in disloyalty. Sharing the truth, even if it is not what the principal wants, is the ultimate show of loyalty.

Mark Greenblatt

Mark Greenblatt was inspector general of the Interior Department from August 2019 until January 2025. He also served as chairman of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency from 2023 to 2024 and as vice chair from 2022 to 2023.