What happens if President Donald Trump defies a court order? The question is far from academic.

Vice President JD Vance, an echo chamber of Trump’s rhetoric, commented in 2021 that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” The vice president recently reaffirmed that view in an interview with Politico.

President Trump himself has summoned words attributed to Napoleon, “He who saves the country does not violate any law,” reminiscent of the Richard Nixon-David Frost exchange, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump added on Truth Social, after revoking federal approval of New York’s congestion pricing program, “LONG LIVE THE KING,” a variation of French King Louis XIV’s boast, “I am the state.” Elon Musk, Trump’s kingmaker, thundered against judicial checks against the President’s agenda, “There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one.”

Since the birth of the nation, it has been the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is. The “king can do no wrong” doctrine of the British Empire was dethroned by the American Revolution. Indeed, Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution saddles the president with an obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Its ancestor was the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which declared, “The pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.”

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist effused that judicial review — the power of the Supreme Court to hold acts of the political branches unconstitutional without force or effect — was one of “the crown jewels” of the Constitution. The president is required by Article II Section 3 to enforce orders of the Supreme Court or subordinate federal tribunals. Thus, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce desegregation at Central High School mandated by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Similarly, President John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi in 1962 to protect black enrollee James Meredith from violent white mobs.

The president cannot be the final judge of his constitutional authorities. It has been recognized for more than four centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence that a person cannot be a judge in his own case. To the Supreme Court is entrusted the final word not because it is infallible but because the nine justices are vastly more likely than the president or Congress to decide the question without ulterior political motives. They are appointed, not elected. They serve for life with protection against lessened compensation. And they represent a healthy diversity of backgrounds and philosophies.

No president has disobeyed a Supreme Court order. Vance’s allusion to President Andrew Jackson is incomplete. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the court voided the convictions of two missionaries for failing to obtain licenses from the State of Georgia to reside in Cherokee County. Chief Justice John Marshall relied on the plenary constitutional power of the federal government over Indian affairs. Skirmishing over compliance with the order became moot when the governor of Georgia granted the missionaries pardons in exchange for dropping their constitutional challenge. President Jackson reportedly smirked, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” But the president soon changed his tune when South Carolina claimed authority to nullify federal tariffs.

The Civil War case of Ex Parte Merryman (1861) is also not on point. There, a federal circuit court held that President Abraham Lincoln was powerless to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the Constitution entrusted the suspension power exclusively to Congress. Lincoln declined to follow the court order and reported the matter to Congress. It retroactively ratified the president’s suspension of the Great Writ in the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of March 3, 1863.

During the Watergate investigation, President Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox over enforcement of a grand jury subpoena for incriminating White House tapes upheld in Nixon v. Sirica (1973). The firing precipitated the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus in the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Awakened to the peril to the Constitution, Americans protested with 30,000 telegrams streaming into Washington daily. Nixon backed down, complied with the court order and appointed Leon Jaworski to succeed Cox. The rule of law triumphed.

More than 50 years later, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk are responding with veiled fists to the federal judiciary for halting their counterrevolution against the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Last month, the Supreme Court refused to disturb a temporary restraining order against the duo’s without-cause removal of the special counsel of the Office of Special Counsel.

A head-on collision between the duumvirate and federal courts up to the Supreme Court is approaching. Then, as during Watergate, whether we remain a government of laws as opposed to a government of men will be up to Congress through impeachment and up to the American people through their voices.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.