Just as Trump and Musk are refusing to submit their plans to a Congress that their party controls, they are at least toying with the notion of ignoring orders by a court they have shaped. The Supreme Court, which has final word on all constitutional disputes, has a two-to-one majority of Republican appointees. When Vance floated the idea of defying the courts in 2021, he was anticipating his party taking actions so indisputably illegal that not even friendly justices would swallow them. They are prepared to smash a system they control, simply because it won’t move at the frantic pace they demand.
Will Trump actually go as far as he, Vance, and Musk have suggested? The notion that they would so early in their term escalate to the highest level of constitutional crisis short of canceling elections seems difficult to believe. Quite possibly, cooler heads will prevail.
The trouble is that the Republican Party’s cooler heads have been on a losing streak since November.
— “Trump Signals He Might Ignore the Courts,” The Atlantic
Executive Orders: A Skeptic’s View of the President’s Actions
With a new authoritarian at the helm, banal summaries of executive orders don’t cut it. So I let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting: provide a brief analysis of each week’s presidential orders from a radical left perspective. No blind trust, no left-wing group think—just a bullshit detector wary of authoritarianism.