As President Donald Trump goes toe-to-toe with the courts over his flurry of increasingly unhinged executive orders, barely a month into his second presidential term, MSNBC Rachel Maddow is warning the American people of the very real possibility that the sitting US president will soon openly defy and ignore an official court order related to his infamous and controversial attempt at a federal funding freeze — a move that Maddow warned could “effectively end the republic.”
“They have been joking about this and making, you know, macho sounding bluffs about this for a long time now – particularly from the vice president – J.D. Vance,” Maddow said in her segment this week. “How is the Supreme Court going to deal with it now that it’s real?”
The MSNBC host went on to take a fine-toothed comb to the variety of different possible scenarios that could soon unfold, depending on how the US Supreme Court weighs in on the very real notion that a sitting US president could soon openly and brazenly defy a formal court order — something Maddow personally described as a “very scary issue.”
The high court, which is currently chock full of a justices who were hand-picked by Donald Trump himself, was slated to take up the case yesterday at the request of numerous Trump government attorneys who are desperately searching for a way to undo the order handed down by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to unfreeze the Trump Administration’s funding freeze against the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“Do they try to give him what he wants from the courts so that Trump doesn’t break that glass? Doesn’t, you know, smash through the brightest bright line that we have and effectively end the republic?” Maddow questioned in her segment. “Do they appease him because they – ‘oh, he’s so scary, we better not make him defy a court order – we better make sure all court orders go his way.'”
She imagined a scenario in which the SCOTUS justices “make clear to him that his powers as president actually don’t allow him to defy the court.”
“Do they tell him that if he does try to defy the courts, he is effectively declaring war on the United States of America? We’ll see,” she said.
Maddow concluded the topic by warning the American people to keep their “eyes wide open on that and take it with all the seriousness it deserves.”
Watch a clip of Maddow’s segment here:
Featured image via The Resistance Report Gallery