Justice Department lawyers, confronting an onslaught of legal challenges, have made a case in court that expansive executive power inherent in the Constitution buttresses the lawfulness of President Trump’s aggressive unilateral actions.
Outside the courtroom, however, legal niceties have little to do with the strategies pursued by White House officials and their allies as they attack individual judges, question the legitimacy of the courts — and undermine the separation of powers that has been at the core of American governance since the nation’s beginning.
The two-pronged defense of Mr. Trump’s actions may be an understandable reaction to the run of successes that the president’s opponents have had in court. But it raises the prospect of a high-stakes confrontation between two branches of government that the nation’s founders designed as coequals: the executive and the judicial.
On Saturday, the number of active lawsuits in federal courts challenging administration actions reached 100. In 21 of those cases, judges had issued temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions, effectively stopping, at least for a time, parts of Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda.
Trial court judges have tried to block the unilateral firing of civil servants, the access that Elon Musk’s team has enjoyed to sensitive agency data, the relocation of transgender women inmates to men’s prisons, the pursuit of immigrants inside houses of worship, and the freezing of up to $3 trillion in federal funding to the states.
Late Friday, Judge Lauren J. King blocked a Trump administration plan to cut funding for hospitals that offer gender-transition treatment for people under 19. In her ruling, Judge King said the two Trump administration orders at issue were “a violation of the separation of powers.”
Five of the judges who have ruled against the White House were nominated by Republican presidents, one by Mr. Trump himself.
On Thursday, Judge John D. Bates ordered administration officials to sit for depositions on Mr. Musk’s wholesale firing of federal workers and to turn over documents to a coalition of unions suing to stop them.
“They’re losing,” said Matthew J. Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general, in an interview.
In response, the Trump administration has been recalcitrant. Officials appear to be slow-walking the implementation of some judicial orders and finding loopholes to avoid complying with the spirit of others. Two judges have issued “motions to enforce” because the government failed to heed their initial orders.
While Mr. Trump has praised judges who have ruled in his favor, his allies have called on Congress to impeach those who have not. On social media, Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have even hinted that they could decide not to be bound by judges’ orders at all. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Mr. Trump posted.
“The court process is forcing a lot of public exposure as to what the administration is actually doing,” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive of Democracy Forward, which has won 12 court orders stemming from more than two dozen legal actions it has filed.
The orders blocking the White House are preliminary, and where the courts ultimately decide to draw the lines around presidential authority remains to be seen. Some of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive moves appear to have stalled, such as an effort to end birthright citizenship for some babies born on U.S. soil. The administration has twice failed to revive this order in appellate courts.
But in other cases, the administration has found ways to carry out Mr. Trump’s policies despite adverse rulings. For instance, when a judge found that moving transgender female inmates to men’s prisons would most likely violate their constitutional rights, the government chose to read the order narrowly and apply it only to the trans women who had filed the suit. It moved ahead with it plans to relocate the others, some of whom then filed suit as well.
After Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the Federal District Court for Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to end a domestic funding freeze, the administration said that it was still holding up some of the money — for reasons that it said fell outside the scope of the lawsuit and the judge’s order.
In another lawsuit challenging cuts the National Institutes of Health made to billions of dollars in grants, Judge Angel Kelley of the Federal District Court for Massachusetts agreed to briefly halt the cuts, given the stark consequences they appeared to have for medical and scientific research. But the agency issued a procedural order that effectively held up the funding anyway, forbidding health officials from giving public notice of upcoming grant review meetings. That stopped the research in its tracks, if not the money.
At this point, the argument appears to be shifting toward a debate over whether the judges — not the president — are pushing the limits of their authority.
Michael McConnell, a former federal judge and an assistant to the solicitor general in the Reagan administration, questioned whether district-court judges should issue restraining orders that force the White House’s hand, such as releasing billions of dollars in foreign aid or reinstating executive-branch employees.
The suggestion that the administration would flout court orders was “fear-mongering,” he said, adding, “Let’s allow the process to work before we panic.”
But if “fear-mongering” is happening, it’s coming from both sides. As prominent Democrats raise concerns about a looming constitutional crisis, Mr. Trump’s allies are using social media to publicly attack judges themselves. Mr. Musk used his platform X to accuse one judge of “violating the will of the people.” He also amplified a post from the far-right activist Laura Loomer that contained screenshots of what she claimed was the LinkedIn profile of another judge’s daughter.
Such rhetoric has raised concerns for judges’ safety.
In his most recent annual report on the judiciary, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the U.S. Marshals Service had investigated more than 1,000 threats against federal judges in the last five years.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which helps manage the judiciary, declined to comment. In a statement, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, a former federal judge who led the administrative office between 2021 and 2024, said that she believed the judiciary could manage the strains of this moment.
“Are federal judges up to the task? You bet,” she wrote.
To some, a clash appears inevitable. On Wednesday, when asked if it was ever permissible for an elected official to defy an order from a federal court, two of Mr. Trump’s nominees to high-ranking Justice Department posts equivocated. John Sauer, the nominee for solicitor general, cited two notorious Supreme Court rulings: Korematsu, which upheld the legality of Japanese internment camps during World War II, and Dred Scott, which denied citizenship to the descendants of enslaved people. If faced with “extreme cases” like these, Mr. Sauer suggested, the executive branch could hypothetically justify defying the courts.
With the White House moving at a relentless pace, judges have struggled to extract from Justice Department lawyers even the most basic details about actions taken by the Trump administration and Mr. Musk.
Before issuing a deadline for the Trump administration to release billions of dollars in foreign aid payments this week, Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia pressed a lawyer in the case to point to a single instance in which the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development had complied with his order from 12 days earlier to unfreeze money that the government had paused for review.
“I’m not in a position to answer that,” said Indraneel Sur, a lawyer for the government.
Government lawyers have at times appeared alone in court — and seemingly unprepared — on behalf of multiple agencies or senior Trump administration officials.
“You appear to be a little outgunned,” Judge Trevor N. McFadden told Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer seated by himself across from a passel of lawyers representing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in a case in February.
Mr. Carilli was set to defend the administration against claims that it had arbitrarily frozen funding that the bishops were relying on to resettle more than 5,000 refugees already in the United States.
Before the case could proceed on Friday, the State Department announced that it had canceled the disputed funding agreement. A challenge to an executive order on refugee resettlement was, to the White House, now a simple contract dispute. If the bishops believed they were still owed money, administration lawyers argued, they could file a new lawsuit.
It will be weeks if not months before the Supreme Court can fully consider any of the lawsuits. But the administration won a small victory on Wednesday when Chief Justice Roberts paused an order from Judge Ali that would have required the State Department to pay out more than $1.5 billion in frozen money by midnight on Thursday, a deadline it said that it could not meet.
In their response, the plaintiffs accused the government of “flouting” the district court’s order “for twelve days.”
In other cases, trial court judges have been more sympathetic to the idea that the president holds broad authority to make changes to the executive, even opening new avenues for it to go further than the actions at issue.
In a case challenging the White House over its decision to bar Associated Press reporters from events with close access to the president, Judge McFadden mused that Mr. Trump most likely enjoyed broad discretion to handpick the journalists and outlets that cover him.
Days later, the White House did just that.
Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett contributed reporting. Alex Lemonides and Seamus Hughes contributed research.
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