President Donald Trump has repeatedly ignored court orders telling him to unfreeze nearly $2 billion of dollars in congressionally approved funds for foreign aid dispersed through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali gave Trump until the midnight of Wednesday to comply with the orders, but a few hours before the deadline, Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt Ali’s order and scheduled a Friday noon hearing of arguments from groups suing Trump over the funding freeze.

“We’re going to be looking to see how the Supreme Court handles that very scary issue: How this Supreme Court is going to treat the prospect of this president, this administration, potentially ignoring the courts,” MSNBC anchorwoman Rachel Maddow noted in her broadcast last night. Numerous Democrats have argued that Trump’s actions illegally and unconstitutionally defy congressional laws and have already placed the U.S. in a “constitutional crisis.”

Related

Rachel Maddow rattles off evidence showing Trump’s “historically unprecedented” unpopularity
It’s not just his approval rating, she said. Everything Trump has done so far has been “wildly unpopular with the American people.”

“Do [the Supreme Court justices] 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?” she asked. “Do they appease him because, ‘Oh, he’s so scary, we better not make him defy a court order – we better make sure all court orders go his way.’”

Insights for the LGBTQ+ community

Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

“Do they tell him that if he does try to defy the courts, he is effectively declaring war on the United States of America? … make clear to him that his powers as president actually don’t allow him to defy the court?” she continued.

She also noted that, yesterday, Trump nominees for senior Justice Department positions told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “they weren’t sure that Trump should always obey court rulings.” Vice President J.D. Vance has also suggested that judges don’t have the ability to challenge Trump’s “legitimate power.” Usually court orders are enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice, but Trump has installed a loyalist, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is unlikely to prosecute Trump officials for ignoring court orders.

Maddow noted that USAID funding has typically gone towards projects like “the magnificently success, successful, world renowned U.S. AIDS treatment programs that have been interrupted, [putting] tens of millions of lives at risk with that funding not flowing — those programs aren’t restarting.”

She also noted that USAID funding would usually go towards efforts like combatting a newly discovered hemorrhagic fever that has already killed 53 individuals in Congo, Africa — a fever that kills 12% of those who contract it and kills them within 48 hours.

“This is bad, an outbreak spreading fast of a previously undiscovered, unknown hemorrhagic fever that is already killing humans by the deserts,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that United States global health programs would be all over usually, to identify this thing, to contain it, to treat people and keep them alive, to stop this thing from spreading, among other things, to make sure that it does not come here to the United States. But we’re not doing the foreign aid funding anymore. Stopping USAID means stopping efforts to combat things like that.”

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.