Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” told Fox News that the Trump administration would defy any federal judge who tries to block the deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members. “We’re not stopping,” Homan said. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Elon Musk, Trump’s top adjutant, was even more contemptuous of legal roadblocks. “We are witnessing an attempted coup of American democracy by radical left activists posing as judges!” he wrote last month on X.

Musk has it exactly wrong. If anyone is attempting a coup, if any malign force is trying to upend the constitutional order in America, it is Trump and his toadies. The president keeps insisting he will obey the law, but aides like Homan and Musk reveal his true intentions. He doesn’t “care what the judges think.” He is determined, defiant and dangerous.

The most visible example is his ongoing struggle with District Court Judge James Boasberg, who futilely ordered the government to turn around two planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants to a jail in El Salvador. Trump wrote on social media that the judge is a “radical left lunatic,” “a troublemaker and agitator” who should be impeached.

That drew a swift rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who issued a rare public statement: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney representing the Venezuelan prisoners, was even blunter: “There has been a lot of talk the last couple of weeks about a constitutional crisis. I think we’re getting very close to that.”

America is “far beyond” a constitutional crisis, Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, told Time. “There is an accumulation of power in one place,” Wehle added. “That means Donald Trump becomes the law. The law is what he sees the law to be … The checks and balances are gone.”

The Venezuelan prisoners are not an isolated case. “A federal judge had issued a restraining order to block the deportation of Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical professor with a valid visa returning from a family visit to Lebanon,” reports Time. “Despite the order, she was deported anyway.”

Trump’s disdain for lawful orders is part of a much larger, longer pattern. He has always assailed any jurist or prosecutor who tries to hold him to account. During a recent visit to the Justice Department, he denounced Biden administration officials who had pursued him as “a corrupt group of hacks and radicals.”

He has fired the Justice Department lawyers who worked for Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Trump in two criminal cases, and attacked three law firms that have represented Trump accusers in the past. This adds up to a deliberate strategy of intimidating anyone — judges, prosecutors, lawyers — who poses a legal challenge to Trump’s unlimited thirst for power. That campaign comes at a time when many of the guardrails that constrained Trump during his first term have been dismantled.

Two of his attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, occasionally stood up to Trump. Other key aides, from White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly to national security adviser H.R. McMaster, would sometimes confront the president with uncomfortable truths, but in his second term, Trump has purged all critics and surrounded himself with total loyalists and cheerleaders.

On Capitol Hill, the few Republicans who were willing to criticize Trump have been exiled, and the Democrats are fragmented and floundering, with no clear strategy or compelling leadership to grapple with a president who is far more experienced and confident today than when he first took office eight years ago.

That confidence, and arrogance, has led Trump to invoke a law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to justify the deportation of those Venezuelan prisoners with no warning or hearing or legal process of any kind. That statute has been used only three times in 227 years, the latest during World War II, when it was cited to permit the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of them loyal citizens and patriots.

In 1988, Ronald Reagan signed a law providing reparations for the surviving victims of that shameful episode and said, “We gather here today to right a grave wrong.” Then he added, “I think this is a fine day.” If he were alive today, I think Reagan would accuse Trump of committing a “grave wrong,” and he would not think it was a “fine day.” He would weep.

Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University.