The United States is sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis. Not only has the Trump administration seized for itself extraconstitutional powers, but yesterday, it raised the specter that, should the courts apply the text of the Constitution and negate its plans, it will simply ignore them.

The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz once theorized that presidential systems are more likely than parliamentary systems to undergo constitutional crises or coup attempts, because they create dueling centers of power. The president and Congress both enjoy popular elections, creating a clash of popular mandates when opposing parties win simultaneous control. “Who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people,” Linz asked, “the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?” Presidential systems would teeter and fall, he argued, when the president and Congress could not resolve their competing claims to legitimacy.

A dozen years ago, when Republicans in Congress presented their majorities as having negated Barack Obama’s electoral mandate and began threatening to precipitate a debt crisis to force him to accept their domestic economic plan, Linz’s ideas began attracting renewed attention among liberal intellectuals. And indeed, the system is teetering. But the source of the emergency is nearly the opposite of what Linz predicted. The Trump administration is not refusing to share power with an opposing party. It is refusing to follow the constitutional limits of a government that its own party controls completely.

Donald Trump is unilaterally declaring the right to ignore spending levels set by Congress, and to eliminate agencies that Congress voted to create. What makes this demand so astonishing is that Trump could persuade Congress, which he commands in personality-cult style, to follow his demands. Republicans presently control both houses of Congress, and any agency that Congress established, it can also cut or eliminate.

Yet Trump refuses to even try to pass his plan democratically. And as courts have stepped in to halt his efforts to ignore the law, he is now threatening to ignore them too. “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X yesterday morning. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Now, Vance was not quite making an unconditional vow to ignore a court order. Rather, he was stepping right up to the line. Obviously, judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power, but determining whether orders are legitimate is the very question the courts must decide.

Elon Musk has described one judge who issued an unfavorable ruling as “corrupt”—using the word in the Trumpian sense, not to describe flouting ethics rules or profiting from office, but rather to mean “opposed to Trump”—and demanded his impeachment. Trump told reporters, “No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision; it’s a disgrace.”

Vance proposed in 2021 that Republicans, when they regain power, should replace the entire federal bureaucracy with political loyalists, and be prepared to refuse court rulings against such a clearly illegal act. “And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you,” he urged, “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” So Vance has already reached the mental threshold of defying a court order. The question is whether he will see any of the current battles as presenting the right opportunity to take this step, and whether he will prevail on Trump (and, realistically, Musk) to do so.

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 has appointed some of his most radical, unhinged, and unqualified followers to the Cabinet, and—with the sole exception of Matt Gaetz, whose attorney-general nomination failed because he’d alienated so many fellow Republicans in Congress—they are sailing through. Trump freed all the January 6 insurrectionists, and has begun firing and investigating the people in law enforcement who investigated the insurrection.

Trump appointed a former January 6 lawyer, Ed Martin, as U.S. attorney for the District for Columbia. Martin has presented himself in public as a kind of concierge lawyer for Trump and Musk, promising them special protection. “If people are discovered to have broken the law,” he wrote to Musk, “or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” The chief law-enforcement officer in the nation’s capital is stating in writing that he will investigate people for actions that he does not believe violated the law, but merely violated his own ethical sensibility, a rather frightening prospect.

Just this weekend, The Washington Post reported that the administration is asking candidates for national-security and law-enforcement positions to answer questions such as “Who were the ‘real patriots’ on Jan. 6? Who won the 2020 election?” and declining to offer jobs to those who fail to supply MAGA answers. Trump has sanctified the insurrection, has criminalized the prosecution of even its most violent activities, and is screening out anybody willing to question his belief that he is entitled to absolute power.

If you had predicted things like this before the election, most Republicans would have accused you of Trump derangement syndrome. Yet Republicans have barely uttered a peep of protest in the face of these actions.

Given his party’s near-total acquiescence in every previous step toward authoritarianism, perhaps Trump would not have to be crazy to take the next one. The entire administration is intoxicated with power. The crisis lies not in the structure of government so much as in the character of the party that runs it, which refuses to accept the idea that its defeat is ever legitimate or that its power has any limits.

Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is moving quickly.

On Friday night, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter informed board members that some of their colleagues had already received termination notices from the administration. And she said that Trump appears to have the legal authority to take the unprecedented step of firing them before their six-year terms expire.

“Per the Center’s governance established by Congress in 1958, the chair of the board of trustees is appointed by the Center’s board members,” she wrote in the email, which was later posted on the Kennedy Center’s website. “There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”

The Kennedy Center is the premier performing-arts institution in the nation’s capital. It is home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and it hosts more than 2,000 performances and exhibits a year, including major foreign cultural exports.

Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon that he would terminate multiple board members and install himself as chair, hours after The Atlantic reported on his plans.

“The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from across our Nation,” he wrote. As chair, he promised to impose “our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” (Since the chair is chosen by the board members, Trump presumably intends to appoint enough to secure a majority in favor of his chairmanship.)

What would that artistic vision look like? Trump’s rallies provide some glimpses into his cultural tastes, with a heavy diet of songs by Village People and Guns N’ Roses along with Broadway standards from Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. (He is, evidently, an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan.) He walks onstage to a recording of “God Bless the USA” sung by the current Kennedy Center trustee Lee Greenwood, who was appointed during Trump’s first term.

[Spencer Kornhaber: How the Village People explain Trump]

Ultimately, a Trumpian Kennedy Center might be distinguished more by what types of performances are not featured. In his original announcement, Trump criticized the organization for having hosted drag-show performances in the past, and said he will stop future performances.

Blaq Dinamyte, the president of Qommittee, a national network of drag artists and allies, condemned the president’s move in a statement Friday. “Banning an entire art form is censorship, plain and simple,” Dinamyte wrote.

A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment. The White House press office sent a link to Trump’s social-media post in response to a request for comment.

People familiar with Trump’s planning have said that his aggressive moves are an effort to avoid the clashes with artists that he endured during his first term. In 2017, he became the only president to ever skip the Kennedy Center Honors since the event began, in 1978, following threats by some of the 2017 honorees to boycott an accompanying White House reception.

The Kennedy Center board was created by Congress as part of the Smithsonian Institution. By law, it includes a number of Cabinet officials, federal officers, and members of congressional leadership. An additional 36 “general trustees” are appointed by the president. Joe Biden appointed 13 new members shortly before leaving office, including his close adviser Mike Donilon, the Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge, and the former Biden White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Trump likewise appointed some political allies and donors during his first term.

Even so, the institution has, until now, believed it could float above partisan politics.

“Throughout our history, the Kennedy Center has enjoyed strong support from members of congress and their staffs—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents,” Rutter wrote in her email. “Since our doors opened in 1971, we have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration. Since that time, the Kennedy Center has had a bi-partisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion.”

Trump, of course, doesn’t believe that the Kennedy Center has been upholding that nonpartisan tradition. Putting himself personally in charge seems unlikely to restore it.