Trump would ignore negative court orders if elected again: ex-Trump admin official

A former Trump administration official said Tuesday that the former president would ignore court orders he disagrees with if he's elected to a second term.

Miles Taylor was responding to a question from guest host Katie Phang during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber,” who referenced a comment Stephen Miller, a former senior advisor to Trump, made in a meeting in which he said “country without judges would help.”

Taylor described the exchange in his newly released book “Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump.”

“How alarmed were you when you heard this exchange Miles, and frankly, if Trump continues to stack the benches with his kind of judges, why would he even bother getting rid of them?

“Well, exactly, Katie, and this is the perfect example of why I think it's important to talk about the history of the Trump administration, but as it relates to the future. An exchange like that, that I witnessed firsthand between the president, Stephen Miller and other officials gets us into Trump's mindset about what he wants to do in a second term, which is he saw the judiciary not as a coequal branch of government,” Taylor said.

“He saw it as an extraordinary nuisance, and one that he finally wanted to find any way to get rid of, and there were actual discussions about sending legislation to Capitol Hill to do what's called judicial gerrymandering, to get rid of certain appellate courts that were problematic. In fact, right now I'm in the state of California, where Donald Trump's most annoying court the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was one that he actually wanted to get rid of.”

Taylor said that Trump didn’t view such action in theoretical terms, but that he ordered Stephen Miller and other officials to draft legislation.

“Well if you think that Republicans thought that was crazy you would be wrong, because what actually happened is several Republicans did get excited about the idea. Now it didn't take off, but I feel very confident that if there was a MAGA majority in the House and Senate and we had Trump return, that they would do judicial gerrymandering, they would get rid of courts that tend to rule against them, but even worse than that, Katie were discussions around simply ignoring the courts altogether. And you know, you're a lawyer, and I'm not, that were the president of the United States to ignore the courts, it creates a constitutional crisis because our court system doesn't have some independent police force to go and enforce its decisions,” Taylor said.

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“It relies upon public officials acting honorably and obeying those courts. And if Donald Trump oversees law enforcement and federal authorities that would try to enforce his orders. Well, then you're in a constitutional crisis and I do worry about in a second administration, that not only gerrymandering the courts but deliberately ignoring orders that they don't agree with.”

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