Stuart Taylor, Jr. is a Washington journalist and author and a Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow.

We should heed closely what Donald Trump has been saying about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel of San Diego—perhaps more so than anything else he has said or done to date. The prospect that a President Trump might defy the judiciary and the rule of law, together with his vows to violate international treaties and his disrespect for domestic laws, may make him the most dangerous candidate in American history.

There are so many things to deplore about Trump's recent attacks on Curiel it is difficult to know where to begin. Trump has asserted that Curiel is unfit to hear two lawsuits against the now-defunct Trump University because "he's a Mexican" (false—Curiel was born in Indiana)—and thus probably biased against Trump's plan to "build a wall" on the Mexican border. Trump has also suggested that any judge of Mexican, or of Muslim, heritage would be biased against him. He has declared that he’s "getting railroaded" by a "rigged" legal system and suggested he “will come back in November” to change things.


This is racism and ethnic and religious bias. It is a deplorable elevation of Trump’s raw financial and political self-interest above the law and the national interest. But mostly what we should deplore—and fear—is this: Such a brazen presidential attack on the rule of law, by a man of such a belligerent temperament and crude sensibility, could portend defiance of court orders by a President Trump.

And that in turn would be a long step toward authoritarian rule.

I write this not as an anti-Republican partisan but as a longtime critic of Hillary Clinton's dishonesty and of the judicial system's drift toward politicization—and as one who would much rather see more divided government than the blowout of congressional Republicans that they will deserve if they stick with Trump.

There is no avoiding the truth: Trump has become ever more contemptuous of our constitutional traditions, especially the separation of powers and the freedom of speech. He has been more demagogic in trashing the judicial system than any president or major-party nominee in history. He has called Curiel "a hater of Donald Trump," without evidence, other than garden-variety rulings by the judge against Trump's side, including a May 27 release of embarrassing internal documents on marketing practices at Trump's "university."

Americans who value the independence of the judiciary should wake up to this threat. Republicans who have held their noses and endorsed Trump should see this as the last straw and dump him. Senator Lindsey Graham suggested as much after the exposure of Trump's megalomaniacal conference call on Monday urging political surrogates to defend his repeated attacks on the judge in his case—a flagrant mixing of his personal interests with the public interest—and blasting his own campaign staff for "stupid" advice to avoid the issue.

If a President Trump defies the judiciary outright, he would be the first president in recent memory to do so. Our nation has long depended on the executive branch to enforce the legal rulings of a judicial branch with no enforcement power of its own.

Trump has said, with menacing ambiguity: “They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace. OK? But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case? Where everybody likes it. OK. This is called life, folks.”

Was this a hint that Trump would retaliate in unspecified ways against any judge who crosses him—in this case, a judge who risked his life as a federal prosecutor going after violent drug dealers from a Mexican cartel?

These attacks on the rule of law cross a more dangerous line than did Trump's crude attacks on news outlets whose reporting he dislikes; or his long history of filing bogus libel suits to silence critics; or his threats to use such suits as weapons if he becomes president; or his trashing of President George W. Bush as a liar who deceived the nation into invading Iraq; or his disparaging John McCain and other former prisoners of war for being captured alive; or even his near-incitements of mob violence against anti-Trump protesters, his astonishing call for a ban on all Muslims seeking to enter the country for an undetermined period, and his vow to deport en masse more than 11 million illegal immigrants—men, women, and children.

Trump's claims that Curiel's Mexican heritage alone should disqualify him from hearing lawsuits against Trump University—or, Trump implies, any case in which the mogul has an interest—also mix breathtaking ignorance of the law with racism.

Judges, like other people, have rights not to be disqualified from anything on account of traits including race, ethnicity, sex, or religion. This is not to deny that judges have their biases, political and otherwise. Of course they do. Judges are human. But we depend on their oaths to put aside biases, and on litigants' appeal rights, to do equal justice.

We have little choice but to do so, because otherwise the judicial system would grind to a halt. If every judge suspected of having a strong, race-based—or non-race-based—disagreement with a litigant's politics, or a strong dislike of the litigant, were disqualified, there would be few left to decide the most important cases.

African-American judges and white judges alike would be barred from hearing racial-discrimination lawsuits brought by blacks, or by whites, because the parties could always speculate that the judges' decisions would be skewed by sympathy for members of their own groups. Neither Roman Catholic judges nor female judges could sit in abortion cases. Jewish judges would be disqualified from lawsuits adverse to Israel. And so on.

Why do I call Trump racist for asserting that ethnic heritage alone can disqualify a judge? Because it's so obvious that he is using a race-based double standard. Would Trump say that all white, Anglo, Republican-appointed judges and prosecutors should be disqualified from cases charging African-Americans with racially motivated murders of white persons? Or from cases involving, or investigations of, Hillary Clinton? Of course not.

Little better are suggestions by Trump and supporters, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that Curiel may be biased for more particular reasons. These included his membership in a Latino-focused professional group called the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association and his appointment of two law firms that had been major financial benefactors of Clinton and other Democrats to handle class-action suits against Trump University.

But the San Diego La Raza group has not taken a position on issues such as Trump's vow to "build a wall," and it is routine for judges to belong to such groups. Curiel appointed the law firms to run the class-action suits in 2014, before Trump became a candidate, apparently because the judge considered them the best qualified firms for the job. The vast majority of law firms that represent class-action plaintiffs are financial benefactors of Democrats.

(To be sure, it can be argued that in the interest of appearing impartial, Curiel might have been wiser to wait a few days to issue his recent order making public documents embarrassing to Trump rather than firing it off a few hours after Trump's May 27 attack. But the timing of the order was at worst a small sin.)

So weak are the arguments for disqualifying Curiel that Gonzales—who had to admit that "ethnicity alone cannot pose a conflict of interest"—stooped to saying that "it might not be unreasonable for a defendant in Trump’s position to wonder who Curiel favors in the presidential election."

Indeed. But such speculation would be dismissed by any sensible appeals court as a ridiculous argument for disqualifying a judge. Which may be why Trump's lawyers have not asked that Curiel be disqualified. Lawyers who file frivolous motions can get themselves fined.

None of this proves my speculation that a President Trump would defy a court order he didn't like. But based on all that he has said, and how he has said it, that seems entirely possible, if not likely.

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It's worth stressing that no president in recent memory has defied a court order. The most famous historical example dates to the Civil War, when President Lincoln defied an order by Chief Justice Roger Taney to release a prisoner. Andrew Jackson came close when he gave verbal support to the state of Georgia's refusal for several months in 1832 to obey a Supreme Court decision curbing the state's power over the Cherokee Indians. But neither Jackson nor the federal government was directly involved in the case. And both Jackson and Georgia ultimately backed down.

(Jackson's famous alleged assertion that Chief Justice "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it" appears to have been apocryphal.)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 effort to "pack" the Supreme Court by asking Congress to enlarge it so that he could appoint a pro-New Deal majority was also a threat to judicial independence.

But FDR did not defy any judicial decisions. And his court-packing proposal died in Congress after the justices had issued several pro-New Deal decisions. (The first of them had been in the works before FDR announced his court-packing plan.)

Our current expectation that the president will and should enforce even court decisions that he does not like was cemented by Dwight Eisenhower in a climactic school desegregation case. Eisenhower thought (although he did not publicly say) that the desegregation decisions transgressed the limits on the Supreme Court's constitutional powers. But in 1957, when white mobs and the Arkansas governor tried to prevent black children from entering Little Rock High School, Eisenhower sent troops to escort the children and enforce the desegregation decree.

What would a President Trump have done in 1957? Someone should ask Trump—and also ask him whether, as president, he would obey a hypothetical Supreme Court decision striking down a Trump order barring Muslims from entering the country. Or perhaps a decision finding that Trump University was at fault and restitution must be paid.

Although President Obama and others have made intemperate rhetorical attacks on debatable Supreme Court rulings affecting important national policies, no major political figure in memory has attacked a judge to protect his personal stake in a garden-variety legal case of no importance to the national interest.

Perhaps the revulsion against Trump's remarks that leading Republicans have expressed could be the start of something healthy. "If Trump does not start consulting and coordinating with allies," Newt Gingrich wrote in an email to the Washington Post, "he will not have any."

He should not have any. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and their colleagues will no longer deserve to be leaders of their party, or of anything else, if they continue to support a man who is now attacking the independent judiciary for daring to hear and make public evidence plausibly alleged to implicate Trump University in predatory fraud. Not to mention his displays of contempt for our constitutional traditions; his appalling ignorance of the law, the nation, and the world; his constant stream of lies; his lashing out like a narcissistic would-be tyrant against reasoned criticism; and his insults to Mexican-Americans and Muslims.

A landslide Democratic victory leading to dominance of all three branches of government would, in my view, be bad for the country. But if Republican leaders fail to separate themselves from Trump, that's what they will deserve.