We should have been paying closer attention on the night of January 20th when Trump pardoned the nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who were convicted of committing crimes in his name on January the 6th, 2021. What Trump did with the stroke of a pen amounted to what his so-called border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News this morning: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

He was talking about the administration’s open defiance of a federal judge’s court order on Saturday night that attempted to stop the deportation of more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members. Judge James E. Boasberg told the lawyer for the Department of Justice if the alleged gang members were being deported by plane, that the planes should be turned around and the deportees returned to American soil until he could sort out whether Trump's actions under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 are legal.

In a hearing late this afternoon, the DOJ lawyer refused repeatedly to answer questions from the judge about the deportation flights on Saturday night, saying he wasn't authorized to reveal details because of national security.

The movement of the Venezuelan migrants, whose heads were shaved and were attired in white pajama-like shorts and shirts, was all over Fox News and other conservative outlets almost in real time, and clips of the deportees being loaded onto and taken out of planes were shown repeatedly on television news today. So, the national security claim of the DOJ lawyer was bogus on its face, because the Trump administration made no attempt whatsoever to hide what it was doing or how.

Judge Boasberg gave the DOJ lawyer until noon tomorrow to come up with an answer to one of the judge’s questions that the lawyer refused to respond to today, namely what time on Saturday that the Department of Justice believes the judge’s order went into effect. Establishing that time is necessary for the judge to determine whether the Trump administration defied his order, which would subject anyone involved in the defiance to a contempt citation by the judge.

There was a bunch of back and forth between the judge and the DOJ lawyer this afternoon, with the lawyer asserting that the judge’s order only went into effect when he put it in writing, and not when he issued it orally from the bench earlier.

None of this is ad hoc. Trump clearly set out to defy the order of this judge, and he will defy any others he disagrees with. White House officials have told reporters that they want this case or another one to end up before the Supreme Court, where they think they will win.

It is apparent that Trump plans to take the position that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity allows him to do anything he wants so long as it is an official presidential act. Trump will contend that anyone acting on his orders is protected by his presidential immunity, and if any court, including the Supreme Court, says otherwise, Trump will pardon anyone who is found to have broken the law or is declared in contempt of court. In an authoritarian state, contempt for the law comes down from the top, and that is exactly where we find ourselves today.