The entire point of what the Trump admin is doing is to directly challenge the limits to executive power. In a nation ruled by law, you’re correct, the President’s actions can be limited by court rulings, which the President can challenge legally and so forth and so on, but ultimately the executive must obey the judicial unless the executive can work with the legislative to change the law.
What is happening now, however, is this administration clearly intends to simply ignore court rulings, and in fact they already are, and they are actively removing federal employees who would obey court orders so that they can replace them with loyalists who would be willing to break the law for the President. The supreme court helped set the stage for this by giving the President immunity, however those below the President don’t have immunity, who knows if he intends to issue thousands of pardons for federal employees who break the law on his behalf.
We will then have the single greatest crisis of law in our country since the Civil War, where we have to decide what to do about it when the executive simply ignores court orders, continues to do illegal things, and then issues mass pardons to the point that enforcement of federal law becomes moot.
The Constitutional process for that, I suppose, would be impeachment, but I think the legislative branch of our government has spent the better part of the last couple of decades making itself almost entirely pointless and I don’t think you could get the house and congress to agree that the color of grass is green.
We have not given the executive the power of a King, but we have told him that if you act like a King, no one is going to do anything to stop you.
