The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow · Mar 17, 2025

Black Saturday: The Day the United States Ceased to Be a Constitutional Democracy The Moment Democracy Ceased to Function 🧵1/10: Saturday, March 15, 2025, may have seemed unremarkable to most Americans. But in time, history will remember it as Black Saturday—the moment the United States ceased to function as a constitutional democracy. For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president openly defied a direct federal court order—and nothing happened. No intervention. No enforcement. No consequences. A legal ruling was issued, and the White House simply ignored it. The White House’s Decision: Power Over Law Inside the White House, the decision was not about law—it was about power. A federal judge ruled against the administration. The debate inside Trump’s team was not whether the ruling was legal, but whether they could get away with ignoring it. They decided they could. And they were right. This was not a clash between equal branches of government. It was the moment the judiciary was exposed as powerless. The courts do not have an army. They rely on compliance. But a court that cannot enforce its rulings is not a court—it is a suggestion box. And a presidency that can ignore the courts without consequence is no longer constrained by law—it is an untouchable executive. Trump did not declare the end of judicial authority in a speech. He demonstrated it in practice. This is how democratic systems collapse—not with a single act, but with the normalization of defiance, the expectation that a ruling can simply be brushed aside. https://theintellectualist.com/black-saturday-us-constitutional-crisis-2025/