Welcome to today’s Qualified at the Intersection: a blatant disregard for the law.The Trump administration clearly has a blatant disregard for the law, and anybody with eyes or ears can see and hear it. Everything they do is a big F-you to the Constitution and the legal system; it is not subtle, it is not debatable, it is simply out in the open. And two recent cases really illuminate that. While federal judges have pushed back, which doesn't matter, it doesn’t change the facts. This administration doesn’t believe the laws of this land apply to them. The first example is the proposed White House ballroom, a project that, just yesterday, a federal court made clear requires congressional approval. You cannot simply knock down part of the White House and start building; that is not how the system is supposed to work. The system is designed to function with checks and balances, and the executive branch does not get to unilaterally decide on a major federal construction project, especially one tied to public resources, national symbolism, or property owned by the government, which is to say, owned by the people. And yet this administration did not care about any of that; they moved forward as if those limits did not exist. This is not a close legal question, and it is not an accident; it was a deliberate act, an assertion that the normal processes of governance do not apply to them and can be bypassed. Why? Because they know that any challenge would come later and move too slowly to alter the decision itself. That is how they have been operating.The second example follows the same pattern. The administration defunded NPR and PBS, which a court said yesterday was illegal because Congress controls federal spending, full stop. Again, this is not a complicated law, and it is not some obscure statute; it is one of the clearest expressions of the separation of powers in the Constitution, and it also implicates First Amendment concerns regarding freedom of speech. And yet the administration did not care; they acted first and left it to the courts to respond after the defunding had already occurred. So, once again, the pattern is not confusion or a matter of not knowing; they are openly and blatantly disregarding the law. They have shown a willingness not only to ignore the law but to force a confrontation after they have already blown things up.When you take these cases, along with many others, together, it is clear they are not isolated incidents; they reflect a governing philosophy, one that pushes systems to their limits in ways that are difficult to repair. They know that by the time courts intervene, time has passed, people have been fired, disruption has already occurred, and the public has already begun to absorb a new reality in which rules start to feel optional. We seem to be adopting that as the norm, and because enforcement is inconsistent, people begin to ask what can really be done. The real impact is not just in the specific actions but in the normalization of this behavior; it is both a loud and a quiet shift toward accepting that if something can be done, it will be done, regardless of whether it should be or is legal.And this is why, even for people who support MAGA or these actions, it should matter. Power exercised this way cannot be contained; it does not stay in one place, and it does not stay loyal to one side. Once you establish that laws can be ignored when they are inconvenient, and that the principles we said we agreed to no longer matter, that philosophy cannot be confined to one administration. It becomes part of the system itself, available to anyone who follows. What is being rewritten is not just policy but expectation and the shared understanding that there are limits at all, because apparently, there are not.So that means what comes next requires a different way of thinking. I heard Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland, talk about what comes after Trump, and he framed it in terms of buckets: things that are broken, things we can fix, things we can change, and things we get rid of. It is an interesting framework, but it does not go far enough for this moment, because what all of this has revealed is that the constraints we thought were fixed were, in fact, choices, and we do not have to continue making those choices. The guardrails people believed were strong have proven to be fragile, and we are seeing how quickly and decisively power can be exercised.That means a lot more needs to go into the bucket that gets thrown out. Resources can be moved, decisions can be made, and long-debated priorities that we were told were impossible suddenly look very possible. We have to fight the instinct to go back, to restore norms, to reassemble a system that, if we are honest, did not serve us particularly well and, in many ways, is what got us here. There is no version of the past to return to, and no way to put the genie back in the bottle or Humpty Dumpty back together again. If the law can be disregarded to concentrate power, then it can also be changed to reimagine how power is distributed more equitably, and the question is no longer whether change is possible but whether there is the will to use this changed system for good.Because make no mistake, the system has been changed. It turns out we could have universal healthcare if we decide to fund it; it turns out we could find a way to tax billionaires if we really wanted to; it turns out we could do reparations for African Americans if there were the political will. We see billions of dollars appear overnight for war, sometimes without meaningful constraint, and that tells you what is actually possible. The capacity has always been there.So perhaps the lesson in all of this is not simply that the law is being ignored, although that is clearly happening, but that the boundaries we have accepted were never absolute, certainly not for everyone. If the laws of gravity no longer apply, if the system itself has shown that it can be bent, stretched, and reshaped, then the answer is not to cling to some version of the past that never fully worked. The answer is to recognize what has been revealed and to decide, deliberately, what comes next, because if we are no longer bound in the ways we once believed, then maybe it is time to fly.SUPPORT QUALIFIED: SUBSCRIBE NOW