WASHINGTON — However scared you might be for our democracy, you are not scared enough.

The president of the United States, from the moment he regained the office, has been step-by-step following the autocrat’s playbook. He has gone after universities for not obeying his decrees. He has extorted law firms for having on staff, or just once-upon-a-time having had on staff, people who crossed him. He has targeted for prosecution former aides who challenged him. He has arrested a local judge for not helping him round up migrants for deportation. He has attacked the free press for not bending to his will. On his very first day in office, he released from prison hundreds of domestic terrorists, effectively a personal militia, who assaulted police officers in his name.

And now, not 100 days into his term, he has done what so many democracy advocates have feared he would eventually do, something that no president has dared try in the more than two centuries since Marbury v. Madison’s precedent that the judiciary would be the ultimate authority on what is and what is not legal: He is straight-up defying the United States Supreme Court.

And — here is the truly terrifying part — he is getting away with it. No one is getting fined. No one is going to jail. In fact, much of America doesn’t even realize it’s happening.

The case at hand is nominally about a migrant who came to this country illegally but who for several years now had been raising a family in Maryland and training to be a sheet metal worker. But in reality it is about whether anyone or any institution has any check on Donald Trump’s ability to claim near limitless power over all our lives simply by declaring a national security “emergency.”

For three years, Trump and his apologist echo chamber repeated, over and over, that the flood of migrants coming over the southern border without authorization constituted an........

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