This June, news broke that a senior Department of Justice official, Emil Bove III, “told subordinates that he was willing to ignore court orders.” According to a whistleblower complaint filed by a department lawyer, “high-level governmental personnel knowingly and willfully defied court orders” and “directed their subordinate attorneys to make misrepresentations to courts.” The lawyer has since been fired, while Bove has been nominated to become a judge on a federal appeals court.

The whistleblower’s complaint underscores a pattern within the Trump administration of challenging the judiciary’s power—in particular, by disobeying court orders on immigration-related cases. Now, a senior legal official’s alleged willingness to defy the courts raises an urgent question: If the president and his team refuse to comply with court orders, what will stop them?

For many Americans, the answer to this question hinges on public opinion—on the idea that the American people would not support a presidential power grab. In a survey this June, 81 percent of U.S. adults agreed that the Trump administration has to follow court orders. A minority of 19 percentthought that the administration should treat court orders as optional. Americans might therefore think, as one expert argued, that there is “very little public support for Trump to claim an even more assertive and powerful version of the presidency” and that public opinion provides a strong safeguard against executive overreach.

Unfortunately, evidence suggests otherwise. While the public may disapprove of curbing the courts in the abstract, in practice citizens around the world have often supported their president’s attacksagainst the judiciary. In many democracies where political leaders have challenged the courts, from Mexico and El Salvador to Turkey, public opinion is rarely a powerful guardrail protecting the judiciary against an executive power grab. Instead, a much more potent safeguard for the courts is societal mobilization.