An ironic side-note to Donald Trump’s status as the most demonstrably dishonest president America has ever had (more than 30,000 verifiable lies during his first term, reports The Washington Post, with the pile now growing ever-larger in his second term) is his penchant for occasionally blurting the quiet part out loud.

That’s apparently what happened when Trump told an interviewer this week that “I could” return a migrant who was wrongly shipped to a Salvadoran prison, despite the administration’s repeated claims in court that it is powerless in the matter.

Some Trump fans might cheer this rare outburst of honesty. But anyone not dwelling in the MAGA rabbit hole should see it for what it is: Trump is arrogantly telling off a court system that he and his people increasingly view as an irrelevant annoyance rather than a co-equal branch of government. This is the very definition of a constitutional crisis in the making.

The facts in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia have been so blatantly misrepresented by Trump and his administration that it’s necessary to lay them out yet again:

Abrego Garcia was sent to the U.S. from El Salvador as a teenager by his family to escape recruitment by that country’s violent gangs. He was undocumented but has worked with immigration officials for years, checking in with the courts, finding employment as a sheet metal worker, marrying an American woman and raising a son. He has never been charged with any crime in the U.S. or El Salvador.

Evidence was once introduced in a court hearing suggesting gang involvement, but it was disputed as unreliable, based on nothing but the fact that Abrego Garcia was seen wearing a Chicago Bulls cap. Another court explicitly ordered that Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador because of danger to his life from the gangs there.

None of this is in dispute. Nor is the fact that the administration erred in shipping Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison in March on the unproven claim he was a member of the violent MS-13 gang. He was deported with no hearing or other form of due process. The administration has since admitted in court that his deportation was an “administrative error.”

Yet when a federal judge and then the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. — a reasonable order, given the admitted mistake — the administration claimed it was powerless to do so because he was in the custody of a foreign government.

That was always nonsense; Trump has touted his close working relationship with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has obediently toed the White House line on the issue. But at least, for a time, the obvious lie served to let the administration ignore the courts’ orders while pretending that’s not what it was doing.

That all changed on Tuesday when, during an interview with ABC News, Trump admitted the obvious.

“You could get him back, there’s a phone on this desk,” interviewer Terry Moran suggested.

“ I could,” Trump replied.

He went on to claim — again, in defiance of any evidence — that Abrego Garcia is a violent gang member and that that’s the reason he won’t bring him back: Not because he can’t, but because he won’t. Court orders be damned, apparently.

Now that the president has admitted on national television that his administration is willfully defying the Supreme Court, will he or his legal team be held in contempt? Will congressional Republicans who are always waxing about law and order actually demand that this president adhere to it? Will there be any consequences at all?

Don’t count on it. The current Republican-controlled Congress has displayed all the backbone of a mollusk when it comes to holding Trump to constitutional standards.

We predicted on this page months ago that Trump would eventually dispense completely with even the pretense of legal arguments and plainly say what he clearly believes: That he has the right and the authority to ignore the courts, thus shattering more than two centuries of constitutional balance of power.

His blithe “I could” this week was within a hair’s width of that level of defiance. When he gets away with it, he’ll inevitably be encouraged toward even more brazen defiance next time. Make no mistake: This is what sliding toward a constitutional crisis looks like.

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