For over a week now, Donald Trump and the Justice Department have been flouting the law meant to shut down TikTok. The legislation was unambiguous and was passed by large, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress; it was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court less than two weeks ago. And for the most part, both Republicans and Democrats have sat quietly by as Trump has waved away their previously stated concerns, as well as the constitutional powers and institutional prerogatives of Capitol Hill.

The TikTok ban was supposed to be a critical national security response to the threat posed by the Chinese government and its control over an app with 170 million users in our country. Shortly before the law went into effect, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in a speech on the Senate floor that “without question, TikTok’s lethal algorithm has cost the lives of many American kids.” He announced that there would “be no extensions, no concessions and no compromises for TikTok.”

Someone forgot to tell Trump.

On his first day in office, Trump declared that he would effectively ignore the law, and so TikTok lives. He appears to have engineered a short-term bailout for TikTok — whose app should have gone dark in the U.S. by now — after a wealthy donor supported the move and amid some belief that TikTok helped him get reelected.

In the process, Trump effectively immunized a slew of large corporations from devastating financial penalties that were dictated by Congress, and he has created a precedent — that he can direct his own administration to ignore laws that he believes are politically or personally unhelpful to him — that ought to trouble Republicans and Democrats alike.

To start, there is no real question about the state of the law on paper: Trump is breaking it.

The law that Congress passed specifically banned TikTok and imposed draconian financial penalties on the companies that provide technical support for the platform if they continued doing so. The president is allowed to grant a one-time, 90-day extension to the ban but only if there are “binding legal agreements” in place to enable a so-called “qualified divestiture” under the law — one that would (in theory at least) effectively eliminate the Chinese government’s purported control over the app and the associated algorithm.

Nothing of the sort has happened, and no one seriously contests that. There is no deal in place, and there are no “binding legal agreements.” Instead, Trump and administration officials are reportedly working to broker some sort of deal or takeover to resolve the issue, but it remains unclear whether any of the reported proposals under consideration would even comply with the specific ownership conditions mandated by Congress.

The reprieve that Trump issued to TikTok upon entering office does not change any of this.

His executive order was little more than a public declaration that he would ignore the law on the theory that it interfered with his ability “to assess the national security and foreign policy implications.” Not only did he direct the attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days, he also instructed the Justice Department “to issue a letter” to each TikTok service provider “stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct” during the 75-day period.

Some Republican China hawks, like Cotton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, had taken the position that state attorneys general could enforce the law anyway, but Trump unilaterally decided that they were wrong about that too. His executive order purports to prevent “attempted enforcement by the States or private parties” and to grant the Justice Department “exclusive authority to enforce the law.”

This is generally not how executive orders are supposed to work. They are not supposed to be vehicles for the president to pick and choose which laws passed by Congress he wants to enforce — or which ones he wants to change by fiat.

Presidents of both parties have, of course, previously issued executive orders that were later deemed unlawful, but conservatives often rail against those efforts. They ripped Barack Obama for briefly delaying implementation of key elements of the Affordable Care Act. They also routinely oppose the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in criminal law — most notably, in immigration enforcement. In fact, the day after Trump’s TikTok reprieve, his acting deputy attorney general issued a memo reversing a Biden administration policy on just this point.

This is not actually the first time that a Republican president has declared that he can unilaterally disregard the laws passed by Congress. President George W. Bush rightly came under fire during his administration after he issued a series of “signing statements” declaring that he had the right to ignore certain provisions of laws passed by Congress based on his assessment of constitutional and national security concerns.

Trump’s executive order on TikTok — which argues that he has “the unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions” — is an aggressive extension of this position. Indeed, the order bears less resemblance to Obama- and Biden-era exercises of executive discretion than it does to the Bush White House’s claim that that they could pick and choose which laws to enforce and without consulting with Congress.

For now, things appear to have settled into an awkward political-legal equilibrium.

TikTok is operational, with the support of some (but not all) of the relevant tech companies — but things could get increasingly awkward for the supposed China hawks who pushed the law through.

On Sunday, Cotton himself — who recently advised the tech industry to obey the law or face “ruinous liability” — seemed to step back, at least for the time being, from a confrontation with Trump. “Our point in passing that law,” Cotton told Fox News, was never to ban TikTok in the United States. It was to force ByteDance, its parent company that is controlled by the Chinese communists, to divest from TikTok — to have a TikTok that is not influenced by Chinese communists.”

It’s an odd defense for those steeped in the conservative legal movement. They are generally supposed to be originalists and textualists, and they typically oppose efforts to interpret laws by reference to congressional purpose.

Democrats, meanwhile, also seem content to let Trump defy the law, perhaps for fear of further political fallout from TikTok obsessives. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who voted for the ban, has pledged to work with Trump to keep the social media platform alive.

At this point, the best-case scenario for TikTok critics on Capitol Hill is that the Trump administration somehow manages to quickly engineer a deal that complies with the law that Congress passed and we all move on, but there is no guarantee when (or even if) that will happen. Trump claimed over the weekend that he has “spoken to many people” about a TikTok deal, but it wouldn’t be the first time such talk yielded little.

What happens if a legally sound deal does not emerge during Trump’s self-created 75-day extension? Will lawmakers sit idly by if Trump gives TikTok another extension or decides to change the ownership provisions of the law himself? And what if a deal never emerges, and Trump simply declares — on the theory first incubated by the Bush administration and referenced in Trump’s TikTok order itself — that his administration can ignore the law?

Even if a deal comes together, the implications of Trump’s bailout extend beyond just TikTok. What is to prevent Trump from directing his attorney general — publicly or privately — to refrain from enforcing certain laws that he simply does not like, or that would interfere with his personal or financial interests?

For instance, Trump notoriously hates the foreign anti-bribery statute, which emerged as a focus of enforcement by the Justice Department during the final years of the George W. Bush administration. Among other things, the law is supposed to help level the international playing field for American multinational companies who compete against companies that bribe foreign officials for business. Would Congress sit idly by if Trump announced that he is ignoring that law too?

What about international sanctions, fraud and money laundering statutes? There are many of those, and they too implicate “the national security of the United States” and “the conduct of foreign policy,” in the words of Trump’s TikTok order. There are no doubt countless companies across the globe that would love to be exempt from these laws — either officially or unofficially — and there are plenty of ways that Trump could advance his and his family’s business interests by directing the attorney general to selectively enforce those laws, too.

Trump’s TikTok bailout appears to be legitimately unprecedented as a unilateral accommodation for a single for-profit company, but the effort is also consistent with Trump’s other legally controversial moves since returning to the White House. Just as importantly, the response among most Republicans in Congress has been similarly docile.

Trump’s decision to pardon the Jan. 6 defendants was a shameful attack on the criminal justice system, but GOP lawmakers barely seem to care.

His political purge of inspectors general violated the law requiring presidents to give Congress actual reasons for their removal, but here too, Republicans are shrugging it off.

It also appears we may be well on our way to a fight over whether Trump can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress.

The consistent theme here is a White House that appears poised to arrogate more power to itself than any in recent memory — and an administration that, for the moment at least, does not particularly seem to care what members of Congress think about any of it. Ultimately, this is about much more than just TikTok.

Ankush Khardori is a senior writer for POLITICO Magazine and a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, where he specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime. He has also worked in the private sector on complex commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. His column, Rules of Law, offers an unvarnished look at national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.

The article was published in the Politico.

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