Freezes on funding committed to research and international aid. Mass firings of federal employees. Ending birthright citizenship. Threatened deportations of legal immigrants.

President Donald Trump’s torrent of executive orders and other unilateral action opening his second term have invited legal scrutiny and outrage from opponents. But don’t expect public opinion to turn against him just because those actions may rest on shaky legal ground, new Cornell research suggests.

Legal concerns about presidential power carried some weight when considered hypothetically or in retrospective assessments of prior-generation presidents, such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the researchers found in 13 survey experiments involving roughly 5,000 participants. But when considering actions taken or floated by Trump or Joe Biden, partisanship wiped out any concerns supporters had about their legality.

“Tribalism and current loyalties overwhelm legal considerations when talking about our two most recent presidents,” said Douglas Kriner, the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government, in the College of Arts and Sciences. “There’s little reason to believe that providing information that unilateral actions rest on tenuous legal foundations, in and of itself, is likely to sway public opinion.”

Kriner, who is also faculty director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, is the corresponding author of “Legal Constraint Through Political Means? Legal Foundations and Public Support for Executive Action,” published Feb. 27 in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. Co-authors are Aaron Childree and Hyein Yang, both doctoral students in the field of American politics and former research fellows at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

The Supreme Court for nearly a century has held that executive orders, proclamations and other policy declarations carry the full force of law when issued with proper legal authority, as outlined in Article II of the Constitution or as delegated by Congress. Yet the limits of that authority are unclear. Because legal challenges may take years and leave constitutional questions unresolved before presidents leave office, some scholars are skeptical of judicial checks on presidential power.

In the shorter term, the researchers said, public opinion may act as a more robust check, forcing presidents to shift course if their policies are unpopular. Trump, for example, eventually reversed course on his first administration’s policy of family separations at the Mexican border. The research team sought to discern the extent to which debate about unilateral actions’ legality, or “law talk,” is influential in shaping public opinion.

To test the question, the team developed a series of surveys over two years that combined real and hypothetical executive actions involving recent and more distant presidents. Contrasting legal conditions drew upon the most oft-cited Supreme Court case concerning presidential power, Youngstown v. Sawyer, which in 1952 ruled unconstitutional President Harry Truman’s seizure of steel mills during the Korean War. Justice Robert Jackson then introduced a framework describing presidential action as being on strongest footing when Congress has delegated authority, weakest when it violates “the express or implied will of Congress.”

Survey respondents considered scenarios including Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to justify building a border wall; Biden’s cancelation of student loan debt; the hypothetical minting of a trillion-dollar coin to avoid a debt-ceiling-induced default; Bush’s establishment of military tribunals for trying terrorism suspects; and Clinton’s authorization of a $20 billion loan to Mexico to stabilize its currency.

The experiments also explored whether participants most committed to the rule of law would give more weight to legal framings about unilateral action. They did in hypothetical or historical cases – but dropped those concerns in contemporary contexts.

“Even when evidence affects your perceptions of an executive action’s legality, it doesn’t affect your support for, or opposition to, whatever Trump or Biden is doing,” Kriner said. “Public opinion breaks pretty clearly along partisan lines in most of these cases, and legal concerns only matter at the margins.”

That doesn’t mean legal arguments aren’t important, said Kriner, the co-author of “The Myth of the Imperial Presidency: How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive” (2020), just that they aren’t enough on their own to shape public opinion. That would require other actors, he said, such as members of Trump’s party; members of his cabinet; Democrats, if they retook a chamber of Congress and could hold hearings; or perhaps the Supreme Court delivering a firm, unambiguous response.

“If the Supreme Court rules against a sitting president, given past research and what we understand, there’s good reason to think that would sway public opinion,” Kriner said. “But by itself, you can say, ‘This action is illegal,’ and a lot of people just don’t care.”