“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Apparently, this famous quote was written by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, but I first heard the line in the movie The Usual Suspects. I think about it often, as it encapsulates Donald Trump’s relationship with the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The Donald Trump who exists in the real world—the racist, fascist sexual predator who happily tweets out the illegal and unconstitutional motivations for his policies—does not exist according to the Supreme Court. Instead, the court has invented a different Trump, one who does not speak, does not lie, and adheres to the well-established norms regarding the use of executive power. It has dreamed up a normal US president, grafted this creation onto Trump’s legal filings, and then ruled as if this fiction were reality.

There is a legal doctrine that explains what I believe the Supreme Court is doing: the “presumption of regularity,” which dates at least as far back as 1926. This doctrine instructs courts to assume that members of the executive branch have acted properly and in good faith. An administration is presumed to have bona fide reasons for its actions, and those actions are assumed not to be “pretextual,” meaning that courts are not supposed to act like the administration has invented a plausibly legal reason to justify its plainly illegal actions. The presumption of regularity is afforded to members of the executive branch and no one else. Only they can waltz into court and expect people to take them at their word.

We hear the Supreme Court invoke the presumption of regularity all the time, especially during oral arguments, when the justices talk about giving “deference” to the administration. This administration deserves no deference, because it lies all the time. But the presumption of regularity instructs the court to defer to the administration and assume it is telling the truth.

The result is that the court presumes Trump had a good reason for shutting down DEI programs, even when there is clear evidence of the flagrant racism behind such actions. It presumes the administration tried its best to follow the rules before taking a chainsaw to the administrative state—even though it was a private billionaire who did the cutting, in violation of all the rules. And it presumes there’s a real national emergency simply because the president said so—never mind that the only national emergency is the armed goons invading our cities.

In embracing this doctrine, the Supreme Court is asking us to do something patently insane—and one of the many ways we know this is that many other courts are refusing to fall for the trick. A study released by the digital law journal Just Security last November found more than 60 cases in which lower courts called out the Trump administration for basing its arguments on misinformation, and it cited numerous instances of lower-court judges castigating the Trump administration for “bad faith” conduct, “manifestly unreasonable” or “contrived” legal arguments, and supplying the court with “mischaracterized,” “misleading,” or “intentionally false” evidence and information.

Lower courts have, in essence, rejected the presumption of regularity. They are no longer treating this administration as normal. But the problem is that they are consistently overruled by the Supreme Court.

This, however, may be changing. The Supreme Court has played Trump’s game for a decade, but two recent cases suggest that even Trump’s handpicked justices might be getting sick of his treating them like idiots.

In December, in an unsigned “shadow docket” opinion, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Trump argued that he should be allowed to deploy the Guard because the regular police forces in Chicago couldn’t uphold the law. The majority didn’t buy his argument—which predictably pissed off the justices who think Trump should be treated as a god-king. In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence Thomas) wrote: “[T]he President said unequivocally that he had ‘determined that the regular forces of the United States are not sufficient to ensure the laws of the United States are faithfully executed…in Chicago.’… Not only is this statement sufficient on its face, but under the presumption of regularity, the Court must presume that the President properly arrived at his determination.” (Emphasis mine.)

Not long after, the court heard a case challenging the firing of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. During oral arguments, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, pointed out that Trump’s stated reason for firing Cook (that she lied on a mortgage application) was pretextual. He suggested that the administration had made up a reason for firing her since it couldn’t admit it was doing so because of policy disagreements. (Fed commissioners can only be fired “for cause.”) Kavanaugh described the administration’s process as tantamount to “let’s find something, anything, about this person, and then we’re good.”