Trump's Second-Term Supreme Court Record: Near-Total Wins on Emergency Orders, a Split Record on Final Rulings — and Mounting Questions About the Court's Ethics and Impartiality

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Trump's second term has produced a historically unusual relationship with the Supreme Court — one defined by two distinct phases. Through 2025, the Court overwhelmingly sided with the administration on the emergency docket, overturning lower court rulings that had blocked Trump's policies in roughly 80–90% of cases. But as the Court shifted to issuing final, reasoned merits opinions in late 2025 and 2026 — striking down the president's sweeping tariffs on February 20, 2026, and then handing down a cluster of consequential end-of-term rulings in late June — the record became genuinely mixed: landmark defeats for the administration on tariffs, the Federal Reserve, and birthright citizenship, alongside a landmark expansion of presidential removal power and other administration-backed wins. Running beneath both phases is a third dimension that the win-loss ledger alone does not capture: the Court is deciding these cases under an ethics regime that remains entirely self-policed — a code of conduct adopted in 2023 with no enforcement mechanism, in the wake of ProPublica's Pulitzer-winning reporting on Justice Clarence Thomas's undisclosed luxury travel from a Republican megadonor — and its impartiality in Trump-related cases has become a live public debate in its own right.

2025: Near-Total Dominance on the Emergency Docket

As constitutional law professor Erwin Chemerinsky wrote on SCOTUSblog in January 2026, "No president in history has challenged constitutional limits or sought to increase presidential power in the way that President Donald Trump has in this term in office." The Court's initial response was largely accommodating.

By Chemerinsky's count, the Court ruled for the administration in 20 out of 24 emergency docket cases in 2025. A study by professors at Washington University and Penn State found the Court sided with the administration about 80% of the time. A Court Accountability report put the figure at 90%.

These emergency orders — typically brief, unsigned, and issued without full briefing or oral argument — allowed the administration to proceed with policies blocked by lower courts, including mass firings of federal workers, removal of independent agency heads, termination of NIH grants, deportation of immigrants, barring transgender individuals from the military, and requiring passports to list birth sex.

The administration's sole merits victory in 2025 was Trump v. CASA, in which the Court ruled 6-3 that federal district courts lack the statutory authority to issue nationwide injunctions — making it substantially harder for courts to block administration policies.

By contrast, lower courts ruled against the administration in the vast majority of over 358 lawsuits filed in 2025. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted, lower courts had "a mix ideologically of Republicans and Democrats deciding against Trump in about 95% of cases."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in every one of the 24 emergency docket cases. In one dissent, she invoked the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes": "This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins."

Rare 2025 Losses

The Court ruled against the administration in four emergency docket cases:

• A.A.R.P. v. Trump: An apparent 7-2 vote blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador prison
• Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition: The Court initially rejected the administration's request to stay a district court order requiring nearly $2 billion in foreign assistance reimbursements
• Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges: The only case where Justices Thomas and Alito voted against the administration
• Trump v. Illinois: In December 2025, the Court ruled 6-3 that Trump lacked authority to federalize the National Guard in Illinois, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett joining the three liberal justices

A Structural Milestone: The Shadow Docket Overtakes the Merits Docket

In July 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Supreme Court terms going back to October 2003 documented a first in modern history: in the most recently completed term, the Court decided more cases through its emergency "shadow docket" (63 orders) than through its merits docket with full briefing and argument (56 decisions). Only 17% of the shadow-docket rulings included any public record of the vote breakdown or an opinion explaining the Court's reasoning; the rest were decided on limited briefing and expedited timelines, typically with no explanation or citation to precedent.

The surge was driven substantially by the administration itself. According to a Brennan Center for Justice analysis cited by ProPublica, the Trump administration filed 32 emergency-docket petitions in 2025 alone — compared with just 8 filed by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations combined over 16 years. The pattern reflected the administration's strategy of rushing its losses in lower courts to the emergency docket rather than litigating them through normal appeals.

ProPublica cataloged consequential outcomes decided this way: a June 23, 2025 order allowing eight men to be deported to South Sudan without due-process review; immigration-enforcement orders under which more than 170 U.S. citizens — predominantly Latino — were stopped or detained by ICE, with more than 50 held even after their citizenship was confirmed; and a May 2025 order letting Louisiana redraw its electoral map mid-election, eliminating a majority-Black district. Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told ProPublica: "The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump... That's the real blow to the court's credibility." Justice Kagan had warned in an earlier dissent that the majority's approach "is emblematic of too much of this Court's shadow docket decisionmaking — which every day becomes more unreasoned." ProPublica also found that Chief Justice Roberts — who once joined a Kagan dissent criticizing shadow-docket practice — referred more substantive emergency applications to the full court than any other justice, nearly half of all referrals last term, up from a single referral in the 2005 term.

Late 2025–2026: The Shift to Merits Rulings

As NBC News observed, the Court has historically waited until a president's popularity wanes before delivering major legal defeats. Trump's approval stood at 42% in December 2025 NBC polling, down from positive ratings at the start of his term. The Illinois ruling in December signaled a change, and the tariffs decision in February confirmed it.

The Tariffs Ruling (February 20, 2026)

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's sweeping tariffs in a 6-3 decision, ruling that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The ruling invalidated the centerpiece of the administration's economic agenda.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, joined by Justices Gorsuch, Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh dissented.

Roberts wrote that the administration's claim rested on just two words in the statute — "regulate" and "importation" — separated by 16 other words, and that those words "cannot bear such weight." He emphasized that IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties and that no president had previously read the law to confer such power.

In a portion of the opinion joined by Gorsuch and Barrett, Roberts invoked the "major questions" doctrine — the same principle used to block Biden's student loan forgiveness — holding that Congress must explicitly authorize policies of sweeping economic significance. Roberts rejected the administration's argument that emergency powers or foreign affairs contexts should exempt the tariffs from this scrutiny.

The three liberal justices agreed the tariffs were unlawful but declined to join the major questions portion of the opinion, citing their prior dissents when the doctrine was used against the Biden administration.

In dissent, Kavanaugh warned that the government "may be required to refund billions of dollars" and that the ruling could destabilize trade deals negotiated under the tariff framework.

Scope and Financial Impact

The ruling invalidated the "reciprocal" tariffs imposed on nearly every country and the "trafficking tariffs" targeting China, Canada, and Mexico, but left intact tariffs imposed under other legal authorities, including steel and aluminum tariffs under Section 232.

U.S. Customs had collected approximately $133 billion in IEEPA tariffs as of mid-December 2025, with collections surging to $30 billion in January 2026 alone. The Court's opinion was silent on refunds. Estimates of potential refund liability ranged from $85 billion (Morgan Stanley) to $175 billion (Penn-Wharton Budget Model). More than a thousand lawsuits seeking refunds were filed within days of the ruling.

Stocks rallied on the news: the S&P 500 gained 0.69%, the Nasdaq rose 0.9%, and the Dow added 230 points. Retailers, tech companies, and logistics firms led the gains.

Trump's Response

Trump's reaction was unusually personal. He called the decision "deeply disappointing" and a "disgrace to our nation," said the justices in the majority were "very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution," and claimed without evidence that the Court was "swayed by foreign interests." When asked if he regretted nominating Gorsuch and Barrett, he called their votes "an embarrassment to their families."

He praised the three dissenters — Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh — for "their strength and wisdom and love of our country."

Hours after the ruling, Trump signed an executive order imposing a new 10% "global tariff" under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a different legal authority with a 150-day time limit. The next day, he raised it to 15%. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration would replace IEEPA tariffs using Section 232 and Section 301 authorities and predicted "virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026."

Trump also blasted "disloyal" Republicans more broadly as midterm elections approach.

Emergency-Docket Wins Continued in 2026

Even as the Court handed down merits defeats, it kept siding with the administration on the emergency docket, underscoring that the two tracks moved in different directions. On June 25, 2026, the Court allowed the administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, overturning lower-court orders that had blocked the terminations. In a 6-3 decision in Mullin v. Doe, Justice Alito wrote that the TPS statute's bar on judicial review was clear and "very broad," and brushed aside arguments that Trump's derogatory comments about Haitians showed unlawful prejudice. Justice Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, dissented, writing that the statements "fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president's resolve to remove Haitians from this country." The decision followed an earlier order allowing the end of TPS for Venezuelans. The same day, the Court also cleared the way for the administration to revive a policy restricting immigrants seeking asylum — a second immigration win in a single day. (For the enforcement and humanitarian stakes of the TPS ruling, see the companion article on the mass-deportation campaign.)

The Term's Final Days: A Split Verdict on Presidential Power

The 2025–26 term closed at the end of June 2026 with a cluster of major rulings that, taken together, neither vindicated nor repudiated the administration — instead splitting the difference on presidential power while handing Trump several personal and policy defeats. (See NPR's term wrap, CBS News's overview, and SCOTUSblog's "The Trump Term" retrospective.)

Removal Power: Cook Blocked, Humphrey's Executor Overturned (June 29, 2026)

On June 29, 2026, the Court handed down two closely watched decisions on the president's power to remove officials at independent agencies. In Trump v. Cook, the Court ruled 5–4 that Trump could not remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while her challenge proceeds. Chief Justice Roberts — joined by Justice Kavanaugh and the three liberals — wrote that accepting Trump's position "would in effect transform the Federal Reserve's for-cause protection into at-will employment — an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted." The majority held that removal "for cause" is judicially reviewable, requires substantial cause, and must be preceded by notice and an opportunity to respond — protections Trump failed to give Cook, whom he purported to fire in August 2025 over alleged 2021 mortgage fraud predating her appointment (allegations she denies as politically motivated). Roberts emphasized the "tradition of central banking protected from political interference." Justice Thomas dissented, calling the ruling "incorrect" and noting it was the first time in constitutional history an injunction had blocked a presidential removal of an executive officer. Merits argument is scheduled for January; Cook continues her Fed duties in the meantime, having participated in the September 2025 policy meeting that lowered interest rates.

The same day, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court allowed Trump to fire Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and overturned the 1935 precedent Humphrey's Executor v. United States, ending for-cause removal protection for FTC- and NLRB-style independent agencies while carving out the Federal Reserve as a constitutionally distinct exception — what Just Security called "The Federal Reserve Exception to the Slaughter Rule". The administration thus lost on Cook by one vote but won a sweeping expansion of removal power over most other independent agencies; SCOTUSblog surveyed the likely fallout, including future Fed fights "and maybe some midnight firings."

Slaughter Applied: Gutting the Election Assistance Commission (July 9, 2026)

The consequences of Slaughter arrived quickly. On July 9, 2026 — less than two weeks after the ruling — Trump dismantled the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, four months before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. As the Washington Post reported, Trump fired the commission's two Democratic members, Chair Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, via termination emails stating their positions were "terminated, effective immediately," and accepted the resignation of Republican commissioner Christy McCormick; the fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, had left in April 2026 for the Heritage Foundation. The EAC — created by Congress after the 2000 election, structured so that no more than two of its four members belong to the same party, and responsible for maintaining the federal voter registration form, certifying voting equipment, and distributing election-security funds — now has zero commissioners and cannot take official action. Election law professor Rick Hasen called it "an open question about the EAC and the Federal Election Commission" whether bipartisan election agencies retain removal protections after Slaughter. The White House said the president "reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections"; top Democratic election-policy lawmakers Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Joe Morelle called the move "a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections."

The EAC purge came against a backdrop of what a Washington Post analysis, excerpted by Political Wire as "Trump's Remarkable Losing Streak," described as courts repeatedly blocking the president's attempts to change voting rules before the midterms. In late June 2026, a federal judge barred implementation of the proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement in Trump's March 2025 elections executive order — also blocking the order's attempt to bar counting mail ballots received after Election Day, and holding that the president has no constitutional authority to regulate voter registration — followed by a further defeat in early July on voter-list and mail-ballot litigation. The Supreme Court itself joined this line on June 29, 2026, ruling that mail ballots arriving after Election Day can be counted — a defeat for the president's long-running campaign against mail voting. (The EAC firings and election-rule litigation are covered in depth in the companion article on centralizing federal control of elections.)

Birthright Citizenship Struck Down — Narrowly

In the term's final days, the Court decided Trump v. Barbara, striking down 6–3 Trump's executive order ending automatic birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors — an order every lower court had ruled against. Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion reaffirmed the reading of the Fourteenth Amendment established in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898): "the Citizenship Clause uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense — referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory," and "if Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design."

But as Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer detailed in a July 3 opinion essay, "These Justices Are Not Impartial," only five justices — Roberts and Barrett among the Republican appointees, plus the three liberals — voted to invalidate the order on constitutional grounds. Justice Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment but argued birthright citizenship rests on the 1940 Nationality Act and could be repealed by a simple act of Congress. Justice Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, dissented on the theory that the amendment covers only those "domiciled" in the United States — a word, Serwer noted, that does not appear in the amendment. Justice Alito alone would have upheld the order in full. Georgetown law professor Aderson Francois told Serwer that by ruling with such a slim majority, "the Court has just handed right-wingers a new bloody shirt to wave in every single political campaign... for the next few years, this will become the new Roe v. Wade" — conservatives now know they are one vote from eliminating birthright citizenship. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts accused the Court of having "cheapened the sacred value of American citizenship," echoing the dissents' language: Alito wrote that the majority opinion "degrades" American citizenship, and Thomas that it "devalues" it. Justice Jackson wrote that the "Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery."

Other End-of-Term Outcomes

Two more late-June decisions rounded out the split record:

• Carroll cert denial (June 29, 2026): The Court declined to hear Trump's appeal of the $5 million verdict in E. Jean Carroll's sexual-abuse and defamation case, leaving intact the 2023 Manhattan jury finding — upheld by the Second Circuit in December 2024 — that Trump sexually abused Carroll in the mid-1990s and defamed her in 2022. Trump had argued the trial was tainted by admission of the "Access Hollywood" tape and testimony from two other accusers. Carroll's attorneys said it is "time for him to pay" the judgment, which has accrued interest since 2023; on July 8, a federal appeals court rejected Trump's bid to further delay payment. The denial came the same day as the Cook and Slaughter rulings. (The separate $83.3 million Carroll defamation judgment, which DOJ is seeking to extinguish by substituting the United States as defendant, is tracked in a companion article.)
• Monsanto v. Durnell (late June 2026): In a 7-2 opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, the Court held that EPA approval of Roundup's label under FIFRA preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims — a ruling that blocks roughly 200,000 pending plaintiffs from pursuing claims that the glyphosate-based herbicide caused their cancers. The administration actively backed Monsanto's parent Bayer: Solicitor General John Sauer filed a brief supporting preemption and argued the point at the Court. The Bulwark reported that the ruling infuriated the MAHA ("Make America Healthy Again") movement, for which glyphosate is a signature concern — HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once championed Roundup litigation, acquiesced to the administration's pro-glyphosate stance, and MAHA-aligned figures including Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly criticized the position, a fracture the Bulwark argued could become a midterms liability.

Ethics and Impartiality: A Self-Policed Court Deciding Trump's Cases

The win-loss record does not capture a second axis on which the Court's second-term performance is being judged: whether the justices deciding Trump's cases operate under a credible ethics regime, and whether their methodology is applied impartially. In July 2026, both questions moved back to the center of public debate.

The Thomas–Crow Reporting, Re-Circulated

On July 6, 2026, ProPublica re-circulated the opening installment of its Pulitzer Prize-winning "Friends of the Court" series: its April 2023 investigation by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski documenting that for more than 20 years, Justice Clarence Thomas — whose judicial salary was $285,000 — secretly accepted luxury travel from Dallas real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. The re-share is not new reporting, but its timing, as the Court closed a term dominated by Trump cases, underscored that the investigation's findings remain the reference point for the current judicial-ethics debate.

ProPublica documented, among other trips: a nine-day June 2019 cruise through Indonesia aboard Crow's 162-foot superyacht Michaela Rose, which could have cost more than $500,000 to charter; a 2007 Greek Islands yacht trip; flights on Crow's Bombardier Global 5000 private jet, including a February 2016 three-hour round trip to New Haven worth roughly $70,000 by charter; and regular summer stays at Camp Topridge, Crow's 105-acre private Adirondacks resort, where in July 2017 Thomas socialized with Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers executives and where a commissioned painting shows Thomas with Crow and Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo. None of it was disclosed. Ethics experts told ProPublica the private-jet and yacht travel required disclosure under the federal gift rules: Kedric Payne of the Campaign Legal Center said the "failure to report the gifts is a violation of the disclosure law," and Virginia Canter of CREW said a justice's lifestyle "being subsidized by the rich and famous... absolutely corrodes public trust." Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner called it "incomprehensible to me that someone would do this." Crow — who has made more than $10 million in public political contributions, gave $500,000 to Ginni Thomas's Tea Party group, and donated $105,000 to Yale Law School — said, "We have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue." Thomas had long cultivated a modest public image, once saying, "I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches."

The aftermath of the investigation built the ethics framework the Court operates under today — and defined its limits. The revelations triggered a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation and a tightening of the Judicial Conference's disclosure rules, and in November 2023 the Supreme Court adopted its first code of conduct. But that code contains no enforcement mechanism: under federal law, justices must disqualify themselves in any proceeding in which their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned," yet each justice decides his or her own recusals, and no body reviews those decisions. Every recusal and ethics question raised by the Trump cases in this file has been resolved, in the end, by the justice involved.

Family Ties and Recusal: The Alito-Son Case

That self-policing framework was tested directly during this term. In May 2026, NOTUS revealed that Justice Samuel Alito's son Philip had been quietly working as a lawyer in the Treasury Department's office of the general counsel since early 2025 — including in November 2025, when the tariff case naming Treasury as a defendant was argued before the Court. The department never disclosed the employment in court filings, and Justice Alito did not recuse, joining the dissent that would have upheld the tariffs; the Court said Philip Alito "has not worked on any matter related to the tariffs." The episode — along with the weaker May controversies over Vice President Vance's appearance at a private Court dinner and Justice Gorsuch's conservative-media book tour, and the prospective conflicts posed by Treasury-related litigation heading toward the Court — is covered in depth in a companion entry, including the counterarguments that the arrangement has precedent and that Alito has recused when his son was directly involved in a case. For this file, the structural point is the same one the Thomas–Crow story established: whether a justice's family or financial ties to a party before the Court require recusal is a question each justice answers alone.

Opinion: "These Justices Are Not Impartial" and the Selective-Originalism Critique

The term's close also prompted a wave of critical commentary — opinion and analysis, not straight news reporting — arguing that the conservative justices' impartiality problem is methodological as well as ethical.

The most prominent entry was Serwer's July 3 Atlantic opinion essay, "These Justices Are Not Impartial." Beyond dissecting the Barbara lineup, Serwer argued that the dissenters applied history selectively: they dismissed the English-common-law foundation of birthright citizenship as a "feudal principle," a "medieval rule," and a remnant of "the darkness of the middle ages" — even though, he wrote, "legal traditions from hundreds of years ago are apparently vitally important if one wants to ban abortion or strike down restrictions on firearms, but they become barbaric anachronisms the second they diverge from the policy goals of the Republican Party." He contrasted the current Court unfavorably with the 1898 Court that decided Wong Kim Ark — "a profoundly racist Court in a profoundly racist era" that "nonetheless could find no way around the plain text of the Constitution" — writing that neither the constitutional text nor a century of precedent "has proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents." Even the narrow win for birthright citizenship, he concluded, "is less a victory than a reprieve."

Several same-week analyses made a similar "selective originalism" argument, including Salon, Bloomberg Opinion, Noah Feldman's syndicated column "The Supreme Court's originalism is dead, dead, dead," and The New Republic.

The record itself supplies the counterpoint to the strongest version of the capture claim: the same conservative-majority Court struck down the tariffs, blocked the Cook firing, upheld birthright citizenship, and let the Carroll verdict stand — and Justice Alito, the justice at the center of the Treasury story, was on the losing side of each. The impartiality critique and the win-loss ledger are in tension, and where the truth lies between them is precisely what remains unsettled.

Power Beyond the Court

A different critique came in a July 10 New York Times guest essay (opinion) by David Lawrence, who oversaw antitrust policy at the Justice Department from 2019 to 2026: "This Is a Lot More Worrying Than the Supreme Court's Ruling on Executive Power." Lawrence argued that as significant as the Slaughter expansion of the unitary executive is, agency heads under presidential control "must still follow clear rules that Congress has written into the law" — whereas the greater danger is the White House's "parallel administrative state" operating outside any statute or judicial review: conditioning access to leading AI models on government oversight, extracting a "golden share" in U.S. Steel, taking a 10% stake in Intel and a cut of chipmakers' Chinese sales, and issuing pricing and content directives to private companies backed by threats of state power. He noted that Justice Gorsuch's own concurrence in the removal-power ruling invoked the founders' fear of "when 'the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person'" — a fear, Lawrence argued, that applies with special force to the administration's extralegal command of industry, and that the Slaughter ruling will compound by strengthening the president's leverage over agencies that oversee those companies. His conclusion: the Court's rulings, win or lose, matter less than whether Congress and litigants can check power exercised outside the courtroom entirely.

Pending Cases

• Trump v. Cook (merits): The June 29 ruling kept Cook in her seat only while her challenge proceeds; full merits argument on the president's power to remove a Federal Reserve governor is scheduled for January, with SCOTUSblog previewing further fights over the scope of the Fed carve-out.
• Post-Slaughter litigation: The EAC firings and any move against the Federal Election Commission are expected to generate new litigation testing whether bipartisan election agencies retain removal protections.

Public Confidence

Public trust in the Supreme Court has declined significantly. More than half of Americans disapprove of how the Court does its job, according to Gallup, with a 65-point gap between how Republicans and Democrats view the conservative-dominated Court. A fall 2024 Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found 68% of voters supported term limits for justices. The confidence problem now has three reinforcing strands: the shadow docket's secrecy — Vladeck's warning to ProPublica that the patterns are "the real blow to the court's credibility" — the unresolved ethics questions left by the Thomas–Crow disclosures and the self-policed recusal regime, and the opinion-page argument that the justices' methodology itself bends toward one party. Whatever the merits of each strand, together they mean the Court is deciding the defining cases of the Trump presidency with historically low reserves of public trust.