WASHINGTON — The just-completed U.S. Supreme Court term made one thing abundantly clear: when President Donald Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts want the same outcome, they tend to get it. But when their priorities diverge, Trump loses — and Roberts is often the one writing the ruling against him.
Despite their starkly different personalities — Roberts is known as a reserved Midwestern institutionalist while Trump is an outspoken billionaire real estate developer from New York — the two found common ground in several landmark cases during the court’s nine-month term, which wrapped up Tuesday.
One of the most significant victories for Trump came in a ruling written by Roberts that granted the president sweeping authority to dismiss the heads of federal regulatory agencies. The decision fulfilled a long-standing conservative goal of giving the executive branch greater control over key government functions.
Throughout his second term, Trump has repeatedly pushed the boundaries of presidential authority in both domestic policy and foreign affairs, generating a wave of legal challenges. On the whole, the court has ruled in his favor more often than not.
However, three major cases exposed the fault lines between Roberts and Trump. In each instance, Roberts authored the majority opinion ruling against the president — on the legality of sweeping global tariffs, on birthright citizenship, and on Trump’s attempt to remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Those rulings drew support from a varying lineup of justices but were backed in every case by the court’s three liberal members.
John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said the defeats should silence critics who claim the high court functions as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration. “This term shows that Trump wins at the court only when his agenda coincides with Roberts’ agenda,” said Yoo, who previously served as a Justice Department attorney under Republican President George W. Bush.
SHIFTING TO THE RIGHT
Roberts has led the Supreme Court for two decades, serving under four presidents — two from each party. For much of that period, the court held a narrow 5-4 conservative majority, with former Justice Anthony Kennedy frequently serving as the deciding vote.
That balance shifted significantly when Trump, during his first term, appointed three justices: Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. The resulting 6-3 conservative supermajority has moved American law sharply rightward, producing decisions that rolled back abortion rights and affirmative action, expanded gun and religious freedoms, and curtailed the power of federal regulatory agencies.
That trajectory continued in the most recent term. In April, the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, and on Tuesday it invalidated a campaign finance restriction — both outcomes consistent with the court’s conservative direction.
Syracuse University College of Law professor Jenny Breen described the continued weakening of the Voting Rights Act as “a decades-long project for Chief Justice Roberts.”
The 6-3 Voting Rights Act ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, made it more difficult for minority voters to challenge electoral district maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark 1965 civil rights law. The decision could allow Republican-led Southern states to redraw majority-Black and majority-Latino congressional districts ahead of November’s midterm elections. Black and Latino voters have historically leaned toward Democratic candidates, and Trump’s Republican Party is working to hold onto its congressional majority in November.
On the same final day of the term, the court also struck down federal limits on coordinated campaign spending between political parties and their candidates, citing free speech protections — a ruling that benefits Republicans heading into the midterms with a significant financial edge over Democrats.
PRESIDENTIAL POWER
Among the rulings drawing the most praise from conservative legal scholars and Trump supporters was a 6-3 decision in a case called Trump v. Slaughter. Written by Roberts, the Monday ruling overturned a 1935 precedent that had allowed Congress to shield leaders of independent regulatory agencies from being fired by the president without cause.
The case arose from Trump’s removal of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter. By siding with the president, the court dramatically expanded executive authority over the federal bureaucracy.
“His best work has come when the limits of the executive branch have been tested by Trump’s adversaries,” said Robert Luther III, a George Mason University law professor who worked in the White House Counsel’s Office during Trump’s first term, referring to Roberts.
The Slaughter ruling is widely viewed as the strongest affirmation yet of the “unitary executive” theory — a conservative legal doctrine that gained prominence during Republican President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s. The theory holds that the president has complete authority over the executive branch, including the unrestricted power to hire and fire agency heads.
American University Washington College of Law professor Elizabeth Beske called the ruling’s outcome “part of a decades-long John Roberts project.” She noted that “Roberts has always been a unitary executive guy, since his days in the White House Counsel’s office” during the Reagan years. “There have been a lot of scholarly headwinds in the past few years against the moves taken in Slaughter,” Beske added, “but I think he set out to do it long ago and could not be stopped.”
ECONOMIC SETBACKS
Two of Trump’s most painful defeats this term struck directly at his economic agenda.
In February, Roberts authored a 6-3 ruling throwing out Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, which the president had imposed under a law designed for national emergencies. Then on Monday, Roberts wrote another opinion blocking Trump’s effort to remove Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook — a decision aimed at preserving the independence of the central bank.
“Both of those decisions reflect the Supreme Court’s discomfort with changes that they fear might disrupt the market or economy more broadly,” said Breen. “Those decisions, in other words, are entirely consistent with the conservative economic orientation of the court.”
On the final day of the term, Roberts also wrote the majority opinion finding that Trump’s executive order seeking to deny birthright citizenship to children of certain immigrants violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil who is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Yoo pointed out that Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship conflicted with “an uninterrupted history of following that rule,” as well as a Supreme Court precedent set in an 1898 case known as United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
“Where Trump seeks outcomes because of their political salience, but he comes into conflict with these long-held Roberts Court principles, he has lost,” Yoo said.
