Trump ‘won’t forget’ the Roberts Court helped him win — and neither should we
President Donald Trump’s “gangster-intimidation moves” against the Supreme Court are getting in the way of his own agenda, warned an opinion columnist from a conservative newspaper on Thursday.
“Donald Trump on Wednesday became the first sitting president to attend a Supreme Court oral argument, a scene that ranked with some of the best gangster-intimidation movie scenes,” wrote Kimberley A. Strassel, a Wall Street Journal opinion columnist. “There he sat in the public gallery, Don Corleone-esque, daring the Supreme Court to find fault with his read on birthright citizenship. All that was missing was a horse’s head.”
Despite thinking that this will help him win cases with the court, Strassel opined in the Journal that Trump’s strategy will actually hurt him instead.
“This frustration-fueled bullying of the justices will get him nothing,” Strassel predicted. “It could lose him plenty.”
Strassel noted that Trump’s progressive critics have filed more than 600 lawsuits against various Trump policies, from his unilateral firing of federal employees and shuttering agency offices to deporting accused gang members under the Alien Enemies Act and deploying the National Guard to enforce immigration laws.
“No amount of ranting or raving (Mr. Trump on Thursday: ‘Kangaroo Court!!!’) will spur the justices to bow to the president’s wishes,” Strassel wrote. “You’d have thought he’d have learned as much from his emergency-tariffs strike out. The president’s relentless campaign to spook the court into considering issues outside of law included warning that an adverse decision would mean a ‘complete mess’ of a $3 trillion economic ‘unwind,’ an ‘insurmountable National Security Event’ that would be ‘devastating to the future of our Country—Possibly non-sustainable!’”
Strassel added, “A 6-3 court in February killed the tariffs. We have surmounted and sustained.”
In short, Strassel concluded that Trump’s best chance of prevailing before the Supreme Court in key cases rests in showing the judges respect rather than trying to publicly push them around. Indeed, by doing the latter, Trump risks sabotaging cases where his legal teams might actually be able to pull him through to victory.
“For all the left’s howling about a ‘lawless’ president, Mr. Trump surrounds himself with good lawyers,” Strassel pointed out. “He has over the years won huge cases—his travel ban, presidential immunity, injunctions—and continues to. This court has been principled, meaning largely deferential, in allowing many Trump policies to continue while litigation is ongoing. And by the end of this term, he’ll likely end up with several key legal victories.”
She concluded, “If he doesn’t get in his own way.”
The Wall Street Journal is not alone in running experts who suspect the worst will come for Trump as a result of him attending the Supreme Court’s oral arguments.
“President Donald Trump bulldozed yet another longstanding norm of American government on Wednesday by becoming the first modern president to attend an oral argument of the Supreme Court,” CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote on Wednesday. He elaborated the effort to “browbeat” the court is consistent with his past, but nevertheless an escalation of those patterns.
“He savaged Kavanaugh in 2021 for occasionally ruling against him despite Trump having stood by his nominee during an arduous confirmation process in 2018,” Blake wrote. “Trump has also frequently attacked Justice Amy Coney Barrett as she has emerged as a tough vote for him. And after the tariffs decision in February, Trump said both Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch were an ‘embarrassment to their families.’”
Despite Trump’s past bullying tactics, he has not cowed the Supreme Court so far.
“Over the last few weeks, a series of rulings have gone against him on some high-profile issues” such as his efforts to shutter Voice of America, ban mainstream media from Defense Department briefings and punish Anthropic for not allowing the Pentagon to do what it wishes with its technology.
“On Tuesday alone, judges both overturned Trump’s order ending NPR and PBS funding and halted Trump’s efforts to build a new ballroom on the White House grounds — which might be one of Trump’s most prized initiatives right now,” Blake wrote. “None of these cases are over. But they add to an increasingly ugly picture of how Trump’s policies have fared in court. (Because the courts take a while to act, that picture has come into focus slowly.)”
Like Strassel, Blake speculated that Trump’s intimidation could boomerang against him.
“It could make the justices — and other judges — feel more like they have to stand up for their branch of government, lest it look like Trump is controlling them to some extent,” Blake predicted.