Don’t be fooled: Roberts’ 'stooge' court is still in the tank for Trump

A political observer might be tempted to think the conservative Roberts Supreme Court is a fair caller of balls and strikes.

Don’t bother, says Salon writer Alex Galbraith. They’re not.

The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a rare loss at the Supreme Court on Monday when Chief Justice John Roberts and a majority of the court once again rejected his bid to avoid paying the $5 million in civil damages awarded to the writer E. Jean Carroll, after a jury found the president had sexually abused her at a Manhattan department store and later defamed her.

The president had appealed that verdict, as well as a larger defamation verdict in a separate lawsuit, all the way to the Supreme Court. The court his dumped that first attempt in June.

But hold your applause, warns Galbraith.

“Across its 2025-2026 term, the Court has proven that it’s more than willing to let Trump dunk all over them, doing everything short of giving him a boost on the way to the rim,” said Galbraith wrote. “In June, they allowed the president to pull Congress’ athletic shorts down, giving him the power to revoke the temporary protected status that lawmakers had granted to Haitian and Syrian immigrants.”

And even though Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court’s liberal justices to stave off an attack on birthright citizenship, within a week, Galbraith said Roberts and Barrett “returned to their squad, getting caught up in the magic circle that surrounds Trump’s actions as president.”

“In a decision that overturned nearly a century of precedent, the conservative majority granted Trump the ability to fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch, effectively letting the administration bowl over any career officials and oversight that might stand in the way of the president’s radical agenda,” Galbraith said.

And this doesn’t include Trump v. United States, he added, the 6-3 decision that held that Trump could do “almost anything he wanted while in the White House and be largely immune from prosecution.”

Galbraith compared the “fiction being peddled by the Court — that this is the legitimate carrying out of the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution” to a staged Globetrotters game, where one team is free to conduct “obvious fouls, double-dribbles and prop-assisted scoring plays” as the audience plays along with the inside joke that they’re watching a legit game.

“The Court is free to play-act at being a check on Trump’s power, so long as the majority of Americans consider it a legitimate body. Keeping that ruse going is crucial for the aims of the wider right-wing project,” said Galbraith. “And to do that, the conservative majority can’t just rubber stamp every last thing this president does.”

Hence the occasional softball into Carroll’s court — an issue that “doesn’t hamper Republicans’ agenda.”

“… [T]he conservative justices are continuing their smoke screen by reinforcing the Court’s legitimacy as an impartial body at a time when they’re more captured by partisan politics than ever. Occasionally ruling against the president keeps up the charade.

Trump might have been sent packing this time, but don’t expect his foils on the Court to go on a winning streak. SCOTUS will be back to their regularly scheduled losing soon enough.