Trump's courtroom bullying could end in humiliating 8-1 Supreme Court loss

President Donald Trump may have attended Wednesday’s Supreme Court session in person to intimidate the judges, but if so his effort likely backfired, according to one expert.

“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. Characterizing this as an effort to “browbeat” the judges, Blake elaborated that “Trump has made no secret that he wants these justices to feel the pressure. He savaged Kavanaugh in 2021 for occasionally ruling against him despite Trump having stood by his nominee during an arduous confirmation process in 2018. 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.’”

Yet Blake noted that despite Trump’s obvious desire to change the Supreme Court’s tune on cases pertaining to his administration, “he chose to do this at a particularly inauspicious time. Over the last few weeks, a series of rulings have gone against him on some high-profile issues” including those involving his efforts to kill the Voice of America, exclude mainstream media for Defense Department briefings and sanction Anthropic for not allowing the Pentagon to do whatever it wants with their 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 added. “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.)”

For these reasons, Blake anticipated Trump’s effort to strong arm the Supreme Court with his presence could backfire.

“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 said.

Independent of Trump’s arrival, there are reasons to believe the Supreme Court will rule against Trump. He is challenging birthright citizenship, which was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1868 and guarantees citizenship to every human being born in the United States. Because a constitutional amendment can only be changed by ratifying a new amendment, and not through executive orders as Trump has tried, the case against his effort seems cut-and-dried.

Per Supreme Court reporter Jimmy Hoover from Law.com, "After a friendly question from Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts right out of the gate expresses skepticism of the Trump administration's central argument: that children of undocumented immigrants are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States. He calls the [solicitor general’s] argument 'very quirky.'"

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett also seemed ready to reject Trump’s argument, and even Brett Kavanaugh pushed back several times. Because the three Democratic judges are also expected to vote against Trump, this means the president could lose by a margin as high as 6-3 or 7-2.

"It was clear over the past few hours that the justices, the majority of them, are deeply skeptical about his executive order limiting birthright citizenship,” CNN reporter Paula Reid said on Wednesday about the Supreme Court hearing. “Even the three conservative justices he appointed do not appear to be willing to side with his administration's interpretation of the 14th Amendment.”

Legal analyst Elliot Williams, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN that things could tilt against Trump in a way shocking even to contemporary observers.

"You could see an 8 to 1 decision here,” Williams said. “It's not out of the question. Certainly, there are five votes that were quite skeptical of the president and probably more. This was just not good."