Government
Trump and the Supreme Court: A Court Built for One Party
Three appointments out of nine sounds modest. In practice, it transformed the court.
When Trump took office in 2017, the Supreme Court was ideologically balanced — Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote, and major decisions could go either direction. Gorsuch filled the Scalia seat with a reliable conservative. Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy — turning a swing vote into a conservative vote. Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg — turning a liberal vote into a conservative one.
The result is a 6-3 conservative supermajority that has used that margin to reverse decades of precedent.
Roe v. Wade lasted 50 years. The Dobbs decision overturned it in 2022, returning abortion regulation to states. Whatever your view on abortion policy, the legal question was whether a 50-year-old precedent that millions of Americans had organized their lives around could be reversed by a new court majority. The answer turned out to be yes.
The Chevron deference doctrine lasted 40 years. It held that regulatory agencies — the EPA, FDA, OSHA, SEC — have expertise that courts should defer to when interpreting their governing statutes. Ending it transfers interpretive power from expert agencies to generalist judges — a shift that has significant consequences for environmental, financial, and health regulation. (Supreme Court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo)
The presidential immunity ruling — Trump v. United States — is perhaps the most consequential. The court ruled that presidents have broad immunity for official acts, a doctrine that had never existed before. The ruling was so broad that even the conservative justices themselves wrote separately to clarify what they thought it meant.
Supreme Court approval ratings are now at historic lows. (Gallup, Supreme Court Approval) A court perceived as partisan loses something the law depends on: the belief that its decisions reflect something other than which party appointed the majority.
The legitimacy of law is not just about what the law says. It is about whether people believe the institution applying it is impartial. That belief is eroding. The consequences of that erosion are not yet fully visible.