Takeaways from a divisive Supreme Court term that expanded Trump’s power

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — After berating the Supreme Court for much of the year — while simultaneously inviting some of the justices over to the White House for dinner — President Donald Trump’s final assessment of the court’s momentous term this week felt something like a ceasefire.

“The Republican Party,” the president posted on social media, “was treated very fairly by the United States Supreme Court.”

The muted appraisal was a remarkable shift from just four months ago, when Trump declared that the justices who voted to shut down his emergency global tariffs were an “embarrassment to their families.” The sudden bonhomie, if it holds, reflects a term in which the 6-3 conservative court, grappling with many of Trump’s policies for the first time, handed the White House big losses, but also a series of substantial wins.

In all, the Supreme Court issued opinions in 58 merits cases, touching on a wide spectrum of American life and deciding who can play on high school soccer fields, who would win the national battle over redistricting and who gets to be a US citizen.

Here are some of the major themes from the Supreme Court’s momentous term.

Trump’s term

Because of the way the court’s calendar works, only a few Trump controversies received a full airing from the justices last year. Many of the administration’s policies that drew the most attention in 2025 — such as its crackdown on immigration and expansion of executive power — didn’t reach the Supreme Court in earnest until last fall.

Trump ultimately lost several of those cases, most notably birthright citizenship and tariffs, but he scored enormous wins on many of his other priorities.

The 6-3 conservative Supreme Court vastly expanded the president’s power to fire the leaders of independent agencies and allowed the administration to end temporary humanitarian relief for potentially more than 1 million people who have been living in the US legally to escape conflict and natural disaster in their home countries.

And while Trump didn’t have a direct stake in the court’s 6-3 decision to allow states to ban transgender students from competing on girls sprots teams, the outcome was clearly aligned with his agenda and rhetoric. Same goes for the court’s divisive 6-3 decision in April to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 6-3 decision to erase limits on how much political parties can spend on campaigns in coordination with candidates.

The president hasn’t been shy about criticizing the court in the past. In a lengthy post in March, Trump accused the court to which he appointed three of nine justices of being “little more than a weaponized and unjust political organization.”

At the same time, the president seemed to be engaged in a charm offensive, inviting the court’s conservatives to a banquet featuring Britain’s King Charles in April. He also publicly praised several of the conservative justices who showed at the White House in May for the swearing in of Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh.

When the dust settled on the term, Trump seemed pleased. He focused much of his attention on the court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, allowing him to fire officials at federal agencies that Congress attempted to protect from presidential politics.

“The biggest and most consequential decision issued by the court, by far, is the Slaughter case, which overturned the very famous Humphrey’s Executor Rule.” Trump wrote on social media, referring to a 1935 precedent the court toppled in that case. “This decision gives tremendous additional power back to the presidency, where it belongs.”

6-3, 6-3, 6-3

When it comes to some of the biggest cases dealing with political power and the culture wars, the term did little to dispel the notion that this is a Supreme Court deeply divided on ideological lines.

The justices handed down 6-3, ideologically split decisions in 13 cases this term, more than double the count last year. Those included cases upholding transgender sports bans, expanding the president’s power to fire and endorsing much of his immigration agenda.

The frequency of ideological splits is one way to test the court’s self-styled image of being above the partisan fray in an era of Trumpian politics. Chief Justice John Roberts has often urged the public to not view the court as a partisan institution voting along party lines.

“People think we’re making policy decisions,” he said to a conference in May.

“I think they view us as truly political actors,” he said, “which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

Among the 6-3 rulings this term was a decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, an outcome that allowed state lawmakers in Southern states like Louisiana and Alabama to redraw their maps in a way that benefited the GOP. The court also allowed the president to end a form of humanitarian relief for Haitians and Syrians, and it erased the caps on how much political parties could spend in coordination with candidates.

“For those who would prefer even more money to be pumped even more easily into politics despite the danger of corruption — this overruling is for you,” Justice Elena Kagan quipped as she dissented in the campaign finance decision handed down on the last day of the term.

To be sure, the court also issued decisions with surprising coalitions that crossed ideology, including in major cases. The court’s decision on upholding automatic birthright citizenship put three conservatives — Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — in the majority along with the court’s three liberals. Roberts and Barrett were together again in a decision that upheld the counting of mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving days later.

The court unanimously settled a Second Amendment case that limited the government’s ability to disarm regular drug users. Roberts, Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined with the court’s liberals to shut down Trump’s emergency tariffs.

By another measure, unanimous decisions, the court was roughly in line with past terms. The justices decided 25 cases this year unanimously, just under 44% of its docket of argued appeals — close to the 45% average calculated by SCOTUSblog for the past 20 years.

Kavanaugh’s big term

As in past terms, Kavanaugh and Roberts were in the majority more than any of their colleagues, underscoring their firm grip on the ideological center of the Supreme Court.

“Justice Kavanaugh emerged as a key vote, a pragmatic jurist, and a thoroughly independent thinker,” said Richard Re, a Harvard Law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk. Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the bench in 2018.

But Kavanaugh also moved closer to Trump this term, siding at least partly with the president in two massive decisions that wound up putting him at odds with the chief. It was Kavanaugh who wrote the lead dissent in the tariffs case. And, on the final day of the term, Kavanaugh declined to join the majority’s reasoning for upholding automatic birthright citizenship.

While the court’s decision against Trump was 6-3, only five justices thought Trump’s birthright order had violated the 14th Amendment. Kavanaugh wasn’t one of them.

“In my view, the executive order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote in a partial dissent that none of his colleagues joined. “Congress could — consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment … enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

Barrett has received sharp criticism from the right after she joined Roberts’ birthright citizenship opinion. Vice President JD Vance this week called Barrett’s vote against Trump a “mistake.”

Others were less diplomatic.

“Impeach rogue, activist judges,” Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, posted. “We’re looking at you Amy Coney Barrett.”

Attacks aimed at Barrett any time she rules against Trump have become something of a ritual in recent terms. Kavanaugh, by contrast, has received no such blowback.

Re framed Kavanaugh’s position in the birthright case as a “hybrid” that had “the virtue of pleasing no constituency.”

“He both frustrated the administration by invalidating the executive order and disappointed liberals by rejecting the plaintiffs’ constitutional claim,” he said.

Tensions flare

Long before the end of the term there were signs of strife as some of the justices wrestled publicly with the significance of a series of emergency docket rulings on Trump’s policies — most of which landed in the president’s favor.

Just as that tension eased, the court handed down its blockbuster decision on voting rights in April. And that seemed to widen the gulf between the court’s conservative and liberal wings.

“Courts are apolitical,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s junior justice, said at an event in May, adding that her colleagues missed the mark in avoiding the appearance of politics. “We have to be scrupulous about sticking to the principles and the rules that we apply in every case and not look as though we’re doing something different in this kind of context.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had to apologize in April after directing “hurtful” comments at Kavanaugh about his opinion in another case. And the court had to clean up after an unusual exchange on the bench in which Justice Samuel Alito signaled he had been blindsided by Sotomayor’s decision to read a dissent in one of his cases.

The court later told CNN that Sotomayor had indeed given Alito’s chambers a heads up, which apparently never reached the justice. “It was a misunderstanding on Justice Alito’s part,” a court spokesperson said.

Closing the courthouse doors

The court resolved several important cases this term by simply removing the judiciary from the equation.

In the decision upholding Trump’s ability to end temporary humanitarian protections for people from Haiti and Syria, a 6-3 majority ruled that federal courts couldn’t review the president’s decisions on the program.

In a case involving a devout Rastafarian whose dreadlocks were cut in prison, the court’s conservatives concluded that people could not sue under a federal law intended to protect the religious rights of prisoners.

The justices barred people from suing companies on claims that they aided and abetted torture overseas. And it ruled 7-2 that a federal law blocks people who say the herbicide Roundup caused their cancer from suing the company that makes that product.

Those decisions continue a trend over the past several years of the court finding that only Congress can authorize lawsuits, not courts.
Critics say that approach has effectively left people who have been injured with no recourse.

Next term, the court has agreed to hear a case involving a prisoner who sued federal prison officials for failing to transport him to a hospital after a gang-related fight left him severely injured. Though the prisoner’s tailbone was fractured, he was treated only with over-the-counter pain medication.

The court could use the case to severely limit the ability of Americans to sue federal officials.

“A tragic pattern of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions is leaving individuals who have been seriously injured and whose rights have been violated with no remedy whatsoever,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school, told CNN. “Rights are meaningless without courts to provide remedies when they are violated.”

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