In the consequential Supreme Court term that ended on Tuesday, the justices rejected some of President Trump’s marquee policies that were personally important to the president.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and two justices appointed by Mr. Trump joined with the three liberals to invalidate the president’s sweeping tariffs. The court struck down Mr. Trump’s order to end the guarantee of birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors. And the justices prevented him from immediately firing a leader of the influential Federal Reserve.
But even as the justices chose key moments to push back on Mr. Trump, the court’s conservative supermajority delivered generational, long-sought wins, including by expanding executive power, as the court that Mr. Trump remade in his first term continued a project of pushing the law to the right.
The court endorsed Republican-backed efforts to lift limits on campaign financing, expanded presidential reach over immigration policy and the federal bureaucracy, and dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights law.
“The headline might be ‘Court checks Trump,’ but the through line is a concentration of power towards the presidency, towards the court itself and away from Congress, federal agencies and voters,” said Deepak Gupta, a plaintiffs’ lawyer who regularly argues before the court. Mr. Gupta said the decisions could “fundamentally change the relationship between citizens and their government.”
‘Running the Table’
In the final days of a contentious term that began in October, the conservative majority overruled a 90-year-old precedent, clearing the way for Mr. Trump and future presidents to fire independent regulators over policy disagreements despite laws passed by Congress intended to insulate agencies from political pressure.
That 6-to-3 ruling upends the structure of the federal government and weakens Congress’s ability to restrain the president. It also raises questions about whether such agencies will continue to operate independently of whomever occupies the White House to regulate major parts of American life, from labor disputes to broadcast television to workplace discrimination.
There was one exception: The court shielded the independence of the Federal Reserve by blocking Mr. Trump from immediately firing one of its governors, Lisa D. Cook, over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud.
The majority also fulfilled another long-held goal of the chief justice, who joined the bench in 2005, when it agreed in April to significantly weaken the Voting Rights Act. The ruling cleared the way for a Republican push throughout the South to redraw congressional maps, carving up voters and dismantling majority-Black districts in Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee.
“Conservatives are running the table,” said Daniel Epps, a law professor who clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Republican nominee who was considered an unpredictable swing vote before his retirement in 2018.
Professor Epps expressed concern about public perception of the justices as political actors. “When they are constantly and consistently boosting Republicans in the political process, the court seems more partisan and its standing with the public decreases.”
In public appearances, the justices often take pride in the percentage of cases in which they are unanimous.
“We’re able to talk to one another and listen to one another, and find common ground a surprising amount of the time,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, one of Mr. Trump’s nominees, told David French of The New York Times in a recent interview. “You give us the 70 hardest cases in the country every year, where lower court judges have disagreed, and we’re able to reach unanimity that much. I think that’s a miracle, right?”
The justices did find unanimity 45 percent of the time, up two points from last term. They joined together, for instance, to say a Texas man could not be prosecuted for violating a law banning drug users from gun possession merely because he frequently used marijuana, and they agreed that a New Jersey anti-abortion group could bring a challenge in federal court to government efforts to seek its donor list.
There were also examples of ideologically diverse lineups during the term.
In a 5-to-4 vote on Monday, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in supporting Mississippi’s grace period for late-arriving mail-in ballots, rejecting a push by the Trump administration to invalidate a state law.
Justice Barrett also joined Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion this week to uphold birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds. Mr. Trump appointed Justice Barrett to the court in his first term, and her tendency to occasionally rule against his priorities has drawn harsh criticism from the president’s allies.
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Justice Gorsuch, who has a libertarian streak, also aligned at times with his colleagues on the left, more often than he has in the past. He sided with them in a case about the rights of criminal defendants who have entered into plea bargains with prosecutors and joined a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal, in a case thwarting people’s ability to sue the manufacturer of the weedkiller Roundup in state courts.
But even so, a conservative bloc routinely controlled the outcome in cases large and small, with the center of the bench shifting considerably to the right and delivering 13 ideologically divided decisions in which all six justices nominated by Republican presidents were in the majority and all three Democratic nominees were in dissent. That was nearly a quarter of all rulings in which nine justices participated, compared to 11 percent in the term that ended in June 2025.
Those rulings included decisions that strip deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti and Syria and allow the administration to turn away asylum seekers fleeing persecution at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The majority continued a trend in recent years of limiting transgender rights after the justices’ expansion in 2020 of workplace protections for gay and transgender workers. The justices upheld state laws from West Virginia and Idaho prohibiting transgender females from playing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., all conservatives, voted in the majority far more often than last term. In contrast, Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, who has at times found compromise with her conservative colleagues, found herself more frequently in dissent this term, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin at Washington University in St. Louis and Michael Nelson at Penn State.
“The six-person conservative juggernaut many predicted in 2020 was in full force this term,” Professor Epstein, a political scientist and law professor, said in reference to the year Justice Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, and solidified the supermajority.
The court’s rulings were more favorable to the administration as it defended the government broadly this year than during Mr. Trump’s first term or compared with all recent administrations since George W. Bush’s.
“The important losses for the administration in the extreme cases do not change the fact that the administration largely found a sympathetic court,” said Gregory Garre, a Supreme Court practitioner who served as solicitor general during the Bush administration.
While the court is unquestionably dominated by the six justices nominated by Republican presidents, it is not being run by those on the far right. Across all cases, the justices most frequently in the majority have been the same for the last six terms: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Barrett.
Justice Jackson, the court’s most junior justice, continued to emerge as a singular figure at the left end of the court. She was the least likely justice to be in the majority this term, and holds the record, going back to 1953 under the Warren court, for writing a greater share of separate, concurring opinions than any other justice. And she has been willing to criticize the court in public remarks.
In a speech at Yale Law School in April, Justice Jackson delivered a lengthy takedown of her conservative colleagues’ handling of the emergency docket, quick-turn orders that are issued without oral arguments or detailed reasoning. She called them “scratch-paper musings” that have real-world impacts and make the justices “seem oblivious.”
‘Not Laying Down for Trump’
Throughout the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court issued a series of emergency orders that overwhelmingly allowed the president to carry out his policies while litigation continued in the lower courts.
The brief orders, issued without oral arguments or detailed reasoning, almost always divided along ideological lines with the three liberal justices issuing sharp dissents.
The term that ended on Tuesday offered a more mixed picture for Mr. Trump, as the court broke from its pattern of ideologically divided decisions to brush back the president on some key issues.
Along with his sweeping tariffs, Mr. Trump appeared personally invested in the legal challenge to his executive order limiting birthright citizenship. In a first for a sitting president, Mr. Trump went to the oral arguments, in what critics said was a show of power meant to intimidate the justices. The president posted constantly on social media about the issue, calling birthright citizenship a “scam” and saying it would be a “disgrace” if the justices ruled against him.
Those complaints came as Mr. Trump frequently vented his frustration with the court, lobbing harsh, personal insults at the justices who ruled against his sweeping tariffs. He singled out two of his nominees, Justices Barrett and Gorsuch, calling them “fools and lap dogs” and “an embarrassment to their families” and suggesting they had been disloyal to him personally.
Mr. Trump has long been a critic of birthright citizenship, the foundational principle that nearly all children born on U.S. soil are Americans. His administration pushed a legal theory — once thought to be a fringe notion — that the 14th Amendment had been intended to apply to formerly enslaved people and their children, not to undocumented immigrants.
Writing for the majority to uphold birthright citizenship, the chief justice said, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community.”
He continued: “The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every freeborn person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
After the decision, Mr. Trump called the ruling “too bad for our Country.” He urged Congress to take up the issue with legislation and asserted that “no long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary.” His claim appeared at odds with the court’s decision, where a majority ruled that the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship.
Despite the president’s focus on unwinding birthright citizenship, many legal observers considered such a view to be a long-shot argument, with far-reaching consequences that would upend the country’s birth and immigration systems and redefine what it means to be an American.
The court this term said it was “not laying down for Trump. That’s the message,” said Irv Gornstein, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center. “They are not going to give in to Trump’s arguments just because he’s the president.”
