The Supreme Court’s 2025-26 term will likely be remembered as one of the most consequential in recent memory. This was certainly the case for President Donald Trump, who was the named party in four of the term’s biggest cases and even became the first sitting president to attend an oral argument. The justices handed Trump high-profile losses on two of his signature priorities – tariffs and birthright citizenship – as well as in his effort to remove Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, from her job while her challenge to that firing continues. But the term proved to be quite successful for the president in other areas, as the court issued rulings that significantly expanded his power over the executive branch and immigration and benefited the Republican Party politically.
Trump’s support for tariffs has long been a core part of his political beliefs. In 1988, he told journalist Diane Sawyer that “America is being ripped off. … We’re a debtor nation,” he said, “and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.”
So it came as no surprise when, not long after taking office in 2025, Trump issued a series of executive orders that imposed sweeping tariffs on virtually all goods imported into the United States. He relied primarily on a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That law, known as IEEPA, gives the president the power, when there is a national emergency, to “regulate … importation or exportation” of “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”
One of Trump’s other major priorities when taking office was birthright citizenship. Trump’s opposition to birthright citizenship – the principle that virtually everyone born in the United States is automatically a U.S. citizen – dates back at least a decade: in 2015, as part of his first presidential campaign, Trump released an immigration reform plan that included a call to end birthright citizenship, arguing that it “remains the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” On the day that he took office for the second time, Trump issued an executive order attempting to do just that.
When challenges to the tariffs and Trump’s birthright citizenship order came to the Supreme Court during the 2025-26 term, they seemed like long shots. No president had ever relied on IEEPA to impose tariffs, and the federal courts that had considered Trump’s tariffs had concluded that IEEPA did not give him that power. On birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause – which provides that anyone who is “born … in the United States” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a U.S. citizen – had for more than a century been understood to confer citizenship on everyone born here.
Like the lower courts before it, the Supreme Court ultimately dealt the president defeats on both issues. But neither loss was the resounding one that many court watchers initially expected. On tariffs, five justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – joined the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts striking down the president’s executive orders.
But even those six justices did not agree entirely on the rationale: Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett believed that the tariffs violate the “major questions doctrine” – the principle that, if Congress intends to give the executive branch the power to make decisions of vast political or economic significance, it must say so explicitly (although even on the nature of that doctrine Gorsuch and Barrett somewhat disagreed). Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, on the other hand, would have struck down the orders based solely on the text of IEEPA – which, Roberts stressed, does not mention tariffs.
Three of the court’s Republican appointees – Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh – would have upheld Trump’s authority under IEEPA to impose the tariffs. In a dissent that Alito and Thomas joined, Kavanaugh argued that “tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.”
The vote in the court’s June 30 decision in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, was even closer. Just five justices – Roberts and Barrett, once again joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson – agreed that Trump’s executive order violated the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. “Citizenship,” Roberts concluded in his opinion for the majority, “then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
Kavanaugh agreed with the result that the majority reached, but not its reasoning. He would have held that Trump’s order does not violate the Constitution, but does conflict with a federal law whose language mirrors that of the citizenship clause, because, according to Kavanaugh, when Congress enacted that law in the 20th century it would have intended to incorporate the then-current understanding of the clause as guaranteeing birthright citizenship. But, Kavanaugh suggested, Congress could adopt new legislation that could carve out additional exceptions to the general rule of birthright citizenship “for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”
In a dissenting opinion, Alito called the ruling both “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court” and “a serious mistake.” There is now in the United States, he wrote, “a huge contingent of people who entered or remained in this country illegally, as well as a large group of people who were born here to such parents. The Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he argued, “makes all the members of this latter group citizens. Many of those who have grown up here now have a strong moral claim to be allowed to remain, but that is a matter that the Fourteenth Amendment, when properly interpreted, leaves to Congress.”
The court’s June 29 decision barring Trump – at least for now – from firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook was also a close loss for Trump, with four of the court’s Republican appointees – Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett – all dissenting. Roberts’ opinion for the majority rejected any suggestion that the laws governing the Fed – which only allow the president to remove a governor “for cause” – violate the Constitution’s allocation of powers between the three branches of government. Roberts emphasized that the Founding Fathers “knew from experience … of the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy.” The “for cause” protections, he wrote, maintain the principle “that monetary policy should not be subject to political interference.”
The majority’s decision also set a “substantial threshold” for what would constitute the kind of “cause” that would allow Trump to fire Cook or other governors. “The key issue,” Roberts said, “is whether ‘[t]he cause assigned’ truly ‘impl[ies] an unfitness for the place’—or whether it simply represents an effort to secure a ‘more congenial’ replacement.”
But although the majority concluded that Cook could remain in office while her challenge continues because the federal government was not likely to prevail on its argument that she was not entitled to notice and an opportunity to respond to the allegations against her before Trump attempted to fire her, it indicated that Cook and others like her are entitled to only “minimal” process – for example, the right to submit written materials, but not necessarily to make an oral presentation or have a hearing.
If the majority’s decision in Cook’s case was at best a loss with a silver lining for Trump, its ruling in Trump v. Slaughter was a major win for him. By a vote of 6-3, the court struck down a federal law that barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Unlike the similar law governing the Fed, the court said, the FTC law (and others like it) violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
More generally, the Roberts opinion, which the other five Republican appointees joined, was an endorsement of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have greater control over the executive branch. The president “alone is vested with ‘[t]he executive Power’ of the United States,” Roberts explained. “To ‘discharg[e] the duties of his trust,’” Roberts continued, “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work.”
The court also gave the president and executive branch officials substantial new power over immigration – a key part of the president’s agenda. In Mullin v. Doe, the court ruled in the Trump administration’s favor in a pair of challenges to the decision by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to end the designations of Haiti and Syria under the Temporary Protected Status program – a program that allows the citizens of designated countries to remain in the United States indefinitely and work legally because it is not safe for them to return home.
The court’s ruling will directly affect roughly 356,000 Haitians and Syrians currently living in the United States, but it could also affect hundreds of thousands more from other countries.
By a vote of 6-3, with Alito writing for the majority, the court determined that decisions to designate or terminate a country under the TPS program are generally not subject to judicial review. This is true, Alito said, even when the plaintiffs seek to challenge the DHS secretary’s compliance with the procedural requirements outlined in the laws governing the TPS program, rather than the designation or termination itself. The majority also rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that Noem ended TPS status for Haiti because the country’s citizens are overwhelmingly Black and thus violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment.
In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court – again by a vote of 6-3, with the court’s three Democratic appointees once more dissenting – upheld a policy, dating back to 2016, of systematically turning back asylum seekers before they reach the U.S.-Mexico border. Alito’s opinion for the majority rejected the challengers’ contention that the policy, which was adopted in response to a surge in the number of Haitian immigrants seeking asylum outside San Diego, violates a federal law that permits noncitizens to apply for asylum when they “arrive[] in the United States.”
The court’s conclusion that asylum seekers do not “arrive in” the United States, and therefore are not entitled to seek asylum, until they actually cross the border, Alito argued, was consistent with the “ordinary meaning” of the law. “A running back does not arrive in the end zone when he reaches the 1-yard line,” Alito countered, nor does a letter “arrive in the mailbox when a dog assaults the carrier a step away from the mailbox. A person arrives in a destination only when he enters it, and that conclusion does not change because someone or something blocks entry.”
And in Blanche v. Lau, the same six-justice majority made it easier for immigration officers to keep green card holders from entering the United States for an indefinite stay. By a vote of 6-3, with Thomas writing for the majority, the court ruled that immigration officers are not required to have “clear and convincing” evidence that green card holders have committed a crime in order to bar them from staying in the United States.
Trump and his party may benefit from at least two more of the court’s rulings during the 2025-26 term. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the court struck down a federal law that limited coordinated-party expenditures – the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate. Experts say that the court’s ruling is likely to advantage political parties and, in particular, the Republican Party, which currently enjoys a fundraising advantage over the Democrats.
And although Trump was not directly involved in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the court struck down a congressional map that created a second majority-Black district in that state and, more broadly, made it more difficult for plaintiffs to prevail on claims that a new map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting, that decision too will likely aid Trump and the Republican Party in the November 2026 elections. Since issuing its decision in Callais in late April, the court has given Louisiana and Alabama the green light to use maps with additional Republican-leaning districts. Earlier in the term, it allowed Texas to use a new map that may lead to as many as five new Republican seats – a map created after Trump called on Texas to redraw its map. Two months later, however, the court allowed California to use a new congressional map that was intended to give Democrats five additional seats in the House. And in March, the court cleared the way for New York to conduct its 2026 elections using its existing congressional map, pausing an order by a state trial court that would have required the state to redraw the map to add Black and Latino voters.
Trump also enjoyed substantial, if not complete, success on the court’s interim docket, racking up wins on issues ranging from immigration stops to ending funding for public health grants linked to DEI initiatives. Trump’s losses on the interim docket, however, included at least one major one in December, when the justices left in place – over his administration’s objections – an order by a federal judge that barred the government from deploying National Guard troops in Illinois to enforce immigration laws.
All in all, the overall portrait of the Supreme Court in its 2025-26 terms appears to have been one that was willing to give Trump substantial power. That said, when he sought to test the outer limits of that already substantial power, in cases like the tariffs case and birthright citizenship, it was too much for two (and sometimes three) of the court’s Republican appointees to allow.