The Court, the President, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

In the grand theater of American public life, there are few things more human than the need to make sense of chaos. We are pattern-seeking creatures, hardwired to find meaning in noise and villains in the shadows. We want to believe that someone is in control, that the machinery of state hums along according to some rational plan—even if the plan is nefarious. It is this deeply human need for narrative cohesion that makes the current moment in American politics so instructive. For while the pundit class wrings its hands over the future of the judiciary, and while cable news panels erupt in performative indignation over the latest ruling from the Supreme Court, there is a quieter, more profound story being told—a story about how we process fear, how we construct meaning, and how we convince ourselves that we are the heroes and our opponents are the architects of an impending apocalypse. It is a story that has nothing to do with constitutional law and everything to do with the fragile, frightened, hope-obsessed human heart beating beneath the formless gray suit of American democracy.

This brings us, inevitably, to the strange and somewhat fantastical suggestion made by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—a man who has made an unlikely career out of being both well-traveled and resolutely uninformed, a sort of geographic satnav for the willfully lost. In a recent column ostensibly about the razor-thin margins of the midterm elections, Friedman mused that a second Trump term, with the former president controlling the House, the Senate, and “tacitly” the Supreme Court, could “bring about the end of America as we have known it.” These are the words of a man trying to sell us a story—a story with villains and heroes, a story with high stakes and crushing tension. By invoking the end of America, Friedman is not engaging in political analysis; he is performing a kind of emotional alchemy, transmuting ordinary politics into existential warfare. The Supreme Court, in this telling, becomes a kind of MAGA puppet, a body of lawyers and judges reduced to a voracious appetite for whatever unchecked power the former president offers them. But what does “tacitly” even mean in this context? The very word is doing so much heavy lifting that it deserves a pension.

Indeed, Friedman is not alone in this fever dream. He belongs to a vast and increasingly hysterical chorus of liberal commentariat voices who have invested enormous emotional and intellectual energy in the idea that John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are all secretly waiting for the phone to ring, desperate for permission to grant Donald Trump the presidency for a third term and eat the Constitution with ketchup as he watches the morning shows. It’s a comforting fiction—and like all comforting fictions, it requires a certain willful suspension of disbelief. Because the evidence, as the piece goes on to demonstrate with the gleeful precision of a friendly accountant, simply does not support the idea of a subservient, partisan Supreme Court. The Court has ruled against Trump on tariffs, on birthright citizenship, on extremely dubious money for liberal nonprofits. Yet the narrative persists. Why? Because the story is too good to fact-check. The story of a corrupt, bought-and-sold Court, stocked with the intellectual descendants of Antonin Scalia, allows the left to justify their own feelings of dread, their own helplessness, and their own complicity in the unraveling of democratic norms.

For a more honest portrait, we need to look at the actual record the way a weary sports fan might look at the scoreboard during a losing season. Take the time to scroll through the Supreme Court docket, and you will find a much more complex picture than the caricature painted by the partisans. By the end of his second term, the former president had a mixed bag before the high court. He had won some cases, yes. But he had lost plenty. In the emergency docket alone—that mysterious and terrifying place known derisively as the “shadow docket”—the administration filed 35 of the 39 administrative requests, and while it did win several key procedural victories that allowed it to fire executive branch employees without congressional approval, it lost five major rulings. In those moments, the Court did not just glance at the rule of law; it appeared to read it a bedtime story before tucking it in. The decision in Mullin v. Doe, about the meaning of the word “temporary” in “temporary protected status,” was a triumph of textualism, a strict reminder that lower courts cannot legislate from the bench. Likewise, in Noem v. National TPS Alliance, the Court affirmed that lower courts cannot decide which countries receive humanitarian protections, reinforcing the constitutional principle that judges should not be making immigration policy. These are not the actions of a rubber stamp; they are the actions of a co-equal branch exercising judgment on the law as written. They are calls for good governance, for procedural correctness, for the idea that the ends do not justify the means—even when the means are tariffs.

The human heart, however, does not care about precedent. It cares about safety. When pundits like Friedman or Elie Mystal look at the Court, they do not see jurists applying the law; they see a reflection of their own deepest fears about losing control. The psychological term for this is “loss aversion,” the deeply human tendency to feel the sting of a loss more keenly than the joy of a win. When the Court rules against the former President, they hardly notice, because such a ruling does not fit the narrative. But when the Court rules for the administration—even in a minor procedural matter—it confirms every fear they have ever had. They see the emergency docket not as a legal mechanism for managing the chaotic final episodes of an administration, but as a sinister backchannel for the restoration of a monarchy. They ignore the fact that the emergency docket was designed specifically to put training wheels on overzealous district judges appointed during the final years of a Democratic administration, or that a stable and functioning country might require the President of the United States to be able to fire executive-branch employees without a million mini-trials. They steadfastly refuse to see that the Court, in issuing unanimous or lopsided opinions in favor of the administration in these cases, is not bowing to a king but insisting that a judge’s duty is to the law, not to the party of their appointment.

This brings us to the lie that continues to grow around the Court, mutating and evolving to survive the evidence. The story goes something like this: there is a legitimate perspective that the Court is “compromised”—whatever that means—but the more accurate story is that we, as a nation, have lost confidence in the institutions we have built. We have supplanted the old idea of institutional loyalty with a politicized, transactional view of the world, in which legal decisions are just politics by other means. We see this most clearly in the astonishing statistic about the liberal justices: no liberal justice has ever crossed over to join the conservative majority in any of the administration’s major victories, while conservative justices have regularly crossed over to side with the progressive wing in major defeats for the White House. There is a certain beauty in that stubborn fact. It suggests that the far left has turned its back on the idea of an impartial judiciary, preferring to believe that institutions are just a game of elite capture. It insists on believing that the legal question is simply a smokescreen for the political one, and that any attempt to adjudicate the presidency away from the ballot box is a betrayal. In other words, they are doing precisely what they accuse the other side of doing—corrupting the judiciary to achieve what they cannot win at the ballot box.

And so we arrive at the uncomfortable truth: the Supreme Court is not a threat to the Republic; lose our heads is. The Justices do not have a super PAC. They do not wave flags for any political party. They swear an oath to the Constitution, which is far more complex and infuriating than any of us can fully grasp in the heat of an election cycle. The impulse to demand that every decision bend toward one’s own political ends is understandable; it is the very essence of the human desire for control. But the insistence on seeing the Court as either a prize to be won or a pawn to be discarded is a rejection of the institutional wisdom that has sustained our democracy for so long. When we strip away the spin, the curves of the court’s reasoning reflect a body of law that remains remarkably balanced. The story that the media keeps trying to tell us—of a benevolent or malevolent genius single-handedly pulling the strings of justice—is itself a fiction. The real story is more human and more troubling: it is the story of a nation struggling to decide whether it still believes in the rule of law, or whether it would rather just tell a really good story about the end of the world. And if history is any guide, we will choose the story every time. We will choose the dramatic tragedy. We will cling to it like a favorite blanket. Because the truth—that we are a pluralistic, divided, and fallible people governing ourselves through a complex system of checks and balances—is simply too boring, too human, and too true to hold our attention.