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There’s a peculiar kind of siege being waged inside the liberal media establishment against the Supreme Court, one that has evolved from thoughtful criticism into an all-out assault on the institution’s very legitimacy. The underlying goal seems to be a relentless effort to paint the highest court in the land as nothing more than a loyal, weaponized arm of the Trump administration, setting the stage for whatever structural “reform” the left might want to impose later. This isn’t a subtle undercurrent; it’s a thunderous choir singing the same tired tune. Take Thomas Friedman, for example, a New York Times columnist known for his sober geopolitical analysis, who recently released a bizarre offhand remark while discussing the Michigan Senate race. He casually suggested that another two years of Donald Trump left “unchained” would give him tacit control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, leading to what he called the “end of America as we have known it.” Setting aside the apocalypse-level doomscrolling, the word “tacitly” is genuinely baffling. Does Friedman actually believe Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett, or Justice Kavanaugh are sneaking off to secret strategy sessions in the West Wing? The hyperbole is so extreme it loses any persuasive power, yet it perfectly encapsulates the fever pitch of current discourse. When a Pulitzer-winning writer suggests the judiciary is silently allied with a president, it reveals a profound misunderstanding of how that branch actually functions—and worse, it uses that misunderstanding to scare the public.
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But Friedman isn’t an outlier; he’s just the loudest echo in a very large canyon. The Guardian has literally run a headline asking, “Does Trump basically own the US Supreme Court now?” with a subheading clarifying that the question isn’t designed to be answered, but to be accepted as fact. Over at Esquire, Charles P. Pierce described the Court’s majority as “carefully manufactured” and devoted to the “money power,” while MSNBC fan-favorite Elie Mystal has called the Court a “rubber stamp” for the President. Just recently, Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times cited Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s claim that the Court has sided with Trump in 25 out of the 31 cases challenging his actions in his second term. At first glance, that statistic sounds devastating—a court out of control!—but it’s a textbook case of torturing data to fit a predetermined narrative. The reality is that the Court’s docket is a far messier, far more nuanced affair than a simple win-loss column for the President. The truth is that the Trump administration has enjoyed just as many profound, gut-wrenching frustrations as it has victories. By focusing only on the raw numbers of procedural wins, these critics ignore the thunderous, substantive defeats that would make a true puppet court utterly impossible. They are checking the scoreboard but ignoring the fact that the losing team just missed three easy layups and got blown out in the finals.
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To genuinely assess the Court’s second-term relationship with Trump, you have to look at the sheer scale of the decisions, not just the count of favorable rulings. On the most consequential issues of his presidency—the ones he campaigned on and built his base around—the Court has absolutely slapped him down hard. The challenge to his sweeping tariffs was a major loss, halting executive authority that was central to his economic platform. The attempts to unilaterally end birthright citizenship were crushed, upholding the Fourteenth Amendment with a clarity that left no doubt about the outcome. And when the administration froze billions in congressionally appropriated foreign aid—much of it flowing to left-leaning nonprofits—the Court told the executive branch it couldn’t just pocket Congress’s money like it was spare change. These aren’t small procedural quibbles; they are massive, foundational policy defeats that have the power to reshape entire presidencies. If the Court were truly “owned” by Trump, as the headlines scream, would it have dismantled the centerpiece of his international agenda? Would it have voted 7-2 to uphold the rule of law over unilateral executive spending cuts? The fact that the administration lost these major battles while winning smaller, technical arguments reveals a Court fiercely guarding its independence, not a vassal of the White House. The media simply refuses to acknowledge that the quality of the losses far outweighs the quantity of the wins in defining the relationship.
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The actual voting coalitions in these major cases shatter the “rubber stamp” myth entirely. In the few decisions the Trump administration won, the conservative majority stood alone—justices like Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch formed the bloc, with no liberal justices crossing over to help. That’s standard operating procedure. But look at the big losses, and we see a remarkable pattern emerging: the conservative justices are breaking ranks to join the liberal minority in droves. On the foreign aid freeze, it wasn’t a 5-4 partisan split; it was a 7-2 thrashing that included several of Trump’s own appointees. On other executive authority questions, we’ve seen 6-3 and 5-4 rulings where the conservative Justices sided with the rule of law over the President’s wishes. This is the enduring, glorious tradition of the Court—where Justices appointed by Republicans historically cross the aisle when the law demands it, just as Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and John Paul Stevens did in their time. Today, it’s Justice Barrett or Kavanaugh checking the Trump administration’s overreach when a case is truly about legal merit rather than political preference. Meanwhile, the liberal Justices never, ever cross over to the conservative side, preferring to vote in rigid bloc opposition regardless of the legal arguments presented. So if we’re talking about partisanship, we should note that the alleged “bought and paid for” conservatives are displaying an independence of thought that their liberal colleagues ironically refuse to display.
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The final piece of the media’s puzzle is the so-called “shadow docket”—the emergency applications that dominate the fear-mongering headlines. The record there is also mixed, and almost always mischaracterized to fit the narrative. Of the 39 emergency applications filed, the Trump administration filed 35. While they won roughly half of those, most of these rulings aren’t the grant of some new, imperial presidential power. They are the Court acting like a referee at a chaotic basketball game, telling a rogue group of overzealous district court judges to sit down, stop shooting at the wrong basket, and stay in their lane. When the administration fired federal agency heads, the Supreme Court said, “You can’t block that—the President has the constitutional authority to fire the executives of the executive branch.” When lower courts tried to redefine the word “temporary” in “temporary protected status” to mean “permanent,” the Court said, “That’s not your call.” When a judge tried to dictate the exact size of the Department of Education’s workforce, the Court reversed it. None of these rulings expand the President’s power in any meaningful policy sense; they simply remind the judiciary that it hasn’t been granted the power to micromanage the executive branch like a micromanaging boss. These procedural decisions are the judicial equivalent of moving the ball to the 20-yard line—they don’t score a touchdown for Trump’s policies; they just stop the other team from cheating and moving the goalposts out of pure political spite. To call this a “rubber stamp” is to confuse a ruling on procedure with a ruling on the merits, a critical distinction that is lost on the chattering class.
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Ultimately, the idea that the Supreme Court is a tool of Donald Trump fails the most basic test of logic: it ignores the gravity of the losses to obsess over the volume of the wins. Activists have adopted a mindset where anything less than total, catastrophic defeat for the administration is viewed as proof of the Court’s partisan corruption. This binary, zero-sum worldview leaves no room for the messy grey area of law. The Court is not a monolith; it’s a living, breathing institution of nine flawed human beings trying to interpret a Constitution that is often intentionally vague and a legal system that is layered with centuries of precedent. The Trump administration has lost monumental cases on tariffs, on citizenship, and on spending. Yet because the Court has refused to let a few overly eager district judges hijack national policy to serve their own progressive agendas, the commentators scream “authoritarianism” and “oligarchy.” This is a skewed, dangerous perception that erodes our democracy from within. If we delegitimize the Court every time it doesn’t rule entirely our way, we undercut the very fabric of our legal system and the public’s trust in it. We are left with a situation where the media is willing to sacrifice the integrity of the judiciary to score a few cheap political points on cable news segments. It’s a cynical, exhausting game. But if we can step back from the sensational headlines and look at the actual docket, we see a Supreme Court that is doing its best to navigate a chaotic political environment—often ruling against the President when he oversteps his boundaries, and often ruling for him simply because the lower courts overstepped their boundaries first. That’s not a rubber stamp. That’s just good, messy, constitutional governance—and it deserves better than the partisan garbage being shoveled at it daily.