On 4 March, Donald Trump delivered his epic 100-minute speech to Congress, the longest such presidential address in US history.

Having finished speaking, in time-honored fashion, he walked down the line of supreme court justices, gladhanding each in turn before coming to a stop before the chief justice, #John #Roberts.
“Thank you again, thank you again,” Trump said, taking Roberts’s hand into both his own and shaking it vigorously.
Then, as he began to step away, the president tapped Roberts on the arm in a gesture of buddy-buddy intimacy, and said: “Won’t forget.”

Supreme court watchers have wondered why Trump thanked the chief justice so effusively.

♦️Was it because the Roberts court had, exactly a year earlier, allowed Trump to stay on the electoral ballot even though he had inspired a violent mob attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021?

♦️Could it have been that Roberts had written the ruling that immunised Trump from criminal prosecution for that January 6 insurrection and for any other criminal misdeed he might commit while in the White House?

Whatever the truth, time has moved on since that friendly encounter months ago.
Were the president to bump into the chief justice today, one might expect an even more extravagant display of gratitude.

👉In the past weeks America has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of decisions from its highest court that should make Trump very happy indeed.

💥The six rightwing justices who control the court – three of them given their lifetime seats by Trump himself – have effectively greenlighted the president’s explosive and law-busting agenda.

💥The supermajority has granted Trump 18 straight victories in the administration’s requests for emergency relief.
Steve Vladeck, a leading supreme court scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, has tracked the decisions in his Substack,
"One First", noting that the rulings have been handed down largely in the legal darkness.

They have been piped through the court’s so-called
“#shadow #docket”,
where important affairs of state are decided at speed and with little or no debate or deliberation.
By Vladeck’s count,seven of the orders have been issued without any explanation, leaving the American people clueless as to the justices’ thinking.

Yet the emergency rulings, though temporary in nature, could have seismic consequences.
🔥For as long as they hold they have the potential to cause untold suffering to millions of people targeted by Trump.
🔸That includes countless federal employees who can now be fired at whim after decades of loyal public service;
🔸transgender people purged from the military;
🔸more than 1 million individuals from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and other countries who are being stripped of their status to remain in the US;
🔸immigrants singled out for deportation to war-torn third countries where their lives are in danger.

🆘Legally, the consequences are also profound.
Several of Trump’s actions given temporary go-ahead are of dubious legality,
violating congressional or international laws and running roughshod over fundamental tenets of the US constitution.

By conceding to Trump’s wishes, the justices have for now approved what Vladeck has called
“a truly unprecedented amount of lawlessness by the executive branch”.

The liberal-leaning justice Sonia Sotomayor has sounded a similar alarm in a series of increasingly despairing dissenting opinions.
Her conservative peers on the court, she has written, are
“rewarding lawlessness”,
and undermining the bedrock principle that America is a
“government of laws, not of men”.

All of this has put Roberts, 70, in a strange and uncomfortable position.
Just as he should be celebrating the completion of his 20th year at the pinnacle of the US judiciary,
he is being accused of betraying the very legal edifice he is supposed to protect.

Prominent jurists have held Roberts responsible for emboldening Trump’s drive towards an authoritarian presidency.

J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly.
❌“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.

In Luttig's view, the court under Roberts is
⛔️“acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness.
And it is doing so without briefing, without argument, without deliberation
– and without even a single word of explanation of its decisions.”

For Luttig, this is more than just the 6-3 supermajority of the court expressing its conservatism.
🔥This is a fundamental distortion of the American legal system.

“The supreme court was never intended to function like this.
Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president,
and never before has it decided them so flippantly.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21/justice-john-roberts-supreme-court?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other