{"id":982,"date":"2026-06-30T22:44:30","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T22:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=982"},"modified":"2026-06-30T22:44:30","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T22:44:30","slug":"what-the-supreme-court-rulings-mean-for-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=982","title":{"rendered":"What the Supreme Court Rulings Mean for Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of <\/i>The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more A Tough Day for NPR<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This week, the Supreme Court handed down the final seven opinions of its term. The rulings paint a complicated picture; some broadly affirm the president\u2019s executive power, and others seem to rebuff his agenda. Today, the justices struck down the executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship for the children of noncitizens\u2014but the vote was in some ways far closer than expected. In today\u2019s newsletter, The Atlantic<\/i>\u2019s staff writer Quinta Jurecic breaks down the decisions.<\/p>\n

Will Gottsegen: <\/b>What surprised you most about the Supreme Court\u2019s decisions this week?<\/p>\n

Quinta Jurecic: <\/b>The big-ticket items were Trump v. Slaughter<\/i> and Trump v. Cook<\/i>, which involved the president\u2019s ability to fire Senate-confirmed leadership at independent agencies. And in those cases, the Court ruled that the president does have a very wide-ranging ability to fire, under a theory that is known as the \u201cunitary executive.\u201d But the justices carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve by ruling that Governor Lisa Cook can stay in her job for now. I don\u2019t think anybody was surprised by either of those decisions.<\/p>\n

I was similarly not surprised that the Court struck down Donald Trump\u2019s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of some immigrants. What shocked me is that the ruling was, depending on how you count, 6\u20133 on the question of whether the executive order could stand, or 5\u20134 on the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires a broad understanding of birthright citizenship. Very few people had thought that it would be anywhere near that close. I certainly did not.<\/p>\n

Will: <\/b>Brett Kavanaugh joined the liberal justices in striking down Trump\u2019s birthright-citizenship order, but he joined the conservatives in saying that the order didn\u2019t violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also decided 5\u20134 yesterday that mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted. What do the slim margins in some of these opinions say about where the Court is at today?<\/p>\n

Quinta: <\/b>After listening to oral arguments in April, I probably would have said that the Court would rule against the Trump administration in the birthright-citizenship case 8\u20131 or 7\u20132, with Clarence Thomas and possibly Samuel Alito dissenting. I did not get indications that Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch were going to go that way as well, and it\u2019s notable because even though they\u2019re both Trump appointees, whatever Trump wants<\/i> tends to be less of a north star for them than it is for Alito and Thomas. And so the fact that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch voted this way, I think, says a lot about the extent to which the Court is willing to give Trump a pass.<\/p>\n

Will: <\/b>Trump has already said that he\u2019ll continue to fight the Cook<\/i> ruling. Is the door still open for him to fire other Fed governors in the future? And why is the Fed somewhat protected from his new power to fire top officials at independent agencies?<\/p>\n

Quinta: <\/b>It is not hard for me to imagine that Trump would continue to try to get rid of Cook, because the administration seems to really love touching a hot stove. I will say that the fact that the Court engineered this carve-out for the Fed pretty definitively suggests to me that the justices are firm in their desire to protect the Fed\u2019s independence in a way that is not true for any other independent agency. But the justices really hedged on why<\/i>. Their answer is basically, Because we said so<\/i>.<\/p>\n

So, theoretically, yes, there could absolutely still be efforts at interference. Practically speaking, it is a little hard for me to imagine that those efforts could actually succeed after this ruling.<\/p>\n

Will: <\/b>In a 6\u20133 ruling, the justices upheld two state bans preventing trans women and girls from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity. This comes about a year after the Court ruled that states can ban trans minors from receiving gender-affirming medical care. Can you tell me more about how this Court has engaged with culture-war issues and whether any patterns or themes have emerged?<\/p>\n

Read more A Search Through the Rubble of Two Towers in Venezuela<\/a><\/p>\n

Quinta:<\/b> As you say, the Court\u2019s main involvement with culture-war issues this term has been through its rulings on trans-rights issues. Today\u2019s decisions allow Idaho and West Virginia to exclude trans students from competing on sports teams aligned with their gender identity, under both Title IX and the equal-protection clause of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The majority opinion by Kavanaugh skirts any hard-core culture-warrior rhetoric\u2014at the end, he includes a somewhat awkwardly phrased sentence declaring, \u201cNo student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.\u201d But Thomas\u2019s concurrence has some fairly vicious language insisting that transgender women and girls are not women and girls \u201ceven if they believe they are.\u201d Gorsuch, meanwhile, gets himself tied in knots trying to explain how his concurrence here is actually consistent with his previous opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County<\/i> that Title VII\u2019s prohibition on sex discrimination at work also prohibits discrimination against transgender people.<\/p>\n

Will: <\/b>How is the president\u2019s power being affirmed by this batch of decisions? And how is it in some ways being undercut?<\/p>\n

Quinta: <\/b>The Slaughter<\/i> case is a huge win for Trump and for the conservative movement. In his\u00a0 Truth Social post reacting to the decision, the president said that \u201c90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!\u201d He is making it very clear that This is great for me\u2014it means that I get to do what I want<\/i>. Where the conservatives on the Court have framed it as a matter of fidelity to the Constitution and to our constitutional history, Trump is more straightforward about how this helps him.<\/p>\n

The birthright-citizenship case is certainly a loss for Trump. I would not interpret it as batting back his overreach, just because the ruling was so narrow. But there is no ambiguity about what the Fourteenth Amendment says, and the fact that the administration seems to have been able to convince four justices that there is some ambiguity there is troubling. It is a real warning sign for the influence of Trump and the far right on the Court.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/b><\/p>\n

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