President Donald Trump seems to be losing his grip on the Supreme Court.
After a remarkable winning streak during his first year in office, Trump has hit significant resistance from the justices in recent months, including a stinging defeat over his tariff policy. Arguments at the high court Wednesday suggested another loss may be looming over his attempt to end birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants and foreigners on short-term visas.
Trump emerged victorious in all but a few of the roughly 30 emergency appeals filed with the high court last year on issues ranging from immigration to mass firings of federal employees to abrupt termination of billions of dollars-worth of federal grants and contracts.
Critics, including some liberal justices, said the high court was being too deferential and treating every lower-court rebuff to a Trump policy as a national emergency deserving of immediate action.
But the rejections of Trump’s signature tariff program and the administration’s use of national guard to control anti-ICE protests, coupled with the difficult outing for the president’s birthright policy this week, are challenging the perception that Trump has the court firmly in his pocket.
“I don’t think it’s possible for this administration to do as well at the court going forward as it’s done over the past 14 months, partly because it’s hard for them to have done better over the past 14 months,” said Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor and prominent critic of the court’s handling of its so-called shadow docket.
Legal experts said that, as the court moves from fielding fast-moving emergency appeals to hearing cases in the more-time-intensive regular process, the administration is likely to face more resistance from the justices.
“It’s going to be much harder and the administration is going to win some, but they’re also going to lose some,” said Roman Martinez, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge.
“The big lesson here is the court is going to be more skeptical of the administration on the merits docket than it has been on the shadow docket,” Vladeck added.
John Sauer’s secret weapon
One key factor likely to result in more pain for Trump at the court is the loss of his lawyers’ control over which cases wind up before the justices. When the administration’s early policies were blocked by federal judges, Solicitor General John Sauer decided which to take up on emergency appeal to the Supreme Court and which cases to let play out at a slower pace in lower courts.
As Sauer’s team stared down a slew of injunctions issued by district court judges, Justice Department attorneys prioritized cases where they had a good chance of winning emergency relief.
Other cases, some of them high-profile, were not rushed to the court. Notably, the administration passed up the chance to file emergency Supreme Court appeals of orders that blocked Trump’s crackdown on Harvard University and his attempt to freeze out several prominent law firms..
“If you just look at the win-loss tracker, yes, it was pretty good for the administration over much of 2025, but the sample set was not a random selection of cases,” said Martinez, who served in the solicitor general’s office during the Obama administration. “It was the set of cases that President Trump’s legal team chose to take up to the court. And those lawyers were savvy and selective, choosing to appeal the cases where their position was inherently stronger.”
Choices become tougher
As the cases progress, the choices for the government become starker, with officials often forced to decide between taking their chances at the Supreme Court or abandoning a policy altogether. In addition, the cases that reached the court on an emergency basis often return for full briefing and argument.
“Earlier in the process, it’s more the case that the solicitor general can sort of dominate that conversation. But as the cases work their way back to the court later on, the SG loses a fair amount of control,” Vladeck said.
As this process plays out, Sauer may continue to try to influence what cases reach the court, but he may not always succeed.
One clear example of this came last month when the Trump administration notified the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the administration was no longer seeking to revive Trump’s executive orders attacking specific law firms — orders that were uniformly blocked by district court judges.
The move, which required Sauer’s approval, would have headed off a potentially negative ruling on the issue from the appeals court. However, the following day, the Justice Department reversed course and announced it would continue with the appeal. It offered no explanation to the court for the reversal, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump claimed he’d never been consulted about the decision to retreat.
A White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the initial filing stemmed from an oversight. “No final decision had been made and there was an inadvertent filing which was remedied,” the official said.
Justice Department spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment.
Sauer has suggested he’s aware that he’s likely to face a tougher assignment at the high court this year than he did in Trump’s first year in office.
At a judges’ conference last September, Sauer joked that he now faced the “terrifying” prospect of full arguments on all the emergency cases in which Trump racked up wins during his early months.
“Who’s going to argue all these cases…?” Sauer asked.
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