You have to hand it to John Roberts: The chief justice played his cards right. For more than a year now, Roberts has largely dropped his pose as an institutionalist, let alone a moderate. He has instead thrown his weight behind Donald Trump, reestablishing his control over the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. These apparent acts of self-preservation, seemingly undertaken in anticipation of a second Trump term, turned out to be the smart bet. It’s easy to imagine an earlier version of the chief justice spending the next four years losing his grasp on the court’s direction and drawing Trump’s public ire. Today’s iteration of John Roberts need not fear this fate. His position of appeasement, if not outright capitulation, to a MAGA vision of the law is about to pay off in spades.
To see how much the chief justice has changed, remember the role he played in Trump’s first term: the uneasy guardrail against some of the president’s most extreme policies and grievances. After Trump condemned an “Obama judge” for ruling against his administration in 2018, Roberts issued a rare public rebuke, scolding the president for besmirching the “independent judiciary.” (Trump fired back over Twitter, keen to seize the last word.) In 2019, Roberts cast the decisive vote to block a citizenship question on the census, correctly accusing the administration of misrepresenting its reasoning for adding one and then shabbily trying to cover its tracks. In 2020, he once again cast the key vote to halt Trump’s rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program protecting Dreamers from deportation. That year, he also voted to protect LGBTQ+ people under civil rights law, impeding the administration’s anti-trans agenda.
During this period, Roberts was still delivering significant victories to the conservative legal movement. But there was a limit to his tolerance for big swings, especially those that reflected poor lawyering by unscrupulous Trump loyalists. SCOTUS was divided 5–4 along ideological lines, and Roberts sat at its center, allowing him to guide a majority back toward the middle to reject some MAGA excesses. After Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in late 2020, however, she shored up a new ultraconservative majority that left Roberts in the dust on hot-button issues over the next two years. This five-justice bloc weakened COVID restrictions to promote “religious liberty.” It abused the shadow docket to revive Trump-era regulations. Most infamously, it fully abolished the constitutional right to abortion. All as Roberts stood on the sidelines, pleading for compromises that his hard-right colleagues spurned. As recently as 2022, it felt as if the chief justice was losing control of the court that he nominally led.
The lesson Roberts took from this losing streak was simple: If you can’t beat them, join them—and if you join them, you might as well take the reins. Trump’s steady return to power in 2023 and 2024 coincided with the chief justice going full MAGA. When the five other conservatives held together, Roberts joined them every time, refusing to be sidelined with the liberals. And, most revealingly, the chief justice powered the court toward huge victories for the former president in a trio of cases that helped pave the way for his comeback.
First, Roberts prohibited states from removing Trump’s name from the ballot under the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from returning to office. According to the New York Times, he wrote the court’s unnecessarily broad ruling, which went out of its way to ensure that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election would not prevent him from reclaiming the presidency. Second, he wrote the court’s opinion undermining obstruction charges for many Jan. 6 participants, including Trump himself, weakening the legal basis for the former president’s prosecution. Third, he steered the court toward a sweeping decision granting Trump shockingly broad immunity for criminal acts undertaken in office. Behind the scenes, Roberts never wavered on his position in the immunity case, and his muscular intervention helped run out the clock for Trump, ensuring his case would not reach a trial before the election.
The immunity decision came down on July 1, just days after Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance made Trump’s victory seem inevitable. Roberts and his colleagues purported to be crafting an opinion for the ages. But given the obvious direction of the election, the ruling seemed tailor-made to let Trump off the hook for his misdeeds, helping him skate straight back to the Oval Office. The former president praised it as a “big win for our Constitution” and, on the campaign trail, seemed to view it as a license to do anything he wanted in his second term. His first-term spats with Roberts had become a distant memory. The chief justice was back in his good graces.
At the dawn of Trump’s next term, Roberts will arguably hold more power than ever. He has reestablished himself as the leader of the court, the justice with the greatest influence over the most important opinions. The question now is how he’ll use that power in a second Trump term. Will there be a limit to what he’ll seek to allow from the second Trump administration? What comes next may well be far worse than what came before, including mass deportations and vindictive prosecutions that test the boundaries of executive authority. With Trump promising to staff his administration with staunch allies, and Republicans poised to take total control of Congress, there will be no other guardrails but the judiciary.
The question mark that hovers over the Supreme Court in the years ahead is straightforward. Will Roberts expend any of the capital he’s amassed to rein in Trump? How far will he and the rest of the court’s conservatives allow Trump to go? Even if no other conservative will stand athwart Trump, will the chief justice sound the alarm in dissent? Or will he rubber-stamp the White House’s most authoritarian ambitions? Roberts himself may not even know the answers yet. But his decision to take the path of least resistance to Trumpism over the past four years suggests that he will not pose an obstacle to it in the four years ahead.
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