SCOTUS Rulings Day One: Trump Didn’t Become King. SCOTUS Became His Landlord.
Today was not “Trump becomes king.” That’s too simple, too tidy, and frankly too flattering to the man currently dry-humping a football he doesn’t realize is on a leash.
On this episode of We Saw the Devil, Robin breaks down the Supreme Court’s decision day and the story most of the coverage is already getting wrong: Trump did gain power, yes. But the Court gained something bigger. It kept the keys.
The centerpiece is Trump v. Slaughter, where the Supreme Court torched a ninety-one-year-old rule protecting independent agency officials from being fired just because the president finds them annoying, inconvenient, or insufficiently obedient. That decision did not just weaken the FTC. It cracked open the entire independent-agency structure and dragged the unitary executive theory out of the Federalist Society basement and into the law of the land.
But the real twist is this: the Court did not simply hand Trump a crown. It handed him a lease.
From Trump v. Cook, where the Court blocked his attempted firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook for now, to the mail-in ballot ruling, to E. Jean Carroll’s surviving verdict, to the Medicaid work requirement lawsuit, the pattern is the same. The Court is not retreating. It is positioning itself as the final landlord of the executive branch. Trump got more power. The Court kept control.
This episode covers: The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. SlaughterThe end of the ninety-one-year protection from Humphrey’s ExecutorWhy independent agencies like the FTC, FCC, SEC, and NLRB are now in dangerThe unitary executive theory and how a once-fringe legal idea became majority doctrineWhy Trump v. Cook is not the clean “Trump loss” people want it to beHow the Court protected Lisa Cook while keeping the door open for future Fed fightsThe mail-in ballot ruling and why the win still comes with a warning labelE. Jean Carroll’s verdict surviving Trump’s latest appealThe new Medicaid work requirement fight and how bureaucracy becomes a weaponSotomayor’s dissent, “chaos will follow,” and the undefined exceptions that give the Court even more powerWhat is still coming tomorrow: birthright citizenship, transgender athlete bans, and campaign finance