If the Supreme Court Is in the Tank for Trump, It Sure Has a Weird Way of Showing It

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the misleading nature of the left’s claims that President Trump effectively controls the Supreme Court, and we cover more media misses.

Read more Supreme Court Rejects Trump Bid to Overturn $5 Million E. Jean Carroll Sex-Abuse Verdict

The Supreme Court Demonstrates Its Independence from Trump

The Nation writer Elie Mystal has dubbed it “Trump’s Court.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) claims it has been “captured” by conservative interests, and Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has argued that it “keeps bailing Trump out.”

But the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday not to hear an appeal by Trump of a jury verdict that awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages after finding the president had sexually abused and defamed her, is evidence to the contrary.

The Court did not explain its decision and none of the justices issued a written dissent.

But in rejecting Trump’s final avenue to avoid paying millions to Carroll, who successfully argued that Trump sexually abused her in the late 1990s and later defamed her when he denied her allegations when she came forward in 2019, the Court has offered just another piece of evidence that it hardly caters to the president’s every whim.

And in fact, the very same day the Court issued its ruling in the Carroll case, it dealt two more losses to Trump, including a ruling in favor of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors whom the president had tried to fire. In a 5–4 ruling, the Court determined Cook can remain in her job while the case works its way through the legal system.

The Court also upheld a Mississippi law allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days after it.

And yet, progressives are quick to discount these rulings against the president. Every decision in the president’s favor is used as evidence that the Court’s conservative majority serves as a “rubber stamp” for the president.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) celebrated the election-related decision in a post on X: “Donald Trump’s effort to rig the midterm elections was dealt a big blow by the Supreme Court.”

But as NR’s Charles C. W. Cooke noted, just three weeks ago Jeffries accused the “Trump Court” of trying to “rig the midterm elections” and claimed Democrats needed to pack the Court. Of course, Jeffries failed to acknowledge his prior comments after Monday’s ruling, or to issue a mea culpa.

Jeffries is hardly alone in his thinking. The Dispatch rounded up a number of these claims just last month: “Thomas and Alito appear automatic in their support for Trump,” Ruth Marcus wrote for the Washington Post in one example, while Jay Willis at Balls and Strikes in 2024 described Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch as “three Republican-appointed reactionaries eager to reshape American society in the graven image of Roger Ailes.”

Furthermore, Mystal has dismissed the conservative justices as “Republican operatives with lifetime appointments,” while Vox published an article last year describing “The overwhelming evidence that the Supreme Court is on Donald Trump’s team.”

Even liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent last year saying, “This Administration always wins.”

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Just two months ago, the Daily Beast published an article outlining “Why This Supreme Court Justice Won’t Say No to Trump.”

The article, written by breaking news reporter Annabella Rosciglione, encapsulates a larger sentiment on the left, that Justice Alito and his fellow conservatives are all in for Trump.

And yet Monday’s rulings are not the first time the Court has ruled against the president.

Most notably, the Court declined to hear lawsuits from Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including Texas v. Pennsylvania (2020), which sought to invalidate electoral votes in four battleground states.

Also in 2020, the Court ruled 7–2 that Trump did not enjoy absolute immunity from a state criminal subpoena as a sitting president, allowing the Manhattan district attorney to obtain Trump’s financial records.

But to Trump’s liberal opponents, every ruling against him is just a fluke in a system otherwise designed to endorse his every political move.

Headline Fail of the Week

The Washington Post is committed to respecting the preferred pronouns of transgender-identifying individuals, even those who stand accused of trying to assassinate a Supreme Court justice.

“She got eight years for plotting to kill Justice Kavanaugh. Prosecutors want more,” reads a recent Post report, referring to would-be assassin Nicholas Roske.

The Post refers to man behind the foiled attack as “Sophie Roske” and uses “she/her” pronouns for Roske throughout the story.

It isn’t until paragraph 26, as Newsbusters first noted, that the outlet tells readers about Roske’s real sex. “Roske was named Nicholas Roske at birth and raised as a boy in a Southern California family active in a large Evangelical church.”

While federal prosecutors initially sought a 30-year sentence for Roske in connection with the plot, Judge Deborah Boardman, a Biden appointee, only sentenced Roske to eight years in prison, leading prosecutors to appeal the sentencing.

Roske’s apparent gender confusion seemed to encourage Boardman to give him a lighter sentence. The article explains, “Boardman said that in weighing how long to sentence Roske, she factored in that Roske could face additional hardships in federal custody owing to assignment to a male prison and uncertainty about access to hormone treatment . . .” and that Roske was “in the throes of a mental health crisis” on the night he was arrested outside Kavanaugh’s home.

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Media Misses

• Ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, media outlets are predictably rounding up all the reasons our great country is not actually worth celebrating after all. CNN’s Victor Blackwell recycled an argument NPR made in 2021: “There is a slur in America’s founding documents.” Blackwell pointed to a passage from the Declaration of Independence found among the list of grievances against the king that reads: “He has excited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”The CNN anchor invited Cherokee podcaster Rebecca Nagle on for the segment. Nagle claimed, “I think that we’re all used to celebrating the lofty Enlightenment ideals that are there in the Declaration of Independence. But right alongside those was actually our founders’ deep hatred for indigenous people. And the line about merciless Indian savages. It’s actually not a throwaway line.”“I think for Native people, the founding of the U.S. government feels a lot different, because instead of getting more freedom or more liberty. For a lot of tribes, it was less. And I think this is a really hard part of the story of the revolution that’s often left out.”
• The View, of course, would also never miss an opportunity to distance itself from displays of patriotism — or to blast Donald Trump. Co-host Joy Behar played a clip of Larry David reacting to the UFC event at the White House in which he said “ It was a travesty, yeah. What else can you say about it? It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed to be an American, yeah.” Behar agreed saying, “I think he’s right in many ways.”