The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025-2026 term closed with a high-profile ruling that delivered a rare setback to former President and current 2026 candidate Donald Trump, but the term as a whole cemented a decades-long shift toward a conservative-dominated bench that has vastly expanded executive authority — a legacy Trump first shaped during his first term in office.
On Tuesday, the court ruled against Trump’s longstanding push to restrict birthright citizenship, a foundational 14th Amendment principle that has granted automatic U.S. citizenship to nearly all people born on American soil for more than 125 years. The 5-4 decision rejected Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from children born to temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants, upholding the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship established in the 1898 Supreme Court precedent *United States v. Wong Kim Ark*.
In a muted response compared to his past reactions to unfavorable court rulings, Trump called the decision “too bad for our country” and threw his support behind congressional legislation that would enact his proposed restrictions. However, legislative prospects for such a bill remain virtually nonexistent: Democrats hold a majority in the Senate and have pledged to block any such measure, and even if it were to pass both chambers, legal scholars widely agree it would fail to survive constitutional challenge.
This defeat for Trump is far from representative of the term’s overall trajectory. The court’s 6-3 conservative majority, three of whom were appointed by Trump during his first presidential term, has delivered a string of landmark victories that expand executive power and shield sitting and future presidents from criminal prosecution for official actions. Even in cases where the court rejected some of Trump’s most extreme policy overreaches, the splits across the bench revealed that deviations from the pro-Trump conservative line are rare and limited.
Tuesday’s birthright ruling was not the only time a faction of conservative justices joined the court’s three liberal members to rein in Trump’s broader policy agenda. Back in February, a 6-3 majority — including two of Trump’s own appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — struck down Trump’s attempt to impose sweeping new tariffs on U.S. trading partners using only existing executive authority. The ruling aligned with longstanding Supreme Court precedent that holds major new economic policy changes require explicit congressional approval. For that defeat, Trump responded with far sharper anger, calling the three conservative justices who crossed lines “lapdogs” and saying he was “absolutely ashamed” of their decision during an impromptu press conference.
In December, another cross-ideological bloc, consisting of Chief Justice John Roberts plus Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined liberals to block Trump from deploying National Guard troops to Chicago to enforce federal immigration law against the wishes of Illinois’ governor and Chicago’s mayor. The ruling upheld a lower court’s decision, putting an early stop to a rare attempt by a sitting president to use the National Guard against the objections of state and local leaders.
In each of these high-profile losses, legal experts note, Trump and his legal team pushed far beyond the traditional bounds of executive power, relying on novel, rarely tested legal theories to justify actions that ran counter to decades of precedent. His attempt to roll back birthright citizenship directly contradicted 125 years of Supreme Court interpretation of what most constitutional scholars have long viewed as the 14th Amendment’s clear language.
Beneath these high-profile headline-grabbing cases, the term produced a steady stream of incremental but substantive rulings that expanded presidential power and advanced conservative legal goals, aligning with Trump’s policy priorities. Kate Shaw, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed up the court’s trajectory: “There will be occasional deviations, but I think this is a very strong, very conservative court with the broadest conception of presidential power that we have ever seen.”
Earlier this week, for example, the court’s six conservative justices ruled that presidents can dismiss members of independent federal regulatory agencies over purely policy disagreements. While the court carved out a narrow exception for Federal Reserve board members to preserve the central bank’s monetary policy independence, the ruling gives Trump and all future presidents far greater control over the sprawling federal bureaucracy. Now, presidents will be able to handpick officials who set labor, election, communications, environmental, and financial regulations, a massive shift in executive influence over domestic policy.
Even on immigration, the issue at the heart of Trump’s political identity for more than a decade, the birthright loss obscures major victories for the president. Last week, the court upheld Trump’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, many of whom have resided in the U.S. for more than a decade following natural disasters and civil conflict in their home countries. The court also tightened asylum rules, requiring that asylum seekers be physically present on U.S. soil to file a claim, a change that makes it far harder for refugees to gain protection.
The court also delivered major advantages to Trump and the Republican Party ahead of the 2026 midterm congressional elections. On the same day the birthright ruling was handed down, the court issued a less-noticed decision that loosened federal campaign finance restrictions, lifting caps on how much national political parties can spend directly on their candidates. With the Republican National Committee holding more than $125 million in cash reserves while the Democratic National Committee carries substantial debt, the ruling gives Trump and Republican candidates a significant financial edge in the upcoming elections.
In April, the court’s conservative majority struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ruling that congressional districts drawn to give racial minorities greater electoral representation are inherently unconstitutional. That decision has already allowed Republican-controlled state legislatures across the South to redraw U.S. House districts to favor Republican candidates, shifting the partisan landscape of competitive House races ahead of November.
While Trump has expressed public frustration with occasional unfavorable rulings — including a Monday decision that declined to block counting of mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive after — the net impact of the term has been to grant him more executive authority than any previous U.S. president has held. With ongoing rumors that one of the court’s senior conservative justices is considering retirement in the coming year, Trump, if he wins re-election in November, could soon have the chance to cement his legacy on the federal judiciary for decades to come.