In each of these cases, Trump and his team had pushed the boundaries of presidential authority, often incorporating novel or seldom-used legal theories to back up their actions.
Trump’s birthright citizenship revocation cut against more than 125 years of Supreme Court precedent interpreting what most legal scholars thought was clear language in the US constitution.
His tariffs, which were imposed and retracted by presidential decree, collided with recent Supreme Court rulings that major new policies had to be explicitly approved by Congress.
Trump’s attempts to deploy the National Guard were a rare instance of a president trying to do so over the objections of local and state officials. It was nipped in the bud by the court, which weighed in to uphold a lower court’s ruling.
Beneath these landmark cases, however, were a long list of decisions that provided Trump with more incremental – but substantive – expansion of his power and advantaged his fellow conservatives.
“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,” said Kate Shaw, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania.
On Monday, the court’s six conservatives ruled that Trump could dismiss members of regulatory federal agencies Congress had established to be “independent”, based only on policy disagreements.
Although in a separate opinion, the court carved out an exception for members of the powerful Federal Reserve, which sets US monetary policy, the decision will give Trump – and future presidents – increased sway over vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy. They will be able to handpick those who determine labour, election, communications, environmental and financial regulations.
