How Trump Could Remake the Supreme Court for a Generation

Donald Trump is poised to become the first president since FDR to have appointed the majority of high-court justices. His potential picks are terrifying.

This article appears in the March 2025 issue, with the headline “The Supreme Trump Court.”

Donald Trump’s first term as president gave the republicans control over the most dangerous body of the most dangerous branch of government: the Supreme Court. With the help of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, along with timely retirements and untimely deaths, Trump was able to secure a 6–3 hard-right majority on the court and use it to make the Republicans’ least-popular policy dreams come true. In the brief years since, the court has undermined labor rights, stripped back voting rights, and reduced pregnant people to the status of second-class citizens whose bodies can be controlled by Republican state legislatures eager to use them for labor without compensation.

The Democrats might have used Joe Biden’s four-year interregnum to begin to claw back the Supreme Court from the Republicans’ grip. Particularly during the first two years, with the Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could have added additional justices to the court. Had they done so, abortion rights could have been saved, voting rights could have been protected, and Trump may have been ruled ineligible to ever run for office again.

Instead, the Democrats did nothing. As the Supreme Court revealed its full moral turpitude to a disgusted public, Congress failed to impose even minimal ethical standards on the justices or cut the court’s funding, while Biden sent court expansion to die in a useless commission.

Now we will experience a time of consequences. Vulnerable communities will pay the price for the Democrats’ inaction—and as bad as the court’s rulings have been in recent years, they are likely to get worse. When the justices are inevitably asked to weigh in on whether Trump can actually revoke birthright citizenship, don’t expect them to stop the guy they literally helped get elected from violating the Constitution. When they hear a lawsuit on whether Elon Musk and his apartheid-adjacent DOGE bros can resegregate the workforce, don’t expect them to honor the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. As for writing trans kids out of existence while citing the writings of J.K. Rowling as precedent, well, this court has already signaled it’s eager to do that.

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