‍For those of us who are both Supreme Court watchers and World Cup fans, there was an odd convergence of worlds with the hand-down of Trump v. Barbara on June 30, 2026, the last day of the Supreme Court’s annual Term, and the United States Men’s National Soccer Team’s trials and tribulations that took place during the following week. With a red card suspension slated to sideline the U.S. Team’s star forward Folarin Balogun from their Round of 16 World Cup match against Belgium, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his friend Gianni Infantino, head of FIFA, the World Cup organizer. By President Trump’s own telling, he urged Infantino to set aside Balogun’s suspension and let him play. Hours later, that is precisely what happened. The President then posted on Truth Social, “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” The irony was more than a little rich. Balogun was born in New York City in 2001 when his mother traveled there to visit her sister and was then refused boarding on her return flight due to her advanced pregnancy. But under Executive Order 14160, which President Trump issued as his first act in office of his second White House term on January 20, 2025, the circumstances of Balogun’s birth would render him ineligible for United States citizenship.

‍In a stunning expansion of presidential powers, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Slaughter overruled a ninety-year-old precedent and held that Congress cannot limit the President’s power to remove heads of federal agencies. This is a major lessening of checks and balances and again shows the six conservative justices’ disregard for even long-standing precedents. In this essay, I initially summarize Humphrey’s Executor, which was overruled in Trump v. Slaughter, and its progeny, before examining the consequences of its overruling in Slaughter, particularly as it relates to presidential power.

‍Pretextualism—the use of formalistic legal logic to mask unstated motives under a misleading cover story—has a long, troubling pedigree in American jurisprudence. Louisiana v. Callais exemplifies its modern revival. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a six-justice majority, deployed this deceptive methodology to dismantle the final remnants of the nation’s most consequential civil rights law. Pretextualism has been baked into Supreme Court decision-making from the institution’s earliest days to its more recent controversies. While history is full of examples, pretextualism is especially salient today because the Trump administration deploys it so rampantly. The Supreme Court’s historical reliance on pretext, combined with its recent reluctance to confront executive deception, paved the way for the Court’s revival of pretextualism in Louisiana v. Callais.