Mullin v. Doe is notable for the logical contortions that the Court performed to deny what was right in front of its face. It also raises stark questions about this Court’s ability to detect and condemn anti-Black racism. President Trump’s stigmatizing statements about Haitian immigrants should have easily sufficed to show racial animus when the administration terminated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) status for Haitian immigrants. This brief essay describes and dissects the various arguments that Justice Alito’s majority opinion unfurled to avoid that conclusion. It then concludes by linking the opinion to a broader cultural phenomenon of “performative politics,” and shows that it extends to the right wing. The majority worked hard to launder the Trump administration’s virulent racism. The Court’s initial method was to bury the comments—to refuse to print them in the U.S. reports. As Justice Kagan pointed out in dissent, Justice Alito declined to recount the actual statements by President Trump and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that gave rise to the respondents’ claim of racial animus. This is extremely unusual and suspect. How can a court analyze statements if it can’t bear to face them?

‍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.

In January 2026, right after overthrowing the President of Venezuela but just before launching a war with Iran, the Trump Administration ramped up its efforts to annex Greenland. During this period, President Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the Danish territory reached a fever pitch, with erratic threats of both a military invasion of Greenland and the imposition of tariffs on European goods. On January 17, in response to a near-unanimous opposition by European countries to the proposed annexation, President Trump threatened several European states with blanket 10 percent tariffs starting on February 1, 2026, which would quickly increase to 25 percent on June 1, 2026. He posted on Truth Social that these increased tariffs would be effective until the United States reached a deal for the “Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

To the public, Learning Resources v. Trump was a fierce condemnation by the Roberts Court of President Donald Trump’s brash assertions of constitutional power. The Supreme Court flatly rejected the claim that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) provision empowering the President to “regulate . . . importation” in the face of emergency unlocked tariff powers. The New York Times pronounced the decision as a “Declaration of Independence” by the high court. Slate praised the thirteen pages of the Chief’s opinion backed by a majority as “a withering rebuke . . . [a] crisp, confident opinion.” But if you look deeper—for instance, at the remaining 157 pages—it becomes clear that the Court’s conservative majority experienced a catastrophic meltdown.