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In a sharply worded media critique published by The Hill, journalist and media critic Becket Adams argues that a coordinated, media-assisted campaign to delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court is deliberately distorting the court’s record in order to lay the groundwork for “reform.” Adams opens his column by zeroing in on a remark made by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wrote that because the midterms will be razor-close, “two more years of Donald Trump completely unchained—controlling the House, the Senate and tacitly the Supreme Court—could bring about the end of America as we have known it.” Adams seizes on the word “tacitly,” noting that its dictionary definitions include “without speaking” and “by unexpressed agreement, allowance, or understanding.” He then asks whether this is the same Supreme Court that has actually ruled against the Trump administration on multiple signature agenda items. For Adams, the use of such language is not a slip of the tongue but part of a broader narrative among liberals and progressives who are determined to paint the judiciary as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump presidency. The suggestion that the court is silently colluding with Trump, Adams argues, is not simply inaccurate; it is a deliberate rhetorical device meant to delegitimize the institution and make it vulnerable to structural changes such as court-packing or term limits. By starting with Friedman’s offhand comment, Adams signals that even supposedly mainstream columnists are now treating the Supreme Court as a political enemy rather than a co-equal branch of government.
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Adams goes on to demonstrate that Friedman is hardly alone in this view. He quotes Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, who described the “carefully manufactured conservative majority” as one that “remains just as devoted to the money power,” with a subhead declaring that “The Supreme Court just loves giving our loony overlord whatever he wants.” The Guardian ran a headline asking, “Does Trump basically own the US Supreme Court now?” and, as Adams notes, the subhead— “Some are arguing it is now a political institution, not a legal one”—makes clear that the question is really a statement in disguise. The Nation’s Elie Mystal has alleged that the Roberts Court is “a rubber stamp for Donald Trump.” Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes likewise wrote that “for notable exceptions … the court has mostly inflated this would-be king’s power, blithely trashing long-held court precedents in the process.” Calmes also claimed that the court has favored Trump in 25 of 31 cases challenging his actions in his second term, an assertion she attributes to Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Adams calls this claim highly misleading and accuses such commentators of torturing data in service of ideologically driven narratives. For Adams, these examples represent a dangerous convergence: mainstream columnists, legal academics, and left-wing media figures are all advancing the same false storyline—that the Supreme Court is simply an extension of the Trump White House. The cumulative effect, he warns, is to make the court appear illegitimate and therefore in need of “fixing,” even though the evidence does not support the charge.
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The heart of Adams’s rebuttal is a detailed look at the actual record of the Supreme Court during Trump’s second term. He acknowledges that the number of rulings touching on executive authority is relatively small, but he argues that even a modest sample size shows a mixed bag rather than a pattern of subservience. According to Adams, of the handful of decisions related to executive authority that have come down since 2024, Trump prevailed in three cases but lost in two. On the emergency docket—often derisively called the “shadow docket”—the White House claimed victory in two applications but went home empty-handed in two others. That is not the record of a court that is merely stamping the president’s requests. Adams also emphasizes a striking institutional detail: in the cases that the Trump administration won, no liberal justice crossed over to join the conservative majority. Yet when Trump lost, conservative justices repeatedly joined their liberal colleagues in 5-4, 6-3, and even 7-2 decisions. This asymmetry, Adams argues, is deeply inconvenient for the narrative of a bought-and-paid-for conservative majority. It suggests that Republican-appointed justices are still willing to break ranks when the law requires it, even while liberal appointees vote monolithically as a bloc. Adams draws a line from this pattern to a longer tradition of Republican-appointed justices crossing the aisle when appropriate, citing the examples of Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and even John Paul Stevens. The absence of reciprocal flexibility from the liberal wing, he contends, exposes the “rubber stamp” accusation as politically motivated rather than empirically grounded.
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Adams then digs into the emergency docket statistics to explain why so many observers have arrived at the wrong conclusion. As of the time of writing, he says, there have been 39 administration-related emergency applications to the Supreme Court in Trump’s second term, according to Ballotpedia’s SCOTUS database, with the administration itself filing 35 of those applications. He concedes that emergency rulings have generally favored the Trump administration, but he insists that only about half of those cases directly concerned questions of executive power, and only about five emergency rulings were clear losses for the administration. More importantly, Adams argues, looking closely at what was actually granted and denied shows that the court was not expanding the president’s authority so much as reminding out-of-control lower-court judges of their own limits. He lists several illustrative cases: Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Wilcox, in which the Supreme Court told lower courts they had no authority to block presidential firings of executive branch employees; Mullin v. Doe, which held that lower courts cannot decide whether the word “temporary” in “temporary protected status” means “permanent”; Noem v. National TPS Alliance, which determined that lower courts have no authority to decide which countries may receive temporary protection designations; Noem v. Perdomo, which barred lower courts from stopping federal immigration stops in Los Angeles; and McMahon v. New York, which held that lower courts cannot dictate the size of the Department of Education’s workforce. For Adams, these decisions are not radical assertions of presidential power but rather basic applications of the constitutional order and existing statutes. In a saner world, he suggests, such rulings would not be controversial at all. The problem is that critics are counting every loss by activist lower-court judges as a win for Trump, ignoring the true nature of the questions at issue.
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Perhaps the most powerful part of Adams’s argument is his reminder that Trump has also suffered major defeats at the Supreme Court on issues central to his campaign and presidency. The emergency-docket rulings may have frustrated progressive judges and their allies, but Adams notes that Trump lost big on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and cuts to billions of dollars in foreign aid that had been going to left-wing nonprofits. These were not trivial matters; they were among the administration’s most high-profile policy priorities. A court that is truly owned by Trump, Adams argues, would not have ruled against him on such consequential issues. He also addresses the claim, repeated by Jackie Calmes and others, that Trump has been favored in 25 of 31 cases challenging his actions in his second term. Adams dismisses this as data-torturing, saying that the number of emergency-docket decisions affirming the limits of lower-court authority is being counted as if it were the same as substantive victories for the White House. The conflation of quantity with quality lies at the root of the “rubber stamp” narrative. Yes, the Supreme Court has declined to let lower-court judges run the executive branch, and yes, that has often benefited Trump in the short term. But the court has also rejected the administration’s most aggressive legal theories on some of the most important issues of the day. When the full picture is considered, Adams concludes, the notion that the Roberts Court is simply an appendage of the Trump presidency collapses.
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In his conclusion, Adams returns to the broader political and cultural stakes. He suggests that for commentators like Thomas Friedman, Elie Mystal, and many others who have made politics their personality, the Supreme Court is deemed “compromised” because activists consider anything less than total victory to be a defeat. For them, quantity trumps quality. They choose to focus on the volume of decisions reining in an out-of-control judiciary while ignoring the gravity of the White House’s losses on major policy questions. That selective perception produces a skewed view of reality—what Adams dryly calls “a Thomas Friedman column.” More importantly, he warns, this campaign of delegitimization has real-world consequences. If enough Americans can be convinced that the Supreme Court is merely a political tool of the president, then the pressure to pack the court, impose term limits, or strip its jurisdiction will grow irresistible. Adams does not deny that the Trump administration has won its share of cases, nor does he dispute that the court’s conservative majority is ideologically distinct from the liberal minority. What he rejects is the caricature of a court that silently conspires with the president, ignores the law, and serves as a rubber stamp for executive overreach. The evidence, he argues, shows a more complex and balanced picture: a court that sometimes sides with the administration, sometimes against it, and often simply enforces the basic limits of judicial authority. To reduce that record to a one-dimensional story of corruption and subservience is not only bad journalism—it is a dangerous attack on an essential American institution.
