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CNN
 — 

When the Supreme Court justices first shared an inaugural stage with Donald Trump, they heard the new president deliver a 16-minute declaration against the country and vow, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Afterward, when they returned to a chamber on the first floor of the Capitol where they shed the black wool skullcaps, mittens and rain gear worn on the blustery January 20, 2017, they fell unusually silent. There was little of the upbeat chatter that commonly occurred once they were together inside. Rather, a person in the room that day told CNN, no one knew what to say.

The justices and their law clerks greeted Trump with collective apprehension eight years ago. Liberal or conservative, they wondered what to expect next. Today, no mystery exists as to what Trump is all about – or whether the Supreme Court majority is mostly with him.

The bench has been remade in his image. Trump appointed three of the current nine justices during his first term (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett). Two other justices on the right wing, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, were galvanized by the Trump effect.

Whatever guardrails were in place from Congress and Trump’s Cabinet in his first term have been lowered; the question for the Supreme Court is whether any of his moves will be a bridge too far.

Chief Justice John Roberts, whose relationship with Trump has been bumpy, nonetheless shepherded the opinion in the case that mattered most to him. Roberts wrote the July 1 decision that gave Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution and ensured he would not face trial for charges of election subversion from the 2020 presidential contest.

Overall, the reconstituted Supreme Court has diminished norms and transformed the law, beginning with the court’s upholding of Trump’s travel ban in 2018, then its reversal of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in 2022, and finally its groundbreaking move to shield the president from prosecution.

Along the way, the justices revealed varying levels of regard for Trump: Thomas and his wife, Ginni, dined privately with him. Ginni Thomas also worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. At the home of Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito in January 2021, an upside-down American flag flew, similar to a symbol adopted by Trump supporters who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

At the other end of the spectrum, liberal Sonia Sotomayor has shown her disdain of Trump. As she dissented from the bench in the travel ban case, she highlighted his verbal attacks on Muslims. More recently, during January 10 oral arguments in the TikTok dispute, she derisively questioned whether Trump would abide by Congress’ ban and enforce the law.

The first term

In January 2017, the justices numbered only eight. Justice Antonin Scalia had died on February 13, 2016, and Senate Republicans had blocked any consideration of then-Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s choice to succeed Scalia, making the vacancy a top issue in that presidential campaign.

The justices had compromised often during that 11-month period, without a tie-breaking ninth vote, and the atmosphere of negotiation and concession lingered through the inauguration.

That was first tested seven days later when Trump issued a travel ban against several Muslim-majority countries, following through on a campaign pledge. He had made such assertions as “I think Islam hates us” and “We’re having problems with the Muslims, and we’re having problems with Muslims coming into this country.”

Inside the court, according to law clerks from that time, a receptiveness to some compromise across ideological lines remained. In the justices’ initial look at the travel ban order, they allowed it to take partial effect, against “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States” but blocked the ban for people with the requisite relationships.

Law clerks recalled an atmosphere of wary cooperation. The clerks were still having lunch together and enjoying weekly “happy hours” without the impending ideological rancor.

The following year, divisions had intensified. When the justices ruled on the merits of Trump’s travel ban (the third iteration), the split was 5-4, with conservatives in the majority. Siding with the Trump administration, Roberts in his opinion brushed away Trump’s anti-Muslim statements as largely irrelevant and emphasized a president’s discretion to suspend immigration.

Then-Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the majority but wrote a separate opinion. Today, Kennedy’s language seems quaint.

“There are numerous instances in which the statements and actions of Government officials are not subject to judicial scrutiny or intervention. That does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it proclaims and protect,” Kennedy wrote.

“An anxious world must know that our Government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts.”

Conservative turn continued with Biden in White House

The Supreme Court created a more powerful president.

Trump will return to the White House with new muscle, notably through the court’s decision shielding him from prosecution for any challenged conduct taken during official acts. On the social policy front, the Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings that would bolster his agenda, for example, against reproductive rights and racial remedies.

All three of Trump’s appointees banded together for landmark decisions in those areas of the law, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have been Trump’s most reliable allies among the three. That was seen earlier this month when they dissented (with Thomas and Alito) as the majority rejected Trump’s plea to block his sentencing in the Manhattan hush-money case.

Last May, a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to “hush money” paid during the 2016 election to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had an affair. (Trump has denied the affair.)

Trump’s bid to the Supreme Court to avoid the sentencing was a long shot. As the majority wrote, Trump’s allegations of “evidentiary violations” at trial were separately on appeal and any burden from the scheduled sentencing was “relatively insubstantial” because it was to be a virtual hearing and the trial judge was giving Trump an “unconditional discharge.”

Trump appointee Barrett, with Roberts and liberals Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson formed the majority. It was less revealing that Roberts and Barrett rejected the request than that four of their fellow conservatives wanted to block the sentencing that Trump contended would disrupt his work during the presidential transition.

After the Supreme Court’s order, Trump himself reserved his criticism for the trial judge. He had said he viewed the high court’s explanation as an endorsement of his broader appeal of the trial verdict and said, “I think it’s all going to work out well.”

During Trump’s first term, Justice Thomas appeared to have the tightest relationship with him. Trump invited Thomas and his wife, Ginni, to a private lunch in 2018. Ginni Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, separately attended Trump’s White House celebration when he was acquitted in February 2020 by the Senate after his first House impeachment.

That 2020 impeachment episode arose from his pressure on Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to investigate political rival Joe Biden. A year later, Trump underwent a second impeachment and acquittal after his effort to challenge the 2020 election results and the events of January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol. Among the communications that emerged during that latter investigation were those from Ginni Thomas’ to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows pleading with him to continue the legal fight to overturn the 2020 election results.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she wrote on November 10, 2020. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

Earlier this January, Trump’s relationship with Alito was in the spotlight when it became known that he took a call from the president-elect about a former law clerk seeking a position in the new administration.

It is not uncommon for justices, conservative or liberal, to tout their former clerks for jobs in a new administration or with any potential employer. The Trump and Alito conversation occurred, however, as the justices were about to take up Trump’s plea to avoid sentencing in the hush-money case.

Alito said in a public statement, given first to ABC News, which first reported the call, “We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today, and indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed.”

Return comes at a perilous time for the court

Multiple polls have documented the decline in public approval and confidence in the Supreme Court in the years since Trump’s first term.

Chief Justice Roberts has minimized that trend as well as national attention on ethical concerns. He focused in his annual report issued December 31 instead on the court’s critics who he said have engaged in “intimidation” and “disinformation.”

“Public officials, too, regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges – for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote.

From the beginning of his first campaign, Trump, in fact, has claimed individual federal judges ruled against him based on politics.

His public attitude toward the Supreme Court fluctuated. When he lost initial immigration cases in lower courts in the early months of his first term, he posted on social media, “See you in the Supreme Court.” But in 2020, when the justices narrowly rejected one of his immigration initiatives against children who had been brought to America without documentation, he wrote on Twitter, “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”

By and large, Trump had scant reason to complain, and he was effusive last July calling the court’s immunity decision “a win for the Constitution and democracy.”

Lawyers who represented Trump in such personal litigation are now slated to represent his administration on policy, including D. John Sauer, whom Trump has tapped to be the federal government’s top lawyer before the Supreme Court. In recent filings in the hush-money case and the dispute over Congress’ ban on TikTok, Sauer laid out an even more expansive vision of Trump’s presidential power.

After Monday’s swearing-in, justices are expected to join Trump for the customary inaugural luncheon in the Statuary Hall. If the ritual from eight years ago repeats, the justices and spouses will be seated at round tables right in front of Trump’s place at the head table.

There, they will sit alongside designated Cabinet officers and other Trump officials who soon will pressing his new legal agenda.

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