EDITORIAL: Firing Power — The Dream of an Executive Without Counterweights

Introduction: When "You're Fired" Becomes Constitutional Doctrine

A president built on dismissal as a governing tool

There was a time when Donald Trump fired his candidates on a reality television show, in the carefully orchestrated staging of The Apprentice. That time is past, or rather it has mutated into something far more serious: the President of the United States is now battling before the Supreme Court to enshrine this right to dismiss as an absolute constitutional principle. This is no longer spectacle. It is doctrine, and doctrine can last generations.

In June 2026, the highest American court finds itself weeks — perhaps days — from delivering a ruling in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook, two landmark cases that question the extent of presidential removal power over the heads of independent agencies. The first concerns the commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, fired without stated cause. The second targets the governor of the Federal Reserve, Lisa Cook, dismissed via a social media post over mortgage fraud allegations she categorically denies. The Court's answer will shape American institutional architecture for decades to come.

The real stakes behind the right to fire

It would be naive to reduce these cases to simple personnel disputes. What is at stake is the fundamental question of whether the American president can exercise complete discretionary control over the entire federal executive, including the components that Congress deliberately designed to operate shielded from daily political pressure. That would transform the presidency from an institution bounded by counterweights into an omnipotent command center in the sole service of the White House occupant.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a Trump victory in the Slaughter case would place "massive, unchecked, and uncontrolled power in the president's hands," in the very words of Justice Elena Kagan during oral arguments. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers, had warned: "The first man at the helm will be a good man. Nobody knows what his successors will be. The executive will always grow here, as elsewhere, until it ends in a monarchy." Nearly two hundred and fifty years later, this prophecy resonates with chilling precision.

The Slaughter Case: Removing Without Cause, a Radical Claim

How Trump fired an FTC commissioner by email

In March 2025, shortly after his return to power, Donald Trump sent an email to Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the Democratic commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission — a woman he had himself appointed during his first term. The message was terse: her presence on the commission was "incompatible" with the administration's priorities. No grounds of misconduct. No allegation of negligence. A simple declaration of ideological incompatibility. That is all. That is enough, the Trump administration argues.

Yet the federal statute governing the FTC since its creation in 1914 is explicit: a commissioner may be removed by the president only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Trump invoked none of these conditions. Lower courts ruled in Slaughter's favor, relying on the precedent Humphrey's Executor v. United States of 1935. But the Supreme Court, through its "shadow docket" — emergency orders issued without full adversarial proceedings — immediately stayed those favorable decisions, effectively barring Slaughter from reclaiming her post while the litigation ran its course.

Humphrey's Executor, a 91-year constitutional pillar

The decision Humphrey's Executor v. United States is, in the words of Professor Michael Dreeben on LawFare Media, "the cornerstone of independent agencies and the administrative state." It was handed down in 1935, when Franklin D. Roosevelt had tried to remove William E. Humphrey, an FTC commissioner appointed by his Republican predecessor, purely for political reasons. The Supreme Court was unanimous: Congress had the constitutional right to protect certain officials exercising "quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial" functions from the political whims of the White House. For nine decades, this decision formed the legal foundation of independent regulation in the United States.

Today, according to multiple legal analysts, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court seems determined to dismantle this edifice. During the December 2025 oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts described Humphrey's Executor as little more than a "dried husk" of what it once represented. That phrase was no passing comment: it foreshadowed a potentially devastating ruling for American regulatory independence. According to Octagon AI, prediction markets assigned a 91% probability to a Trump victory in this case.

The Unitary Executive Theory: When a Reagan-Era Idea Becomes a Presidential Weapon

From Reagan-era lawyers to Supreme Court benches

The unitary executive theory was not born with Trump. It was forged in the corridors of Reagan's Department of Justice in the 1980s, by a generation of ambitious young lawyers — among them a certain John Roberts, then in his twenties — who were looking for tools to counter decades of Democratic dominance in Congress and in federal agencies. The central idea is as simple as it is radical: since the Constitution "vests the executive Power" in the president through Article II, he holds absolute control over the entire executive, including the right to remove any official at his discretion.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his famous lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson in 1988, had laid out this argument: the Constitution grants the president "all of the executive power," not "some of the executive power." According to Reason Magazine, this 1988 solitary dissent "has only grown in stature and influence on the legal right" over the years, and the Trump administration's brief in the Slaughter case cites it abundantly. What was yesterday a marginal dissent is today the official position of a presidency and a judicial majority.

From Reagan to Trump: the rise of a contested doctrine

The progression of the unitary executive theory through jurisprudence has been steady but gradual. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2020, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that an agency led by a single director "insulated from Presidential control" lacked grounding in historical practice. In that decision, the Court ruled that Trump could dismiss the CFPB director at will. That was a turning point, but a limited one: the agency itself survived, and the decision concerned only a single director, not a multi-member commission.

Trump v. Slaughter takes an additional, potentially decisive step. It asks the Court to subject to presidential discretion not only single directors, but the entirety of multi-member commissions — FTC, NLRB, FERC, SEC — in short, the entire architecture of independent American regulation. According to Misha Tseytlin, an attorney at Troutman Pepper Locke cited by Law.com, such a ruling would be "a major earthquake for previously independent agencies."

The Cook Case: Targeting the Federal Reserve, Hitting the Heart of the World Economy

A dismissal via social media post

In the summer of 2025, Donald Trump attempted to remove Lisa Cook, a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and the first Black woman to hold that position, via a letter posted on social media. The stated reason: mortgage fraud allegations concerning documents related to a loan taken out before her Fed appointment, allegations brought by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Cook firmly denied any wrongdoing. Elements obtained by NBC News appeared to contradict these allegations.

The Federal Reserve Act stipulates that board governors may only be removed "for cause" — that is, based on tangible evidence of misconduct. Cook contested her dismissal in court, and courts blocked her removal pending a final judgment. She continues to serve. But the battle has cost her more than one million two hundred thousand dollars in legal and security fees, according to an ethics disclosure made public in June 2026 and reported by Reuters — costs covered largely by nonprofit democracy-defense organizations.

Why even conservatives hesitate to touch the Fed

The Cook case reveals an interesting fracture within the Supreme Court's conservative majority itself. According to the Los Angeles Times, a majority of six justices out of nine appeared ready, during the January 2026 oral arguments, to block Cook's dismissal — not out of attachment to a democratic principle, but because allowing the president to control the monetary policy of the American central bank would amount to "blowing up the economy," to borrow the colorful phrase of the Brennan Center. The Federal Reserve is a "unique, quasi-private" institution, with a historical tradition rooted in the nation's earliest banks.

This dichotomy is revealing: the conservative judicial majority supports the expansion of executive power when it serves market deregulation, but recoils before a presidential takeover likely to shake investor confidence in American monetary stability. This is less a matter of principle than economic pragmatism. This dividing line — protect the Fed but let the FTC, the NLRB, or the CFPB fall — is arbitrary on constitutional grounds. It reveals that even its supporters do not fully believe in the consistency of the theory they are about to impose.

The Shadow Docket as a Political Weapon: Winning Before the Verdict

Emergency orders that shift the balance of power

One of the most troubling aspects of this legal saga is the way the Supreme Court has used its "shadow docket" — emergency orders issued without full adversarial proceedings — to allow Trump to fire protected officials while litigation continued. The Court thus effectively authorized the removal of members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and FTC commissioner Slaughter, long before any decision on the merits.

Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissenting opinions, denounced this practice forcefully: "The emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent forbids... or to transfer governmental authority from Congress to the President, thereby reshaping the nation's separation of powers." In other words, the Court has already granted Trump much of what he is formally seeking, before officially ruling. The coming judgment in Trump v. Slaughter will merely legitimize retroactively what has already happened in practice.

Democracy by proxy: when emergency procedures replace debate

The shadow docket has become, under Trump and with the complicity of the conservative majority, a tool of silent constitutional transformation. Decisions that would normally require months of deliberation, full hearings, and detailed opinions are made in days, often without detailed written reasoning, making any substantive critique extremely difficult. According to LawFare Media, the Court has used this mechanism to allow a political reality to take hold — an administration that fully controls its agencies — which its formal ruling will merely consecrate.

This is a form of step-by-step constitutional engineering. First, the president's unilateral action creates a fait accompli. Then, lower courts attempt to resist. Then the Supreme Court, via the shadow docket, neutralizes these efforts. Finally, a ruling on the merits validates the entire process. The final result is identical to a constitutional revolution, but it occurred without anyone ever being able to clearly identify a precise moment of rupture. That is the perverse genius of the system: modifying the institutional order without ever having to openly assume responsibility for it.

The Myers Precedent and the Long Constitutional Quarrel Over Removal

A debate going back to the origins of the American Republic

The quarrel over the presidential power of removal is not a Trumpian invention: it is as old as the Constitution itself. John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, considered that firing an official for a purely partisan reason would be "rude and odious," revealing a "hasty, intemperate, and vindictive temper." Yet the Constitution itself is silent on this precise point. According to law professors cited by the Brennan Center, this gap has been "filled since the nation's earliest years by a cacophony of disagreements and competing positions."

The Myers v. United States decision of 1926 had recognized broad presidential removal power over officials exercising executive functions. But Humphrey's Executor in 1935 had nuanced that precedent by distinguishing purely executive functions from the "quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial" functions exercised by independent commissions. This distinction allowed the preservation of technical expertise and regulatory continuity across electoral cycles. It is precisely this distinction that the Trump administration intends to abolish.

Constitutional theory vs. the practical reality of governance

The most powerful argument against the unitary executive theory is not legal but practical: a modern federal state of America's complexity cannot function if every change of administration potentially triggers the removal of all independent regulators. The expertise accumulated over the years at the SEC, the FTC, the NLRB, or the FERC represents decades of irreplaceable technical knowledge about financial markets, consumer protection, labor law, or energy. Allowing a president to purge these institutions according to his political preferences amounts to forfeiting the state's capacity to regulate effectively.

Professor Caleb Nelson, cited by the Brennan Center, articulated the most piercing critique: "The Take Care Clause does not imply that the President must be able to remove all executive officers at will, any more than it guarantees the President the ability to imprison officers who refuse to do what he says." He adds that a strong version of the unitary theory would grant the president "more power, I believe, than any sensible person would want to vest in anyone."

The Institutional Impact: Fifty Independent Agencies in the Crosshairs

Beyond the FTC and the Fed: the entire regulatory state threatened

A Trump victory in Trump v. Slaughter would not concern only the FTC. It would potentially threaten the independence of some fifty regular federal agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and many others. According to Octagon AI, a pro-Trump ruling "could have repercussions on approximately 50 independent agencies before 2027."

These agencies are not bureaucratic abstractions. They investigate plane crashes, monitor dangerous product recalls, arbitrate labor disputes, regulate financial markets, and set food safety standards. Their independence is not a corporate privilege: it is the necessary condition for them to carry out their mission without being subject to the electoral moods of a president who, tomorrow, might not want to recall products marketed by his donors.

A silent transformation of the American institutional order

What is striking about the Trump strategy is its systematic character and its long time horizon. The point is not simply to remove an inconvenient commissioner or an awkward federal governor. The point is to establish a legal precedent that will allow any future president — of the right or the left — to exercise direct political control over the entirety of the federal administration. This dynamic of executive power concentration goes beyond Trump himself. In terms of institutional legacy, this is perhaps the most durable risk.

According to LawDork, if the Court demolishes Humphrey's Executor, it will be "a dam-breaking decision, destroying the very foundation that has allowed governmental expertise to develop as the federal government expanded and became more complex — in economics, but also in science, health, safety, and more." This is not incremental reform. It is a structural overhaul of the American state, carried out not through legislation but through a judicial decision, at the behest of an administration whose time in power is by definition limited.

A Dispossessed Congress: A Separation of Powers Reversed

The legislative branch rendered impotent by executive claims

The separation of powers is the founding principle of American democracy. The Founders in Philadelphia in 1787 designed it precisely to avoid the concentration of excessive power in the hands of a single institution. Congress legislates, the executive applies, the judiciary arbitrates. Independent agencies were created by Congress precisely because it wished to delegate certain regulatory functions to experts insulated from short-term electoral pressure, while maintaining legislative oversight over their missions and budgets.

The unitary executive theory, in its most aggressive form, reverses this logic. It asserts that Congress cannot create truly independent agencies because that would encroach on the president's executive power. But in doing so, it strips Congress of a governance tool it has used for more than a century with the blessing of the courts. According to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and other Democratic lawmakers who challenged the administration in June 2026, the Trump government is "gutting independent agencies of their substance, blocking Democratic appointments, and handing bipartisan oversight posts to pure Trump loyalists."

Independent agencies as expressions of legislative will

It is crucial to recall that the Federal Trade Commission was created by Congress in 1914 to protect consumers and prevent anticompetitive practices. The agency's founding statute explicitly stipulated that its commissioners could only be removed for serious cause, precisely to protect them from the influence of large corporations that tended to control successive administrations. The very structure of the FTC was an institutional response to the history of American political corruption in the early twentieth century.

By claiming that this statutory protection is unconstitutional, the Trump administration is not defending the original rights of the president: it is contesting Congress's right to structure its legislative creations as it sees fit. This is a profound rewriting of the American constitutional balance. And as the Brennan Center notes, this reinterpretation is not rooted in historical tradition: "The Constitution says executive power belongs to the president. It does not say the president can imprison officers who refuse to obey him."

The Shadow of Jerome Powell: The White House Against Monetary Policy

Trump vs. the Fed: a conflict running for years

The attempted dismissal of Lisa Cook cannot be dissociated from a broader context: the simmering war that Donald Trump has waged against the Federal Reserve since his first term. Trump has repeatedly, publicly stated that he wanted the Fed to lower interest rates, and that he considered its chairman, Jerome Powell, incompetent. During his first term, he had considered firing Powell before backing down in the face of market warnings. In his second term, he opted for a different strategy: attacking members of the Fed's board.

Firing Lisa Cook — the first Black woman on the Fed board — on mortgage fraud pretexts that the press largely found implausible amounts to sending a signal to the entire board: tolerating central bank independence has a personal cost. If the Supreme Court validates this approach in the Cook case, even partially, the signal sent to global financial markets would be devastating for the credibility of American monetary policy. This is what even the conservative justices most favorable to expanding executive power appear to have understood.

Central bank independence as a bulwark against financial instability

The independence of the central bank is not a technocratic whim. It is the product of decades of painful experience, in countries where governments used the printing press to finance their political deficits with catastrophic results for the real economy. The Fed's credibility in its anti-inflationary mission rests on market actors' conviction that its decisions are not dictated by the electoral needs of the White House occupant.

Had Trump succeeded in removing Cook, then Powell — as he reportedly considered, according to sources cited by CNN — and replaced them with loyalists ready to cut rates to boost the economy in the short term before the midterm elections, the consequences for the dollar's credibility and America's debt financing could have been severe. That is why, according to the Los Angeles Times, even the Court's conservative majority "wanted to preserve the Fed's independence" — not out of love of democracy, but out of financial pragmatism.

The West Facing Its Mirror: When Democracies Sow Their Own Deconstruction

The American model under pressure, from within

The West has long presented the American model of institutional counterweights as a universal example to follow. The separation of powers, judicial independence, independent regulation, freedom of the press — these elements formed the backbone of a system that was actively exported, sometimes by force. Today, this model is fracturing from within, under the blows of an administration that explicitly claims the right to concentrate power in the hands of one person.

This retreat of American exemplarity has direct geopolitical consequences. Every time Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or the Iranian mullahs point to American institutional failures to justify their own authoritarian practices, they now find abundant material in the United States' own legal controversies. The West cannot export liberal democracy if its guiding power is itself dismantling it piece by piece. This is a credibility problem, but also a fundamental strategic problem.

The particular responsibility of the United States toward the liberal world order

The United States is not an ordinary democracy. It is the de facto guarantor of the liberal international order born after 1945, the security, economic, and normative architecture that allowed Europe to rebuild, Asia to develop, and emerging democracies to have a reference model. This role imposes particular responsibilities in terms of institutional consistency. When Washington weakens its own safeguards, it weakens the entire system it is supposed to embody.

Trump may be a "necessary evil" for the West on certain fronts — his firmness toward China, his support for European rearmament, his pressure on NATO for allies to carry their share of the security burden. But his policy of executive power concentration constitutes a direct threat to the values the West claims to defend. One cannot fight the authoritarianism of Beijing or Moscow while allowing a form of unbridled presidentialism that borrows its mechanisms to take hold in Washington.

A Complicit Supreme Court? The Question of the Judicial Role in Executive Drift

A conservative court pushing in the same direction as the executive

The Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be the ultimate safeguard against abuses of executive power. In the present case, it appears on the contrary as an actor that actively facilitates the expansion of that power. The majority of six conservative justices — three of whom were appointed by Trump during his first term — used the shadow docket to allow the contested dismissals before even ruling on their legality, granted the president near-total presidential immunity for his official acts in a 2024 decision, and appears ready to abolish nine decades of jurisprudence protecting regulatory independence.

Legal scholar Noah Feldman, interviewed by NPR in June 2026, was direct: "The power of the presidency has significantly increased over the last decade due to Supreme Court decisions. It seems like strengthening the presidency is a priority for the current court." This is no longer a tribunal arbitrating power conflicts — it is an institution that deliberately chooses a side. Trust in the Court's institutional impartiality is one of the first victims of this dynamic.

When judicial counterpower becomes a lever of power

The supreme paradox of the current situation is this: the institutional mechanism supposed to limit executive power itself becomes the vector of its expansion. By allowing Trump to fire protected officials before any ruling on the merits, by granting unprecedented presidential immunity in American history, by preparing the abolition of Humphrey's Executor, the Supreme Court is not playing its counterweight role — it is functioning as a power multiplier for the executive.

Jesse Wegman of the Brennan Center notes that the irony is brutal: "The Court forges its executive aggrandizement project at the very moment the White House is controlled by the most lawless, erratic, and corrupt president in the nation's history." One may disagree with this partisan formulation, but the timing problem it identifies is real: expanding presidential power in the constitutional abstract is one thing; doing so while that power is exercised by an actor who contests the legitimacy of his rivals, attacks the independent press, and normalizes noncompliance with judicial decisions is quite another.

Comparative Lessons: What Europe and International Institutions Observe

Europe watches with concern but not without a degree of bad faith

America's European partners observe this institutional drift with growing concern, but not always without a degree of guilty conscience. For some of the dynamics now expressing themselves in Washington have already manifested themselves, in different forms, in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. The concentration of executive power, the takeover of public media, the undermining of judicial independence — these processes are not an American exclusivity. What makes the American situation particularly grave is the planetary scope of the possible consequences.

International institutions, for their part, observe in silence but take note. The Bank for International Settlements, the OECD partners, NATO allies — all are now incorporating into their analyses the hypothesis of a less predictable American administration, less constrained by its own institutional structures. The risk premium for this uncertainty is already visible in certain behaviors of diversification of global monetary reserves away from the dollar. These are not catastrophist signals — they are reasonable adjustments to a new political reality.

Democracy is measured by its institutions, not only its elections

The fundamental distinction between a liberal democracy and an illiberal democracy does not rest solely on holding elections. It rests on respecting the institutions, counterweights, and rights that exist between elections. Trump was elected. That confers on him an indisputable democratic legitimacy. But this electoral legitimacy does not confer the right to dismantle the institutions that Congress has built over a century to exercise functions of public interest in an expert, continuous, and impartial manner.

Elections are only the visible tip of a considerable institutional iceberg: press freedom, judicial independence, independent regulation, protection of civil servants from political pressure, the right of access to information. If these foundations crumble, elections themselves lose their meaning — because they take place in an institutional environment increasingly shaped by those who already hold power. That is the path several democracies have taken before gradually ceasing to be democracies.

What Can Still Resist: The Counterweights That Hold

The states, Congress, and civil society as lines of defense

It would be excessively pessimistic to conclude that all is lost for the American institutional balance. Counterweights resist, even under pressure. The states have shown their capacity to challenge federal policies in court and to maintain independent regulations at the local level. Congress, despite partisan pressure, has sometimes resisted — on public spending, on certain nominations. Civil society, remarkably active, has funded the legal battles of officials like Lisa Cook and Rebecca Slaughter, demonstrating that institutional resistance can find resources outside the state.

Independent media continue to document, investigate, and reveal. The American bar, in its great majority, maintains professional standards that limit the most flagrant distortions of the law. Federal judges appointed for life have issued decisions unfavorable to the administration on several fronts. These resistances are fragmented and insufficient against the strategic coherence of the Trumpist executive, but they exist. American democracy is not dead — it is under intense strain.

The next step: what the Supreme Court's final ruling can still limit

Even if the Supreme Court abolishes Humphrey's Executor in the Slaughter case, the final outcome will depend on the conditions and exceptions the justices might provide. Some analysts believe the Court could opt for a limited approach, allowing the president to remove FTC commissioners while preserving protections for the Fed and other institutions deemed particularly sensitive from an economic or national security standpoint. Such a "surgical" decision would be less devastating than a complete reversal.

Moreover, a future Democratic administration could use the same expanded powers to restructure agencies in an opposite direction, if the courts confirm that the president can indeed appoint and remove their members at will. That is the ultimate irony of the unitary executive theory: by giving the president this absolute power, one gives it to all future presidents, including those Trump would fear. The precedent is a double-edged sword. That may be the only argument that could still temper some of the most enthusiastic proponents of this theory.

Conclusion: The Dream of a Total Executive, the Nightmare of a Democracy

A pivotal moment for American institutions

We are in June 2026, days or weeks from judicial decisions that could redraw the architecture of American power for generations. Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook are not mere administrative disputes: they are battles for the soul of American institutions. If the Supreme Court abolishes Humphrey's Executor and validates a presidential right of removal without cause over all independent agencies, it will have allowed a single man to exercise unprecedented control over the regulatory machinery of the most powerful state in the world. That is a transformation that the Founders would, based on their own correspondence, have described as alarming.

It is not that Trump is fundamentally different from his predecessors in his desire to control the federal executive — every president would prefer more power rather than less. What is different is the combination of his will, his multi-year coordinated legal strategy, and a Supreme Court ideologically aligned with his objectives. This convergence is historically rare and institutionally dangerous.

Preserving the West also means preserving its internal safeguards

The West must win the systemic competition that opposes it to China, Russia, and authoritarian regimes of all kinds. But it cannot win it by gradually becoming what it claims to fight against. The concentration of executive power, the subordination of experts to political loyalists, the bringing to heel of regulatory institutions — these are precise symptoms of the authoritarian dynamic that the West combats externally. Treating them at home is not a weakness: it is the condition of credibility.

Trump is and will remain a controversial figure in American and Western history. His track record on firmness toward revisionist powers deserves recognition. But his tendency to concentrate power in contempt of institutional counterweights represents a real threat to the democratic model the West seeks to defend. Criticizing the one does not invalidate the other. That is precisely what it means to think as an adult in the complexity of the present moment.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Primary sources

Brennan Center for Justice — "It Ends in a Monarchy," Jesse Wegman — May 26, 2026

LawFare Media — "The Hidden Nondelegation Issue Raised by Trump v. Slaughter," Michael Dreeben — June 2, 2026

NPR — "How the Supreme Court has quietly overturned precedent," interview with Noah Feldman — June 21, 2026

Secondary sources

Fox News / KOTA Radio — "Trump's firing power faces twin Supreme Court tests" — June 18, 2026

Missouri Lawyers Media / Reuters — "Fed's Cook spent $1.2M on legal services fighting firing by Trump" — June 18–19, 2026

LawDork — "The justices will decide this June whether to constrain Trump at all," Chris Geidner — May 31, 2026

Reason Magazine — "Trump, Scalia, and the unitary executive," Damon Root — June 16, 2026

Newsmax — "Trump, Supreme Court Justices Prepare for Key Rulings" — June 22, 2026