On Dec. 23 three of the six person Trump majority on the US Supreme Court (John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Matt Kavanaugh), declined to give Trump an early Christmas present. They joined the three person liberal minority in ruling that Trump sending the National Guard into Chicago was unconstitutional. This came after an 80+% win rate for Trump in Supreme Court emergency docket decisions. What is going on here? Is this a case of the rats leaving the sinking ship? Consider the history:

For years now, Supreme Court watchers have been commenting that chief injustice John Roberts has balanced his support for Trump with a concern that the Supreme Court would be seen as apolitical. Then, last July, he threw caution to the winds by not only ruling that Trump – and let’s be clear, this is about Trump, not about presidents in general – is immune from any legal prosecution for almost anything that he did while in office. In the weeks and months leading up to that ruling many court watchers were expecting the opposite. They were expecting that the appeals court ruling would be allowed to stand. The only explanation is that Roberts must have figured that if Trump came back into office it really didn’t matter how people perceive the Supreme Court, because Trump would be able to ram anything through that he wanted, including in the face of broad opposition. In other words, it would be a major step towards one person dictatorship. So who cares how the Supreme Court is viewed, Roberts figured.

Trump was clear on what Roberts had done. When he delivered his March 4 speech to Congress, at which Robert was president, Trump marched down the aisle and stopped where Robert was standing. He shook him by the hand, and said “Thank you again, thank you again.“ Then he “tapped Robert on the arm in a gesture of buddy-buddy intimacy and said ‘ won’t forget’.”

Since Trump‘s returned to the presidency, the six person Trump majority on theSupreme Court has helped fast track Trump’s project 2025 agenda. They did so in the main by rulings on the emergency docket, also known as the “rocket docket“. By doing so they don’t have to even issue an explanation.

Nor does a ruling via the emergency docket, require the injustices, actually hearing the case before them. And consider how the circuit and appeals court judges have looked at some of Trump‘s executive orders:

“Egregious, brazen, lawless,” is how some federal judges labeled Trump‘s executive orders. Leonie Brinkema of the eastern district of Virginia court, said of an affidavit that the DOJ had filed before her, “if this were before me in a criminal case and you were asking to get a warrant issued on this, I’d throw you out of my chambers.“ James Boasberg of the DC District Court, commented “in an egregious case of cherry, picking, defendant selectively.”

Birthright Citizenship
But yet, over 80% of the time, the six person Trump majority accepted these “egregious,” “lawless” positions of the Trump administration. The most blatant came at the end of June, when all six of the Trump majority on the Supreme Court allowed Trump to deny birthright citizenship in any state where it was not challenged and overturned. This means that Trump will be allowed to violate the constitution on this issue until sometime in the middle of 2026 if not beyond, unless it is challenged in the individual state. What they could have done, and should have done, was to apply the appeals court ruling on a national basis, and just simply deny the Trump administration the ability to remove citizenship from anybody that is born in the United States.

Trump invincibility crumbling?
So why did three of the six person Trump majority reverse course here? The reason is that some of them are starting to see that Trump‘s Project 2025 maybe more of a bumpy road than a glidepath, that his absolute power may be crumbling, and the perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court might have to be resuscitated. Recent Democratic wins, and recent bye elections had already shaken some Republican members of Congress, especially those in swing districts. But the Epstein scandal has proven to be a lot more persistent than anybody thought. Democratic candidates will have video after video of Trump calling it a Democratic hoax , and they will be trotting those out in the 2026 elections , along with Trump‘s calling “affordability” also a “Democratic hoax”. That is why every single Republican, except for one voted to require a full release of the DOJ‘s Epstein files.

A year ago (December 30, 2024) Oakland socialist published an article on the HYPERLINK HERE “rising conflicts within the Trump coalition: preview of what’s to come”. We wrote that “the wheels have not fallen off the Maga bus yet, but the lug nuts are coming loose.” That was overly optimistic, but we were right in pointing out the contradictions within the Maga coalition, just as we were when we pointed out the barriers that Trump would face towards actually instituting actual fascism in the United States.

In late November of 2025, Oakland socialist pointed out that “Trump/project 2025 base may be a lot weaker than you think.” We pointed out the Trump‘s base is weakening in the federal judiciary, federal, law-enforcement agencies, including, but not limited to the FBI; the US military, both at the top and within some layers of the enlisted soldiers; there’s also a serious weakening of support for Trump/project 2025 within major sectors of the capitalist class itself, on top of that is the weakening of popular support.”

This Supreme Court ruling is another symptom.

Trump‘s response to all of this has apparently been to try to distract attention by moving towards war with Venezuela. But the TACO effect may be in play here; Trump keeps threatening, but he hasn’t pulled the trigger. Maybe some wiser heads within his administration, are warning him of how extremely unpopular such an invasion would be. Opposition would come not only from the independent voters but also from the extreme right wing isolationist MAGAists. So instead of sending troops into Venezuela, Trump left Nigerians a little Christmas present by bombing the people of Jabo in northwest Nigeria on Christmas Day. This was supposedly to protect Christians in that country, but according to CNN there has been no ISIS activity in Jabo and the local population – Christian and Muslim mixed – get along fine. Trump says he will be bombing ISIS throughout Africa and Asia, also to protect Christians. But he doesn’t care about Palestinian Christians! Nor does he care about Christians in the nations he’s labeled as “shithole countries”. So why now? He probably feels this is a safer distraction than an invasion of Venezuela. But that won’t work either.

Nobody, least of all Donald Trump, knows where things will go from here. But the Maga coalition is riddled with contradictions. One danger with those contradictions is the rise of an even more extreme right wing tendency within the coalition. That is the tendency led by the likes of Nick Fuentes and the young Republicans. Recently, Israel’s daily newspaper, Haaretz, published a report of the New York State young Republicans

Nazi sympathizers, old and young alike, gathered at the N.Y. Young Republicans gala.

annual gala. They reported on the Nazi like antisemitism that is rampant and that wing of the Maga coalition. (A pro-Nazi from Germany’s AfD was also present.) Those sentiments also found their way into the annual turning point conference founded by the now deceased Charlie Kirk. Weather Trump goes or not, whether the Democrats retake Congress and the presidency or not, those actual fascist sentiments will continue to grow.

The Democrats answer to this will be to try to help the Republicans reestablish themselves as a bipartisan and more “reasonable” partner in administering US capitalism. Among other things, they will do everything they can to try to legitimize the Supreme Court.

But no matter what the outcome of the next two elections, no matter whether there even are elections in 2026 and 2028, the United States will never be the same. Trump‘s destruction of the east wing of the White House stands as a symbol of the end of method of rule of capital in the United States ever since the Civil War. What comes next nobody knows. Much depends on whether or not there will be a real independent uprising of the US working class, and how, when, and through what channels such an uprising would occur.