Chief Justice John Roberts is on a collision course with Donald Trump as the president increasingly tests the limits of the judiciary’s role as the most prominent backstop to his administration’s sweeping agenda.
The president stepped up his attacks this week by calling for a judge’s impeachment, earning a rare public rebuke from the chief justice.
Though it marked the most direct spat yet between the duo since Trump retook the White House, the trail ahead appears rougher as the ever-intensifying barrage of litigation against the Trump administration creeps closer to the Supreme Court.
“If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday.
As the president expresses agitation toward district judges who block his policies nationwide, Trump so far has maintained more cordiality with Roberts, refusing to attack him personally.
“The president respects Chief Justice Roberts overall, he just expressed that to me in the Oval Office,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday.
The restraint was notable, given that Trump has no trepidation for lambasting judges who rule against him. Yet he refused to personally chastise Roberts, who had just rebuked the president for calling for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg for ordering the administration to turn around deportation flights last weekend.
The chief justice’s pushback was terse, two sentences in all.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts wrote.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served alongside Roberts for nearly 17 years, said on CNN this week that “every judge is aware of the climate of the era.”
“He’s trying to explain to the people of this country how the legal system works and how it doesn’t work,” Breyer said of the chief justice’s rebuke. “It doesn’t work by impeaching a judge because you don’t like his decision. And, by the way, you may be right. The other side may be wrong. There are two sides, usually.”
When asked if the country is nearing a constitutional crisis, Breyer said “no one really knows.”
“People have different views on that. And the best thing, I think, for the judges is you follow the law. You simply follow the law. And that is what they try to do,” he said.
Trump, for his part, has brushed off Roberts’ rebuke by noting the statement didn’t explicitly name him. Trump stood firmly on his calls to impeach the lower judge but declined to go after Roberts.
“He didn’t mention my name in the statement. I just saw it quickly. He didn’t mention my name,” Trump replied in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.
Others in Trump’s orbit were also calling for the judge’s impeachment. That Roberts felt the need to speak out at all – whether Trump was named or not – is rare.
Roberts rebuked Trump once before, during his first White House term, when Trump in 2018 assailed a judge as an “Obama judge” for temporarily blocking the administration from refusing to consider asylum applications.
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” the chief justice said at the time.
In recent years, Roberts has only spoken out against another prominent politician one other time, when he critiqued Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) remarks at a 2020 rally outside the Supreme Court. Schumer told Trump-appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh they “will pay the price” and “won’t know what hit” them as they were inside hearing oral arguments in an abortion case.
During Trump’s first White House term, Roberts often sided with the president, but not always. In 2019, for example, Roberts joined the court’s liberals in refusing to clear the way for the administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
As Trump makes sweeping moves on the federal bureaucracy, immigration, federal spending and more in his second administration, Roberts may now face his greatest test of all.
The chief justice has long looked to keep the court above the political fray and once famously compared his role to an umpire who calls balls and strikes. Trump, meanwhile, has long accosted judges whenever they have ruled against him as a defendant and as president, often accusing them of being politically biased and part of the “radical left.” Trump has also, at times, invoked some of their family members.
The two men’s starkly different views on judges’ proper role became apparent at Trump’s joint address to Congress earlier this month, when Trump passed Roberts in the front row of the House chamber.
“You did such a great job, thank you…and they’re still talking about it,” Trump told Roberts as he approached the rostrum.
On the way out, Trump similarly told him, “Thank you again, thank you again, won’t forget it,” patting Roberts’ arm.
The chief justice did not appear to say anything in response.
The now-highly scrutinized exchanges prompted speculation among Trump critics that the president was referencing the Supreme Court’s landmark decision carving out broad criminal immunity for former presidents.
In a Truth Social post, the president later insisted he was referring to how the chief justice swore him in at the inauguration and went on to attack “sleazebag ‘journalists’” for trying to “create a divide between me and our great U.S. Supreme Court.”
No matter how Roberts perceived it, at the time, he was preparing to rule against Trump.
Days earlier, the administration filed an emergency application with the court seeking to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid payments. The court issued its decision denying the request the morning after Trump’s speech.
Though Roberts joined the court’s liberal justices to side against the administration, he largely was spared from the spotlight. Instead, the online right directed their barrage of criticism toward Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third nominee to the court who joined Roberts to form the slim 5-4 majority on the ruling.
But Roberts may not be able to do the same as many of the more than 100 legal challenges filed against major Trump administration directives approach the Supreme Court. Some of the appeals appear designed to prompt Roberts and his conservative colleagues to overturn some of the court’s precedents.
Already, the Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court for an emergency intervention to narrow several judges’ nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship. The court is set to rule after briefings concludes early next month.
And other cases are inching closer to the justices. The Trump administration has signaled a desire to bring a lawsuit filed by Democratic attorneys general over frozen teacher preparation grants to the Supreme Court, and challenges to Trump’s independent agency firings could soon arrive too once an appeals court issues its ruling.
“It’s incumbent upon the Supreme Court to reign in these activist judges. These partisan activists are undermining the judicial branch by doing so,” Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said this week.
