Trump's court losses are piling up. Here's why that's not slowing him down

U.S. Chairperson Donald ruff has suffered a string along of courtroom losses in recent years as he and his governing body continue to test the legal limits of presidential powers.

Despite suffering six legal setbacks in less than a week, the administration is forging ahead with its agenda, in large part because none of these rulings constitutes the final judicial word on the matter. 

In the case with the biggest implications for Canada, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against Trump's imposition of broad-based tariffs on a wide range or trading partners — tariffs the administration had justified as a response to economic and narcotic emergencies. 

That ruling came Aug. 29, last Friday. Since then, in quick succession, five other noteworthy court decisions have gone against the Trump administration:

The White House has already petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the tariffs ruling, and in the meantime the tariffs remain in place. 

The court order halting the deportation of children to Guatemala is temporary, while the legal battle is expected to play out further over the coming days. 

The Trump administration can appeal all the other rulings — and almost certainly will, according to legal experts.

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Peter Larsen, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minn., says he believes the Trump administration is banking on the Supreme Court largely ruling in its favour on any cases that make it that far. 

While Larsen thinks the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, will place some limitations on executive authority, he believes the Trump administration has good reason for optimism about its chances of winning at the final stage of these legal battles. 

"The Roberts court has quite an appetite for upsetting longstanding precedent," he said. "And certainly we've seen the Roberts court also interpret the powers of the president as much more expansive than other courts have in the past." 

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The tariffs case could be an exception. 

It addresses both the tariffs Trump levied on imports from Canada and Mexico in March and what the president called his "Liberation Day" tariffs, first imposed on dozens of countries in April, quickly paused, then re-applied in August. Trump is the first president to try using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs.

Scott R. Anderson, a senior fellow in the national security law program at Columbia Law School, says he's not confident the Supreme Court will accept the Trump administration's argument. 

"I think it's actually a harder case for the Supreme Court than one might expect," Anderson told the Lawfare Daily podcast this week. "There's a lot of competing interests, competing legal trends intersecting here, and it's not super easy to me to see how they get disentangled."

In the foreign aid case, even the judge himself acknowledged the legal battle is far from over.

District court Judge Amir Ali wrote in his ruling that "definitive higher court guidance" will be needed in the case that he said "raises questions of immense legal and practical importance" — chiefly whether the president can stop a federal agency from spending money that Congress had already allocated.

What remains to be seen is whether the administration shifts its tactics in response to any of these cases. 

The order in California declaring the use of the military to police Los Angeles to be unlawful doesn't apply to the administration's ongoing deployment of the National Guard in Washington to deal with what it claims is a surge in crime. 

Trump is still threatening to send the National Guard into Chicago in response to crime although had not made a move to do so by Friday.  

Meanwhile, the White House is pushing back at the legitimacy of some rulings, while stopping short of actually defying them. 

In response to the deportation case involving Guatemalan children, Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on X that the "Democrat judge" was "refusing to let them reunify with their parents."

In a statement on the Harvard case, White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston brushed off the ruling as coming from an "activist Obama-appointed judge" and said the university "remains ineligible for grants in the future."

None of that sounds like an administration that is backing away from its agenda. 

Senior reporter

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