Trump Lost the Case. He Won the Term.

Birthright citizenship survived. Presidential power, dark money, and a billion-dollar crypto payout did better.

This is "What I'm Hearing" — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

The Radical Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court closed its term this week, and the headline you saw was “Trump loses birthright citizenship.” That’s true, and it’s a genuinely good outcome. But the vote count should terrify you.

In Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority, joined by Barrett, Kavanaugh, and the three liberals, holding what the Fourteenth Amendment has plainly said since 1868: if you’re born here, you’re a citizen. Trump attended the oral arguments in person, the first sitting president ever to do so, and he lost. The ACLU’s Anthony Romero called it “one of the most important constitutional cases of the past 100 years.” The families who spent eighteen months living in fear can stop being afraid. The majority opinion is clear, grounded in a century of precedent, and would be very hard for a future Court to unwind.

But, you should know by now, in Trump’s America, we can’t have anything nice. Inside this ruling is a massive warning sign. The Supreme Court has some radicals on it.

This ruling should have been 9-0. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand that. Instead, we got a 6-3 ruling, which was really a 5-3-1 ruling. Meaning there are currently four judges on the Supreme Court open to overturning birthright citizenship.

The Constitution is clear: if you are born in this country, you are a citizen. Don’t like that? There are ways to change the Constitution. It requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Donald Trump tried to change it via executive order. He signed a piece of paper on day one declaring that a right written into the Fourteenth Amendment no longer applied to the people he didn’t want it to apply to. And three justices of the Supreme Court — Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch — looked at that and said he could. Three sitting justices endorsed the idea that a president can amend the Constitution by fiat. A fourth, Kavanaugh, voted the right way on the order but wrote separately to say Congress could still strip birthright citizenship by ordinary statute — as if a simple law could override a constitutional guarantee that itself requires the amendment process to change.

Four justices on the Supreme Court of the United States just signaled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee — the clause written to bury Dred Scott and make citizenship something no politician could take away — is negotiable. Three of them think a president can do it alone.

We won this one 6-3. If Congress passes a law ending birthright citizenship, it would be 5-4. Sit with how thin that is. The birthright ruling wasn’t the Court saving us. It was the Court showing us exactly how close the edge is, and how many of them are willing to walk us off it.

Read more: CBS News, The Bulwark, Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell

The Court Just Made the Case Against Itself.

The Supreme Court just made the strongest argument for expanding the court. JVL at The Bulwark chronicles it perfectly — you should read his entire piece.

He walks through the timeline of Trump’s Birthright order. Trump’s order was struck down at every level before it reached the Supreme Court. A district judge appointed by Ronald Reagan called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and said in four decades on the bench, he couldn’t remember a clearer case. A George W. Bush appointee certified the class action against it. The Ninth Circuit ruled against it. Every judge who looked at the order — across the ideological spectrum — reached the same conclusion: this isn’t close.

The first judges anywhere in America willing to say Trump could end birthright citizenship by executive order sat on the Supreme Court. And there were three of them.

That’s JVL’s argument, and it’s the right one. What does it mean that a third of the Supreme Court took the anti-constitutional side of a case that every other judge in the country found obvious? A Court where three justices will sign off on rewriting the Constitution by executive order is not a functioning check. Democratic politicians need to start banging this drum even louder. The Supreme Court is radical and compromised. A Court with three votes for constitutional demolition has a structural problem. The only fix is to expand the court.

Read more: The Bulwark

More Supreme Court

The same week as the birthright ruling, we got a slate of other rulings from the Supreme Court. In NRSC v. FEC, the Court struck down limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates — a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, written by Kavanaugh. Dan Pfeiffer calls it the most consequential campaign finance decision since Citizens United. The case was originally brought by JD Vance in 2022, when he was running for Senate. The Trump DOJ refused to defend the law, so the Court had to appoint an outside lawyer to argue in favor of keeping the limits. Now party committees can function as what Justice Kagan, in dissent, called “the candidate’s checking account” — an unlimited pipeline between the deepest-pocketed donors and the campaigns they want to own. Republicans currently hold a cash advantage. The ruling hands them a structural weapon heading into the midterms.

As discussed on Monday, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court overturned ninety years of precedent to let the president fire the leaders of independent agencies at will. Trump celebrated on Truth Social that “90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed.” He’s not wrong about what he got.

Here’s the term in one sentence: the Court told Trump no on the case that made headlines, and yes on the two that shift durable power to him and his party. Birthright citizenship survived, barely. But presidential control over the administrative state expanded, and the wealthiest party got a new spending weapon.

Read more: CBS News, NPR — campaign finance, Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell

$1.2 Billion

Trump’s annual financial disclosure dropped this week. The 927-page filing shows Trump personally took in roughly $1.2 billion from crypto ventures in a single year — dwarfing what he made from the real estate empire that made him famous. Mar-a-Lago brought in $77 million. His crypto businesses brought in fifteen times that.

Here is the breakdown:

• $635 million in royalties from his $TRUMP meme coin, launched three days before his inauguration. The coin has since fallen by more than 97% from its peak, meaning those who bought in lost nearly everything while Trump collected the royalties.

• $500-plus million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by his sons and the sons of Steve Witkoff. World Liberty sold a $500 million stake to an Emirati royal shortly before the inauguration.

• $196 million from a stablecoin holding company. $65 million more from equity sales.

Trump took office promising to make America “the crypto capital of the world.” He then appointed crypto-friendly regulators, gutted Biden-era enforcement at the SEC and DOJ, signed the GENIUS Act to legitimize stablecoins, and pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao — whose exchange had just done a $2 billion deal using World Liberty’s stablecoin. Every one of those moves raised the value of assets Trump personally owns.

A Chinese billionaire, Justin Sun, spent $75 million on Trump’s tokens and $200 million on his meme coins. A federal fraud case against Sun was quietly paused, then settled. The White House says there are “zero conflicts of interest.”

This is the whole scheme in one document. A billion-dollar payout disclosed on a federal form, earned from an industry the president spent the year deregulating for his own benefit.

I’ve said Trump will leave office the richest man alive. The disclosure is the receipt.

Read more: PBS, CBS News, Time

That's your Wednesday. Trump lost birthright citizenship but won the term. The Court handed his party an unlimited spending weapon. And the president has made $1.2 billion in crypto while regulating crypto.