John Roberts Sends Pathetic Message to Trump on Takeover of Courts
The chief Supreme Court justice only lightly pushed back on Donald Trump’s efforts to control the judiciary.

Chief Justice John Roberts offered a gentle rebuke of Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on the judiciary.
During a fireside chat Wednesday night marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York in Buffalo, Roberts emphasized the importance of judicial independence.
“In our Constitution, judges and the judiciary is a coequal branch of government separate from the others with the authority to interpret the constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” Roberts said. “And that innovation doesn’t work if the judiciary is not independent.
“Its job is to, obviously, decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive, and that does require a degree of independence,” he said.
The chief justice’s impartial recounting of the nation’s founding document flies in the face of the Trump administration’s efforts to sidestep the checks and balances provided by the judiciary.
Roberts also doubled down on his rare public criticism of Trump, after the president called to impeach a federal judge who ruled against his illegal deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
“Well, I’ve already spoken to that, and impeachment is not how you register disagreement with decisions,” Roberts said.
But Roberts’s mild criticism may not be enough, as the administration has escalated into making direct threats. When announcing his inane plan to reopen Alcatraz Sunday, Trump listed “judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals” alongside the “criminals” and “thugs” he hoped to imprison there.
Josh Gerstein, a senior legal affairs reporter at Politico, suggested that there may be a method to Roberts’s missing madness.
“Subdued Roberts seemed to be keeping his powder dry since many of the big fights, like law firms, deportations, contempt, are making their way to the court or already there,” Gerstein wrote on X Thursday. “A reasonable strategy, but that’s not some rousing defense of the judiciary or separation of powers.”
Gerstein noted that Roberts’s “‘judicial independence’ stuff” was “thinner” than his 2024 Year End report on the federal judiciary, which had compared political bias to doxxing and disinformation as some of the “illegitimate activity” that threatens independent judges. At the time, his comments seemed to echo Trump’s complaints about critics who went after judges that ruled in his favor. Now the Trump administration has taken to attacking so-called “activist” judges who rule against him.
Roberts’s refute is comparatively limp when held beside Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent indictment of the right-wing campaign of threats being used to intimidate judges.
“The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law,” Jackson said last week.