President Donald Trump let slip the big reveal the evening before the Supreme Court’s landmark hearing on birthright citizenship Wednesday: He would be attending the oral arguments, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, making him the first sitting president to do so.
The next morning, as Trump supporters and protesters gathered outside the courthouse, the presidential motorcade wound its way from the White House, delivering him to the building at 9:47 a.m., with 13 minutes to spare before the session began.
But if a president known for shattering norms and grabbing public attention intended to make the day about himself, he wound up playing a less visible role: as a silent observer, along with several hundred others who scored a coveted ticket.
“I wondered if he might sit at the [government] counsel’s table — that would have sent a message,” said Amanda Frost, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia.
Frost was seated in an area reserved for members of the legal bar, just in front of the public viewing section where Trump took a seat near White House Counsel David Warrington, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
“He sat in a fairly unobtrusive seat, so much so that I did not immediately notice when he arrived,” Frost said. “He did not wave hands. Or mutter or make noise. He was an audience member.”
Trump has bashed the justices for some of their decisions in recent weeks, but as they entered the chamber at 10 a.m., he stood along with everyone else in the courtroom when the “All rise!” call went out.
In the past, Frost said, the justices have welcomed dignitaries, including top legal delegations from other nations. But on Wednesday, none appeared to acknowledge Trump’s presence; his name did not come up a single time, according to a transcript of the hearing, as the justices and attorneys for the government and the American Civil Liberties Union debated over Trump v. Barbara for more than two hours.
Trump listened as U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer fielded questions from the justices and defended the president’s executive order, which seeks to deny automatic citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors.
Trump departed at 11:20 a.m., not long after the ACLU’s national legal director, Cecillia Wang, began her arguments, and did not stop to address the media outside the courthouse.
The White House declined to comment on Trump’s appearance at the court, and staff at the Supreme Court referred questions to his administration. Trump is due to address the nation at 9 p.m. Wednesday about the Iran war.
“Any effort to distract from the gravity and importance of this case will not succeed,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement. “The Supreme Court is up to the task of interpreting and defending the Constitution even under the glare of a sitting president a couple dozen feet away from them.”
There is no record of a sitting president attending the nation’s highest court for oral arguments. Trump floated the idea last year before the Supreme Court heard arguments on his tariff policy but changed his mind. The court ultimately struck down most of his tariffs.
Though he was a silent observer inside the courtroom, Trump’s mere presence in the public gallery signaled the primacy of his executive order on birthright citizenship to his second-term agenda. Trump signed the directive on Inauguration Day last year, amid a slew of immigration-related executive actions that aimed to kick-start his mass-deportation agenda.
On Tuesday evening, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their descendants, had been misapplied to immigrants. He suggested foreigners were gaming the U.S. immigration system by having children on American soil to gain entry to and benefits from the country.
“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Our country is being scammed.”
Trump’s order drew immediate blowback, with the ACLU and more than half a dozen other groups filing federal lawsuits within days. Federal judges issued several injunctions that prevented the administration from implementing the ban, which some analysts said could deny citizenship to an estimated 250,000 newborns a year if it takes effect.
Frost, the U-Va. professor, has called the order unconstitutional, but she said she did not think Trump was trying to intimidate the justices and did not believe his presence inside the courtroom was inappropriate.
“The executive order plus his presence was clear messaging about the primacy of it and his world view,” she said. “You’ve got to give him credit: He is transparent. He does not hide what he is.”
Early Wednesday, demonstrators began gathering on the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court. One had a large spray-painted banner that read “Donald & Barron Trump Are the Children of Immigrants.” Barron Trump is the president’s son with wife Melania Trump, who emigrated from Slovenia. Others held placards that said “Trump Must Go Now!” Nearby, TV crews had set up to report on the historic arguments. Tourists milled around the scene.
In November, the court heard lengthy arguments about whether Trump had the legal authority to impose sweeping tariffs in a test of his major economic policy. After suggesting he might attend, Trump reversed course, saying, “I do not want to distract from the importance of this Decision,” in a post on Truth Social.
The court ended up ruling against him 6-3 in that case, saying that he could not use emergency powers to impose import levies on goods from nearly all U.S. trading partners. Trump railed against the decision, branding the justices in the majority a “disgrace” and calling the decision “an embarrassment to their families.”
On Wednesday, the debate at the high court centered on the actions and intentions not of Trump — but of long-deceased historical figures, including Justice Horace Gray, who authored the 1898 opinion in Wong Kim Ark that affirmed birthright citizenship, and Sen. Lyman Trumbull, author of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision by the summer.
“We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” Trump posted on Truth Social at 12:20 p.m., after returning to the White House.
Before long, he had moved on to posting about other topics, including the congressional funding fight over immigration enforcement and Wednesday’s planned launch of the Artemis II space mission.
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