The Week Trump Lost to His Own Deadline, His Own Judge, and His Own Approval Rating
Three losses, and the pattern is almost too on-the-nose: a deadline he set and missed, a judge he appointed and lost to anyway, and a poll number that makes his first term's worst week look like a triumph. Pour something cold.
1. Trump Vowed to Fight the Birthright Citizenship Loss 'IMMEDIATELY.' The Deadline Came. He Did Nothing.
After the Supreme Court struck down his executive order ending birthright citizenship on June 30, Trump vowed in a Truth Social post — quoted by NBC News — that he would seek 'a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY.' SCOTUSblog reported that the 25-day deadline to file that petition closed Monday, July 27, and the docket shows nothing was ever submitted. The Court hasn't granted a rehearing of an argued case in more than 50 years anyway, so the odds were always close to zero — he just never bothered to buy the lottery ticket. The ruling that gutted his signature immigration order is now, for all practical purposes, permanent.
He set the deadline, hyped it in all caps, then let it walk right past him without a wave. Even his own bluffs are folding early now.
2. A Judge Trump Appointed Just Ruled Against Him. It's Now 5 Circuits to 2 on His Detention Policy.
The 9th Circuit ruled 2-1 on July 30 that the Trump administration cannot deny bond hearings to immigrants detained inside the U.S. under its mandatory-detention policy. The majority opinion in Rodriguez Vazquez v. Bostock was written by Judge Daniel Bress — a Trump appointee — and joined by a judge appointed by Bill Clinton, over the dissent of a judge appointed by George W. Bush. The ruling affirms a lower-court win for a class of immigrants detained at a Tacoma, Washington facility and widens an already lopsided circuit split to 5-2 against the administration's reading of the law. The wider that split gets, the more likely the Supreme Court eventually has to settle it.
When your own hand-picked judge reads the statute and still rules against you, that's not an activist judiciary — that's just the law, catching up to the guy who signed the order.
3. Trump's Approval Rating Just Fell Below His Own First-Term Floor. That Floor Was the Week After January 6th.
A new AP-NORC poll released July 30 put Trump's approval at 33%, down from 37% a month earlier, with two-thirds of Americans — including a growing share of Republicans — saying the Iran war hasn't been worth fighting. The same day, Nate Silver's tracker put his net approval at -20.6, a new second-term low that's worse than the -19 floor he hit in his first term, in the days after January 6th. A separate Economist/YouGov poll conducted July 25–27 tied his term record at 34% approval and a record 62% disapproval.
It took the days after January 6th to make him this unpopular the first time. This time, all it took was a Thursday.
Now go back to doomscrolling. You've earned five minutes of not-doom.