MAGA is turning SCOTUS loss into the existential crisis it needed

Signed on his first day back in office, Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to unilaterally dissolve the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of automatic citizenship to virtually every child born on American soil perfectly exemplifies the core obsessions of his era’s politics. It was flatly unconstitutional. Yet even before the Supreme Court narrowly upheld over 150 years of precedent in a 6-3 decision that blocked the bedrock of MAGA’s nativist project on statutory grounds, many in right-wing media cried foul. Only a 5-4 majority found the doctrine to be constitutional.. To anyone operating within the bounds of reality, the Court’s ruling was a troublingly close baseline affirmation of American law. But within the echo chamber of right-wing media, it was treated as an existential apocalypse. 

While the right of birthright citizenship today is the same as it was yesterday — and the same as it has been for generations — conservative media is, ironically, reframing the preservation of the status quo as a catastrophic loss. By soundly rejecting Trump’s imperial decree, the Court did not end the assault on birthright citizenship. Instead, it handed right-wing media exactly what it wanted and so desperately needed: a permanent grievance engine. For 50 years, the conservative movement used Roe v. Wade to raise billions of dollars, discipline lawmakers and whip its base into a frenzy of perpetual victimization over abortion rights. Tuesday’s ruling gives them a new Roe.

“The fact that this case was a 5-4 decision effectively means that the concept of birthright citizenship, which is an absurdity to the 14th Amendment — that concept is hanging by a thread,” Vice President JD Vance told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. He went on to inform viewers that there is an opportunity to “reverse” the Court’s decision.

Vance’s arithmetic reveals the insidious long game the right is playing. Five justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the three liberals — upheld the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. While Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment to strike down the order, he did so by arguing that Trump’s decree merely violated a federal statute — not the amendment itself — leaving the door wide open for Congress to change the law. He signaled that if Republicans can pass federal legislation restricting citizenship and flip Roberts or Barrett, they will have their five votes to dismantle the 14th Amendment. 

Far from settling the issue, the Court’s ruling looks to have guaranteed that the right will become even more rabid. 

We are already seeing the first salvos of this escalated warfare. Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., immediately appeared on Fox News to plug his cynically named “Anchors Away Act,” a piece of legislation that would effectively ban pregnant foreigners from even entering the United States. Rather than distancing himself from such an authoritarian overreach, House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly announced that he was actively looking at the bill. 

Relentless media repetition has served to create the sense of perpetual siege the right uses to justify extreme positions that would have been unthinkable to voice out loud a decade ago. Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway, for example, described the ruling as “the worst case scenario on birthplace citizenship case. Apocalyptically and indefensibly bad.” Her colleague at the Federalist, CEO Sean Davis, then called for the forced sterilization “of all foreign visitors prior to entry.” 

Right-wing pundits have also singled out the only conservative woman on the court for particular criticism. 

“Amy Coney Barrett is a turncoat,” Megyn Kelly said. “She’s constantly siding with the left. She’s supposed to be one of ours.” More broadly, the podcaster complained that the Court’s conservative justices are “all too afraid of being called ‘racist’ to find accordingly.” Kelly neglected to consider that they all enjoy lifetime appointments. 

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The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who previously hailed Trump’s nomination of Barrett in 2020 as “a bullet proof choice” and claimed that “if she had the same expertise and philosophy and was a dude, I’d be just as happy,” declared after the ruling that “it turns out that Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire, little better than Ketanji Jackson.” The Notre Dame College Republicans were equally as angry at the university’s former law professor, posting on X that “Barrett is an absolute disgrace to the Notre Dame name. We apologize on her behalf to all who will suffer the devastating consequences of infinity [sic] third-world migration.”

Many MAGA commentators got personal by going after Barrett’s children, who were adopted from Haiti. “If you think it’s a coincidence that the ‘conservative’ justice with no biological children and the justice with two Haitian adoptees are fundamentally libs when the chips are down, you have a lot to learn about politics,” posted Jeremy Carl, Trump’s nominee as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, who was forced to withdraw from consideration due to his extensive history of bigoted remarks.

This apocalyptic language emerging from MAGA commentators, Fox News and other conservative media outlets, and the White House is all of a piece, designed to manufacture urgency for a coalition that needs permanent grievance to stay mobilized. Trump and the GOP believe they can turn the tide of public opinion on the issue. Recent polls have found that a majority of Americans support the doctrine — 69% according to a Quinnipiac University poll. 

Trump may have lost his case before the Court, but in a narrower political sense, MAGA has gained something valuable: another resentment they are certain to turn into a rallying cry in the run-up to November’s midterms.

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