Looking back, the theme of the past Supreme Court term is clear: a near-complete victory for Donald Trump and the conservative political movement. In nearly every case where Trump’s agenda was at issue, he won. Whatever hope once existed that the Court would operate as a last bastion for the rule of law, it’s gone now.

Not only is the Roberts Court not standing up to Trump, it is the farthest right that it has ever been. It upheld a law banning gender-affirming care for minors; it allowed parents in public schools to opt out of curricula that could be interpreted as supporting gay rights; it consistently allowed Trump to skirt around due process in his handling of deportations.

Just as striking as the ideological bent of the opinions coming from the Court is their incoherence, both internally and within the Court’s broader jurisprudence. Let’s take a quick look at some big ticket cases:

United States v. Skrmetti: the Court held that a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care did not discriminate based on sex, despite the law itself banning care that is “inconsistent with [one’s] sex,” making sex the dispositive factor. They further held that the ban didn’t discriminate against transgender people, a conclusion so ridiculous that even Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas disagreed.

Mahmoud v. Taylor: the Court held that parents have the right to opt their children out of any public school curricula that contains normative messaging that conflicts with their religious beliefs – including supportive depictions of LGBT characters – creating an unprecedented private veto over public school classrooms.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: the Court upheld a Texas law requiring age verification to access any online content “harmful to minors,” functionally ignoring decades of precedent requiring the highest level of scrutiny for content-based speech restrictions. 

It’s easy to look at this and think that the Supreme Court is operating without rules, unmoored from principle or precedent. Some law professors have even sought guidance on how to teach some of the more unintelligible reasoning from recent opinions. 

But the Court’s incoherence isn’t befuddling; it’s illuminating. The more the Justices move away from the realm of legal formalities, the more clearly you can see their actual operating principles. 

If you look at the cases above from a jurisprudential perspective, there’s no real throughline. Skrmetti is about the application of the equal protection clause to trans minors, Mahmoud is about the free exercise rights of parents, and Paxton is about speech rights related to adult content online. But running through them is a single principle, which we can call the moral panic exception to the Constitution.

It’s not a novel observation that right-wing politics are fueled by moral panics. From trans women in sports to vaccine conspiracism and immigrant crime waves, much of conservative politics revolves around pervasive, irrational fears of threats from outsiders. Maybe the most prevalent over the last several decades is the idea that the LGBT community – and left-wing cultural forces more generally – target children as vectors of liberal sexual ideology.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to see the Court’s conservatives buy into the panic, not just as a matter of fact but as a constitutional imperative. Each of these cases reflects the same trend: where constitutional rights come into friction with the right-wing moral panic about gender and sexuality, the panic takes precedence. From gender-affirming care to gay-friendly books in school and explicit online content, the threat of LGBT ideology is so great that the Constitution must give way.

To use Mahmoud as an example: the case involved a public school district’s use of several LGBT-friendly books in its curriculum, as well as some guidelines for teachers. One of the books included a medieval same-sex wedding. Justice Alito argues that the fact that the wedding is celebrated throughout the book’s fictional kingdom is a clear indication that the book promotes same-sex relationships, and in turn should grant parents the right to opt their children out of instruction. 

It really doesn’t need to be said that a book where a prince married a princess would not clock to Sam Alito as promoting an ideology, because the ideology that it does promote is so ingrained in his head that he doesn’t know it’s there. 

What accounts for this immense hypocrisy is that Sam has bought into the moral panic surrounding LGBT people, itself a subset of the idea that Christianity – a religion that pervades and dominates in every hall of American government – is besieged by liberal cultural forces. Suddenly the idea that parents can opt out of public school instruction on any religious whim is palatable; a necessary sacrifice in the culture wars.

The example in Skrmetti is even more striking. Just five years ago, in Bostock v. Clayton County, the Court held 6-3 that transgender people are covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex. Although Skrmetti was about the Equal Protection Clause, the reasoning should have been the same: the Tennessee law banned certain medical treatments if they are “inconsistent with” the sex of the recipient. What the Court recognized in Bostock but ignored in Skrmetti is that discrimination based on gender identity is inherently predicated in sex.

If you try to square Skrmetti and Bostock using logic, you’ll end up splitting hairs. But if you understand Skrmetti as the output of an anti-trans moral panic, it clicks into place. We’ve seen a shift against transgender rights over the last several years as monied right-wing interests have invested in the issue. Now, in 2025, anti-trans sentiment is a core component of the GOP platform. The logic changes to fit the politics.

Maybe the most disturbing element of the Court’s jurisprudence this term was their general ambivalence to Trump’s plainly illegal deportation regime. It’s been six months since Trump issued one executive order purporting to end the constitutional right to birthright citizenship and another invoking the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act, declaring that the United States is being “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Supreme Court has refused to substantively address either order, instead opting to let the issues fester in lower courts, giving the administration room to maneuver through every loophole and technicality it can find.

When birthright citizenship finally did reach the high court, they ignored the fact that Trump had functionally nullified a constitutional amendment and instead used the opportunity to forbid the general use of nationwide injunctions. This despite the fact that during Joe Biden’s term the Court repeatedly let such injunctions stand.

Again, a law professor trying to teach this as jurisprudence would struggle. You can’t plausibly claim that the Court opposes the broad use of nationwide injunctions when they let them stand nine times out of ten. It’s also hard to explain as a matter of legal theory why the Court would decline to intervene on the merits in a case where an executive order directly contravened a constitutional amendment. 

But as an extension of a right-wing moral panic, this all makes perfect sense. The idea that illegal immigration constitutes an “invasion” is the direct output of conservative media, and it comes as naturally to the conservative Justices as the idea that LGBT propaganda permeates our public schools.

A lot of stuffier legal academics (and Supreme Court justices themselves) decry political analysis of Supreme Court rulings as unsophisticated, results-oriented thinking. But only political analysis can explain the current Court. Only political analysis can explain why the Supreme Court would side with the Trump administration nineteen times more often than District Courts. Only political analysis can explain why the Court is nearly eight times as likely to lift an injunction against the Trump administration as it was to lift one against the Biden administration. And only politics can explain a jurisprudence that has been rendered unintelligible by the Court’s fealty to conservative culture war narratives.

As the Court continues to upend American law, lawyers will rush to the editorial pages with rationalizations, purporting to explain the law. But all they’ll be doing is parroting the Court’s own justifications at you, copywriters for an unreliable narrator. At the Supreme Court, traditional legal analysis is dead letter. To understand what the Court is doing, you need to understand first and foremost that they swim with the tides of right-wing politics. Every other explanation is inadequate, and every other principle is secondary.