Even Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have already sided with the four liberal justices on a couple of cases, so if Trump thinks they'll be his puppets when a case involving him comes before them, I think he's in for a big surprise. For one thing, having lifetime appointments frees them from all future obligations to him, unlike his cabinet officers - who get fired the minute they stop kissing his ass. The Supreme Court doesn't have to kiss anybody's ass. The so-called conservative justices are conservative in the sense that they tend to favor economic interests over civil rights whenever there's a conflict between those two policies. Their constitutional originalism means they will try to interpret the Constitution as meaning exactly what it meant in 1789, which IMO is kind of ridiculous, but with respect to the issues Trump is stirring up, that approach isn't likely to help him because there's nothing in the Constitution that suggests, let alone states specifically, that the president is superior to or more powerful than the other two branches of the government. I don't see them handing Congress' power over to the executive.
And the courts are also very protective of their own role as an equal branch of government. They'll find a way to tell Trump that he's not the boss of them, if it comes to that. Chief Justice Roberts isn't going to want the court with his name attached to it to be delegitimized and go down in history as Trump's tool. If such a case presents itself they will follow the precedent of US v. Nixon because they have no justification for deciding otherwise. And a word about that case: It was decided 8-0, with Rehnquist recusing himself because he'd worked in Nixon's White House. He was Nixon's Bob Barr:
When President Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, Rehnquist returned to work in Washington. He served as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel, from 1969 to 1971. In this role, he served as the chief lawyer to Attorney General John Mitchell...
In fall 1971, Nixon received the resignations of two Supreme Court justices, Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan II. After compiling an initial list of possible appointees that ran afoul of Chief Justice Burger and the American Bar Association, Nixon considered Rehnquist for one of the slots. Henry Kissinger discussed the possible pick with presidential advisor H.R. Haldeman and asked. "Rehnquist is pretty far right, isn't he?" Haldeman responded, "Oh, Christ! He's way to the right of Buchanan," referring to then-presidential advisor Patrick Buchanan...
On the Burger Court, Rehnquist promptly established himself as the most conservative of Nixon's appointees, taking a narrow view of the Fourteenth Amendment and a broad view of state power. Rehnquist almost always voted "with the prosecution in criminal cases, with business in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases, and with the government in speech cases."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rehnquist
Rehnquist was actually worse than any of the current justices. He had never been a judge of any kind before he was appointed to the Supreme Court; until then he'd spent most of his legal career as a political operative on behalf of the GOP, like Barr. He once wrote that he thought
Plessy v. Ferguson was correctly decided! I mention this because, despite their political inclinations and unlike Rehnquist, all of the conservatives on the Supreme Court had been Court of Appeals judges before joining the Supreme Court (so were all of the liberals except for Kagan, who had been the Dean of Harvard Law School). Because all of them had been judges and not political operatives like Rehnquist (or Barr), they will not be thinking like political operatives but like judges. That is, they will follow the law - maybe with a more conservative slant, but they won't ignore it altogether, which is what they would have to do to save Trump.
When the Supremes rule against Trump in some case - and they will, sooner or later - Trump will shit a brick. He will try to defy their order if they order him to do something. He will rant about how "his" justices betrayed him and that they're losers and he never should have appointed them. It will be great fun to watch.
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