But look beyond the top-line of each ruling, and there’s reason to think Trump and his populist agenda are in a better position than they were before. In both cases, Trump unilaterally took aim at a long-settled practice: No president had fired a Fed governor before, and no meaningful political challenge to birthright citizenship existed.

While neither of his shots landed, they came surprisingly close. Only four justices joined Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s majority opinion rebuking the president in each case. The rulings were sweeping, but the coalition behind them is narrow. Populists now have an opening, and maybe more determination, to keep up the fight on both fronts.

Start with Cook. As part of his campaign to pressure the Fed to lower interest rates, Trump said last year that he was firing Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed’s board appointed to a 14-year term in 2023 by President Joe Biden. Trump’s pretext was an allegation of mortgage fraud — which Cook denies and the government never proved — posted on social media by Bill Pulte, a political attack dog Trump made housing regulator.

By all appearances, the White House’s move was never going to fly at the Supreme Court. Lower courts blocked Cook’s firing, and when the Trump administration asked the justices last September to set those rulings aside while the case played out, the justices declined, with no noted dissents. The oral argument in January went well for Cook, with the Wall Street Journal observing that “not a single justice voiced sympathy for the arguments to remove the Fed governor.”

Yet the ruling, when it came down in June, was 5-4. The majority opinion said Trump needed to give Cook “notice and some opportunity to respond” before firing her, but offered only general guidance about what that might look like and what showing he would need to make. Trump said after the decision was announced that he would try again with a “perfect process.”

If the ruling had been unanimous or near-unanimous, the administration might have been deterred from going another round in court with Cook. But the 5-4 split means the Trump administration needs to peel off just one member of the majority (most likely Roberts or Brett M. Kavanaugh) if the case gets to the Supreme Court again.

Roberts’s Cook opinion also tried to distinguish Fed governors from other officials whom the chief justice maintains the president can fire for any reason. But the reasoning Roberts musters is strikingly cursory. He cites the existence of national banks early in U.S. history, but the Fed is a very different institution. The inescapable impression is that the justices spared the Fed from presidential control because of concerns about policy and economics more than constitutional law. That might be why the dissenters were more numerous than expected.

Weakly reasoned decisions upheld by a single vote are more vulnerable to political attack. The durability of Fed independence might depend on presidential forbearance — a weak reed in 21st-century American politics.

In the birthright citizenship case, Trump has less prospect of a do-over. Five justices said the Constitution requires birthright citizenship (with a sixth, Kavanaugh, saying the current immigration laws require birthright citizenship, but Congress could change them). That means that even Republican majorities in Congress couldn’t restrict the citizenship of immigrants’ children unless one or more justices on the Supreme Court is replaced.

But Trump’s executive order and the Supreme Court’s decision elevated and polarized the issue in a way that can only help the revisionists. Constitutional birthright citizenship was settled law, with only a handful of mostly marginal figures on the right questioning it. Trump prompted an explosion of scholarship showing that the conventional view of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was at least open to competing interpretations.

The energy on the legal right is now with the Barbara dissenters. Judges who want a Republican president’s appointment to the Supreme Court will look for ways to signal their sympathy with the revisionist view, as some are already doing.

Roe v. Wade was overturned after decades of activism by the conservative base and discipline by its legal elite. Barbara is different; it’s a conservative decision in the sense that it entrenches an established understanding rather than devising a novel one (it’s also much more plausibly “originalist” than Roe). But today’s populist right isn’t wedded to what it sees as decaying political conventions.

Trump maneuvered the Supreme Court into answering questions hardly anyone was asking. In the process, he exposed the contradictions of Fed independence under the unitary executive theory that the conservative justices otherwise support, and he bolstered the viability of a once-radical interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The president’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later legal strategy, on display in Cook and Barbara, is very often self-defeating. Here he might have moved the realm of the possible his way.