The courts have delivered President Trump a striking flurry of defeats this week on hot-button issues.

Even if Trump challenges the decisions, which seems almost certain, the verdicts at the least have the capacity to disrupt his efforts to asset his power in ever more expansive ways.

On Tuesday alone, courts hit at two deeply contentious Trump policies, declaring his deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this year to have been illegal, and preventing him from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants.

Also on Tuesday, an appeals court ruled in favor of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, whom Trump has sought to fire as a Federal Trade Commissioner. An earlier court had ordered Slaughter reinstated and the appellate court declined a bid from the administration to have that decision put on ice.

The following day, yet another court voided the administration’s efforts to choke off more than $2 billion in research funding to Harvard amid the long-running battle between Trump and the nation’s oldest university.

Separately, the president has already embarked on the effort to have an adverse decision from last week overturned.

Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that he did not have the authority, under a 1977 law, to impose many of his signature tariffs. Trump took to social media in the aftermath to lambaste the allegedly “Radical Left........

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