The first executive power case to reach the Supreme Court in President Donald Trump’s second term wasn’t really about the plaintiff, Hampton Dellinger, a federal officer Trump fired two weeks ago.

It was about what signal the court would send to the architects of the White House’s aggressive executive power agenda and the mostly liberal lower court judges who are trying just as aggressively to block it.

Many of Trump’s opponents label that clash a “constitutional crisis.”

Whatever you want to call it, the Supreme Court had only one message in its Friday order: We want to deflect this maelstrom just a little longer.

The basics of the case: On Feb. 7, Trump fired Dellinger, a Joe Biden appointee, from his role as head of a government agency — confusingly called the Office of Special Counsel — that investigates federal workplace disputes. Dellinger sued, citing a 1978 statute that says he can only be fired for cause.

Though more recent Supreme Court decisions say that Congress can’t interfere with the president’s constitutional power to remove subordinates, a judge in D.C. issued a temporary restraining order, or TRO, blocking Dellinger’s removal for at least 14 days.

An appeals court said the order could not be appealed because it was only temporary, not a final judgment.

The one Republican-appointed judge on the panel disagreed, citing the “extraordinary character” of the order, “which directs the President to recognize and work with an agency head whom he has already removed.”

Last stop: the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.

There the Trump administration’s lawyers called on the justices to dissolve the TRO and send a message to trigger-happy lower courts. “The district court’s order exemplifies a broader, weeks-long trend in which plaintiffs challenging President Trump’s initiatives have persuaded district courts to issue TROs that intrude upon a host of the President’s Article II powers,” said one government filing, citing a case involving the U.S. DOGE Service’s work at the Treasury Department and another involving foreign aid.. By ruling against Dellinger, the Trump administration emphasized, the Supreme Court could “deter further abuse of TROs going forward.”

Dellinger’s lawyers offered the justices a different spin on the case’s significance: Step in now, and you’ll get overwhelmed by the Trump legal storm.

Their filing warned of “premature escalation of politically fraught disputes.” Overturning the TRO, they said, would invite “a rocket docket straight to this Court, even as high-stakes emergency litigation proliferates across the country.”

The Supreme Court’s response to this politically charged dilemma has all the markings of a compromise brokered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While two of the court’s most progressive justices — Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — would have upheld the TRO, and two of the court’s most conservative justices — Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — would have dissolved it, the court as a whole decided simply to … not decide.

Noting that the TRO won’t be in force for much longer, the remaining justices, including Roberts, concluded tersely that the government’s appeal should be “held in abeyance until February 26, when the TRO is set to expire.”

That’s a partial win for Dellinger, who remains in his post for at least a few more days, and for Trump’s legal opponents, who can continue to seek TROs in the lower courts without adverse Supreme Court precedent.

But the court also did not reject the Trump administration’s appeal. It did not say, as the appeals court did, that TROs issued by district judges are shielded from review. That could have emboldened more liberal lower-court judges to temporarily halt Trump initiatives without fear of reversal.

The risk from this nonruling is that executive vs. judicial friction will escalate without firm direction from the Supreme Court. But that friction might already be easing as the Trump shock fades and the legal process grinds on. When conflict does escalate, the court will have kept its powder dry.

Jason Willick is a Washington Post columnist focusing on law, politics and foreign policy.