‘Fools and lapdogs’: Trump blasts his supreme court judges over tariff defeat

Rage-posting on Truth Social deep into Friday night, a defiant Donald Trump vowed that “new TARIFFS… are on their way”, after the supreme court struck down his flagship economic policy in a rare and stunning rebuke for the president.

In a landmark 6-3 decision, America’s highest court ruled that Trump had acted illegally when he imposed sweeping tariffs without approval from Congress last year, upending global trade and assuming even greater presidential power. To Trump’s fury, the ruling split the six conservatives on the bench. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett – both appointed by Trump in his first term as president – joined the three liberal justices to rule against the president. The three other conservative justices dissented.

The White House has quietly braced for defeat in court for months, but Trump still appeared stunned by the ruling. “I’m allowed to destroy the country but I can’t charge them a little fee?” he told reporters, incredulous.

“I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” he went on.

Packing the bench to secure a 6-3 conservative majority on the court was one of the signature achievements of Trump’s first term. The conservative justices overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, striking down the constitutional right to abortion for millions of American women after almost 50 years in a momentous victory for the religious right.

Two years on, in 2024, the six conservatives again united in a 6-3 vote to grant Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution. The ruling derailed a looming court trial over the former president’s hand in the 6 January riot in 2021 and was pivotal to his election victory months later.

Since Trump took back the White House, the conservative justices have broadly acquiesced as the president has tested and expanded the limits of his executive power. Emergency court rulings have allowed him to fire federal employees, seize control of government agencies and deport migrants to countries they have no relation to. The parade of rulings in his favour has infuriated the court’s three beleaguered liberals. “This administration always wins,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in one opinion last year.

Trump has made no secret of the fact that he views the court as a rubber stamp to unchecked power. That was underlined on Friday as he singled out Gorsuch and Barrett, denouncing his appointees as “fools and lapdogs for…the radical left”. “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, if you want to know the truth, the two of them,” Trump told reporters.

The president will come face-to-face with the nine justices when he delivers his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday. The president has made clear, however, that the court ruling will not deter him from using global trade as a foreign policy weapon. Since unveiling his tariffs on “Liberation Day” last year, he has wielded the levies on a whim to pressure US allies and adversaries alike.

Trump recently revealed that he hiked tariffs on Switzerland last year following a phone call with the country’s president who “just rubbed me the wrong way”. Last month he threatened Denmark with swingeing tariffs if it did not agree to sell him Greenland. Global markets have convulsed with the whiplash effect of the president’s on-again, off-again trade wars with China.

Recovering from his stinging defeat, Trump issued an executive order on Friday imposing a unilateral 10% tariff on all foreign imports. He raised that yesterday to 15%. Those levies are capped at 150 days before they require approval from Congress, however. The president’s refusal to back down from his most cherished economic policy ensures that the chaos over international trade will continue into the autumn midterm election campaign, when control of Congress is back up for grabs.

Though few have the courage to say it to his face, Republicans in Congress know that Trump’s tariff strategy is deeply unpopular with voters. A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released on Friday found that almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the president’s trade policy, which they tie to rising prices and an increasingly stagnant economy.

Many Republicans seeking re-election fear that the impact of tariffs and Trump’s failure to tackle the cost of living crisis that dogged Joe Biden’s presidency will condemn them to defeat in November. Some privately cheered the court’s ruling and lamented the missed opportunity to change course. “Besides the constitutional concerns I had on the administration’s broad-based tariffs, I also do not think tariffs are smart economic policy,” said Republican Don Bacon.

Still fuming and unrepentant, however, Trump shows no intention of giving up the power he seized last year. Asked he would seek approval from Congress for a new round of tariffs, the president said: “I don’t have to. I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs.”

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images