A U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Donald Trump’s tariffs sent the 47th president into a rant that leaves little doubt who he is and what Constitutional crisis he is about to cause, writes Joe Lauria.
Trump at his press conference on Friday denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision on tariffs. (C-SPAN Screenshot/YouTube)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Reacting to a U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling his tariffs policy unconstitutional, U.S. President Donald Trump launched into an unhinged rant on Friday confirming that he considers himself above the law as any tinpot authoritarian leader would.
The court ruled 6-3 that the U.S. Constitution makes clear that only Congress can levy tariffs, which are really taxes, on the U.S. population. Thus Trump’s extensive tariffs, imposed since January 2025, are illegal and American consumers and companies are due a refund of around $200 billion, the court said.
The ruling unleashed Trump in full psychotic mode, railing against justices as “fools and lapdogs;” the plaintiffs in the lawsuit the court ruled on as “sleazebags, major sleazebags” serving an unnamed foreign power and he announced a new 10 percent worldwide tariff “over and above our normal tariffs already being charged” in defiance of the court.
Trump argues he is still allowed to impose tariffs over the heads of Congress by the authority of the 1974 Trade Act. That act allows a president to unilaterally impose tariffs of up to 15 percent (hence the new 10 percent measures), but only for 150 days, after which Congress must continue them.
However, Friday’s ruling means he must vacate the existing tariffs, which he is so far refusing to do.
Trump tries to justify his existing tariffs as having been imposed under an emergency act. But the court struck that down, arguing in essence there is no economic or national security emergency in the United States today.
In his madness, Trump furiously claimed he had authority to impose embargoes and “destroy countries” but the Supreme Court dared rule he couldn’t even put a single dollar tariff on a nation’s imports. He exclaimed:
“I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country. I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo, I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge one dollar because that’s not what it says, and that’s not the way it even reads. I can do anything I want to do to them, but I can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge them a little fee.
Think of that. How ridiculous is that? I’m allowed to embargo them, I’m allowed to tell them you can’t do business in the United States anymore, ‘we want you out of here,’ but I want to charge them $10. I can’t do that.
It’s incorrect, their decision is incorrect. But it doesn’t matter because we have very powerful alternatives … .”
In fact, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution asserts Congress has the authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. Embargoes, such as those on Cuba, North Korea and Iran, are imposed by Congress, not the White House (unless there is an emergency).
With Trump having amassed a U.S. strike force poised to illegally attack Iran, the timing of his cry that he can destroy nations brings little comfort.
An Historic Constitutional Crisis
1808 British political cartoon ridiculing the ‘Embargo Act of 1807’. President Thomas Jefferson reassures his petitioners, ruined businessmen, that the embargo on warring Europeans may show good results in 15 to 20 years. (British Cartoon Prints Collection/U.S, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)
Trump has uncorked a Constitutional crisis reminiscent of one of his favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, who in 1832 defied a Supreme Court decision regarding Cherokee sovereignty in the state of Georgia that ultimately led to the tribe’s forcible removal in the Trail of Tears.
There have been a few other instances of presidents defying a federal court. Thomas Jefferson, in a case relevant to Trump’s, defied an order by Supreme Court Justice William Johnson in 1808, while Johnson was doing double duty sitting on the federal circuit court in South Carolina.
The ruling involved the Embargo Act of 1807, which forbade all U.S. foreign trade to stop British and French ships from harassing U.S. ships on the high seas. It was an even more extreme measure of economic warfare than Trump’s tariffs.
The South Carolina case involved a shipowner whose ship was impounded by federal customs officials and who sued to get it back.
Jefferson had appointed Johnson to the Supreme Court, but Johnson ruled that under the Embargo Act, only Congress could authorize the seizing of a ship. Jefferson ignored the ruling.
The case went to the Supreme Court in February 1808 but the court said it lacked appellate jurisdiction to review the case so Jefferson continued to defy the lower court’s order until the end of his term.
The Embargo Act was an economic disaster, even greater than that brought on by Trump’s tariffs. Exports plunged from $108 million to $22 million in just one year, sinking U.S. GDP by five percent before Congress repealed the Act in March 1809. The unpopularity of the Act led to the protest slogan of spelling embargo backwards: O grab me.
An 1807 political cartoon showing merchants caught by a snapping turtle named “Ograbme” (“Embargo” spelled backwards). The embargo was also ridiculed in the New England press as Dambargo, Mob-Rage, or Go-bar-’em. (Public Domain/Wikipedia)
In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to detain suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial. Sitting as a circuit judge, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who delivered the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott case that African-Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens and Congress couldn’t prohibit slavery in U.S. territories, ruled in 1861 that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus and he released an imprisoned Confederate, a member of the Maryland legislature.
Lincoln ignored the ruling. In 1863 he got Congress to authorize him to do so.
If Trump continues to defy the court he will add his name to this record. Indeed, he gave his clearest indication that he will defy the Supreme Court on the existing tariffs, which were struck down.
“All of those tariffs remain. They all remain,” he said. “I don’t know if you know that or not. They all remain. We’re still getting them and we will after the decision. I guess there’s nobody left to appeal to.”
It will be interesting to see how he interacts with Supreme Court justices who sit in their robes in the front row at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Thank You Joe
‘I Can Destroy Countries’ …… and, Starting with America.
Historians will of course write long books about Donald Trump’s role in the Fall of the American Empire. If humanity survives its twin existential crisis (heat and war), then Donald Trump’s name will be remember for a long time, right alongside Nero and the famous bit about how he fiddled while Rome burned. There will be some similar saying about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is destroying America’s standing in the world, and wiping out any good will that it once had from its previous era of freedom and helping the world. And Donald Trump is stoking such divisions within America that it seems almost certain to result in Civil War. The name Trump will now always be connected with The Fall of The American Empire.
“”Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”” – President George W. Bush, August 5, 2004
““”Our enemies are innovative and resourceful,”
Not our enemies, Waiting to be our friends.
I believe they resist abuse, if we could just concentrate on ours owen country and not unregistered foreign ones.
Jared Kushner, through his firm Affinity Partners, is investing $1.4 billion to transform Sazan Island in Albania—a former Soviet Cold War military base featuring numerous tunnels and abandoned bunkers—into a luxury, eco-conscious resort. The project received preliminary approval from the Albanian government in January 2026, aiming to develop the 1,400-acre site
A retirement home after the next world war complete with bomb shelters
Is that where the billions in tariffs is going?
sign me up…
The obvious resolution is through impeachment in the House of Representatives followed by conviction/removal in the Senate. Given our present state of political paralysis, the chance of that happening is essentially zero percent.
The senate will not remove Trump. Frist they still have the GOP majority and secondly the Dems don’t really want him removed before the midterms because without Trump they have nothing.
Trump is right – he can (and does) do all those things, and this ruling won’t stop him.
The Constitution (which attempts to limit but does not prevent his tariffs) is not protecting US citizens from much of anything anymore.
After 2 1/2 centuries, it is time to start over.
Unfortunately, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” will take revolution to wrest the massive amount of power out of the hands of the few. Unfortunately, successful revolutions are often the ones that follow a devastating defeat from outside.
Too bad the idea of “a government of the people” was tied up with the idea of a “classless society” where all were equal. As soon as America decided to throw out that second part because everyone dreamed they could be rich, the whole government of the people think was on shaky legs even before Lincoln created that lovely poetry that provides the best description of democracy.
Remember, the Republicans were a morality-based Third Party trying to get a stuck system to see that whole bit about “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was BS if it did not apply to everyone. The Democrats were proudly the party of Slavery and The South, and the Whiggs must have been happy with business-as-usual. The system was already broken, and the era of Lincoln was one of the few times the people rose up and made it work for a short time.
PS… The French Revolution followed a French victory over Great Britain during the wars around the time of the American Revolution. France signed a treaty of victory over Great Britain in 1783, and the storming of the Bastille was in 1789.
The French Revolution was a case of a policy of Endless War eventually taking its predictable toll in a mountain of debt that soared above the Alps. This caused the French King to raise taxes, etc, etc, etc. Both France and Britain had pushed a series of Endless Wars in their hatred for each other. The debt and taxes in both led to outbreaks of democracy and freedom in Boston and Paris. Neither city is in a functioning democracy today, and in both nations “freedom” is police in stormtrooper gear beating down citizens on the orders of a President who acts like they are Emperor.
Are his comments on the judgment not a contempt of court?
Since we have allowed permission for wars with lies now we have Presidents who think they are elected with permission to destroy any country they want for no reason at all. That is the problem with our permanent warfare military strategic missionary position for profit motives in wars. Plus they now claim to define all reality for the rest of the world to worship as war goods.
And the War Department and warmongers are proud of it.
Dismissing a supreme court ruling is disregarding the rule of law and is grounds for impeachment.
Then why does it not happen? Are the impeachers paid off? It was once said some decades ago that the POTUS could not do what he liked, was rather powerless as he needed permission to do it (from Congress?) Now, as it was really the same years ago Congress, Supreme Court and laws are no obstacle.
Trump is clearly mentally deranged and not fit to hold office. Too bad congress is as corrupt as it is to the point of being useless to the citizenry. His removal will only happen if enough of us are willing to get into the streets en masse to force the issue.
That’s the logical conclusion – another US civil war. How else will the tyranny be overcome?
It may well come to that. And if so, that will be the end of the US.
You say that as if it’s a bad thing.
The repugnant orange ? Jabba the Trump is an evil pig ?
Given the complete exposure of global totalitarian intent, it is only a matter of how many, in what positions of power, will follow the administration cabal and how many, in what positions of power, will oppose it. A confrontation is being forced that could easily turn to open violence, domestically and internationally. It is now a matter of numbers as much or more than a matter of diplomacy. The true madness of oligarchic power is upon us, functioning by its own rules; we (both ‘the people’ and the influential) either catch up to this understanding and respond effectively or the fullest extent of that madness will be our near term future.
Impeach now … nothing else matters politically …
And who will impeach him? Has a single Dem gotten up and condemned the lunatic’s latest defiance of the Courts? This would be hugely popular, but the Dems won’t do it.
This man exhibits many negative behaviors. Impeach! Now!
The Republican opportunists (Rubio, Cruz, Miller et al) need to consider his destructive conduct. In the end he does not help.
Americans must immediately remove Donald Trump from power via the 25th Amendment process and Israelis must remove Benjamin Netanyahu from power via any means available – before the two criminally insane mass murderers get us all killed.
Agreed.
Agreed
I agree 100%.
You’re dreaming.
Removing Yahoo will do nothing. The vast majority of Israeli Jews agree with his policies. He’ll get replaced by another racist criminal. The Dems will do nothing. I’m afraid that the utter lawlessness will continue to move to its horrific end. My guess is the Dems will hope that the Iran war will go badly and this will set Trump up for a fall.
As for Mr Trump, by the words reported here he has declared himself Fuehrer – a dictator unbound by any law whatsoever.
The repugnant orange ? Jabba the Trump is an evil pig ?
And he has the backing of the Rs, so far. However Big Money is the true ruler, and It doesn’t like anything that costs it money. Both parties serve Big Money.
With his flair for drama, perhaps Mr Trump will have the six SCROTUS traitors arrested during the State of that Union address. Better yet, have them brought to the podium to have their hearts cut out then devoured by the President of the United States, while the GOP offers a standing ovation.
I find it deeply worrying that the Supreme Court cannot agree about even such a clear-cut matter of constitutional law. What were the three dissenting judges thinking of?
It’s called the “major questions doctrine.”
What makes you think the SCROTUS cares about law? It is a corrupt political body that serves Big Money.
How do share stuff Consortium articles on Facebook? My feed always says “forbidden”?
Try: hxxps://r.pebmac.ca/ replace the x’s with t’s.
Add some glyphosate and frackwater to your feed. Presto. The regime will automatically approve it.