A President Under Siege Lashes Out At The Checks On His Power

President Donald Trump is increasingly at the mercy of forces he unleashed but can’t control — so he’s taking aim at the umpires.

Gas prices surging. Unemployment climbing. War with Iran threatening to engulf his presidency. The fracturing of his political coalition. The collapse of his signature trade-negotiations-by-tariff strategy. Relentless scrutiny of the Epstein files. A public backlash to his agenda that could swamp Republicans in the midterms. Failure after failure to criminalize the conduct of his political adversaries.

So it was, in a fit of Sunday night fury that set Washington’s armchair psychoanalysts ablaze, that the president channeled his rage at the few functioning checks on his power: the media, independent regulators and — most pointedly — the federal judiciary.

Trump’s Sunday night outburst took on all of them, but it was most notable for how he cast the Supreme Court — one that has staved off the destruction of his agenda and even his own criminal prosecution — as “a weaponized, and unjust Political Organization.”

“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” the president blared on Truth Social. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”

It was a remarkable attack. Until the Feb. 20 tariff ruling, the Trump administration had been touting its winning streak at the Supreme Court. The justices have salvaged Trump’s broadest efforts to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of noncitizens in the United States, allowed him to assert unprecedented control of once-independent agencies and unilaterally slash congressionally authorized spending.

The court, as Trump knows, is arguably responsible for his return to power in the first place: The justices blocked an effort by some blue states to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot by labeling him an insurrectionist responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. And the court’s decision to adopt a sweeping view of presidential immunity helped stave off special counsel Jack Smith’s most potent criminal case against Trump.

But to Trump, that’s ancient history.

The core of the attack is the frustration that Trump often exhibits when he brushes up against the limits of his power. He spent Sunday lashing out at the news media, cheering on FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threat to revoke broadcast licenses for stations that report unfavorably on the war in Iran, and lamenting his inability to control the independent Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions.

Trump describes the high court’s recent rejection of his unfettered ability to levy tariffs against American trading partners as a deeply personal affront — one that contradicted the ethos of his entire decade in public life.

Since the stinging tariffs decision last month, Trump has seemed fixated on the ruling, weighing in against the high court every few days.

“Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote Sunday.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the White House referred POLITICO to Trump’s posts.

Trump’s bristling anger over the tariffs decision is akin to the umbrage he felt after the justices rejected his last-ditch courtroom bid to overturn the 2020 election.

Unsurprisingly, both of those cases featured in Trump’s post, adorned by false claims about what the justices actually decided in each one. They did not, in fact, bless Trump’s alternate scheme to re-issue tariffs. And they did not, six years ago, tell Trump he lacked standing to challenge the 2020 election results.

“All I can do, as President, is call them out for their bad behavior!” Trump lamented of the co-equal branch. He even acknowledged his vent session could be a strategic blunder: “This statement about the United States Supreme Court will cause me nothing but problems in the future, but I feel it is my obligation to speak the TRUTH.”

That admission comes as Trump has appeared powerless at times to shape the fallout of his own decisions — even though they may control his, and his party’s, fate. The war in Iran has rattled markets and sent gas prices surging, while Americans have largely looked askance at the prospect of a prolonged military conflict that has already claimed the lives of several American service members.

His effort to suppress interest in the sex trafficking operation run by late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein went largely ignored and has drawn extensive international attention and an expansive review by Congress — rare pushback by the GOP-controlled House against Trump’s own appointees.

Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA coalition appears to be splintering over the war in Iran, with factions accusing each other of being shills for foreign governments or even criticizing Trump for falling victim to interventionist forces in Washington.

Some of Trump’s most visible loyalists have broken with him in recent days, prompting Trump to declare, “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM.” Trump’s push for Republicans to rewrite election rules and redraw political boundaries to maximize their chances in the midterms are both faltering. Poll numbers reveal dissatisfaction with the economy and a backlash to Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

And Trump’s Justice Department has failed in its efforts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and six Democratic lawmakers who filmed a video encouraging members of the military to disregard unlawful orders. And on Friday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg capped that losing streak with an exclamation point: tossing out a grand jury subpoena aimed at Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

The Obama-appointed chief of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. delivered a memorable rebuke of the administration’s pursuit of that criminal probe in what he concluded was an effort to harass and punish Powell for refusing to bend to Trump’s demand that he lower interest rates quicker.

Trump’s personal vendetta against Boasberg began behind closed doors in 2023, when the newly minted chief blessed special counsel Jack Smith’s efforts to compel testimony from a raft of high-profile Trump aides. But it deepened when Boasberg attempted to halt the abrupt deportation of 137 Venezuelan men Trump accused of being gang members.

That history was palpable as Trump — in an encore to his initial Sunday night post — uncorked a long list of adjectives to demean the Obama-appointed judge: wacky, nasty, crooked, totally out of control, flagrant, extreme. “Exactly what Judges should not be!” he added.

“A man who suffers from the highest level of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and has been ‘after’ my people, and me, for years,” Trump wrote, calling for Boasberg and other judges to “suffer serious disciplinary action.”