Trump's Unlikely Hero: Justice Brett Kavanaugh

President Donald Trump, despite his protestations regarding the Supreme Court on Friday striking down his sweeping tariffs, is singling out one justice as worthy of his praise: Brett Kavanaugh.

The president has spent the last 24 hours lavishing praise on the justice, the only Trump appointee to side with the White House in yesterday’s landmark ruling.

“My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and, of course, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito,” he declared Saturday morning on Truth Social. “There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that they want to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Three Republican-appointed justices — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts — joined with the court’s liberal minority to bar Trump from invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to enact his global tariffs. It’s a significant legal wrench on an approach Trump has used to reset trade relationships with allies and pressure Europe to conform to his global policy positions.

But the president saved the bulk of his ire for Barrett and Gorsuch, two jurists he appointed to the bench during his first term.

“I think it’s an embarrassment to their families,” he told reporters in a hastily called Friday press briefing mere hours after receiving word of the court’s decision. “You want to know the truth, the two of them.”

Kavanaugh, by extension, is getting the favored-son treatment, with Trump saying on Friday that Kavanaugh’s “stock has gone so up,” quoting from his dissent and lauding the justice for “his genius and his great ability.”

Both Democrats and Republicans opposed to the president’s tariffs cheered the court’s ruling, but the White House responded almost immediately. Trump signed an executive order Friday imposing a new temporary 10 percent global tariff and citing a section of the Trade Act of 1974 that empowers a president to enact levies in response to a “large and serious balance-of-payments deficit.”

The new duties, which will come into effect on Tuesday, will almost certainly face legal scrutiny as well. But Kavanaugh, writing for the minority, laid out what is practically a blueprint for the White House’s efforts to pass legal muster with the high court on the next go. In his dissent, the justice wrote that the majority’s decision “might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward.” He then listed several other federal statutes the White House could rely on to implement its preferred levies.

“I am so proud of him,” the president said Friday.

The Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s reaction.

But Trump’s affection is often fleeting — and could evaporate the next time Kavanaugh rules in a way he doesn't like. In his six years on the bench, the justice hasn’t always found himself on the president’s nice list. Trump slammed Kavanaugh and Barrett for siding with liberals on the court in a July 2021 challenge to Obamacare.

“I was disappointed, and that’s the way it goes. Very disappointed, I fought very hard for them,” Trump told David Brody of Just The News days after that 7-2 ruling.