Trump’s Winning Streak At The Supreme Court Comes Crashing To A Halt

President Donald Trump’s winning streak at the Supreme Court snapped emphatically Friday as the justices handed him the most significant loss of his presidency.

The 6-3 ruling striking down the broad tariffs at the center of Trump’s trade and economic agenda could upend the global economy and shatter the president’s most potent non-military negotiating tool. And the decision ripped the heart out of a central premise of his presidency — an unbridled, ever-escalating assertion of executive power, countenanced by the Supreme Court.

Trump had racked up a near-perfect record of victories at the high court to open his second term, and at the end of his first. The sting of sudden defeat was palpable at a White House press conference Friday where Trump raged against the ruling.

“They’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and radical left Democrats,” Trump said of the conservative justices who ruled against him. He vacillated between slamming the justices who rejected him and suggesting implausibly that the defeat had actually strengthened his power to level tariffs against other nations.

Often acting over strenuous objections from the court’s liberal wing, the conservative majority has allowed Trump to fire large swaths of the federal workforce, cancel billions of dollars in grants and contracts, end the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and deport some migrants to countries in which they have no ties.

But the court has cast a wary eye toward the White House lately.

In December, the justices said Trump does not have the authority to send the National Guard into American cities at will. And they have seemed skeptical of Trump’s efforts to fire a member of the Federal Reserve.

Few issues have been as central to Trump’s identity in public life as his steadfast insistence that tariffs could be used as leverage to secure favorable trade deals with allies and punish countries that refuse to bend to America’s will. Trump’s increasingly furious defense of tariffs, when it appeared likely the Supreme Court would reject them, underscored his view that tariff authority is synonymous with presidential power.

In the lead-up to the tariffs decision, Trump repeatedly upped the ante, trying to goad the justices into ruling for him by predicting fire-and-brimstone destruction of the U.S. economy if the court forced him to cancel the duties.

The defeat Friday may have been extra dizzying for Trump because he had gotten used to winning at the high court. It has reversed lower-court orders blocking parts of his agenda about 80 percent of emergency appeals Trump has filed.

The unanimous ruling in 2024 rejecting state efforts to keep him off the ballot, and the 6-3 decision later that year endorsing broad criminal immunity for presidents, ended legal crusades that could have proven fatal to his bid to return to the White House.

Trump’s feeling of betrayal was evident during the Friday press conference. In addition to calling the court’s majority a “disgrace to our nation,” the president made clear the court had rubbed salt in the wound by keeping him hanging for months.

“I've been waiting for this decision so long,” Trump said. “They could have made this decision a long time ago. … He should have released us a long time ago. We waited months, and that gave uncertainty. “

The justices handed Trump a reminder of his fallibility at an especially unwelcome time: He’s seen a string of defeats and brushbacks in the Republican-led Congress; signs of economic weakness; an intense worldwide focus on the Epstein files, whose release he initially sought to prevent; and a rising tide of Democratic enthusiasm heading into the midterms.

While the ruling seems certain to create some tension between Trump and any of the justices in the majority who show up at his State of the Union address Tuesday, some of his appointees tried to use their opinions Friday to cushion the blow.

In his dissent, Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly asserted that the tariffs could easily be replaced with other similar measures under less contested legal authority. Kavanaugh also sought to minimize the significance of the majority’s decision, arguing that the court simply found that Trump “checked the wrong statutory box” in implementing the tariffs.

Trump in his press conference Friday referenced Kavanaugh’s opinion before he announced a new 10 percent global tariff using another statute.

And while Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the majority in rejecting Trump’s tariffs, Gorsuch closed his solo concurrence with a passage that seemed aimed at soothing Trump’s anticipated anger. Adopting an almost patronizing tone, Gorsuch said he knew the court’s ruling “will be disappointing” and he observed: “Legislating can be hard.”

But Gorsuch also warned that effectively sidelining Congress by deferring to the executive branch’s view on matters in which the law is vague would risk concentrating too much power in the presidency.

“Our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man,” he warned. “That is no recipe for a republic.”