US President Donald Trump can keep collecting import taxes for now, an appeals court has said, a day after a trade ruling found the bulk of his global tariffs to be illegal.
A federal appeals court granted a bid from the White House to temporarily suspend the lower court’s order, which ruled that Trump had overstepped his power by imposing the duties.
Wednesday’s judgement from the US Court of International Trade drew the ire of Trump officials, who called it an example of judicial overreach.
Small businesses and a group of states had challenged the measures, which are at the heart of Trump’s agenda and have shaken up the world economic order.
In its appeal, the Trump administration said the decision issued by the trade court a day earlier had improperly second-guessed the president and threatened to unravel months of hard-fought trade negotiations.
“The political branches, not courts, make foreign policy and chart economic policy,” it said in the filing.
Shortly before Thursday’s tariff reprieve from the appeals court, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told a press briefing: “America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president, for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges.”
US President Donald Trump criticized the trade court decision that said he had overstepped his authority by setting global tariffs.
“The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political! Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY,” he wrote on Truth Social, going on to question if the legal decision came out of “purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP.'”
The over 500-word post also claimed that tariffs had brought “many Trillions of dollars” into the US economy. No current economic analysis supports this claim.