IUS President Donald Trump has imposed a new 10% global tariff to replace ones struck down by the Supreme Court, calling the ruling “terrible” and lambasting the justices who rejected his trade policy as “fools”.
The president unveiled the plan shortly after the justices outlawed most of the global tariffs the White House announced last year.
The court, in a 6-to-3 decision written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ruled that Mr. Trump had exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner last year. The ruling prompted a defiant response from the president: In a news conference at the White House, Mr. Trump excoriated the justices who had ruled against him as “fools and lap dogs” and foreshadowed the new tariffs he announced within hours, to begin on Tuesday.
Over the course of President Trump’s second term, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has sided with the president on key issues in most cases, often without explaining why. But on Friday, Trump repeatedly attacked the conservative justices who voted against him on tariffs as disloyal. In a social media post in the evening, Trump suggested that two of the justices he appointed, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, were disloyal compared to liberal members of the court appointed by his Democratic predecessors.
“What happened today,” Trump said of the vote, “never seems to happen with Democrats. They vote against the Republicans, and never against themselves, almost every single time, no matter how good a case we have.”
He added, “At least I didn’t appoint Roberts,” referring to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative who was appointed by President George W. Bush. Roberts wrote the ruling upending Trump’s tariffs.