Trump Is Trying to Blackmail the Supreme Court

Ankush Khardori: “Donald Trump is making a last-ditch effort to salvage his beloved, beleaguered tariff policy, heading to the Supreme Court in hopes that the Republican appointees will come to his rescue. The desperation is both palpable and warranted given the conspicuous weakness of the administration’s legal arguments, as underscored by a series of lower court rulings against him. That has in turn led the president and his aides to make increasingly histrionic public claims about what will happen if the Supreme Court does not cave and side with Trump.”

“Call it The Chicken Little Defense: If the courts do not sign off on the administration’s tariffs, it ‘would be a total disaster for the Country’ and ‘would literally destroy the United States of America,’ Trump said on Friday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the bulk of the president’s tariffs are illegal. He doubled down on those claims on Tuesday while tacking on the transparently ridiculous assertion that the U.S. is ‘taking in $17 trillion … because of tariffs.’”