By James J. Devine
The veneer of invincibility shattered on Friday.
For the better part of a year, President Donald Trump had operated as if the normal rules of American governance did not apply to him.
He bulldozed through congressional prerogatives, dismissed judicial oversight as a nuisance, and treated the Constitution as a suggestion. The Supreme Court, with its six conservative justices, including three of his own making, had largely given him his way, greenlighting emergency orders and shielding him from accountability with a sweeping grant of immunity.
Congress posed less of an obstacle, with Republican majorities willing to bend over backward to endorse fascist executive overreach and spineless Senate Democrats who earned a moniker: The Capitulation Caucus.
Then came the tariffs ruling.
In a stinging 6-3 decision, the high court told the president what he apparently never expected to hear from a judiciary he had packed, cajoled, and publicly courted: No. You went too far.
The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to tax. The 1977 emergency law Trump twisted into a pretzel to justify his global trade war does not mean what he says it means.
After his tariffs were ruled unlawful, the reaction from the White House briefing room, delivered with the president’s trademark blend of grievance and grandiosity, was less the measured response of a chief executive accepting judicial review than the sputtering of a man betrayed by his own servants.
“I’m ashamed of certain members of the court. Absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” Trump told reporters, his voice carrying the sting of personal injury.
He singled out for particular abuse the two justices he himself placed on the bench: Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Both had joined Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion eviscerating the tariff program.
“I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, the two of them,” Trump said. “They’re just being fools and lap dogs” for political opponents. He went further, suggesting without evidence that the court had been “swayed by foreign interests” and accusing the majority of being “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”
It was, by any measure, an extraordinary moment. A sitting president of the United States, standing at the podium of the White House, publicly branding two of his own appointees as disloyal embarrassments to their families for the crime of exercising independent legal judgment. The three dissenters—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh—received effusive praise. Kavanaugh, the president said, is a “genius.”
But beneath the personal vitriol lies a larger question, one that hangs over the capital like the humid Washington summer that awaits: Is the dam breaking?
For the first year of his second term, Trump has governed as if the traditional checks and balances of the American republic were mere stage dressing.
He has asserted the power to impound funds Congress appropriated, triggering a constitutional crisis that remains unresolved.
He has launched military strikes without congressional authorization.
He has demanded the firing of any federal employee he deems disloyal, dared judges to stop him, and called for the impeachment of those who tried.
He has treated the Republican-controlled Congress less as a coequal branch than as a clerical service for his decrees.
And for most of that year, the courts—including the Supreme Court—largely stood aside, allowing his agenda to proceed while legal challenges slowly wound their way through the system. Emergency applications were granted. Injunctions were lifted. The president kept winning.
Friday was different. This was not a temporary stay or a procedural ruling. This was a merits decision, a final judgment on the lawfulness of a major executive action. And it cut to the heart of Trump’s governing philosophy: the belief that presidential power, particularly in matters of economics and national security, knows no bounds.
The court’s message was unmistakable. Congress taxes. Congress regulates commerce. The president executes the laws; he does not invent them. Roberts, writing for the majority, noted that the framers “did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch.”
The 1977 emergency law, he wrote, contains no mention of tariffs. Had Congress intended to grant such authority, “it would have done so expressly.”
The ruling does more than upend a trade policy that has already cost more than 80,000 American manufacturing jobs while failing to shrink the trade deficit. It sends a signal to a president accustomed to deference: The judiciary still sees itself as a co-equal branch, not a subordinate one.
And Congress, too, shows faint signs of stirring. A handful of House Republicans recently voted with Democrats to disapprove of Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, drawing immediate threats of primary challenges from the president.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and former majority leader, issued a rare public statement praising the Supreme Court’s ruling as leaving “no room for doubt” that Trump’s circumvention of Congress was “illegal.”
“When Mitch McConnell agrees with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court that a Republican president exceeded his authority, the tectonic plates may be shifting,” said one observer..
It remains to be seen whether these are the first tremors of a broader realignment or merely isolated quakes that will be absorbed by the system.
The president has already announced he will impose new tariffs under a different legal theory, citing Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974—a provision never before used for such broad purposes.
He has made clear he has no intention of asking Congress for explicit authorization. The fight is not over; it has merely entered a new phase.
But the cumulative weight of a year’s worth of actions—illegal in the view of many constitutional scholars, unconstitutional by the court’s own reckoning, immoral to critics who see cruelty as policy, and economically stupid by the evidence of job losses and rising prices—may finally be catching up with the president.
The Supreme Court has drawn a line. Congress may be inching toward asserting itself. The midterm elections loom, with control of both chambers in play.
For the six justices who ruled against him, the immediate future holds an awkward encounter.
On Tuesday night, by tradition, the Supreme Court will sit in the front rows of the House chamber for the State of the Union address.
The president will stand at the rostrum, within eyesight of the judges he has just labeled fools, lap dogs, unpatriotic, and disloyal.
Trump was asked on Friday whether they remain invited. His answer captured the disdain he feels for any institution that dares to check him.
“They’re barely invited,” he said. “Honestly, I couldn’t care less if they come.”
Whether the feeling is becoming mutual among the institutions themselves may determine the fate of the republic in the months ahead.
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