Analysis | Law

Trump throws a temper tantrum after tariff loss

February 21, 2026 6:00 AM ET
Nina Totenberg


President Trump excoriated the Supreme Court majority that struck down his use of emergency powers to implement international trade tariffs.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

At this time last year, President Trump warmly shook hands with Chief Justice John Roberts at the State of the Union address, thanking him for the opinion he authored granting Trump and other presidents in the future expansive immunity from prosecution for their official acts after leaving office. But on Friday, after the Supreme Court invalidated Trump's tariffs, the president was singing a decidedly different tune.

At a hastily called press conference, an agitated Trump railed against the conservative Roberts and two of the courts other conservatives, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both Trump appointees. ... "They're just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats," Trump said, using the apparently derisive acronym for "Republicans in name only." ... And that was hardly all. Trump called the three conservatives "disloyal, unpatriotic," and at one point he launched into a rant about how the court should have invalidated the election results in 2020, which Trump lost to Joe Biden.

The origin of legal battle

The battle over the tariffs began on day one of Trump's second term when he signed an executive order that allowed him to impose a wide range of tariffs on virtually every U.S. trading partner, with the tariffs being paid for mostly by U.S. businesses. ... On Friday, however, Trump suffered a massive defeat at the Supreme Court. Writing for a hefty 6-to-3 majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that the nation's founders deliberately and explicitly placed the power to impose taxes, including tariffs, with Congress, not with the president.

As the Chief Justice put it, "Having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by taxes imposed on them" by the King of England without their consent, the Framers wrote a Constitution that gives Congress the taxing power because the members of the legislature would be more accountable to the people.

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