The Supreme Court struck down President Trump's global tariffs, ruling he overstepped his authority without clear congressional permission.
WASHINGTON -- For nearly a decade, President Trump has viewed the Supreme Court as his ally, counting on the court's conservative majority to side with him in both his personal legal troubles and his policy goals.
That sense of harmony shattered Friday.
The decision striking down Trump's global tariffs was the most resounding brushback the court has ever delivered to him. It sent an unmistakable signal that, even for a highly conservative court that has tried to avoid an all-out conflict with an unpredictable president, there are some red lines that Trump cannot cross.
Trump responded with his signature pugnacity. He called the justices who ruled against him -- including two of his own appointees -- unpatriotic "fools" and "lap dogs" who were bowing to foreign interests. And he said that his days of being a "good boy" in how he talks about the court are over.
Seeking to steer the court through the morass is Chief Justice John Roberts, whose desire to stay above the political fray has been tested time and again by Trump.
Two years ago, Roberts wrote the decision granting Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution, helping smooth the path toward his return to the White House. And a year ago, after an address to a joint session of Congress, Trump shook Roberts’s hand, patted him on the shoulder and thanked him.
On Friday, it was Roberts who wrote the court's decision declaring that Trump had overstepped his authority by enacting sweeping tariffs without clear permission from Congress. His reasoning hinged on the bedrock constitutional principle that the taxing power -- which includes the power to levy tariffs -- belongs to the legislature, not the president.
Yet in some ways, his 21-page opinion rejecting the administration's claims of broad emergency powers was a departure from his lengthy record of endorsing robust executive authority in other areas, including in other Trump cases.
"It's almost Greek tragedy that Roberts, who has often endorsed expansive presidential power, including in the immunity opinion, is confronted by a president who is not only happy to take that to the far extreme but doesn't accept any constraints," said Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Other tests loom for the relationship between the president and the chief.
The two men will likely come face to face next Tuesday when Trump delivers the State of the Union and is likely to continue railing against the court. Asked at a press conference Friday whether the justices who ruled against him are still welcome to attend the speech, Trump said: "They're barely invited. Honestly, I couldn't care less if they come."
In the next few months, the court will rule on another one of Trump's assertions of power: his bid to remake the Federal Reserve by firing one of its governors. And it will also soon take up a cornerstone of Trump's immigration agenda, his attempt to eliminate automatic birthright citizenship.
Those disputes will be the next milestones in a decadelong string of Trump controversies that have largely defined the Roberts court. During Trump's first term in the White House, the court's three most significant rulings on his policies involved his travel ban, his attempt to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census and his effort to strip protections from immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Roberts wrote all three of those decisions. Trump won the first and lost the other two -- but none of them were as central to his agenda as his tariffs are.
"This was an important case to me," Trump said Friday, with clear disappointment in his voice.
After the 2020 election, the Supreme Court summarily rejected attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. But during the four years he was out of office, the court issued the landmark immunity decision as well as a decision blocking states from barring him from the 2024 ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Since Trump returned to the White House, the court has considered a series of emergency appeals from the administration on issues like his firings of independent regulators, his cuts to the federal workforce and his moves to quickly deport immigrants. In nearly all of those cases, he won preliminary rulings from the Supreme Court allowing his policies to take effect notwithstanding lower-court injunctions that had blocked them.
The president's record so far of second-term success at the high court made the tariffs defeat even more jarring. But in some ways, the defeat -- for all its symbolic weight in the dynamic between two branches of government -- wasn't total.
After all, the decision left the door open for Trump to try to re-enact his tariffs through other legal authorities. ("We do not speculate" on whether he could do so, Roberts wrote in a footnote.)
And in a noteworthy omission, Roberts didn't address the momentous question of whether the government must pay back the tens of billions of dollars in tariff revenue it has already collected from U.S. companies importing goods. Ordering refunds, as some observers expected the court to do, would have exacerbated the blow to Trump. Instead, Roberts left the refund question to be sorted out in the lower courts.
Michael Nelson, a political scientist at Penn State whose research focuses on the power of courts, said the tariff ruling may prove to be only a stumbling block in Trump's mission to remake U.S. trade. Its larger significance, he said, is how it fits into Roberts's project of preserving the court's public image as it faces a president who pushes boundaries and attacks anyone who stands in his way.
"It is good for the court as an institution that people understand that there are times when it will say no to the president," Nelson said. "It's good for the court's public standing that people see that it does impose limits on executive power."