Trump SCREAMS as Supreme Court PULLS Most SHOCKING Move Against Him Yet

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]We're coming on the air because the Supreme Court has just released a major decision which could have a profound impact on the midterm elections. The justices issuing a ruling on a case out of Louisiana involving the Voting Rights Act, redistricting, and whether states must end any consideration of race when redrawing congressional maps. The decision potentially reducing the influence of minority voters and minority representation in Congress.

[00:00:27]Let's get right to our senior Washington correspondent Devon Dwer who covers the Supreme Court for us. Devon >> Kira, this decision is 6 to3 written by Justice Samuel Alo and it's a significant decision and a setback for the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 which was a pass to guarantee equality in how we vote. Donald Trump spent his entire first term remaking the Supreme Court. Three appointments in four years.

[00:00:54]Neil Gorsuch replacing Anton Scalia confirmed April 2017 in the same seat that Mitch McConnell had refused to let Obama fill for nearly a year. One of the most consequential pieces of political hor in modern Senate history. Brett Kavanaaugh replacing Antony Kennedy confirmed October 2018 after one of the most contentious confirmation processes in decades with allegations of sexual assault and days of testimony that consumed the entire country's attention.

[00:01:19]Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg nominated just eight days before the 2020 election and confirmed in one of the fastest and most contested confirmation fights in modern American history over the objections of every Democrat in the Senate who pointed out that McConnell had blocked Merrick Garland 8 months before an election in 2016 and was now confirming a nominee 8 days before an election in 2020. Three justices, a 6-3 conservative supermajority, the most right-leaning Supreme Court in generations. And Trump spent his out of power years and his 2024 campaign running on the idea that the court was his, that he had built it.

[00:01:56]That when cases came before it that mattered to him, the court would deliver for him because it was in a meaningful political sense his creation. He used that claim as a fundraising pitch. He used it as a campaign message. He told his supporters that the court was stacked his way and would protect his agenda. And then on February 20th, 26, that court ruled 6 to3 against the most important economic policy of his second term. Gorsuch voted against him. Barrett voted against him. And Trump went on speeches and interviews and social media and said publicly with his name on the words that Gorsuch and Barrett sickened him, that they disgusted him, that they had betrayed him. Can you believe this?

[00:02:33]The man who appointed those justices to the highest court in the country is saying publicly that they disgusted him because they ruled against him. That tells you everything you need to know about how Trump understood the relationship he had built, not as an appointment of independent jurors who would serve the Constitution as they understood it, as an appointment of people who owed him outcomes in cases that mattered to him. And when they ruled on the law rather than on loyalty, he treated it as a personal betrayal that sickened him. This is wild. And the ruling and the rage together are the most revealing moment in Trump's relationship with the judicial branch in his entire political career. Stay with me. But before we go any further, real quick, let's be honest. You can't really trust mainstream media anymore. That's why we built Pump Politics to bring you real stories, real context, and no corporate spin. If you want to stay ahead of the headlines, join our free newsletter. We'll send the news straight to your inbox every day. Just click the link in the description to join. And if you just want to support what we're doing, join us. Be part of the community that actually cares about the truth. All right, let's get back to the video.

[00:03:35]>> I'm ashamed of certain members of the court. absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what's right for our country.

[00:03:44]>> That is how President Trump reacted after the Supreme Court ruled that he cannot order sweeping tariffs. The decision is a major blow to the president's second term agenda. Fox 9's Mike Manzon is following these developments from the newsroom tonight.

[00:03:58]So Mike, President Trump calling this decision a disgrace.

[00:04:01]>> And Simone, he called the people who brought the case to the Supreme Court sleas bags. That's his word. The majority ruled that the president cannot use emergency powers to issue sweeping tariffs, though they did not say he couldn't use other laws to impose them.

[00:04:14]Last year, President Trump imposed tariffs on nearly every country. The Supreme Court ruled that he cannot set and change tariffs because that power belongs to Congress. Here is the specific ruling and what is said because the legal language that Roberts used in the majority opinion is more pointed and more politically significant than the headlines captured. The case arose from an educational toy company called Learning Resources that had been hit with massive tariff increases on the product it imports from overseas. The company sued arguing that the law Trump used to impose those tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, does not actually authorize the president to impose tariffs at all.

[00:04:52]EPA gives the president broad authority to regulate imports and exports during declared national emergencies created by foreign threats. It has been used for decades to freeze assets, block financial transactions, impose targeted sanctions, restrict specific trade relationships with adversarial nations.

[00:05:08]What it has never been used for in the nearly 50 years since his passage is imposing broad indefinite comprehensive tariffs on the entire global economy. No president before Trump had ever tried to use it that way. And when the Supreme Court looked at the specific language of the statute and the claim Trump was making, the claim that IEPA's regulation language was broad enough to let him impose tariffs on any product from any country at any rate for any duration.

[00:05:33]Roberts wrote in the majority opinion the sentence that became the defining legal statement of the entire case.

[00:05:39]Those words cannot bear such weight. Can you believe this? that is the Supreme Court of the United States in plain English telling a sitting president that the legal claim he built his entire economic agenda on was simply too heavy for the two words he tried to build it on and then they struck down the tariffs and the rage that followed was immediate. Trump's public reaction to the ruling was one of the most extraordinary things any American president has said about the Supreme Court in modern history. He did not issue a measured statement of respectful disagreement with the majority's legal reasoning. He went on speeches and interviews and said that justices Barrett and Gorsuch, the two Trump appointees who had joined the majority, sickened him. He said they disgusted him. He said they had betrayed the country. He accused them of lacking courage. He singled them out by name for personal condemnation in a way that no president in memory had ever done to sitting Supreme Court justices. And then in separate posts and statements, he called the ruling a disgrace to the nation. He accused the justices of being influenced by foreign interests. He said the court had made a catastrophic mistake that would be remembered as one of the worst decisions in his history and then he announced replacement tariffs under a completely different statute the same afternoon. The message was simultaneously, I have contempt for this ruling and I will work around it immediately. But working around it was not as simple as announcing new authority. The replacement tariffs ran into the same legal walls within weeks and the financial consequences of the original ruling, $175 billion or more in tariffs now potentially subject to refund claims did not disappear because Trump called the decision disgusting.

[00:07:09]The legal reality that the ruling created was durable in a way that no social media post or speech could undo.

[00:07:15]All right, let's go through the full substance of the ruling and its consequences because the specific legal reasoning Roberts used and the specific financial implications of what comes next, the parts of this story that most coverage reduced to a few sentences when they deserve paragraphs. Start with the major questions doctrine because this is the legal framework that made the ruling possible and that will shape presidential power claims for decades.

[00:07:36]The Supreme Court has been developing a principle over recent terms called the major questions doctrine. The idea is straightforward, but its implications are enormous. When the executive branch claims authority under a statute to do something that would have a sweeping economic, political, or social impact, court should require that Congress has explicitly and clearly authorized that specific action before accepting that the authority exists. The doctrine grew out of a series of cases where executive agencies had tried to use broadly written regulatory authority to address issues that Congress had never specifically addressed, claiming in essence that general language in old statutes gave them power to regulate entirely new categories of conduct. The court kept saying, "No, if you want to exercise that much power, Congress needs to say so clearly." The Aie EA tariff case was the most high-profile application of that doctrine since the court began developing it. Trump's administration argued that Aie EA's authority to regulate imports, gave the president the power to impose tariffs.

[00:08:32]Roberts and the majority looked at that argument and applied the major questions test. This is an action of enormous economic significance, so we need explicit congressional authorization for it, not a general regulatory grant. And the word tariff does not appear anywhere in EPA. Congress never said explicitly that IEPA gives the president tariff authority. So the authority does not exist. The simplicity of that reasoning is what makes it so devastating to the administration's legal position. They built a 175 billion tariff architecture on two words. And the court said those words cannot bear such weight. Now let's talk about the specific coalition that produced the 6 to3 majority. Because who voted which way and why is the part of this ruling that Trump's rage cannot escape from and that the political coverage often glosses over too quickly.

[00:09:18]The six justices in the majority were Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Sodomayor, Justice Kagan, Justice Jackson, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Barrett. The three dissenters were Justice Alo, Justice Thomas, and Justice Kavanaaugh. Look at that breakdown carefully because every name in it tells you something specific. Roberts leading the majority a Republicanapp appointed chief justice who has spent his career trying to preserve the institutional credibility of the court as an institution above partisan politics and who is using the major questions doctrine here as a conservative legal tool that limits executive overreach rather than enabling it. So to Mayor Kagan and Jackson in the majority, the three Democratic appointees, all of whom would have been expected to be skeptical of broad claims of presidential emergency power, and then Gorsuch and Barrett, the two Trump appointees in the majority, Gorsuch confirmed in 2017, filling Scalia seat, the justice Trump had pointed to most consistently as the embodiment of his judicial legacy and the proof that Federalist Society style originalism would dominate the court's jurist prudence. Barrett confirmed in 2020 the third Trump appointee, the justice who completed the 6-3 conservative supermajority. Both of them in the majority against him. Kavanaaugh Trump's second appointment in the descent. So of Trump's three justices, the score on the most important legal challenge to his second term economic agenda was two against him and one with him. Trump had a mathematical expectation of loyalty and a narrative of court ownership that he had been using for years to tell his supporters that the court was in his corner. The ruling did not just reject his tariff policy on its merits. It destroyed that political narrative completely. The conservative supermajority that Trump built is not his to direct in cases that matter to his agenda. It is a court that applies legal principles, including conservative legal principles that constrain executive power regardless of who benefits. And Trump has not absorbed that lesson even after the ruling. His rage at Gorsuch and Barrett is the rage of a man who still does not understand or will not accept that he built a court that was never going to be the instrument of his personal agenda that claimed it to be. Now, let's talk about the financial consequences in specific and concrete terms because a $175 billion refund exposure is the most consequential immediate outcome of the ruling and the one that most directly threatens the administration's fiscal position and its relationship with American businesses. From the moment the EPA tariffs were first imposed in early 2025, American importers were paying them sometimes at rates ranging from 10% to over 100% on specific categories of goods from specific countries. Those payments went into the federal treasury as revenue. They were counted in budget projections. They were cited by the administration as evidence that foreign countries were paying for the tariff program rather than American consumers.

[00:11:56]a claim that economists widely call false. Since American importers pay the tariffs and pass the cost to consumers, when the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unlawful, it did not specify a refund mechanism. It declared them illegal under IEA and left the question of what happens to already collected money to lower courts and administrative agencies. But the legal logic is straightforward. If the tariffs were never legally authorized, the money collected under them was collected without legal authority. that is the basis for the refund claims. Within days of the ruling, over 2,000 American businesses have filed claims at the Court of International Trade seeking refunds on over $ 160 billion in tariff payments. The Pen Wharton budget model estimated the total exposure, including interest, could reach $175 billion or more. That is not a political number invented by critics. That is a fiscal analysis of what the legal consequence of striking down an unlawful revenue collection looks like when calculated across a year of collections that the scale Trump's tariff program operated.

[00:12:54]Are you kidding me? The administration was collecting hundreds of billions of dollars under legal authority the Supreme Court said never existed. And then there is the replacement tariff scramble because the administration's response to the ruling was to immediately pivot to alternative legal authorities. And watching that pivot reveals exactly how dependent the entire secondterm trade strategy was on the specific EPA authority that the court struck down. Within hours of the February 20th ruling, the administration announced a new 10% global tariff under section 122 of the trade act of 1974.

[00:13:27]Section 122 allows the president to impose a temporary search charge of up to 15% on imports in situations where there is a large and serious balance of payments deficit. It has never been used before in American history. It statutory requirements, a genuine and demonstrable balance of payments crisis, were immediately identified by trade lawyers as not clearly met by the current economic situation. Trump raised the section 122 rate to 15% the following morning via true social post. And within weeks, the court of international trade struck down the section 122 tariffs as well, finding that the administration's invocation of balance of payments justification did not meet the legal standard the statute required. The pivot failed. The backup authority was legally insufficient and the administration was left with the narrower and slower moving tools of section 301 trade investigations and section 232 national security reviews processes that take months require specific procedural steps and produce targeted tariffs on specific products rather than the sweeping universal coverage that IEPA had enabled. The broad emergency powered global tariff regime is gone. What replaces it will be more constrained, more targeted, more legally defensible, and dramatically less politically powerful than what Trump had built. Can you believe this? The most aggressive unilateral trade program in modern American history struck down with no immediately available replacement of comparable scope. Let's break it all the way down. Four clean points and then we talk about what all of this means for the future of presidential emergency powers and why this ruling will be studied constitutional law courses for the next 50 years. Point one that those words cannot bear such weight. Language is the most significant piece of judicial writing about executive power in years and it was written by a chief justice who was appointed by a Republican president. Roberts is not a liberal justice. He was appointed by George W. Bush. He has written opinions protecting executive power in other contexts. The fact that he led a six justice majority using the clearest possible language to reject the president's claim, authority, and chose phrasing as pointed as those words cannot bear such weight tells you that the legal case for the tariffs was not a close call. The phrase is not the language of a court that wrestled with a genuinely difficult question and came down on one side by a slim margin. It is the language of a court that looked at the claim and found it obviously wrong.

[00:15:41]And those four words cannot bear such weight are now the permanent judicial shortorthhand for the limit of what I.e. EA authorizes. They will be cited every time any future president tries to use EA for something Congress did not explicitly authorize. That is the legal legacy of this ruling beyond the specific tariff policy is struck down.

[00:15:59]And it is the reason why this ruling matters. Not just for the remaining years of the Trump administration, but for every president who comes after him and every emergency power claim that any future executive branch tries to make using broadly worded statutory authority without explicit congressional authorization. Point two, the two Trump appointee defections in the majority are the most politically significant aspect of the ruling and the one that generates the personal betrayal language of disgust and sickens. When Trump appointed Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaaugh, the implicit political understanding in his coalition, the understanding that shaped his campaign promises about the court and fundraising around those nominations was that the justices he put on the court would be reliable votes for his agenda in cases that matter to him and to his political base. The tariff ruling revealed that understanding to be wrong in the most public and undeniable possible way.

[00:16:49]Gorsuch and Barrett applied the major questions doctrine and concluded on the merits that the law did not support the tariff authority Trump claimed. They were not acting out of political opposition to Trump or personal animus toward him or ideological alignment with the liberal block. They were applying a conservative legal framework, the major questions doctrine, that limits government overreach and requires explicit congressional authorization for consequential executive actions. That framework is not a liberal legal innovation. It is a principle that conservative legal scholars including the Federalist Society Network that helped recommend both Gorsuch and Barrett to Trump had consistently endorsed as a check on administrative state overreach. Gorsuch has written about the major questions doctrine extensively in his judicial opinions and academic writing. He was always likely to apply it aggressively in cases where executive power claims exceeded their statutory grounding. Trump's rage at Gorsuch and Barrett for applying a legal principle he and his supporters praise him for applying to administrative agencies when those agencies were acting under democratic administrations reveals the specific transactionalism at the heart of his relationship with the judiciary. He wanted them to apply conservative legal principles when those principles helped him advance his agenda. He did not anticipate or could not accept that those same principles would constrain him with equal force.

[00:18:03]The court does not work that way.

[00:18:04]Gorsuch and Barrett understood that. And when the court voted on the law rather than on loyalty, Trump's model of what he had built collapsed. Point three. The 175 billion refund exposure is a fiscal crisis that has not been resolved and will not be resolved quickly. The practical process of refunding 160 to 175 billion in tariff payments to thousands of importers across hundreds of product categories is not something the federal government can execute in a matter of months. It requires administrative adjudication of individual claims. It requires determination of which specific payments fall within the scope of the unlawful IEA tariffs versus those imposed under separate statutory authority that was not struck down. It requires calculating interest. It requires funding the refunds from a federal budget that was already counting on that tariff revenue.

[00:18:51]The section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs imposed under national security authority rather than IEPA were not affected by the ruling. The section 301 China tariffs on specific products already under investigation before the second term also not fully affected. But the sweeping reciprocal tariffs and the fentanyl related Canada, China and Mexico tariffs, the ones that form the bulk of the IEP and PA based revenue are all within the refund exposure. That is a legal and fiscal obligation that does not go away because the administration is angry about the ruling. The courts will work through the claims. The refunds will have to be processed and every dollar of refund is a dollar of revenue the federal budget has to replace from somewhere else. Point four, the ruling establishes a precedent that limits every future president's emergency economic powers, not just Trump's. This is the aspect that gets the least attention and coverage that focuses on the Trump specific drama and rage. The Supreme Court's ruling in the IE APA tariff case is now binding president on the legal limits of presidential emergency economic authority. It establishes that IE authorize the president to impose tariffs. It establishes that the major questions doctrine applies to claims of emergency economic power. And it establishes that when the president tries to exercise sweeping authority over the entire economy based on broadly worded statutory language, courts will require clear congressional authorization rather than deferring to executive interpretations. That principle applies to future presidents regardless of their party. A future Democratic president who wanted to use IEPA to impose trade restrictions for climate or labor purposes would face the same ruling. The ruling is not about Trump specifically. It is about the limits of presidential emergency power generally. And those limits are now more clearly defined than they have been at any point since IEPA was passed in 1977.

[00:20:37]Why this matters going forward and why this ruling will still be shaping American law and American trade policy years from now. The IEA tariff ruling does not end the administration's trade policy entirely. Section 301 investigations and section 232 national security reviews are underway and are producing replacement tariff structures on a slower and more targeted basis.

[00:20:59]Section 301 investigations into specific trade practices by specific countries.

[00:21:04]China's technology transfer policies, the European Union's agricultural subsidies, other countries specific unfair trade practices are the legal vehicle for tariffs on particular products from particular countries based on specific documented violations.

[00:21:17]Section 232 national security reviews are the vehicle for tariffs justified on national security grounds. The steel and aluminum tariffs that survive the EPA ruling have been imposed under section 232. Both of those processes take months rather than weeks. Both require specific procedural steps and specific documentation. Neither produces the sweeping universal coverage that EPA enabled. The replacement trade regime will be more constrained, more targeted, more defensible in court and dramatically less politically powerful as a unilateral economic weapon than what the IEA architecture had been.

[00:21:51]Trump will not be able to threaten any country with any tariff at any rate for any duration again because that is precisely what Roberts's opinion said.

[00:21:58]IEPA does not authorize and never authorize. And the $175 billion refund exposure will continue working its way through the courts for years with individual importer claims being adjudicated, interest being calculated, refunds being processed from a federal budget that was counting on that revenue. The rage at Gorsuch and Barrett, the discuss language, the second language is part of the permanent political and judicial record of what happened when a president who believed he had built court committed to his agenda discovered that the justices he appointed were instead committed to applying the law as they read it. That discovery cost him his most important second-term economic policy. It cost him his most powerful geopolitical leverage tool. It cost him $175 billion in collective revenue that will have to be unwound. And it established a precedent that will constrain the emergency economic power claims of every future president regardless of party for the indefinite future. Those words cannot bear such weight. Four words written by a Republican appointed chief justice joining five other justices including two of Trump's own. And they changed the constitutional landscape of presidential economic power permanently.