Trump IN TEARS As SCOTUS DELIVERS him Worst News of HIS LIFE!!

[00:00:00]Good to be with you. This is a CBS News Special Report. I'm Tony Dokoupil in New York and we are interrupting our normal programming because the Supreme Court has just issued what is a major ruling on the president's use of tariffs. We have a team going through this decision right now from a legal and economic and a political point of view, but first our legal correspondent Jan Crawford who has the decision for us in Washington. Jen?

[00:00:24]>> Tony, this decision is 6-3 invalidating President Trump's use of the sweeping tariffs imposing tariffs on almost every trading partner worldwide.

[00:00:35]>> When the text pointed away from the administration's position, two of Trump's own picks followed it anyway, and the president responded by attacking the very judicial philosophy his political movement has championed for decades the moment it produced a result he did not like. Now to the money because the dollar figures here are enormous and they are not abstract.

[00:00:56]>> This Chicago area educational toy company Learning Resources was part of the lawsuit challenging the tariffs arguing the taxes would devastate their business.

[00:01:06]>> We're feeling vindicated. We felt that the tax was an unlawful tax and we're excited to see the Supreme Court take a very strong stance in favor of the equal application of law to all of us.

[00:01:18]>> Despite the Supreme Court's ruling President Trump says he will continue his policy by collecting new global tariffs under a different statute.

[00:01:27]>> The Treasury had already collected more than $160 billion in tariff revenue under the now invalidated law with some estimates of total refund exposure running as high as $175 billion. To put that in perspective, that is more than the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security, roughly double what the federal government spends each year on the National Institutes of Health and enough to fund the entire Pell Grant program for low-income college students for years.

[00:01:55]When a tariff is found to have been collected without legal authority, the businesses that paid it have grounds to get that money back, and that is exactly what is starting to happen. FedEx has already filed a multi-billion dollar refund claim, and it is widely seen as just the first of many.

[00:02:11]>> President Trump's favorite economic tool is the tariff, and tariffs are taxes on imports, on products that are brought into the United States from abroad.

[00:02:22]>> On his first day in office, the president announced that he'd be putting a 25% charge on goods from Mexico and Canada, probably starting February 1st.

[00:02:32]>> Like other taxes, tariffs raise money for the government. They can also be used to protect domestic industries from foreign competition, and they can also be used to punish foreign countries if we think they've been behaving badly, having bad >> Over the past year, the entire sales pitch for these tariffs was that foreign countries would pay them, that China pays, that the European Union pays, that Canada and Mexico pay, and that America wins while everyone else foots the bill.

[00:03:02]That was never how tariffs actually work.

[00:03:05]American importers pay tariffs at the border to US Customs before goods are even released to be sold. Foreign exporters never send a check to the Treasury, so the same American companies that quietly paid these tariffs for months may now get refunds directly from the US government, money taken from American businesses sitting briefly with the Treasury.

[00:03:25]>> Supreme Court handed President Trump a significant defeat for his economic agenda today, ruling his use of emergency tariffs is illegal. In a 6-3 decision, the justices determined the president does not have the power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose taxes. The ruling strikes a stunning blow to the centerpiece of the president's economic agenda. It also marks the first major ruling by the high court against the president's expanded use of power in office. He spoke about the ruling at a press conference a short time ago.

[00:03:54]>> I can destroy the trade. I can destroy the country.

[00:03:58]I'm even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo. I can embargo.

[00:04:04]I can do anything I want, but I can't charge $1.

[00:04:08]>> In the immediate aftermath, the administration scrambled for a fallback.

[00:04:12]Within days, Trump invoked a different law, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose temporary tariffs, but only for a maximum of 150 days, and only for narrower purposes than the sweeping global regime that was just struck down.

[00:04:30]New tariffs went into effect under that authority almost immediately, first at 10%, and then raised to 15.

[00:04:37]But 150 days is not a trade policy. It is a countdown clock.

[00:04:42]Supply chains cannot be rerouted, contracts cannot be renegotiated, and manufacturing decisions cannot be reversed on that timeline. It buys the administration a few months of headlines, not a replacement for the legal foundation that just collapsed.

[00:04:57]And when that window closes, the administration will be right back where it started without a durable legal basis for the policy it is called essential.

[00:05:06]>> President Trump's reciprocal tariff set to go into effect Wednesday, April 9th, would bring import taxes to the highest level for the US since 1930. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act enacted by President Herbert Hoover in 1930 came months into the Great Depression.

[00:05:20]Designed to protect American farmers and manufacturers, these tariffs instead kicked off retaliation from US trade partners, bringing global trade to a standstill. The tariffs were renegotiated under President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. So far, multiple nations have expressed a desire to negotiate with the US on these tariffs.

[00:05:38]And according to our next guest, tariffs don't necessarily mean tough economic times ahead.

[00:05:42]>> Once reached, the ruling did not end the trade conflict. In other words, it simply changed its legal shape, and the administration's continued attacks on the court itself do little to suggest the underlying approach has softened.

[00:05:56]The historical comparison that keeps coming up is Herbert Hoover, the president most associated with the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, tariffs many economists believe deepened and prolonged the Great Depression.

[00:06:10]Trump has spent years holding Hoover up as an example of weakness, contrasting it with his own supposed strength and deal-making ability, often citing Hoover as the last president to even attempt tariffs on this scale before himself.

[00:06:24]Now, his own signature tariff program has been struck down as illegal by a court that includes three of his own nominees, not by a future administration or by Congress reversing course, but by the very institution he bragged about reshaping for a generation. The comparison is not perfect. The economic circumstances of 1930 and 2026 are very different, but the symbolism is hard to avoid. The modern president who built his identity around rejecting the Hoover comparison now finds his own tariff legacy ending not with a market collapse, but with a courtroom defeat handed down by judges he himself put on the bench. There is also a pattern worth naming in the language Trump has used since the ruling, calling the Supreme Court a weaponized unjust political organization, saying it ransacked the country, suggesting it was influenced by foreign interests. These are not simply complaints about legal reasoning. They are attacks on the legitimacy of the institution itself, the idea that its rulings reflect bias rather than law.

[00:07:25]That is a different posture than how past presidents have handled losses at the Supreme Court.

[00:07:31]Barack Obama, after the court gutted parts of his immigration agenda, expressed disappointment, but said the administration would comply.

[00:07:40]George W. Bush, after losing the Guantanamo detainee cases, criticized the reasoning but worked within the new framework the ruling created. Bill Clinton disagreed with rulings that limited his authority without ever suggesting the court itself was illegitimate. Even Richard Nixon, for all his conflicts with the judiciary, ultimately complied with court orders.

[00:08:00]Trump's response here goes further than disagreement toward delegitimizing the institution that ruled against him, and that message does not simply disappear once the news cycle moves on.

[00:08:11]It becomes part of how a portion of the public views the court going forward, and it sets a precedent for how future adverse rulings from this administration or the next might be received. There is a broader question sitting underneath all of this that legal scholars will be debating for years. What happens when a sitting president responds to losing at the Supreme Court not by disagreeing with the reasoning, which presidents have always done, but by telling the public the court itself cannot be trusted? What happens when a meaningful share of that president's supporters absorb that message? And what happens the next time a president, this one or a future one, faces a ruling they do not like and decides the previous president was right that the court has no real legitimacy and that compliance is optional. Those are not hypothetical questions anymore. For now, the administration has said it will comply with this ruling, and in that narrow sense the system held. But the episode still functioned as a kind of stress test, and it revealed that the norms protecting judicial independence are more dependent on voluntary restraint than many people had assumed. Restraint that was visibly strained here even when the court ultimately got its way. The business community's reaction has been telling in what it has not said as much as what it has. The US Chamber of Commerce, which had stayed largely quiet through the tariff fights, issued a statement after the ruling that avoided defending the administration and avoided attacking the court, simply noting that businesses need certainty and that the decision had created exactly the kind of uncertainty Congress should now address.

[00:09:43]The National Association of Manufacturers was more direct, calling on Congress to clarify trade authority going forward so future administrations do not repeat the same legal mistakes.

[00:09:54]Read between the lines and both groups are saying something similar. They are done waiting on the White House to resolve this and they are looking past it to Congress and the courts for the stability trade policy actually requires.

[00:10:07]So what happens now? In the short term, expect the administration to lean as hard as it can on that 150 day Section 122 window, framing each new tariff announcement as continued fights for American workers while quietly hoping something changes before the clock runs out, whether that is a shift in Congress, a new legal theory, or simply running out the political calendar.

[00:10:31]Congress is unlikely to hand the administration new tariff authority in the current political environment and the Supreme Court is not going to revisit a 6-3 ruling on this kind of timeline. Meanwhile, the refund claims will keep working their way through the courts for years. Each new filing from a major company serving as a fresh reminder that the policy at the heart of this presidency's economic agenda was found to be illegal. A reminder that will keep surfacing in headlines long after this particular news cycle fades.

[00:11:00]The administration has signaled it intends to keep exploring alternative legal authorities, but every alternative on the table is narrower, slower, and more constrained than the sweeping emergency powers approach the court just rejected, which means the gap between the tariff policy as it was sold and the tariff policy as it can legally exist going forward is unlikely to close anytime soon.

[00:11:22]Politically, the ground is already shifting.

[00:11:25]Republican lawmakers who quietly went along with the tariffs while the money was flowing in and the legal footing looked secure are now facing a very different set of facts. A court ruling against their own party's president, a refund bill that could run into the hundreds of billions, and a president who spent 45 minutes attacking the judiciary on national television and then kept going for days afterward.

[00:11:49]Vulnerable incumbents heading into the midterms are not eager to defend any of that, and the calculation in competitive districts has visibly changed since the ruling came down.

[00:12:00]Few lawmakers want to be asked on camera why the president's own appointees ruled against him, or why a policy that was supposed to make other countries pay is instead sending refund checks to American companies, and fewer still want to defend a 45-minute attack on the Supreme Court as a normal or appropriate response from the head of the executive branch. Strip away all the noise, and the through line is simple. Trump built the defining economic claim of his second term on a legal theory that his own appointees ultimately rejected, using the same judicial philosophy his movement spent decades fighting to install on the bench. The money collected under that theory may now flow back out to the very American companies that paid it, not to the foreign countries he promised would foot the bill. And rather than accept that outcome the way past presidents have accepted adverse rulings, he responded by attacking the court itself, including the two justices he once held up as his proudest judicial legacy, telling them in public that they sicken him and that their decision was an embarrassment to their families. For years, the tariff regime served as a kind of proof, evidence that ignoring conventional advice and pushing through with sheer force of will produced results other presidents were too cautious to achieve.

[00:13:15]That narrative depended on the tariff staying in place, on the revenue continuing to flow, and on the legal theory underneath it all holding up under scrutiny. The Supreme Court removed all three at once, and did it with a margin 6 to 3 that leaves very little room to argue this was a fluke or a close call that might be revisited if the court's composition changes.

[00:13:37]Two of the six votes against the administration came from justices Trump nominated himself, applying the same legal philosophy his political movement spent a generation fighting to put on the bench.

[00:13:49]He said himself that this was the ruling that mattered most to him, more than any other decision of his presidency. By his own measure, it is also the one that has cost him and the country the most, not only in the dollars that may now have to be refunded, but in the example it sets for how a president responds when the institutions he counted on to back him instead simply followed the law.

[00:14:11]Major retailers like Walmart and Target, automakers like Ford and General Motors, technology companies like Apple and Dell, and agricultural exporters like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland are all believed to be reviewing their own filings. Each one paying close attention to how the courts handle questions like whether refunds go to the importers who paid the tariffs directly or to the consumers who ultimately absorbed the cost through higher prices, and whether the government can offset what it owes against other taxes.

[00:14:42]None of those questions have simple answers, and resolving them is likely to take years, generating its own wave of litigation costs along the way. Every time a major company announces a new refund claim, it will become a fresh headline, a recurring reminder that a policy sold to voters as a winning strategy ended up being ruled unlawful by the nation's highest court. Here is the part that should land hardest with anyone who heard Trump's pitch