In February, six Supreme Court justices told Donald Trump his tariffs were illegal. Two of the six were his own appointees. His response was to call them fools, question their loyalty, and keep charging you the tariffs anyway.
Here’s the part that should bother you more than the insult. On February 20, in Learning Resources v. Trump, the Court ruled 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act never gave a president the authority to tax imports on his own say-so. Chief Justice John Roberts put it about as plainly as a chief justice can: the Framers never vested any part of the taxing power in the executive branch. Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both Trump picks, sided with the majority. Trump called them “fools” and “lapdogs” and floated that foreign influence had somehow gotten to the Court. He did not stop the tariffs. His administration is now arguing, in a separate case, that tariffs, deportations, and National Guard deployments simply aren’t something courts get to review in the first place. Not “we lost, we’ll adjust.” Just: you don’t get a say.
That phrase keeps showing up this year. In March, Trump told reporters, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” about his new White House ballroom. By June, internal records obtained by the Washington Post said something else: the project’s price tag had grown to $600 million, and taxpayers were covering roughly $307 million of it, routed through the Secret Service, the White House Military Office, and the Executive Residence budget. Rep. Katherine Clark’s summary was blunt: “How many times did Trump say zero taxpayer dollars would go to his gilded ballroom? He lied.” The donor list, released later, includes Amazon, Meta, and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman. Trump’s own name isn’t on it. Neither is an apology for the first version of the story.
Now set that next to Anthony Fauci. He pleaded the Fifth more than a hundred times in a Senate hearing this summer, which is a real constitutional protection, available to anyone, for exactly this reason. A Rand Paul-led committee voted to hold him in contempt anyway and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department, which is still deciding what to do with it. So a private citizen asserting his rights is treated like a confession waiting to happen, while a sitting president gets told by the highest court in the country, 6-3, that what he’s doing is against the law, and just keeps doing it with no committee vote, no referral, nothing.
I don’t care that this is a Republican or a Democrat doing it — I’d be writing the same post either way, and I’ve been just as hard on the other side’s spending habits in this space. What I care about is that the rules only seem to bend one direction. A ruling from the Supreme Court used to mean something was actually over. A promise about where your money isn’t going used to mean you could check. Right now neither one does, and the people pointing that out are the ones getting hauled in front of a committee.
Two cents: you don’t get to lose in court and keep doing the thing anyway. That’s not a legal opinion. That’s just what “illegal” means.