The Real Reason Trump Is Pissed About the Supreme Court Tariff Ruling
They took away his favorite blackmail tool
Snatch a toddler’s favorite toy away, and nine times out of ten, they’ll have a fit. This is what happened when the Supreme Court ruled just before the weekend that the toddler-in-chief couldn’t invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) to blackmail various nations with tariffs.
“They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” he whined after the ruling. He then bellowed, “The Court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” Huh?
Hot tip to the Teflon Cupcake: The Federalist Society is not only a lot bigger than people think, but if not for them, you’d be some convict’s final victory dance on their way to death row right now instead of a shyster cosplaying as a mad king.
The IEEPA is an act unrelated to tariffs that is designed as a sanctions tool when countries like Russia do bad things like invade Ukraine.1 The grifter was using the act to blackmail world leaders into following his orders. It formed a critical part of the regime’s foreign policy toolset.
The Supreme Court said that the act doesn’t include anything about tariffs and that, instead, it is designed mostly as a sanctions tool.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the way he invoked the law was wrong on statutory grounds, and thus “ordinary rules of statutory interpretation” mean he can’t arbitrarily impose tariffs.
The three justices who have been busy handing off parcels of the Constitution to the Grifter in Chief focused on something else, which legal beagles like writers at SCOTUS blog call the “major questions” doctrine. The doctrine has been used by crooked Federalist justices as a cudgel against Democratic presidents in the past to get around Constitutional law.
This kind of terminology, like almost all legal terminology, is almost intentionally vague so that lawyers can charge you $1200 an hour to interpret it for you if you should ever need their service.
The term “questions doctrine” simply means, in the words of SCOTUS Blog, that any invoked presidential power requires “clear congressional authorization.”2
Trump called his tariffs “reciprocal tariffs,” usually claiming that he imposed them on nations that were already imposing tariffs on the U.S. The mainstream press, as usual, copied his language and helped spread his propaganda. Luckily, the Supreme Court saw through it and snatched away one of his favorite toys.
This drew his ire, so he called them mean names, even though they’ve rubber-stamped almost every other awful thing he’s done.
He can still invoke tariffs using some existing laws, but other laws are more broad-based and usually, depending on the statute, have an expiration date. That’s why he immediately said, upon hearing the bad news, that he’d impose 10% tariffs on everyone. He then soiled his diaper and changed it to 15%, but I honestly don’t know what it’s currently at, because what’s the point of researching something like that when we know it will change in 24 hours?
Some examples of how Trump used the IEEPA to retaliate and blackmail target countries:
He set the highest tariffs on Brazil because one of its Supreme Court justices, Alexandre de Moraes, sanctioned the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Trump-like former president, who was convicted by the nation’s Supreme Court for leading a coup attempt (must be nice). Bolsonaro’s son tried to rally Steve Bannon to Bolsonaro’s cause, but de Moraes said, “nope,” and, boom! 50% tariffs.3
Trump raised Swiss tariffs after speaking with a Swiss leader during a phone call: ‘I didn’t really like the way she talked.’ (He was probably hitting on her). He referred to her as the Prime Minister when he whined to the press about the call, but Switzerland doesn’t have a prime minister, so nobody knows who the hell he was referring to. The mental inebriate described the conversation thusly:4
“Again and again and again. I couldn’t get her off the phone. So [the tariffs were] at 30 percent, and I didn’t really like the way she talked to us, and so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent, and then I got inundated by people from Switzerland and I figured, ‘Do you know what? We’ll do something that’s a little bit more palatable.’” Well. Okay, then.
In January 2025, when Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected two U.S. military aircraft full of abducted migrants, Trump ordered a 25 percent increase in tariffs on Colombia. Petro quickly reversed his decision.5
He raised tariffs an additional 10% on Canada (after raising them during previous spats with the intellectually superior Canadian PM Mark Carney) when the province of Ontario aired an advertisement quoting Reagan dissing tariffs and saying they “hurt every American.”6
In February 2025, he issued an executive order imposing tariffs on Mexico (25%), Canada (25%), and China (10%). The excuses varied depending on the slush inside his head on any given date, which is why the acronym “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) became part of the American lexicon. The idea here was to impose the tariffs and demand things in return for lifting the tariffs. Tariffs turned on and off as if he had a switch in the Oval Office. Today, I get the feeling nobody knows what the actual tariff percentages are except maybe Mark Carney, and he’s not saying.
Image created by author from images licensed from Adobe Stock. For a while, the orange grifter even sometimes changed his mind based on stock market prices, but eventually the market gave up trying to guess what the hell he was doing, and just removed tariffs from their equations.
To coax China into reducing oil purchases from Mexico, he announced a 25% tariff on most Chinese goods. He also imposed various tariff rates (depending on day and mood) to force China to stop importing fentanyl into the U.S., an impossible ask since China is not a major source of street fentanyl in the U.S. His back and forth with China is another impossible thing to reliably track.
On February 10, he announced steel tariffs of 25 percent and aluminum tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 25 percent. Nobody really knows why, so it can’t be tied specifically to retaliation. The tariffs don’t fall within the IEEPA because they don’t target specific nations as part of an “emergency” response, which is the excuse he uses for imposing tariffs on individual nations. Their legality has not yet been addressed by the Supreme Court, so for now, they remain in effect.
The bullet points I’ve listed only touch on some of the retaliatory/blackmail type of tariffs Trump has imposed or threatened. The general back and forth of tariffs is much crazier than that. NPR has a nice timeline here.
Back and forth they go, where they stop, nobody knows.
The effects of tariffs on the economy are minimal, aside from taking money out of your wallet
The world is at the mercy of a lunatic in many ways. Tariffs are just one more, and nations and the stock market have learned to shrug off most of them.
No matter how the stock market feels about them, most economists agree that they hit your wallet directly.
The Tax Foundation says “Trump’s 2025 Tariffs Are the Largest Tax Hike Since 1993”
The Tax Foundation, an anti-tax lobbying group, calculates that each American’s taxes will effectively rise in 2026 by $400 through tariffs.7
This is because Trump has other avenues for imposing tariffs. The Supreme Court ruling prevents him from imposing tariffs arbitrarily or through TACO mechanisms. But he can still impose tariffs generally, which he did almost as soon as the Supreme Court ruled against him.
Don’t mistake Trump’s pivot after the ruling for intellectual alacrity. Susie Wiles and her team of sycophants had the new tariffs in their pockets already just in case the Supreme Court ruling didn’t go their way. The predator in chief is simply the bullhorn.
These new tariffs are highlighted by a 10% or 15% hike across the board, meaning every country is subject to them (and you’re paying them, not the country that is targeted).
The overall effect of this change in tariffs imposed by the Supreme Court, according to the Tax Foundation, is that the effective cumulative average tariff rates will fall from 13.5% to 6.4%. 8
There is almost no impact from tariffs on the balance of trade or domestic manufacturing growth
According to a survey by the grifter’s own Bureau of Economic Analysis, the annual trade deficit in goods (as opposed to goods and services) set a record high in 2025.
That didn’t stop him from lying in all caps on his personal message board, True Sociopath, by saying that the trade deficit has:
BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES. IT WILL GO INTO POSITIVE TERRITORY DURING THIS YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY DECADES.
Nobody has a clue what he’s talking about, but since most of his cult gets their news from him and from the various right-wing outlets that report directly from his mouth, that is what most of them now believe.
His Bureau of Economic Analysis didn’t stop there with its initial bad news:9
The federal agency further reported the U.S. trade deficit rose by 32.6% to $70.3 billion in December 2025. This was sparked by a 3.6% rise in imports ($357.6 billion) and a 1.7% drop in exports ($287.3 billion). Yay, tariffs!
There has been almost zero impact on manufacturing productivity, either, unless you include negative numbers. According to a report by Fortune magazine, the manufacturing sector lost 108,00 jobs in 2025.10
This number is part of a larger number: 166,000 blue-collar jobs were lost during Captain Snowflake’s first year of his second coronation. Way to go, Tariff Man!
Adding to the huge trough of numbers that would tell any normal person that tariffs might not be a great idea, last Wednesday, the New York Federal Reserve released a study concluding that the US paid 94% of its own tariff costs during the first eight months of 2025.11
The Trump regime found a new toxic mouthpiece to whine about the study, somebody named Kevin Hassett, who is supposedly the White House Economic Council Director but is more likely the grifter’s McDonald’s order guy.
Hassett, in a typical regime fit of childish pique, called the study an “embarrassment,” and demanded that the authors be disciplined, even though the executive branch has no formal authority over the Fed (yet). He was right about one thing, at least. The study was an embarrassment.12
Making America Great Again has been tough sledding for his core constituency.
But Herr Epshteen clings to tariffs like a toddler who won’t let go of a Lego.
Why? Because ultimately, he still believes he can weaponize them.
Still crazy after all these years
It doesn’t help that his mind is functioning on ever-dwindling battery power with no recharge stations available.
Substacker Heather Delaney Reese points out that Melania, fresh off her box office smash hit, is acting in the capacity of a geriatric nurse these days.13 After visiting Georgia and regaling awestruck reporters there with a tale about a phantom steel plant owner who wanted to kiss him, yesterday he smacked sanity across its forlorn jowls with this blather as reported by Heather Reese:
He launched into a story about the Great Salt Lake that sounded like a man trying to work out, in real time, where a major body of water was located, despite the fact that it shares its name with the city right next to it. “We’re going to save the Great Salt Lake. You know that, right? We’ve got a problem,” he said. “He came in to see me today. These are the kind of things he said, sir: we have to save the Great Salt Lake. I said, ‘Explain this to me, please.’ In that city called Salt Lake City, somebody said, ‘Where is it located?’ I said, ‘It’s located in Salt Lake City, right?’” That was the President of the United States, standing in front of a camera, openly questioning the location of one of the most well-known landmarks in the American West.
Then came the 2020 election. Again. Because it always comes back to that. “When the election was rigged and I missed my normal second term,” he said. “I was the one that got the Olympics, and I was the one that got the World Cup. The problem was I was gonna be president for another four years, and this was going to take place.” And then, with what appeared to be genuine frustration: “I took credit for the Olympics. I took credit for the World Cup, and I’m trying to take credit for the 250 years, but I’m not getting away with it. I’m getting hammered. I’m getting hammered.” He was talking about the founding of the United States. Not just the anniversary. The founding. And he sounded genuinely frustrated that no one would let him take personal credit for something that happened 250 years ago.
Then he turned to the press. “Now we’re with some very special reporters tonight. It’s… I often say the fake news, but I will not say that tonight, even though I’m on live television. I will not call you fake news, okay, as the cameras are roaring.” And he pressed on. “The press has been relatively fair to me over the last year, meaning they’ve been bad but not horrible.” Then he floated a strange idea: that the governors should vote on whether to allow the press to stay for the musical performance planned later in the evening. “If you’d like, should we, by vote, allow the press to watch the great finale that we have planned tonight with the musicians?” It was extremely odd, and the room went quiet as it shifted uncomfortably. No one seemed to know whether to raise their hand, respond, or simply look away.
Much like his presidency, the speech was confused, unsettling, and deeply chaotic.
You might wonder what all this has to do with tariffs, but, like everything Herr Trumpendipshit does, the answer is simple: Everything.
You can’t evaluate stuff he does in the context of normal presidents, even the really bad ones. He’s operating off nothing more than a brain stem. The weird, lost servile toadies who work for him feed him policy implementations based on a combination of what they think he wants and what serves them. Then, he blathers about them. Then, the mainstream press screams out in a headline, “President Trump today…” did something or said something, describing him like he’s a normal president instead of someone who should be sent to a hospice specializing in demented sociopaths.
At the head of the sycophant table, as always, is Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who almost singlehandedly turned Florida into a toxic stew and massive Superfund site.
The mainstream press acts as if his response to the loss of his power to impose tariffs as punishment demonstrated an adroit skill of some kind, but this response was already catalogued and ready to go because even this regime knew that SCOTUS would probably scuttle the tariffs.
All Susie Wiles had to do was push a button, and the new, broader-based tariffs were ready to go. It’s likely that Trump barely understands the law under which they were invoked.
That was part of the problem from the beginning. When he first tried to impose tariffs, he thought he had unlimited power to do so. He imposed the tariffs, then his sycophants scrambled for the law books.
He’s an uneducated small child with a brain that is now in its final stages of operation. The mainstream press and even most opposition Democrats will continue to try to act as though he is working on tariffs as part of some master plan. To the extent that’s true, it’s not his plan. It’s Susie Wiles’ plan, or the plan of whoever has his ear on any given day.
Everything he does needs to be understood from the dangerous perspective of a small child with nothing more advanced in his brain than the final rot of dementia.
Footnotes
Congress.gov. “The International Emergency Economic Powers Act: Origins, Evolution, and Use,” 2026. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45618.
Feldman, Adam. “A Breakdown of the Court’s Tariff Decision.” SCOTUSblog, February 20, 2026. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/a-breakdown-of-the-courts-tariff-decision/.
Mitchell, Andrea, and Julie Cerullo. “Trump Hits Brazilian Products with 50% Tariffs over Bolsonaro.” NBC News, August 2, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-brazilian-products-tariffs-bolsonaro-rcna222534.
Mancini, Ryan. “Trump Says He Raised Swiss Tariffs after Leader’s Call: ‘I Didn’t Really like the Way She Talked.’” The Hill, February 11, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5732984-trump-switzerland-tariffs-phone-call/.
Torres, Nora Gámez. “Calling Petro ‘Drug Leader,’ Trump Halts U.S. Aid to Colombia, a Key Ally in Region.” Miami Herald, October 19, 2025. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article312562927.html.
Matza, Max. “Trump Raises Tariffs on Canadian Goods in Response to Reagan Advert.” Bbc.com. BBC News, October 25, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ljgrm78zo.
Tax Foundation. “Tracking the Economic Impact of the Trump Tariffs,” February 21, 2026. https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/.
Tax Foundation, ibid
Bea.gov. “U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, December and Annual 2025 | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA),” 2025. https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-trade-goods-and-services-december-and-annual-2025.
Rogelberg, Sasha. “Nobel Economist Warns a Dearth of Blue-Collar Jobs Is among the Biggest Threats to the U.S. Economy—and They Fell by More than 100,000 Last Year.” Fortune, February 20, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/02/20/nobel-economist-joseph-stiglitz-blue-collar-manufacturing-job-loss-tariffs/.
Amiti, Mary, Chris Flanagan, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein. “Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs?” Liberty Street Economics (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), February 12, 2026. https://doi.org/10.59576/lse.20260212.
Banta, Daniel, and Daniel Banta. “Top White House Official Demands ‘Discipline’ for Fed Researchers over Tariff Study.” Scotsman Guide, February 19, 2026. https://www.scotsmanguide.com/news/top-white-house-official-demands-discipline-for-fed-researchers-over-tariff-study/.
Reese, Heather Delaney. “Does the President Even Know What Is Happening?” Substack.com. Heather Delaney Reese, February 22, 2026. https://heatherdelaneyreese.substack.com/p/does-the-president-even-know-what.
Will someone in the press pool please raise their hand and ask “wtf is wrong with your brain?” Meanwhile, after he’s bored and done with his tariff toddler tantrum, he’ll slip into the White House bathtub with his toy boats and play “let’s blowup Iran”. That is until tomorrow morning when he sees the new cost breakdown for the Trumpstein Ballroom with the increased structural steel costs because almost all wide flange shapes (except the smallest) come from foreign steel mills subject to his new steel tariffs of 25 percent.
To be fair, even a potato is intellectually superior to that walking dunce cap. Carney is in another league altogether. Trump lacks any form of intellect.
Also, Doug Ford is the Ontario Premier who pissed him off, so why did he feel the need to "punish" all of Canada?
As an aside, tariffs don't punish us, they punish the USA as most financially literate people know.
He STILL has no idea how tariffs ruin his own economy. Either he's stupid or he's very, very stupid.
Left to his own devices, he's going to completely collapse the US economy.
“Again and again and again. I couldn’t get her off the phone..." Translation: he didn't shut up or take a breath while he talked her ear off sharing his grievances. She probably put the phone on speaker and went about her business because, unlike the incompetent, incontinent American lay-about, she has real work to do.
"...I will not call you fake news, okay, as the cameras are roaring.” In what universe do cameras "roar"?
"Much like his presidency, the speech was confused, unsettling, and deeply chaotic." Yeah, Biden made a hell of a lot more sense. And, he was sane about it.
Thanks for your work, Charles.