Trump's Tariffs... Trump attacks the Supreme Court over tariff ban

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0:05Anthony Zurcher:How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:40They've gone and done it. The Supreme Court, after much deliberation, delayed deliberation, has decided to stand up to Donald Trump. It is the first time they have done it on a big issue in his second term, and he is angry. Well, thank you very much for being here. The Supreme Court's ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing. And I'm ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what's right for our country. What a shame, having to do with voting in particular, when in fact they're just being fools and lapdogs for the rhinos and the radical left Democrats.

1:26and not that they should have anything at all to do with it. They're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think. It's a small movement. I won by millions of votes. We won in a landslide. With all the cheating that went on, there was a lot of it. But we still won in a landslide. too big to rig. But these people are obnoxious, ignorant and loud. They're very loud. And I think certain justices are afraid of that. They don't want to do the right thing.

2:07They're afraid of it. Even as we begin recording, Donald Trump is talking to the press and he's already made one thing very clear. He's intending to go ahead with tariffs. He's going to find other ways of doing it. So two questions. Can he do that? But also a wider question. What does this say about the Supreme Court and his administration? What does it say about his political heft in the remaining days, weeks, months, years of his presidency? Welcome to AmeriCast.

2:38Anthony Zurcher:AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. Nicolas Maduro yuffed around and he found out. This is a big cover-up, And this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump derangement syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.

3:04Hello, it's Justin in the emergency headquarters of AmeriCast in South London. It's Sarah in the BBC's Bureau in Washington.

3:13Anthony Zurcher:And it's Anthony here at home in Arlington, Virginia on a very busy Friday. Yeah, very busy Friday indeed. It is 10 to 7 in the evening here in London. Donald Trump, I think I'm right in saying, is still speaking to the press. So this is all going to be a bit of a work in progress. But the reason why we have come together is that this is a very, very big deal. Yes, it's a big deal about tariffs, and we'll certainly get to that. But it just strikes me initially, Sarah, that this is not just about tariffs. And you could see that in the anger the president showed right at the beginning of his news conference.

3:49It is also that he does not approve of being told no, to put it mildly, and the court has told him no. And that's that for the second term, at least is a first. Yeah. On any big issue, this is the first time he's been told that he can't just do whatever he wants and expand the power of the presidency to rule by executive order without having to go through Congress or get legislation to do what he wants. and he's as angry about that as he is about the idea that the court says that his tariffs can't be applied in the manner in which he had brought them in and he's railing against supreme court justices which is pretty unusual i mean normally presidents are quite deferential and respectful to these justices but instead he's not only said that the ruling's deeply disappointed and that he's ashamed of members of the court who didn't have the courage to do what was right i mean he's been lashing out in these statements he was giving to the press saying that some of the Supreme Court justices are fools, lapdogs, rhinos and radical left Democrats.

4:48I mean, he's really angry about what they have done. But we should explain the rhinos, shouldn't we? Because he's not saying that they're wild animals, is he? No, no, no. He said that. So that stands for Republicans in name only. And of course, one of the reasons he's so angry is you've got three liberal justices who almost always vote against what Donald Trump wants. But three of the most conservative justices agreed with them this time. So you had a 6-3 majority saying that Donald Trump can't impose tariffs in the way that he had done so. And they're the ones he's really angry with, the conservative justices who he feels have betrayed him by ruling against his tariffs.

5:26Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, and two of them, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, were justices that Donald Trump himself appointed. So I think that stings particularly sharply for Trump. And I think he was directly speaking to them when he said he was ashamed of certain members of the court for not having the courage to do what's right for our country. So yeah, presidents don't normally talk this way. I remember when Barack Obama, in a speech to Congress, singled out the court for their ruling on campaign finance. It was a lot of finger wagging and tut-tutting. But that was nothing like what we heard Donald Trump say today.

5:59Yeah. And it's worth saying they've got the State of the Union coming up on Tuesday night. the Supreme Court sits right there, don't they? Because if the president walks in, everyone will know this scene and walks into Congress and the Supreme Court. I wonder if some of them might not come. And also more seriously, I mean, they have been doxxed and harassed, haven't they, by some left-wing campaigners in a way that I don't think was, well, it certainly wasn't normal 10, 20, 30 years ago. And you wonder now, particularly for those two, Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, where they are under real pressure, just to put it very mildly, from some people who will be overexcited about the way the president sort of singled them out.

6:42Anthony Zurcher:But that was just the start of what Donald Trump said in this ongoing press conference. He lashed out at the court in the beginning, but then he did turn to what he might do next. And there was a lot of speculation that there are other laws on the books that Trump could use that more directly give the president's tariff authority and that Trump could try to impose new tariffs under those laws. And Trump did sit there and he read some of Kavanaugh's dissent that outlined some of those laws he could use line by line. Section 232 of one law would allow him to impose tariffs based on national security.

7:20Anthony Zurcher:And then about maybe 10 minutes into his press briefing, he said that that's exactly what he was going to do. He's going to impose a broad 10 % across the board tariff on all countries based on Section 232, a different provision under law. And that would replace some of the tariffs that Trump had imposed that the court struck down earlier today. So we should probably try and unpack that a little bit. How can he possibly be talking about imposing tariffs on the very day that the Supreme Court has told him he doesn't have the power and authority to impose tariffs? And to do that, we should probably go back to April last year and what was famously known, of course, as Liberation Day when Donald Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and he had this large, cumbersome sign that he held up showing what the tariff rates he wanted to impose on all the different countries around the world were going to be.

8:12And he said he was able to do that at the time without going through Congress because he was using something called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. And that allows the president to declare a national emergency when he thinks there's an unusual and extraordinary threat. And of course, Donald Trump said all these other countries have been ripping America off by charging tariffs on American goods being imported there when America let their goods into the United States without charging them for it. So he said there was enough of an emergency for him to impose these tariffs. And what the judges were looking at was whether or not that law gave him the authority to do so, because it lets him regulate imports, but it doesn't let him impose taxes.

8:54Taxes are the purview of Congress to decide upon. So basically, I think I'm right, Anthony, you'll be clearer on this than me. Essentially, what happened was the court decided that tariffs are a tax, not a import regulation mechanism. And for that reason, they said under this IEPA, Trump can't impose tariffs without Congress.

9:18Anthony Zurcher:Exactly. The reason Trump used that law, the IEPA, as it's called, This because it gives the president a fairly free hand in the size of the tariffs, in their view, the duration. They decided that this was the best one to hang this on because it hadn't they didn't have restrictions spelled out in the text of of the law. Now, the court has, as you mentioned, come in and said, no, regulating trade doesn't give you this kind of power. There's no way that Congress really wanted to give a president the ability to declare an emergency and put tariffs on at the drop of a hat for as much as he wants, for as long as he wants.

9:57Anthony Zurcher:That just was going too far. So now Trump is looking at some of these other provisions and looking to try to impose them under other provisions. Although now I'm reading some of this is a kind of a moving target here. But Trump may have misspoke and not cited Section 232. He might have cited section 122 or meant to, which would be a 90 day tariff of 10 percent that would give him some time to impose new tariffs to come up with a broader scheme to impose new tariffs. And that's that's kind of what we need to take away from all of this is that there are a bunch of different laws that speak to presidential tariff powers.

10:34Anthony Zurcher:And they all have their different timelines and different caps and different restrictions. and the White House now is going to have to go to try to figure out which law they want to use, what they can get away with, what they can push the boundaries on, just to try to scramble to reconstruct a tariff structure that was built over the past year by this president that has been torn down in large part by the Supreme Court at 10 o 'clock this morning. Yeah, when you go through them all, I mean, one of the problems that he has, Anthony, isn't it, is that some of them require some sort of investigation, including hearings, potentially.

11:15In other words, the thing that he is losing, potentially, and he's desperate now to find a way of keeping, is the ability just to snap his fingers, as we got used to him saying, or issue a truth social and say, you know what, I'm putting 50 % on Switzerland because I don't like the president there, or whatever it is. And it's the instantaneous nature of it, just without going into the details of which role he's going to, which effort, which door he's going to kick at, one of the issues is how instantaneous it can be and how much fuss there is around it with hearings and all the rest of it. In fact, it seems to me that's the crux of the White House's problem now.

11:53Yeah, and because he wasn't just using tariffs as a tool of trade policy, he was using them as leverage in international diplomacy. So he could threaten tariffs on the UK and on Europe if they tried to stand in the way of his plan to take over Greenland, for instance. He threatened India and Pakistan with 200 % tariffs if they didn't stop hostilities. And he claims that he brokered a peace and ended a war as a result of that. He's used tariffs all over the world as leverage to get other countries to do what he wants. And I'll tell you what's going to be really interesting. We just got the dates today of when he's going to go to China, late March, early April.

12:34Is he going to turn up in Beijing unable to threaten the Chinese with increased tariffs if he doesn't get what he wants from them? That's going to be very interesting.

12:43Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, the relationship with China when it comes to tariffs is fascinating because that is the one country that has pushed back against Trump in his attempts to impose tariffs. Other countries have negotiated, other countries have made concessions. China has drawn a bright line as saying, we're not going to take this and we're not going to negotiate under a threat of higher tariffs. And now they end up looking like they had made the right play. And a lot of these other countries that had cut deals, cut deals under tariffs that don't exist anymore. They have to be wondering what exactly they gave up when all of this kind of evaporated anyway.

13:21Anthony Zurcher:But it was interesting, I thought, early on, Trump also talking about the foreign influence, as he said, that there's some kind of a nefarious plot by foreign concerns that were behind this lawsuit that was behind the court's decision. And you've seen him talk about that in the past. He was lashing out against Canada that took out an advertisement during the World Series, urging the Supreme Court to strike down the tariffs. But I think he views it as even bigger than that. I think he views this as the globalists, as people who have interests, foreign interests, trying to corruptly undermine his make America great again economic policy.

14:04Anthony Zurcher:And I suspect that is something we will hear more of in the days ahead from this president. It's funny, isn't it, guys? The thing that we haven't mentioned so far is Congress. And I mean, the whole point of this is that they're saying that you don't have the rights under existing laws to do this. so i mean in a functioning system you're the president you've got a majority in the senate you've got a kind of majority in the house it's a bit tricky you just say okay well we'll pass a law giving us the right to do all this stuff and in a sense i mean you could see the supreme court decision couldn't you as a sort of big big shot in the arm for congress and yet dot dot dot i mean he was asked about it at the press i can't remember exactly what he said but he sort of dismissed it, didn't he?

14:47He said, well, we could go down that road, but we don't need to.

14:50Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, he said they would. Oh, he definitely would do it. But I don't have to because there are already all these other laws. And the reality is he can't. There's not the will in Congress. We'd actually had a vote in Congress just last week in the House of Representatives where they majority voted to curtail Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada. And that was going to go to the Senate. They were going to have a vote there as well. It seems like the mood in Congress is one of concern about Donald Trump's tariffs, not wholehearted support. And I think there are going to be some in Congress, particularly Republicans, particularly Republicans in swing districts, battleground districts, who are probably happy that this decision came down the way it did, because these tariffs, if you look at polls, aren't very popular.

15:34Anthony Zurcher:And they were going to have to go out there and face slings and arrows from Democrats and face angry constituents who are paying higher prices for imported goods and try to make the case that Donald Trump was doing something that would ultimately help the economy. And I don't think they were looking forward to that. And I think now they're happy that they may not have to make that defense. So, Sarah, has the Supreme Court rescued the midterms for the Republican Party? Well, some of that hangs on another huge question, I think, because it may be that Donald Trump is able to find another law, another authority that will keep the tariffs going broadly as they were, and you won't see huge disruption in trade.

16:13But that still means that for the last 10 months or so, he has imposed tariffs illegally, essentially. That's what the court has ruled. And businesses who have been paying those tariffs, because remember, it's American companies importing goods into America. They're the ones who pay the tariff, not the Chinese or the Swiss manufacturers. It's American companies that pay the tariff. They're going to want their money back and they're going to take action to do that. The Supreme Court ruling doesn't actually say anything about whether the tariffs that have already been collected need to be refunded.

16:45But you can bet there will be legal action to try and make that happen. This is something like 200 billion dollars, some of which has already been spent. The$12 billion that Donald Trump has promised to farmers to make up for the fact that his tariff regime meant they couldn't sell as many soybeans to China, that's coming out of the tariff fund. The$2 ,000 checks that he's wanting to write to every American citizen's tariffs were going to pay for that. So, I mean, yeah, the policy might be more attractive in some swing districts, but the consequences of this to the Treasury could be really quite significant.

17:20Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, that is a big unknown here. The Supreme Court didn't talk about it. Kavanaugh and his dissent pointed out that they may have to pay these refunds. There are some companies like Costco that are already suing for refunds. So expect a mad dash from a lot of companies to try to file legal claims to get their money back. And then the big question is, if they get their money back, do they just pocket it, even though they may have passed some of the tariffs along to consumers? I mean, and it could end up being a bit of a windfall for them. And it could mean that American consumers don't instantly feel the benefits of these tariffs being pulled off.

17:56Anthony Zurcher:So the electoral gains of people having more money at the grocery store may not be something that hits right away. We'll put all of this in the political context, which is, isn't it, the Democrats are staggeringly unpopular and still all over the place when it comes to opposition to Donald Trump. One or two efforts have been made. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California we've talked about quite a lot on the pod but basically the party's still not really kind of making any kind of headway with the American people but on the other hand winning some important elections recently and quite likely it would seem to do as well as they should do in the midterms later on in the year the Republicans it seems to me increasingly all over the place I don't know what you two think about this, because there is now the real possibility that Republican politicos, particularly members of Congress, but actually more widely than that, people are hoping to run presidential campaigns for 28, etc., are going to feel the authority of the king is being sapped, is ebbing away.

19:02And so I would be able to say what I want to do without being as frightened of him as I might have been in the past. And that, it seems to me, is potentially quite important. It looks like a chink of vulnerability. Suddenly he doesn't appear to be as all powerful as he was when the Supreme Court was allowing him to pretty much do whatever he wanted.

19:22Anthony Zurcher:Exactly. We had the Supreme Court giving Trump win after win last year, sometimes on a temporary basis, not stepping in and putting on hold things that Donald Trump was trying to do on immigration and changing, reforming, cutting the federal government. But this was one where the Supreme Court drew a line. And this was one where a case went all the way through arguments, brief filings. This is the way cases normally work and a definitive final judgment. And that suggests that maybe this court is not going to be quite the rubber stamp that we had seen it for Donald Trump in the past. It may be on things like birthright citizenship and being able to fire members of the Federal Reserve Board, a couple of other big cases that are boundary testing exercises of presidential power, that Trump may get his hand slapped once again.

20:14Anthony Zurcher:So this does represent perhaps a turning point, a high watermark of Trump's second term, and that from here he might see his power start to decline. Donald Trump has been carrying on talking whilst we've been discussing all of this. And he was actually asked in the press briefing whether or not the Supreme Court justices who ruled against them are still invited to the State of the Union address next week. and he has said the three who voted in favour of his tariffs are happily invited, the other six are barely invited and that honestly he couldn't care less if they come. We're going to see some theatrics, I am sure, when he will criticise them from the State of the Union and there will be a camera ready to catch all of their facial expressions as he does so.

21:01I think that's going to be one of the key moments to look out for, I think, in next week's State of the Union. and of course an emergency podcast immediately after the state of union but we ought to leave it there sarah anthony you've got work to do i want to go and have a drink with my wife bye bye bye bye y 'all

21:19thank you for listening to another episode it is you the americaster that makes americast the community that it now is if you like what you've heard please do subscribe to this podcast on bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. We always want to hear your feedback as well. We look at every single bit of correspondence that we get. So you can send us an email, americast at bbc.co.uk. The WhatsApp is 44 330 123 9480. And you can get involved in the AmeriCast Discord server. The link to that is in the description. Till next time. Bye bye.

22:18Anthony Zurcher:How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khaled, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the U.S. has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.