What a difference a year makes, huh? Almost exactly a year ago, President Donald Trump rolled up on Chief Justice John Roberts after the State of the Union address, to effusively tell the jurist, “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it,” heaping praise on the jurist for concocting an unprecedented theory of presidential immunity that helped Trump evade trial on his way back to the White House. On Friday, Trump called Roberts “a disgrace to our nation,” “swayed by foreign interests.”
Now John Roberts — and Justices Barrett and Gorsuch, for that matter — must watch the presidency of their own creation mark them by name for public, ritualistic humiliation.
The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping IEEPA tariffs in a 6-3 decision Friday, with Roberts writing for a majority that included Gorsuch and Barrett alongside the three Democratic-appointed justices. Within hours, the president held a hastily assembled press conference to both showcase the tragedy of dementia and call the majority justices “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” for reaching an opinion urged by such pinko communists as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Haphazardly calling on journalists and then — if they began a remotely probing question — instantly declaring that he meant to call on someone else, Trump raged and rambled about the decision, noting that he was “absolutely ashamed” of the Republican justices in the majority.
Of Gorsuch and Barrett, Trump added that they were “an embarrassment to their families.”
Trump followed up by instantly imposing a new 10 percent tariff under a different statute — Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — which unlike the IEEPA actually talks about tariffs. But Section 122 is explicitly limited to 150 days unless extended by Congress, a tall order since many Republican legislators quietly (or not-so-quietly) object to the tariffs as directly counter to conservative economic principles. But no one bothered to stop Trump when he violated the TikTok ban for months, so maybe the committed textualists on the Court will find a way to read “150 days” as “forever.” The Section 122 theory is also hamstrung by the Trump administration’s own galaxy brained argument in this case that they needed IEEPA tariffs because Section 122 tariffs, they argued, would be illegal under the circumstances. In order to head off any claim that Trump acted without a hint of capriciousness, he raised these new tariffs to 15 percent the next day.
Like clockwork, mainstream legal analysts fell over themselves to frame the tariff decision as “The Supreme Court’s Declaration of Independence” or a “Turning Point,” a triumph of institutional integrity shepherded by the Court’s moderate voices. Jonathan Turley, who has never met a conservative judicial overreach he couldn’t launder into respectability, crowed that the tariff decision proves the Court “continues to exercise independent judgment.”
Anyone hoping to bolt a fairy tale narrative onto the Supreme Court is fooling themselves. Or at least trying to fool you.
Nothing about Friday’s opinion signals a Court finding its backbone. Real, dyed-in-the-wool, Reaganaut conservatives hate tariffs and three of the Supreme Court’s six conservatives chose the conservative movement over the prattling of a president who brags about being able to identify a giraffe in a test designed to track cognitive decline. The Federalist Society didn’t spend decades building this Court so a president could impose a massive tax hike on imports. They weren’t so much rejecting a naked Republican policy interest, as defending an older one.
We’re not sitting here watching the president of the United States have an unhinged meltdown over the Supreme Court because it’s suddenly a nonpartisan institution. Trump’s fury is so pronounced because the Supreme Court’s conservatives are brazenly partisan and Trump ran face first into one of the few internecine conflicts within the Republican Party. He’s angry because the Supreme Court told him they would rubberstamp his every desire — up to and including stealing classified documents and conspiring to commit election fraud — and he discovered right-wing business interests still outrank him in some conservative hearts.
The Chief Justice sold out the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court to help Donald Trump return to office because the people who guide his judgment wanted more tax cuts and fewer protections for marginalized people. In return, he gets publicly berated on national television. Maybe this is some sort of “turning point,” but based on the record as it exists right now, this isn’t the beginning of the “John Roberts: Principled Jurist” redemption arc, this is just a guy choking down his karmic vegetables. Donald Trump didn’t hide the ball during his 2024 campaign — his few, but significant breaks with conservative conventional wisdom were front and center. Roberts understood that this day would come, and it would probably be humiliating, and that he’d still do it anyway because he hates the Voting Rights Act more than he loves self-respect.
And he’ll willingly go through all this again after he fires off four or five more engraved invitations for unconstitutional executive overreach, but still won’t let Trump fire Federal Reserve governors. There’s no amount of abuse he won’t take to achieve his desired political outcome.
He’s sat around as Trump spent the next year attacking lower court judges in terms that generated a 327 percent increase in threats against the federal judiciary. Federal judges sounded the alarm that they feared for their lives, telling NBC News that the Supreme Court “doesn’t have our backs.” One judge said flatly that if nothing changed, “somebody is going to die.”As the leader of the judiciary, Roberts responded by issuing a year-end report about how Thomas Paine would probably yearn for a return to the monarchy and collecting a funding boost for Supreme Court security.
John Roberts left last year’s State of the Union being publicly thanked by Trump like consigliere getting praised by a mob boss. Now, according to Trump, Roberts is just “barely invited” to this year’s installment.
Quite a year.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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