The Supreme Court’s decision is clear. The president did not have the authority to impose most of his tariffs.

President Donald Trump argued that, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, his actions were justified because of a national emergency caused by a foreign threat. In the 6-3 ruling, the court said that, on the contrary, that act provides Congress with that authority, which hadn’t delegated it to the president. The tariffs left standing are largely by sector: cars, semiconductors, steel.

Trump, like the infamous honey badger, don’t care.

The president immediately insulted the six justices who ruled against him, calling them “disloyal, unpatriotic” and “lapdogs… for the radical left Democrats.” Then he turned around and reimposed a global 15% tariff rate.

The court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach.

For a lot of countries, that new rate is actually an improvement. Mexico and Canada have faced higher tariffs, at least for products not covered under the existing US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. China, Brazil, and India will also benefit from the court decision. But for countries that negotiated lower rates with the Trump team—Japan, Indonesia—it’s a slap in the face. That should teach them to made deals with the devil.

To justify his reassertion of tariffs, Trump is using another law, which establishes a ceiling of 15% and a 150-day limit before Congress can weigh in. No previous president has invoked this law to impose tariffs. For good reason: its provisions reference not a trade deficit but an “international payments problem” connected to fixed exchange rates and the gold standard, a world that no longer exists. As such, Trump is simply graduating from one illegality to another. It may not be long before Trump dispenses altogether with his misinterpretation of esoteric laws to sanctify his lawlessness.

A sensible president might have used the court decision as an opportunity to jettison an unpopular policy and pivot toward “affordability” in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, as his advisers have been urging. But that’s not Trump’s style. He almost always doubles down in the face of resistance.

And resistance there will be. The court ruling opens up the possibility for companies to file suit against the US government to recover costs associated with the tariffs. In his dissenting opinion, Brett “OG Lapdog” Kavanagh warned that this could usher in a “mess.” Perhaps Kavanagh slept through his econ classes at Yale, because the “mess” was already created by Trump’s chaotic approach to trade in the first place.

Trump’s intransigence will naturally interfere with a court-driven effort to restore a measure of predictability to US trade policy. However, perhaps the court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach. Low approval ratings, pushback by some Republicans against Trump’s federal diktats, intimations of rebellion from countries like Canada: These are signs that guardrails are going back up to protect against a presidential monster truck gone amok.

The United States continues to run a huge trade deficit—in goods and services—of roughly $901 billion. There was a slight decline last year—of $2 billion—that amounted to a reduction of 0.2%—a far cry from the 78% decline that Trump has claimed. Worse, from Trump’s point of view, the deficit in goods—which his tariffs were supposed to target—went up 2.1%.

Okay, but hasn’t the United States pulled in a lot of revenue from these tariffs? With an effective rate of 11.7%—the average for the previous two years was 2.7%—tariffs brought in $194.8 billion in 2025. That’s not a small figure. It ends up in the same place as domestic taxes: the US treasury. From there, Congress makes decisions regarding spending (which the Trump administration has, on occasion, unconstitionally ignored).

The more important concern is: Who pays?

The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”

A majority of Republicans believes that foreigners pay the cost of these tariffs. They are just following the president, who argued this week in his State of the Union that “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.”

However, since they apply to goods entering the United States from other countries, it’s actually American importers who pay the tax. That includes car manufacturers that are using foreign-made components, big retailers like Walmart that are selling foreign-made products, and service providers like FedEx that deliver goods across borders.

Ordinarily, US companies will pass on the cost of tariffs to the consumer. And there has been an overall increase in inflation over the last year: an uptick of 2.7% in consumer prices in December 2025 from the year before. The rising cost of autos is a case in........

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