Unsurprisingly, President Trump did not react well to the U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating much of his tariff agenda as an unconstitutional power grab. First, there were reports about how he initially took the news:

CNN: Apparently the breakfast had been going well. Then Trump became enraged. He started ranting about the decision, not only calling it a disgrace, but started attacking the courts at one point saying: these f’ing courts pic.twitter.com/p7aR2LiXVV— Acyn (@Acyn) February 20, 2026

CNN: Apparently the breakfast had been going well. Then Trump became enraged. He started ranting about the decision, not only calling it a disgrace, but started attacking the courts at one point saying: these f’ing courts pic.twitter.com/p7aR2LiXVV

Trump subsequently fired off two long Truth Social posts deploring the decision, then held a rambling press conference in which he strongly suggested that his Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett were traitors for joining the 6-3 majority invalidating the tariffs.

The president also announced some new tariffs based on different statutes than the one addressed by the Court, and we’ll have to wait to see how that works out from a legal point of view. But for the moment, it’s clear a huge sigh of relief is emanating from GOP circles in and far beyond the White House. Most business executives and traditional conservative Republicans have always considered Trump’s tariff fetish to be an embarrassing and economically illiterate bit of MAGA nonsense. Just yesterday, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, not for the first time, impatiently bashed Trump’s tariffs as a drag on the economy.

But policy considerations aside, even those Trump allies who don’t really care whether tariffs make good economic sense are aware they are very unpopular. The latest Silver Bulletin polling averages show that the president’s specific job-approval numbers for his management of trade policy are far underwater, with 39.3 percent of Americans approving and 55.7 percent disapproving. More specific polling isn’t any better. On February 4, Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of Americans disapproved (and 39 percent disapproved strongly) of Trump “substantially increasing tariffs,” while 37 percent approved. And even more specifically, a late-January Marquette Law School survey found that 63 percent of Americans hoped the Supreme Court would “limit the president’s authority to impose tariffs.” Among self-identified Republicans agreed, 33 percent agreed, as did 69 percent of self-identified independents.

You’d think, then, that the Supreme Court taking a big batch of tariffs off the table would at least temporarily eliminate one source of downward pressure on Trump’s flagging popularity. But if Trump goes into a highly visible and audible hate frenzy over this, the beneficial effect could be muted or reversed.

The timing is interesting as well. Is there any way the president will fail to address this setback at great length during next week’s State of the Union address? After all, at least some Supreme Court justices — quite possibly including the turncoats Gorsuch and Barrett — will be sitting right in front of him as he speaks. We have been told, moreover, that the entire administration and the congressional GOP are on the brink of a sustained pre-midterm messaging campaign to convince skeptical Americans that the economy is doing extremely well and getting better every day. It will be more than a bit discordant if Trump himself can’t stop complaining about the disastrous effects of not having tariffs fully at his disposal to threaten allies and rivals alike, and to use as leverage for the various “deals” he loves so very much.

Beyond sheer stubbornness, there’s another, deeper reason Trump may overrule his allies and his party on this subject, as one acute observer of today’s presser noted:

Trump's anger during this press conference really drives home the fact that over a lifetime where he's held basically every imaginable position on every imaginable political issue, tariffs are the one thing he truly believes in.— Kevin Robillard 🇺🇸 (@Robillard) February 20, 2026

Trump's anger during this press conference really drives home the fact that over a lifetime where he's held basically every imaginable position on every imaginable political issue, tariffs are the one thing he truly believes in.

The bottom line is that the Court may have done the angry president a solid by relieving the economy and his political ledger of the problems created by his 19th-century convictions about trade policy. But if he now goes to war against the Court on behalf of his precious heresy, the net effect could be very different — and very negative.

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2026 state of the union address

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