Donald Trump has made the bizarre claim that he won the Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs, despite its brutal takedown of his signature policy.
Almost two weeks after the conservative-dominated court ruled that Trump overstepped his authority to impose widespread tariffs on countries around the globe, the 79-year-old president apparently hasn’t come to terms with the rebuke.
“We won on tariffs, actually,” he said in the Oval Office during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
“Somebody said ‘you actually won the case’. We won on tariffs. We had a decision that was wrong. It was a very bad decision from certain standpoints, but from other standpoints, a very powerful decision, because it reaffirmed the fact that we have all these various forms of tariffs…
“It totally reaffirmed. It said: you can use all of these (other) tariffs.”
The court’s 6-3 ruling was a major blow for the president, who called the case “literally, life or death for our country.”
It essentially found that Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs on imports from more than 100 countries was unlawful.
Trump was furious about the decision, calling the justices who ruled against him, including his own appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, “lap dogs” and a “disgrace to our nation.”
But he also declared that he would use a different set of trade powers, known as Section 122, to impose an across-the-board global 10 percent tariff.
The president was far less incendiary on Tuesday as he insisted that he won the case, declaring that while the decision was “foolish,” he could still impose tariffs in other ways through different legal trade provisions.
“While we’re doing that, as you know, we’re doing the various studies and things, and we’ll be coming out with tariffs, different tariffs, on different countries,” he said.
The Supreme Court’s ruling nonetheless undercut one of Trump’s biggest tools for reshaping U.S. trade and exerting pressure on other countries.
It also put about $150 billion of tariff revenue that the administration has collected in limbo.
Companies are now demanding refunds, but the administration is working to slow them down while privately weighing options to delay refunds indefinitely.
About 2,000 refund-related cases are now reportedly pending at theU.S. Court of International Trade, a number that has grown by dozens since the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Trump’s tariffs were largely the reason behind Merz’s visit to Washington on Tuesday.
The long-planned meeting was held with a focus on trade, but the war in Iran dominated the discussions.
During the meeting, Trump announced that the U.S. would cut all trade with Spain after the European country refused to let the U.S. military use its bases for missions linked to strikes on Iran.
“Spain has been terrible,” he told reporters.
Merz’s visit came as the European Union has halted the ratification of its trade deal with the U.S., saying it needs “full clarity” on Trump’s next steps before proceeding.
“How are we going to hit Germany?” Trump asked his trade representative, Jamieson Greer, as Merz sat next to him in the Oval Office.
The president jokingly added: “I think we should hit them, very, very hard.”
