Donald Trump could easily wriggle his way around an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on his precious tariffs, causing dangerous consequences for the country, one legal analyst warns.
Author and New York Times op-ed contributor Jeffrey Toobin told The Daily Beast Podcast that the president would simply tweak any policy the high court deems unconstitutional, plow ahead with that, and dare the legal system to catch up—if it even has the means to.
“The Supreme Court in our country doesn’t have any individual enforcement powers. They don’t have an army. They don’t have a police force that can do anything except protect their members,” Toobin told co-host Joanna Coles, referencing how President Andrew Jackson is said to have challenged Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832 to enforce a pro-Native American ruling he disagreed with.
Rather, the court relies “on the understanding in the other branches of government that they...have the last word,” Toobin, 65, explained. But this administration is unlike any other.
“I think Donald Trump is not going to directly defy the court, but this administration has figured out ways to get around court rulings, and in a way that I don’t think it’s for certain. I don’t think it’s entirely clear how he would react to an adverse decision. But we’ll see,” he said.
Toobin reasoned that if the conservative majority court were to side against him, Trump would do the bare minimum to proceed with his tariffs.
“What he would do is he would say ‘I understand the Supreme Court has said these tariffs are unconstitutional, but I’m going to make some changes and these new tariffs will be different enough’, and [Trump will] then force litigation on those sets of tariffs,” he said. “There are ways to play with the wording and play with the response so that you don’t seem like you are in direct defiance of the courts, even if you really are.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
During oral arguments in November, justices—including some Trump appointees—seemed to question Trump’s justification for the global tariffs: a 1977 law that applied to national emergencies.
Trump-nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch, for instance, mused on a “one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”
Since then, Trump, 79, has amped up pressure on the court to let his controversial economic policy slide. If the highly anticipated decision goes the other way, the U.S. would be “SCREWED,” he fumed in a Monday Truth Social post.
The Supreme Court is also weighing another key Trump action that could spur a furious response from the White House; the jurists are expected to rule on Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment.
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