President Donald Trump is fuming after one of his key economic policies was struck down by the Supreme Court—and the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is rubbing salt in the wound.
On Friday, a 6-3 majority ruled that the 79-year-old president lacked the authority to impose widespread tariffs on other nations last year. Trump lashed out at the justices in response, suggesting they had been bought by “foreign interests.”
The Journal took an editorial stance on both the decision and Trump’s tariff tantrum, branding Friday “arguably the worst moment of his Presidency” in a piece entitled “Trump Demeans Himself as He Attacks the Supreme Court.”
“This is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards,” the Journal wrote. “He’s accusing them of betraying the U.S. at the behest of nefarious interests he didn’t identify, no doubt because they don’t exist.”
In a separate editorial, the paper said today was “the real tariff Liberation Day” in a mocking rebuke of the Trump administration’s 2025 messaging.
It described the court’s decision as “a monumental vindication of the Constitution’s separation of powers” and celebrated this rare instance of guardrails being placed around the otherwise free-wheeling president.
“Had Mr. Trump prevailed, future Presidents could have used emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose border taxes with little constraint,” the paper wrote.
Chief Justice John Roberts led the decision that the power to impose tariffs in the sweeping way Trump did lay with Congress, not with the Executive branch. Trump-appointed judges Neil Gorsuch and conservative Amy Coney Barrett agreed with Roberts.
It was these justices for whom Trump reserved specific scorn, describing them as a “disgrace to our nation.”
“They’re just FOOLS and ‘LAPDOGS’ for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats and, not that this should have anything to do with it, very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution,“ the president wrote on Truth Social on Friday following the decision.
The ruling has raised questions of what will happen to the $175 billion raised by Trump’s tariffs, although Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already suggested in gloating tones that taxpayers likely won’t see a dime of it.
Despite Trump’s insistence that the economic lever would result in greater cash flow from foreign nations into the United States, recent Reserve Bank of New York analysis found that American households and businesses are footing the bill for 90 percent of the tariffs.
Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007, has been in a long-running on-again-off-again dispute with Trump. The president launched a $10 billion legal case against the news outlet last year for its report on the sexually suggestive birthday card he allegedly sent the late sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.
According to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, the nonagenarian Australian media mogul has frequently wished Trump dead in the past, while his heir, Lachlan, used to use toilet paper with the president’s face on it.
The paper further chided Trump’s Friday attack on the justices during a time in which political polarization is intensifying, and the murder of elected representatives by masked vigilantes remains a recent memory.
“This is rhetoric that could cause some deranged Trump acolyte to turn to violence against a Justice,” the paper wrote. “We hope all nine Justices appear next week at the State of the Union address as a show of self-protective solidarity.”
It concluded by laying the blame for the entire debacle at the administration’s feet.
“We warned from the start that this would be the result of his unlawful resort to IEEPA. The fault doesn’t lie with the Justices but with his own tariff obsessions.”
