MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell didn’t mince words when discussing Donald Trump’s sweeping legal defeat after a federal trade court annihilated his “illegal and unconstitutional” tariffs in a unanimous ruling.
The court ruled to block the president’s sweeping tariffs on imports using emergency powers laws, claiming Trump had exceeded his authority and left U.S. trade policy overly dependent on his whims.
Although the Trump administration announced plans to appeal the decision, if the ruling stands it will blow a hole in the president’s signature economic policy, which seems increasingly likely to define his second term in office.
“The Trump tariffs were always illegal,” O’Donnell said during a blistering monologue on The Last Word. “They were constitutionally insane.”
“Donald Trump’s attempts to kill the Constitution this time have failed,” O’Donnell declared, emphasizing that not a single judge—not even Trump’s own appointee—accepted “a single word” of his justification.
On Thursday, he added, “the world will reset itself around the restoration of law and order in international trade and the crushing of the Trump tariffs and resultant personal worldwide humiliation of Donald Trump.”
O’Donnell also mocked Trump’s inevitable spin, predicting another “worldwide humiliation day” when the president attempts to defend himself against the verdict over the coming days. “The humiliation was already building today,” he noted, recalling Trump’s meltdown on Wednesday when confronted with Wall Street’s new mocking refrain: “Trump always chickens out.”
“Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question,” Trump told a reporter who asked him about the acronym. “I usually have the opposite problem. They say I am too tough.”
The court’s 49-page evisceration leaves Trump with no legal path to enforce his tariffs—only an appeal to a Supreme Court that O’Donnell says he expects to bow to him.
But for the time being, he added, “The court stopped that madness tonight. It’s over. The Trump tariff madness ends now.”
Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent shockwaves throughout global financial markets when they were announced in April, leading many economists to predict a worldwide recession and a severe downgrade of the United States’ economic growth.
The court made its ruling Wednesday in response to a lawsuit filed against the administration headed by a group of small businesses, including wine importer V.O.S. Selections, whose owner claimed the price hikes imposed by the tariffs would lead to the demise of their company. A dozen states also filed similar suits against the administration, led by Oregon.
White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Daily Beast: “These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base—facts that the court did not dispute.”
“It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” he added.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller responded to the ruling by claiming “the judicial coup is out of control” in a post on X.
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