Donald Trump on Friday attacked the Supreme Court majority that ruled against him in a landmark decision on tariffs with a venom and ferocity he has never directed against America’s foreign enemies. He suggested they were disloyal to the country, under the sway of other nations. The entire performance was unhinged, an old man’s tantrum about an affront to his manhood. He called the three Republican appointed justices who voted against him “fools and lapdogs.”
Just imagine him using that kind of language about, say, a war criminal like Vladimir Putin.
The president seemed to miss the entire point of the Supreme Court ruling—that the power to levy tariffs lay with the Congress—as well as the nuance in the majority opinion, such as a footnote by Chief Justice John Roberts that suggested while there were may be other ways by which he could seek to put tariffs in place, those “contain various combinations of procedural prerequisites, required agency determinations and limits on the duration, amount and scope of the tariffs they authorize.”
In other words, he could not behave like a king. He could no longer go around the world threatening other leaders whenever it suited him. He could no longer ignore the law, existing U.S. treaties, or the role Congress is assigned by the Constitution. He said he could—he said he didn’t need Congress to impose the new types of tariffs he mentioned during his press conference. But that was either denial or ignorance or a special Trumpian combination of both.
Because it will be very difficult for Trump to recreate the tariffs of the past year. Should he attempt to put some in place, and should he get the Congress and government agencies to work with him on this, the process is going to be more complex, require periodic renewals, and be far more limited in scope.
But watching Trump, it was clear that the thrust of his remarks had nothing to do with the letter of the law. With him, it seldom does. His feelings were hurt. Someone told him “no.” And he was going to lash out until he felt better.
The outburst was notable, then, because it revealed just how battered, exhausted, and at wits’ end the president is after weeks and weeks of similar experiences, of serial defeats and embarrassments, and of the prospect of many more such humiliations in the months ahead in a world that is finally learning how to say “no” to him.
With pressure building on him because of a soft economy, public anger at his immigration policies, fears of spiking healthcare costs for millions of Americans, the Epstein scandal and a looming massive defeat in the November midterms, Trump has returned regularly to the authoritarian playbook in the hopes that it would make him feel more powerful, less enfeebled by age, more like the kind of leader the slavering courtiers in his daily retinue say he is.
But the results have not been good.
He tried to deflect attention from Epstein with a “wag the dog” foray into Venezuela. But once the brief operation was completed, it was clear he had no next steps towards stability. Oil would be stolen and revenue pumped into his accounts, yes, but he could not force changes in Venezuela.
At Davos, he said he would take over Greenland, but America’s allies united in opposition to him, forcing him to back off. He left the Swiss ski village with his tail between his legs.
He sent his Gestapo into Minnesota to round up illegal aliens and to intimidate his opponents. The people rose up—even as his thugs gunned innocent Americans down in the streets—and he was forced to withdraw again. He put up banners with his face on them and attempted to deface everything in sight with a blank wall long enough to fit his last name. But his takeover of the Kennedy Center became another catastrophe, and he had to shut it down. He launched legal cases against his opponents, but they were rejected by grand juries who saw them for the shams they were.
New scandals have been cropping up across his administration, from DHS to the Department of Labor. The “bribeumentary” that Jeff Bezos conjured up about his wife was a flop. Major allies rejected his “Board of Peace.” He can’t stay awake in meetings. People keep talking about him slurring his words, about his bruised hands and ballooning cankles.
And now the Supreme Court, which has treated him oh-so-gently in the past, has slapped him down for overreach. He’s had a big tantrum, but it is already clear that it is not going to help. It may make matters even worse. Trump is going to face further legal challenges as he tries to sidestep the constraints placed on his role by the Constitution, the law, and the country’s highest court.
He is losing.
And he is losing it.
As he denounced the court and its decision and its members in his rager of a press conference, he dodged questions from real journalists and took only softballs from potted plants in the crowd. Now he’s talking about another distraction, a strike on Iran. But he also knows he tried that before, and it didn’t have the results he asserted it did. His threats now appear fairly hollow as the Iranian’s have announced they are ready if that is the path he chooses to take. And Trump knows he cannot achieve what he wants to by attacking Iran. It won’t make Epstein go away. It won’t make him younger. It won’t hide the fact that he is failing as president.
That’s no way to lay the groundwork for next week’s State of the Union. Nor is it a good start to a year that could end calamitously with massive defeats for the GOP. He will try more distractions during the address. He will try more lies. Indeed, smart money is betting he will break his own world records for lying during such a speech. He will announce more good news is just around the corner.
But 2026 will only get worse for him. And while some may take some satisfaction from seeing him humbled by the Supreme Court, we should all recognize that his anger and frustration and flailing about should also be seen as a warning. Wounded, he will be more dangerous. Unable to play within the rules, he will work harder to cheat come election time. And, worryingly, the Supreme Court and the Congress may both give him more power to do so through pending decisions and the possibility of passing the extremely dangerous and misleadingly named “SAVE Act”—the most pernicious voter suppression legislation this country has seen in the modern era.
The tension between the fact that the public and foreign leaders and some of our own institutions are learning how to stand up to Trump and his fury at their success in doing so will be defining for us in the year ahead.
Challenged as he has been, Trump is now likely to see his only path forward is to seek to effectively end free and fair elections in America. For the voters of the US, our only hope is that we maintain the resolve and clarity of all those worldwide who have finally, belatedly, but increasingly effectively, learned how to say “no” to America’s man who would be king.
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