It stood to reason that Donald Trump would throw a fit after the Supreme Court rejected his tariffs policy, and on Friday afternoon, the president did exactly that, describing the ruling as “ridiculous,” among other things.
But the Republican incumbent also took steps Americans have never seen from a sitting president: He went after individual high court justices, by name, in unusually personal terms.
Targeting the six-member majority, which included two of the justices he appointed to the Supreme Court, Trump condemned the sextet as “a disgrace to our nation,” “fools” and “lapdogs for RINOS and the radical left.”
And he kept going. The president insisted that the justices who dared to rule in a way he didn’t like are “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” Asked whether he regretted nominating Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, Trump didn’t answer the question directly, though he said he considers their role in the majority ruling “an embarrassment to their families.”
In case that wasn’t quite enough, he also slammed the high court’s three-member progressive minority as a “disgrace to our nation.”
To be sure, previous presidents might have seethed privately to aides in the wake of major Supreme Court defeats, but there’s no precedent in the American tradition for anything like this.
It may seem like ancient history, but in the run-up to Election Day 2024, Trump invested a fair amount of time in condemning those who criticize judges — as if his own rhetorical record didn’t exist. Such criticisms, the Republican said in August, are “probably illegal.” Two weeks later, he went a little further, adding that judicial criticism should be “illegal.”
If that wasn’t quite enough, Trump — who’d spent years publicly chastising judges — went so far as to declare, “These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges.”
A lot has changed since then.
But of particular interest was the president’s conspiratorial perspective. From the transcript of his Friday press conference in the White House briefing room:
It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests. … I think that foreign interests are represented by people that I believe have undue influence. They have a lot of influence over the Supreme Court, whether it’s through fear or respect or friendships, I don’t know.
When a reporter specifically asked whether he had any evidence of foreign interests having influence over Supreme Court justices, Trump replied, “You’re gonna find out.”
As a rule, when Trump uses the phrase, “You’re gonna find out,” it’s his way of saying, “I’m peddling a conspiracy theory that I can’t substantiate, but I don’t want to admit it, so I’ll leave people with the impression that some made-up evidence might eventually emerge.”
The conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal added, “This is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards. 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 2010, during a State of the Union address, President Barack Obama offered some modest criticisms of the Supreme Court’s highly controversial Citizens United ruling, and much of the political world just about lost its mind over the breach in norms related to the presidency and the court.
It was difficult to imagine that 16 years later there would be a Republican president who would make those criticisms appear rather quaint by comparison.
