The Supreme Court on Friday dealt President Donald Trump perhaps the most significant rebuke of his second term. The justices, including two of the president’s appointees, struck down Trump’s signature economic policy: his global tariffs.
In the long run, the court might have saved him from himself — at least politically.
Some Republicans are outright praising the decision, and you can bet more are happy behind the scenes.
That’s because, while the decision is clearly a major setback for Trump’s agenda, it also strips him of tools that seemed to cause short-term economic damage to the country, and that were clearly doing short-term political damage to Trump’s party.
This is not the end of the tariffs story. Trump quickly signaled he’d launch 10% global tariffs under a different authority (which he said Saturday he was upping to 15%). He even claimed on Friday that the Supreme Court’s decision had actually made his ability to levy trade penalties “stronger,” somehow.
But that’s not actually true. Trump’s tariff powers have been significantly curtailed. And while Republicans have been happy to let him try to do things on his own, even when those things were powers delegated to Congress by the Constitution, this setback could also lead to some soul-searching in the GOP about whether to continue entertaining Trump’s trade gambits.
Whether any of them seize on this apparent opportunity to deescalate is the big question.
It was fortuitous that the Supreme Court’s decision came Friday. Just 90 minutes before it landed, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced the gross domestic product had grown at just a 1.4% annualized rate in the fourth quarter. That made 2025 the second-worst year for GDP growth since 2016.
In other words, the stock market aside, the economy isn’t doing great.
It’s not clear how much the stagnancy is due to tariffs, specifically. But the uncertainty surrounding them and the extra costs they’ve created have clearly put a damper on an economic picture that wasn’t great to begin with.
At the very least, they gave Americans a reason to blame Trump for economic hardships. Trump voluntarily took ownership of a struggling economy, using a method that economists widely predicted would cause more problems, at least in the near term.
It’s not difficult to see why that cost Trump and the GOP. And cost them it did.
Since Trump announced the global tariffs back on April 2, his net economic approval rating in Nate Silver’s averages has gone from plus-6 to minus-12.
