The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board denounced President Donald Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Court restricting his ability to impose tariffs Friday night, stating that the president “owes” an apology “to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself.”
“Mr. Trump doubtless won’t offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency,” the board wrote in an editorial headlined “Trump Demeans Himself as He Attacks the Supreme Court”
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court struck down most of the “emergency” tariffs Trump tried to implement, finding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the president to impose them. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.
Following the court’s decision, Trump raged against the justices who ruled against him, calling them a “disgrace” and calling their decision an “embarrassment to their families.”
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“Others think they’re being politically correct, which has happened before far too often with certain members of this court,” Trump said at a press conference Friday. “And it’s happened so often with this court, what a shame. And having to do with voting in particular, when in fact they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOS and the radical left Democrats.”
The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper said the president’s meltdown was “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,” the editorial board wrote.
The editorial warned that the president’s rhetoric “could cause some deranged Trump acolyte to turn to violence against a Justice,” and added that the board hoped ”that all Justices will appear next week to the State of the Union address as a show of “self-protective solidarity.”
“Mr. Trump shouldn’t have been surprised by the Court,” the op-ed read. “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.”
