U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 3, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The conservative learning Wall Street Journal blasted President Donald Trump for “smearing” members of the Supreme Court who overruled his unilateral tariff policy Friday.
“President Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology — to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself,” WSJ reported. “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.”
Where other presidents have criticized SCOTUS when they didn’t like a ruling, WSJ said Trump “lit into the Justices who voted against him as traitors bought by foreign interests.”
Trump called the liberals on the court a “disgrace to our nation,” but reserved even more hate for friendly justices he’d expected to side with him due to their nearly rubberstamp approval in past cases.
“[They] think they’re being ‘politically correct,’ which has happened before, far too often, with certain members of this Court, when, in fact, they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats—and . . . they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Trump spat. “It’s my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests.”
“This is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards,” said the WSJ. “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. Asked about Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, whom he appointed, Mr. Trump called them ‘an embarrassment to their families.’”
The WSJ editorial board pointed out that “this is the same Court that ruled Mr. Trump’s way on presidential immunity, which was more personally consequential for this President.”
“Mr. Trump shouldn’t have been surprised by the Court. 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,” WSJ said.