Donald Trump's stubborn insistence against the Supreme Court's recent tariff ruling shows that he has "slipped his constitutional leash," and is driving the U.S. towards a new "civil war," according to a scathing new analysis from a conservative journalist.
Ambrose Evan-Pritchard is the international business editor for the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. This week, he published a new op-ed examining Trump's moves to denigrate the Supreme Court and use other tariff authorities to "pick the pockets of the people by new means."
Last week, the Court voted 6-3 that Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping global tariffs without congressional approval was illegal, effectively shutting down his most prized economic and foreign policy tool. Instead of taking the rare defeat from the conservative-majority court with grace, Trump lashed out at the justices and moved forward with using Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act as a limited alternative to keep some tariffs in place.
In his piece on the matter, Evans-Pritchard hailed the "thunderous" ruling as "the most consequential assertion of Supreme Court authority since the Dred Scott case of 1857 on the eve of the American Civil War," for its affirmation of the separation of powers between the branches of government and the limits of the presidency that the Founding Fathers envisioned. Trump's reaction, he argued, sees the country hurtling "towards a full-blown constitutional crisis" and decaying from a democracy into a form of "elective despotism."
"But this welcome return to civic spirit resolves nothing because Trump refuses to accept the verdict," Evans-Pritchard wrote. "His behavior pushes this simmering constitutional showdown into the open and takes it to a more dangerous level."
He later added: "[The] larger story is that the president has entirely slipped his constitutional leash, accepts no constraint of any kind and will drain US democracy of its substance unless stopped by greater political force – leaving aside the other little matter that he is deploying carrier strike groups around the world with escalating hubris and as if they are his own personal toys."
Evans-Pritchard further argued that Trump's actions with tariffs directly echoed those of British monarchs, who fomented both the English Revolution and the American Revolution. He also noted that European powers will inevitably need to take economic action to try and exert pressure "as Trump pushes America closer to political civil war." The real deterrent for this, he argued, will have to come from the Supreme Court and Congress continuing to stand up to Trump.
"The giant question hanging over America is whether the Supreme Court will remain courageously high-minded as fresh cases arise or whether it will bow to intimidation and let Trump pick the pockets of the people by new means," Evans-Pritchard wrote. "The justices have no artillery. They cannot stand up to the White House without the backing of Congress. The Republicans on Capitol Hill now face their test of character. Are they really so tribal, so drunk with ideology and so far gone that they will collude in the degradation of American democracy for the sake of this rogue presidency?"