Trump lashes out at Gorsuch and Barrett over tariff ruling, calling his own Supreme Court picks sickening
Sadie Smith – President Trump tore into two of his own Supreme Court appointees Wednesday night, telling donors at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett “sicken me” for siding against him in last month’s landmark tariff case. The remarks, reported by the New York Post, mark the sharpest public rebuke Trump has delivered against justices he personally elevated to the bench.
The anger stems from the Feb. 20 ruling in which Gorsuch and Barrett joined four colleagues to strike down Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs. The decision forced the White House to scramble for alternative legal authorities, and, by Trump’s telling, cost the country “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Trump did not mince words at the fundraiser. He told the room that “bad courts in this country are costing us a tremendous amount of money,” then zeroed in on the high court itself.
“And the Supreme Court, that’s right, of the United States cost our country, all they needed was a sentence, our country hundreds of billions of dollars, and they couldn’t care less.”
He followed that with a direct shot at Gorsuch and Barrett, the two justices he nominated who voted against his position.
“Not that it matters, doesn’t matter at all, but two of the people that voted for that I appointed, and they sicken me. They sicken me ’cause they are bad for our country.”
The ruling and the revenue at stake
The Feb. 20 decision gutted the legal foundation Trump had used to impose customized duties on dozens of countries. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that IEEPA tariffs had taken in $133 billion during fiscal years 2025 and 2026 as of mid-December 2025. That river of revenue is now in legal limbo. The ruling did not specify whether any of the money already collected would need to be refunded.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s other first-term Supreme Court pick, dissented in the president’s favor. Even Kavanaugh acknowledged, however, that “the Court’s decision might not prevent the Presidents from imposing most if not all of these same sorts of tariffs under other statutory authorities.”
That concession pointed toward the path the White House has since taken. Trump cited Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a 15 percent baseline tariff rate on all countries. That authority carries a hard limit: the tariff can remain in place for only five months without congressional approval.
The administration also opened investigations under Section 301 of the same law into whether major trading partners maintain policies that discriminate against U.S. goods or violate economic agreements. Any tariff imposed on the basis of a Section 301 review would remain in effect for four years, a far more durable tool, but one that requires a formal investigative process before duties can be levied.
Navarro calls the loss ‘the best possible outcome’
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro offered a strikingly different tone on the same day. Speaking at Politico’s energy summit Wednesday, Navarro framed the Supreme Court defeat as a strategic win.
“Even though we lost the IEEPA tariffs, it was the best possible outcome because the justices ratified and affirmed the use of every other statute we’ve been using to implement tariffs.”
That spin carries some weight. The ruling’s scope was narrow enough that it left intact the president’s authority under older trade statutes, authorities that Congress granted explicitly for trade purposes, unlike IEEPA, which was designed for national-security emergencies. But the pivot comes at a cost. Section 122’s five-month clock is already ticking, and Section 301 investigations take time. The nimbleness Trump enjoyed under IEEPA, the ability to impose and adjust duties country by country, almost overnight, is gone.
Navarro’s optimism and Trump’s fury are not contradictory. They reflect two realities: the administration still has tools, but it lost the one it liked best.
A pattern of confrontation with the courts
Trump’s broadside at the fundraiser did not come in isolation. Earlier this month, as Newsmax reported, Trump publicly attacked the justices on Truth Social after the ruling, accusing Republican-appointed justices of openly disrespecting “the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land.”
He singled out Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Kavanaugh for praise as dissenters, while making clear that the tariff decision “mattered most to me.” He also lashed out at U.S. District Judge James Boasberg over a separate ruling involving Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, broadening the White House’s conflict with the judiciary across multiple fronts.
The Supreme Court itself has not been immune to internal friction. Justices have sparred publicly over the Court’s use of its emergency docket, with Kavanaugh and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson clashing in a rare public exchange over the scope and propriety of so-called shadow-docket orders. That kind of open disagreement, once almost unheard of, has become a recurring feature of a Court under intense political pressure from all directions.
Chief Justice John Roberts, for his part, used a rare public appearance last week to push back, not against Trump by name, but against the broader climate. Roberts acknowledged that judicial opinions are fair game for criticism.
“Judges around the country work very hard to get it right, and if they don’t, their opinions are subject to criticism. But, personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”
Roberts did not specify whose hostility he meant. He did not need to.
The constitutional stakes
The clash between Trump and the Court raises questions that go well beyond tariff policy. The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate foreign commerce. For decades, Congress has delegated pieces of that authority to the executive through trade statutes, each with its own conditions, limits, and timelines. The Feb. 20 ruling drew a line: IEEPA, a law built for financial sanctions and asset freezes during genuine emergencies, could not serve as a blank check for broad-based trade policy.
Whether that line was drawn in the right place is a legitimate debate. Trump and his allies argue the president needs maximum flexibility to counter unfair trade practices in real time. The majority on the Court concluded that IEEPA was never meant to provide that kind of flexibility. Both positions have serious constitutional pedigree.
What is harder to defend is the suggestion that justices who reach an unwelcome conclusion are acting out of personal disloyalty. Gorsuch and Barrett were not the only votes in the majority, four other justices joined them. The decision reflected a reading of statutory text, not a betrayal of the president who nominated them.
The Supreme Court has been navigating politically charged territory across a range of cases, from election-law disputes over ballot deadlines to the legal reckoning over mail-ballot grace periods. In each instance, the justices are asked to apply the law as written, not to deliver outcomes that please the political coalition that put them on the bench.
Open questions
Several loose ends remain. The $133 billion already collected under IEEPA tariffs sits in a gray zone. The Court’s ruling did not address whether importers are entitled to refunds, and no clear mechanism for resolving that question has been announced. If refunds are ultimately required, the fiscal hit would be enormous, and politically devastating for an administration that has treated tariff revenue as a signature achievement.
The five-month clock on Section 122 tariffs also creates a legislative pressure point. Without congressional action, the 15 percent baseline rate will expire. Whether this Congress, narrowly divided and consumed by other fights, can move fast enough to extend or replace those tariffs is an open question. The Section 301 investigations, meanwhile, are just getting started. Their timelines are measured in months, not days.
And then there is the broader relationship between the executive and the judiciary. Trump’s rhetoric has escalated from policy disagreement to personal denunciation. Roberts’s response, measured but unmistakable, signals that the Court is aware of the pressure and unwilling to absorb it silently.
The real problem
Trump’s frustration with the ruling is understandable. He had a tool that worked, and the Court took it away. The tariff revenue was real. The leverage over trading partners was real. Losing IEEPA authority is a genuine setback for an administration that made trade enforcement a centerpiece of its economic agenda.
But directing that frustration at individual justices, especially ones you nominated, by telling a room full of donors that they “sicken” you is a different matter. It does not change the ruling. It does not speed up the Section 301 investigations. It does not extend the Section 122 clock. What it does is put every future Supreme Court nominee on notice that independence from the president who appoints you will be treated as betrayal.
That is not a standard any conservative who values constitutional order should want to set. The whole point of lifetime tenure is that justices answer to the law, not to the man who gave them the job.
Presidents lose cases. It comes with the office. The question is whether you lose with the kind of discipline that keeps your coalition together, or whether you spend your political capital reminding your own appointees that gratitude was the price of admission.
SF Source American Almanac Mar 2026