President Trump doesn’t mince words, and last night at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner, he proved it again. According to reports from attendees at the event, Trump targeted two justices he personally appointed to the Supreme Court, saying, “They sicken me. They’re bad for our country.”
The context matters. The Supreme Court just dealt a major blow to Trump’s economic agenda in a 6-3 decision, siding with the three leftist justices to strike down his tariffs. As detailed in the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch formed the majority, ruling that Trump lacked authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose those tariffs aimed at renegotiating trade deals and bringing manufacturing back to American soil.
Justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh dissented, but it was Barrett and Gorsuch—Trump’s own picks—who joined Roberts in blocking the president’s signature economic policy. The majority opinion, as released by the Supreme Court, stated that no president in IEEPA’s fifty-year history had used the statute for tariffs of this magnitude and argued that Trump needed “clear congressional authorization” for such an “extraordinary assertion of power.”
Translation: unelected judges just overruled the elected president on a core economic issue that voters put him in office to fix. Trump’s frustration is palpable and understandable; he nominated these justices expecting constitutional originalists who would respect the separation of powers and the executive’s authority on foreign trade. Instead, as Trump noted during his remarks at the dinner, he got justices who sided with the left to kneecap his agenda, a decision that, per Trump’s comments, could cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars—and the justices, he said, “couldn’t care less.”
This isn’t about loyalty to Trump personally; it’s about loyalty to the Constitution and the voters who elected him. When a president wins an election on a specific platform—like tariffs to protect American workers—the judiciary shouldn’t be inventing new limits on executive power to stop him. That’s not judicial review; it’s judicial activism wearing conservative robes.
The bigger question is what this means going forward: If Trump’s own appointees are willing to join the left to block his policies, what happens when the Court considers other aspects of his agenda? Trump built his first term’s legacy in large part through the judiciary, with three Supreme Court picks and hundreds of lower court judges, as noted in various conservative analyses. But judges have minds of their own, and last night’s remarks suggest the president is learning that lesson the hard way—sometimes you pick winners, and sometimes you pick people who “sicken you.”
For the base that elected Trump to shake up Washington, this ruling stings; they didn’t vote for Gorsuch and Barrett to play legal games while China eats our lunch. They voted for action, and right now, the Supreme Court just told them no.
Providence watches over the bold.
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