With the Supreme Court poised to make rulings in several major cases testing the president’s authority, the nation’s highest court will ultimately decide “in the coming weeks and months” whether President Donald Trump ends his second term as a “king,” or as a “lame-duck president facing obstacles to his reign,” the Intelligencer reported Sunday.
“In a very real sense, the Supreme Court will determine in the coming weeks and months whether a president determined to act outside traditional executive boundaries can or cannot be meaningfully restrained by Congress or the judiciary,” writes Intelligencer columnist Ed Kilgore. “As Christian Farias put it in New York, if the Court acts quickly and decisively in Trump’s favor, it could in just three months effectively make him king.”
Perhaps the most consequential case the Supreme Court will decide on is whether the president holds the authority to impose broad tariffs, a case that challenges Trump’s key policy agenda.
Trump issued a wave of so-called reciprocal tariffs earlier this year that were immediately challenged by business owners. The Supreme Court first heard arguments in the case earlier this month, and the majority of justices expressed skepticism at Trump’s defense of his tariffs, leading to online betting platforms predicting that the court would ultimately strike down Trump’s signature trade policy.
Trump has grown increasingly panicked at the possibility of the Supreme Court ruling against him in the tariff case, warning that the United States “could be reduced to almost Third World status” should the tariffs be ruled unlawful.
Other cases on the Supreme Court’s docket that could decide Trump’s fate include a decision on the president’s authority to deploy the military to U.S. cities, weighing in on the president’s ability to cancel the refugee status for hundreds of thousands of migrants, and deciding on whether the president holds unilateral authority to control executive agencies.
The Supreme Court may also weigh in on Trump’s aggressive redistricting push, a strategy to bolster the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Aside from the scope of Trump’s powers, the Supreme Court will also have a lot to say about their duration by granting or denying him the power to rig the midterms and perpetuate Republican trifecta control of the federal government,” Kilgore wrote.
“That could make the difference between the Trump 2.0 train roaring toward the end of his presidency at full throttle and a chastened lame-duck president facing obstacles to his reign from a Congress partially controlled by the opposition.”