An expert compared President Donald Trump's legal strategy to a classic arcade game, and she said U.S. consumers were the loser.
The 79-year-old president rolled out temporary import taxes to replace his tariffs after the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down in February, and attorney and activist Rachel Cohen told the "Legal AF" podcast that the Trump administration was attempting a new gambit to replace the stopgap levies before they expire this summer.
"I think in kind of mainstream commentary about the tariffs decision at the Supreme Court that Donald Trump got up after that decision came out and said, 'Okay, cool, I'm going to put in new tariffs under new different authority and you're going to have to challenge those back up, too, because now it's legal again because I'm doing this under different authority,'" Cohen said.
"[This] is a constant Trump kind of behavior," she added, "that he'll get a court ruling that he doesn't like and then he'll say, 'Okay, cool, I'm going to keep doing it, but now I'm going to say it's because of this other law or this other legal reasoning,' or whatever else, and people don't cover that as him defying court orders, when that is so counter to the norms of the legal system in the United States. The idea that a court would hand an like a decision down and you would say, 'Okay, well, I'm just going to try a different argument next time' – it's never worked that way."
Trump's approach is more a pattern of law-breaking disguised as a legal strategy, Cohen said.
"It's the sickest game of whack-a-mole, and it wouldn't surprise me if we see this all over again, right," Cohen said. "That things get appealed up, and once again the money that's collected by the government, at least in part, goes directly to companies instead of back into the pockets of the American consumer. So I think that we're seeing in Trump 2.0, in particular, we always saw such contempt for everyday Americans among the Trump administration and the Trump family, in particular."
"But I think that this time, the way they're behaving makes me very concerned about how they're planning on approaching these elections, right, because there's clearly no desire to do anything that might win over the American public towards Donald Trump or that allows an argument that the economy is actually better for everyday people," Cohen added. "They're just hiding the statistics, like, at least in his first term, we had things like stimulus checks, we had actual like overtures made and programs that you could point to, and I don't see that at all this time."