Trump's team may have committed a major Supreme Court 'blunder': analysis

President Donald Trump and his legal team may have made a huge "strategic blunder" in defending the president's "reciprocal tariffs" scheme at the Supreme Court this week, Adam Liptak wrote for The New York Times in an analysis published on Friday — and it could have big implications for the outcome of the case.

Trump imposed the tariffs months ago, bypassing congressional approval and causing enormous chaos in markets, and invoked as his authority the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) — despite the fact that this law doesn't even mention the word "tariffs."

The problem, Liptak argued, is that for months now, Trump has been bragging about how much money the tariffs will raise for the government, but "before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, his lawyer said something different. The tariffs were tools to achieve policy goals, said D. John Sauer, the solicitor general. 'The fact that they raise revenue,' he said, 'is only incidental.'"

"The difference was legally significant. If the Supreme Court finds that the tariffs are, at bottom, a kind of tax, it is likely to rule against them, since the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to tax," wrote Liptak. "If the justices agree that the tariffs are diplomatic tools, they may sustain them, as part of the president’s foreign policy prerogative."

In general, Liptak wrote, the justices don't pay much attention to political statements made in public, but this time they might, and there's a very significant reason why: "the disconnect at Wednesday’s argument was more complicated than in the earlier cases because, in an unusual move, the introduction to the government’s main brief quoted and so adopted some of Mr. Trump’s public statements. 'One year ago,' the brief said, quoting Mr. Trump, 'the United States was a dead country, and now, because of the trillions of dollars being paid by countries that have so badly abused us, America is a strong, financially viable and respected country.'"

This means, he continued, that not only do the administration's legal arguments contradict the president's own words, they contradict themselves.

Legal experts broadly think the oral argument in the tariff case went poorly for the president, with many of the right-wing justices skeptical that Trump has the ability to create tariffs out of thin air with no input from Congress.