Former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, David Frum, said that if the U.S. Supreme Court hands power to President Donald Trump to wage his trade war, then they're effectively killing the Constitution.
Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, Frum called Trump's tariff actions "the most extreme thing that he's ever done in this way."
"If there's one idea that runs through the American legal tradition and before that, the English legal tradition, it's that the executive cannot impose taxes without the consent of the legislature," he noted. "When Charles I in England, did it in the 1600s, the English cut off his head. When George III tried to do it in his own way, the United States started the American Revolution. This is the foundational idea."
Frum also explained that it was so important to the Founding Fathers that it was written as Article I of the Constitution.
"Taxes have to be approved by Congress, and tariffs are taxes. Donald Trump has invented this completely ludicrous theory about how he is entitled to impose this massive tax."
He compared the huge amount of "illegal taxes" Trump is collecting to the "no tax on tips" agreement that he included for a few years under the 2026 budget, known as the "big, beautiful bill."
"To give you an idea of how big the taxes he imposed illegally are, you've heard a lot about this no tax on tips promise? Now, most people don't know that the promise expires at the end of 2028. But the total value of the no tax on tips commitment is about $32 billion before it expires at the end of 2028. The Trump administration has taken that much money in illegal tariffs just in the month of August; $30 billion in illegal taxes in August, which entirely offset the holiday they claim to have given to working Americans. And so there's a lot at stake here," said Frum.
"If the court lets Donald Trump get away with this, you just might as well take Article I out of the Constitution. Because Congress has lost control of the taxing power," he closed.
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