Rising This Week: 'These f***ing courts'
Trump's profane tantrum after his tariffs defeat shows what his supporters — and many critics — refuse to acknowledge: He's losing.
Find out more about live courtroom coverage this week in the newsletter below.
The moment that the Supreme Court’s tariffs decision came down on Friday, Donald Trump reportedly launched into a profane tirade in the middle of a breakfast with Democratic and Republican governors that he had been hosting.
“These f***ing courts,” Trump groused, according to CNN.
It was a telling moment exposing that Trump’s self-contradictory messages in his press conference later that day were different halves of the same lie.
As Trump put it, the Supreme Court’s decision was both a historic betrayal by “disloyal” Trump-appointed justices and barely a speed bump in his global tariffs regime. Trump gave Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett the Mike Pence treatment, calling them “LAPDOGS” who didn’t have the “courage” to subvert the constitutional order. He also minimized the consequences of their ruling, claiming the power to accelerate his tariffs under different statutes. Both of these talking points couldn’t be true, and in fact, neither of them are.
Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ran with that messaging anyway.
“The Court did not rule against President Trump’s tariffs. Six justices simply ruled that [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] authorities cannot be used to raise even one dollar of revenue,” Bessent said. “This administration will invoke alternative legal authorities to replace the IEEPA tariffs.”
Don’t believe the hype: Trump appears to be outvoted on those other approaches, too.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a footnote: “The cited statutes contain various combinations of procedural prerequisites, required agency determinations, and limits on the duration, amount, and scope of the tariffs they authorize.”
Trump’s latest 15 percent global tariff announcement relies on a statute that his government seems to have admitted would be illegal. Even if it isn’t stricken down immediately once it takes effect, this new import tax would expire in 150 days. Put another way, those other statutes lack the unilateral and kingly power to impose taxes, which the Framers of the Constitution gave to Congress.
In his private moments, Trump bluntly acknowledges what he pretends not to understand in public: “These f***ing courts,” combined with popular pushback, have thwarted major prongs of his authoritarian agenda, including the legal fiction that he used to levy taxes by fiat on U.S. consumers and extort foreign allies.
Other major parts of Trump’s agenda are in shambles. Trump’s troops have all been withdrawn from California, Oregon, and Illinois. His political prosecutions against ex-FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and six Democratic members of Congress collapsed either before or shortly after they started.
Fox pundit turned U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro racked up as many no-true-bills in her failed prosecution of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and his peers than the entire Justice Department did in 2016.
So-called border czar Tom Homan claims that a withdrawal of federal agents is imminent in the Twin Cities, but that surge has strained the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota to the breaking point, hollowed out by mass resignations.
Judges have found prosecutors there violated scores of court orders to release unjustly detained immigrants, and one found the government in civil contempt. The Justice Department’s response to literally hundreds of defeats has been to whine more loudly about the courts before begrudgingly complying with their orders.
U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country meanwhile have been struggling to find lawyers willing to serve as foot soldiers to Trump’s agenda, hanging a Soviet-style banner hailing the leader outside Main Justice to clarify the job description for any willing applicants. Some Justice Department lawyers have resorted to posting want ads on social media.
As Trump puts it, “they aren’t sending their best” — or keeping them.
Perhaps more than any other legal saga of Trump 2.0, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia probably represents the biggest thumb in the eye of Trump’s pretensions of unchecked power.
That’s because Abrego — a vilified, undocumented immigrant — wasn’t supposed to be able to rack up an unbroken string of victories against the full weight and force of Trump’s government.
After being spirited to a foreign gulag last March, Abrego won his return to the United States in every level of the U.S. judiciary, including a 9-0 decision of the Supreme Court. Rather than return him to his family, Trump’s Justice Department sent Abrego for criminal prosecution in Nashville, Tenn., where the Salvadoran immigrant’s winning streak continued. Two federal judges in Tennessee upheld Abrego’s right to pretrial release, and another federal judge in Maryland freed him from immigration detention.
Kristi Noem crowed that Abrego would never set foot on U.S. soil again, but she was ultimately forced to release him to his wife and family in Maryland pending his possible trial.
Abrego beat back four attempts by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security to send him to at least four African nations to which he has no connection: Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and Liberia. The government refuses to send Abrego to the one nation where he agreed to self-deport: Costa Rica, which agreed to respect his human rights.
Justice Department attorneys never explained why the government refuses to deport Abrego to the only country that it has legal authority to send him, but it’s reasonable to conclude that the reason is that Abrego agreed to go there.
That fact will likely loom large over Abrego’s upcoming evidentiary hearing on Thursday to dismiss his criminal prosecution on the grounds of vindictive prosecution.
When this newsletter launched last year, All Rise News immediately recognized the significance of Abrego’s case for due process and the rule of law, but there was another reason for this wall-to-wall coverage.
Whatever its ultimate outcome, Abrego’s case exposes the illusions of powerlessness and inevitability surrounding Trump 2.0.
Trump’s government tried labeling Abrego a human trafficker, MS-13 gang member and a sexual harasser in an unrelenting pretrial propaganda blizzard of public statements and social media posts. Abrego has never been charged with any of these crimes, only a far less serious crime of smuggling immigrants. Every federal judge who inspected evidence of Abrego’s supposed gang affiliations found them lacking. He has never been convicted of a crime.
Instead of making Abrego toxic, Trump’s government attracted a broad coalition of unions, faith groups, politicians and activists to his case. Throngs of protesters show up to all of his civil and criminal proceedings, dozens or hundreds at a time in multiple states. Abrego won his civil lawsuits, and his criminal prosecution now may hang on a thread.
The vindictive prosecution hearing shifts the burden to the government to provide a lawful basis for the criminal case. In legal terms, Trump’s Justice Department must overcome the presumption of vindictiveness.
That’s why All Rise News will attend the hearing in Nashville, Tenn., which could be the beginning of the final chapter of Abrego’s criminal case. If Abrego wins again, it will be an incredible testament to the system vindicating the rights of the powerless against emboldened executive vengeance.
All Rise News will provide wall-to-wall reporting of the proceedings on Thursday, coverage powered entirely by paid subscribers of this newsletter. If you have not become one already, and you have the means to do so, consider a subscription today and unlock the listings below.
