Of bark, bite and lapdogs
Trump's belligerent response to the Supreme Court foreshadows uncertainty ahead
Meaning no disrespect to a beloved lapdog, we need to grasp what the president’s words really portend.
As political rhetoric goes these days, President Trump’s gibes at the Supreme Court after its decision on tariffs might at first have seemed relatively typical for him. But they’re nothing like what we’ve ever heard a president say before about the nation’s top jurists. The six justices who ruled that Trump’s unilaterally-imposed tariffs are unconstitutional — two of them Trump appointees — are “unpatriotic” and disloyal to the Constitution, the president said. He suggested they were influenced by “foreign interests” and “slimeballs.” Did he regret appointing them? “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, to tell you the truth,” he said, calling the justices, for good measure, “fools and lapdogs.”
Speaking of which, Vice President JD Vance, who passed the Kentucky bar exam just over a dozen years ago, said the ruling amounted to “lawlessness from the Court, plain and simple.” A rather outrageous attack on American jurisprudence from a Yale Law School graduate, certainly, but it keeps Vance in his boss’s good graces while making clear that he remains also an understudy to Trump in rhetorical skills.
Listening to a Trumpian rant is like rubbernecking at an accident scene: Yes, tragedy is at hand, but it’s hard to altogether disregard the awfulness. Likewise, the words of the president (and his sidekick) may be entertaining, but they put us at risk of distraction from the real peril at hand — namely, what happens now?
Strict adherence to the court’s ruling would add a trillion dollars to the federal deficit, money that Trump’s team had blithely projected would flow to the U.S. Treasury under a strategy that many experts predicted the court would find to be unconstitutional, as it has. Yet defying the court and demanding tariff payments anyway, as the president ordered Friday night, puts uncertainty at the center of both the global economy and the constitutional order of the United States. We are left in a Trumpian mess.
Maybe there’s an answer in looking at the record of Trump’s slurs and slanders. We’ve gotten accustomed to them, after all, to the point that we tend to discount them as mere symptoms of his likely mental illness. But bluster is usually a byproduct of weakness. So maybe what we have seen for more than a year now as an impending crisis in America has, finally, reached an inflection point. Maybe we have come to a reckoning just now, and the peak power of this pernicious president has in fact passed.
It doesn’t mean Trump will go quietly, or that the disorder that follows everywhere the man’s gaze alights will be eased — at least, not soon. But no matter what the man says now, there is reason to believe that the Supreme Court decision striking down Trump’s assertion of broad tariff power will be viewed as the day America began to regain its footing from the darkest presidency in its history.
Psychologists tell us that Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is frequently cited as the source of Trump’s malevolence, often manifests in harsh, demeaning language aimed at controlling others. NPD aside, psychologists say that name-calling is often a result of “displaced aggression” — that is, a person projecting their own feelings of inadequacy onto others in order to feel temporarily superior. And it’s not unusual for someone to mount an attack on character in desperation when they run out of rational or logical points.
This all helps us to understand what we hear constantly from Donald Trump. He has referred to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar as “garbage,” nicknamed Nikki Haley, his last-standing 2024 primary opponent, “birdbrain,” claimed federal prosecutor Jack Smith is “deranged” and reserved an especially inappropriate name, “Horseface,” for the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who triggered the hush money trial that led to Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts. Oh, and there’s this: Democrats in general, Trump routinely repeats, are all “radical lunatics.”
In the pre-Trump era of American politics, we expected our leaders to have acquired the self-control of normal adulthood, and so to check themselves before exhibiting anti-social behavior or uttering hateful language. Not now; much less is actually the best we can expect of our current leader. But while there’s surely more invective ahead, the very recklessness of Trump’s language and policy direction suggest that he sees something slipping away.
The first step for us, though, is to keep his language in context. What risks being lost as we pay attention to the name-calling and showboating is that we settle for witnessing and reacting to Trump’s over-boiling frustration. We can’t help but give our attention to the Trump show, but we have to look away now and pay attention to what’s really at stake.
In this instance, Trump’s team obviously had planned for the possibility of an adverse ruling from the high court, because they had prepared a script for the president citing a different statute, one that would enable the U.S. to collect a lot of the money that had been projected to come from tariffs under the law argued before the Supreme Court. Hours after the Supreme Court decision that he denounced, Trump carried through with an executive order citing that other law to re-impose tariffs, notwithstanding the court ruling.
What Trump didn’t promise to do, though, is turn to Congress, which is explicitly given the authority by the Constitution to set tariffs. (See Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8, Clauses 1 and 3.) That is clearly what the Supreme Court might have expected a president to do after receiving its ruling.
Instead, Trump issued executive orders based on a provision of a half-century-old law that no president has ever before invoked. In sidestepping the Supreme Court, Trump invites new legal challenges, of course. That means there will be a lack of clarity overhanging the U.S. budget and the global economy for a long time to come. Businesses already have lined up lawsuits demanding repayment of some of the $200 billion they’ve paid in tariffs since the beginning of the year, a process that likely will take years of litigation and, eventually, government action.
The New York Times cited experts who said that the administration had expected the tariffs to raise $3 trillion in revenue over the coming nine years, and that perhaps half of that could come in, anyway, under the new set of tariffs Trump intends to impose. The government will need that money, and then some, because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Republican-controlled Congress happily enacted last year, will add roughly $4.7 trillion to the national debt over those same nine years — even as more pressure is placed on the Treasury by Baby Boomers qualifying for Social Security and Medicare payments.
Alongside the economic and constitutional questions is one of U.S. foreign policy. Trump has used tariffs as a bludgeon in dealing with other governments, threatening huge trade disruption if they displease him. Without that tool, Trump’s wild swings aimed at global dominance will be curtailed. Because Trump has disabled so many tools of “soft diplomacy” — killing the U.S. Agency for International Development, shutting down American media broadcasts to other nations, withdrawing aid that supported investigative reporting in hostile lands — there are fewer options to extend American influence and pro-democracy efforts globally. It will leave less bite behind the bark.
Plenty of American presidents before Trump have been known for fiery words, and some have tried to stretch what the letter of the Constitution seems to require. John Adams, our second president, was so thin-skinned that he pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to publicly insult him (a provision quickly repealed under his successor, Thomas Jefferson). Andrew Jackson was so angry at his vice president, John C. Calhoun, that he threatened to have him hanged. One of the reasons that Dwight D. Eisenhower took up golf, it is said, was to calm his temper, which had gotten him labeled “the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang” by some on the White House staff.
The good news for Americans, then, is that our democracy has survived ill-tempered executives before, meaning that the bark-to-bite ratio might be one metric that doesn’t set apart Donald Trump from all his predecessors — though none were as coarse in public as Trump is routinely. The shock that Trump’s angry, foul-mouthed campaigning provoked a decade ago has yielded now to a sort of “there-he-goes-again” notion.
After all, our experience with Trump blather suggests that it is often ephemeral. Take, for example, the experience of Marco Rubio, who is now Secretary of State: When Rubio was running for the presidential nomination in 2016, Trump called him a “choker” and a “lightweight” — though he misspelled both those words in a social media post — and claimed that “Little Mario” needed to apply makeup with a trowel “to cover up his ears.” That sort of invective seems to be just part of Trump’s act.
So it isn’t the incivility of Trump’s response to the Supreme Court ruling that ought to concern us as much as the uncertainty he insists upon extending. Alongside the legal actions seeking refund of the unconstitutional tariff revenues — which are likely to unsettle federal budget deliberations even more than they have been lately — there will be lawsuits now aimed at stopping this new regime of tariffs. Congress, a lapdog for Trump till now, will almost surely move to fulfill the role setting tariffs that the Supreme Court has ruled is rightfully its own, especially if Democrats do well in November.
Budgetary and economic instability, then, will be key factors of American life for years to come, with accompanying political stress. The Supreme Court ruling on tariffs makes it more likely that this is the way Trumpism will wind down — uncomfortably, but inexorably.
Of course, we shouldn’t overlook the tendency of this president to distract us from issues that he believes threaten his popularity. A vast American military force has been amassed in the Mideast, suggesting Trump is about to order an attack on Iran, even as he promises to continue paramilitary action in Democrat-run U.S. cities. We can’t underestimate Trump’s capacity for malevolent activity.
What we can say for certain is that all of this will provoke the president to more invective, harsher attacks on anybody who displeases him and more intemperate action. But it’s comforting to note a verse from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs that echoes warnings found in the wisdom literature of many ancient societies: “The mouths of fools are their undoing, and their lips are a snare to their very lives.”
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THE UPSTATE AMERICAN is a weekly essay aimed at helping all of us who are concerned about America’s future consider how we might best respond to the challenges of the day. Thank you for joining in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll be back next week.
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I very much fear that he will become more dangerous and wild as he feels himself losing power and impact, and this will lead to a catastrophe. Like nuking someplace. He is so crazy now, and there seems no one is going to rein him in.
Also, what do you think of this: https://www.facebook.com/reel/938123142008741
Anyone who says that he will act any differently than he ever has is either delusional or complicit.