Breaking — The Court Trump Built Just Gutted His Economy

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump's sweeping tariffs were illegal. Two of his own justices voted against him. The government has no plan to return $130 billion.

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“We hold that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.”

That’s Chief Justice John Roberts — a conservative appointed by George W. Bush — writing for a six-justice majority that just demolished the central pillar of Trump’s economic agenda.¹ Not a close call. Not a technicality. The Supreme Court ruled today that Trump invented a power that doesn’t exist, used it to tax every import in the country, and pocketed $130 billion that was never his to take.²

Let that number breathe. One hundred and thirty billion dollars — collected from American importers, passed on to American consumers, extracted from the American economy — under a law that doesn’t authorize any of it.¹ The Congressional Budget Office estimated the total damage at $3 trillion over the next decade.² And the court just said: every dollar was illegal.

His Own Justices

The 6-3 vote is the detail that should haunt this administration. Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — Trump’s own appointees — joined Roberts and the three liberal justices to strike down the tariffs.¹ The court Trump built to rubber-stamp his agenda looked at his signature economic policy and said no. Not because they’re liberals. Because the law isn’t even close. Roberts wrote that Trump “asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope” — and pointed to no statute that gives him that power.¹

That’s not judicial activism. That’s the Constitution working the way it was designed. Congress sets tariffs. The president doesn’t. No president in American history had ever used IEEPA — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law designed for sanctions during national emergencies — to impose import taxes.² Trump didn’t push an envelope. He fabricated a power out of whole cloth, declared trade deficits a “national emergency,” and started taxing the country.

The Grift They Tried to Sell

The oral arguments are where this goes from illegal to absurd. Solicitor General D. John Sauer — the man whose job is to defend the administration’s legal positions — stood before the Supreme Court and argued, with a straight face, that tariffs aren’t really about revenue.³ “These are regulatory tariffs,” Sauer told the justices. ”They are not revenue-raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental.”³

This while Trump was publicly bragging about raising trillions.

Justice Sotomayor didn’t bother with diplomacy: ”I just don’t understand this argument. You want to say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”³ Roberts himself — during oral arguments — said the quiet part: ”The vehicle is the imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been a core power of Congress.”³

The administration’s own lawyer told the court these weren’t taxes. The court’s own chief justice told the lawyer they were. That’s not a legal gray area. That’s a con exposed in real time.

Who Got Crushed

Here’s who paid for Trump’s illegal tariffs while they lasted: small businesses selling plumbing supplies, educational toys, women’s cycling apparel, wine and spirits.² Not multinational corporations with armies of lawyers and supply chain consultants. Small operators who couldn’t absorb a 25-34% overnight tax on everything they import. The “reciprocal” tariffs alone hit at rates of 34% on Chinese goods and 10% baseline on the rest of the world.¹

Dan Anthony, executive director of We Pay the Tariffs — a coalition of small businesses — put it bluntly: ”Small businesses cannot afford to wait months or years while bureaucratic delays play out, nor can they afford expensive litigation just to recover money that was unlawfully collected from them in the first place.”¹ Costco has already lined up in court to demand refunds.² Hundreds of other companies have sued.

And here’s the part Kavanaugh — in dissent — flagged with what sounded like genuine alarm: ”The Court says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the Government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers.”¹ The government stole $130 billion. The court said the theft was illegal. Nobody has a plan to give it back.

What Comes Next

Trump will try to reimpose tariffs under other legal authorities — trade-specific statutes that are slower, narrower, and don’t allow the sweeping “reciprocal” framework that was his economic centerpiece.¹ Steel and aluminum tariffs, imposed under different laws, remain in place.¹ But the architecture is shattered. The emergency-powers shortcut that let him tax the entire global economy by executive fiat is dead.

And this ruling drops while Trump is running a 10-day countdown clock on a potential war with Iran. A crumbling domestic agenda. An illegal economic policy in ruins. And a military buildup accelerating in the Middle East. Failing regimes don’t moderate. They escalate.

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The Call

This isn’t an isolated incident. We track stories like this using the fascism syndrome—ten indicators that a democracy is sliding into fascism—so you don’t lose the thread in the daily chaos:

• Capture of the state: Trump invoked emergency powers to bypass Congress’s constitutional authority over taxation. No president had ever claimed this power. Roberts: “unlimited amount, duration and scope.”

• War on reality: Sauer told the court tariffs aren’t taxes. Trump told the country they’d raise trillions. The lie was the strategy.

• Consolidation of economic power: $130 billion extracted from small importers who couldn’t fight back. The tariffs functioned as a regressive tax — crushing the bottom, enriching the machine.

• Aggression as virtue: Trump called this ruling “the difference between going bankrupt and thriving.” When you lose at the Supreme Court, you call the Constitution an attack.

Invent a power. Extract $130 billion. Dare the court to stop you. That’s not governance. That’s a shakedown. That’s fascism.

But naming the con is only half the job.

We built this publication to equip you with the tools to fight back—the frameworks, the messaging, the strategies that actually work. See the links below. But we can only keep doing this with your help. If this matters to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You keep the fight alive.

• Fighting Fascism: How Charge Ahead Back and Win — The strategic playbook for reclaiming power

• The Trump Regime Messaging Guide — How to talk to people who’ve been captured by the machine

• The Freedom Illusion — How we got here, and the counter-ideology that gets us out

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Article Sources:

1. Lawrence Hurley, “Supreme Court strikes down most of Trump’s tariffs in a major blow to the president“, NBC News, February 20, 2026.

Detailed reporting on the 6-3 ruling authored by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Gorsuch, Barrett, and the three liberal justices. Documents Roberts’s holding that IEEPA “does not authorize the president to impose tariffs,” the two categories of tariffs struck down (reciprocal and fentanyl-pretext), Kavanaugh’s dissent warning about the $130 billion refund problem, and the immediate response from small business coalitions demanding their money back. The most comprehensive source for the legal breakdown of the decision and its immediate economic implications.

2. Lindsay Whitehurst, “Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s sweeping tariffs, upending central plank of economic agenda“, ABC7 / Associated Press, February 20, 2026.

Associated Press wire report establishing the broader context: this is the first major piece of Trump’s agenda to come squarely before the Supreme Court, legal opposition crossed the political spectrum including libertarian and pro-business groups, and polling found tariffs aren’t broadly popular. Documents the CBO estimate of $3 trillion in economic impact over the next decade, the $133 billion already collected under IEEPA, and the fact that no president had ever used the 1977 law to impose import taxes before Trump.

3. Callum Jones, “Trump illegally overstepped executive power with global tariffs, supreme court rules“, The Guardian, February 20, 2026.

The strongest source for the oral argument exchanges that exposed the administration’s legal absurdity. Documents Solicitor General Sauer’s claim that tariffs are “regulatory” and “not revenue-raising” despite Trump publicly touting trillions in collections, Sotomayor’s devastating response that tariffs “are exactly” taxes, and Roberts’s own observation during arguments that taxing imports “has always been a core power of Congress.” Captures Trump’s pre-ruling claim that the case was “the difference between going bankrupt and thriving.”