No Kings

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, February 20, 2026

 

Yesterday an honest-to-goodness prince (yes, fine, technically a former prince) was taken into custody in the United Kingdom. Hours later in the United States, an enormous image of the president was installed on the facade of the Justice Department.

 

See now why I’ve felt so jealous lately of how Europeans conduct business? I prefer a monarchy in name but not in substance to a monarchy in substance but not in name.

 

That said, I also prefer the DOJ’s new look to its old one. Hanging Donald Trump’s photo on the nerve center of federal law enforcement is a disgusting, disgraceful fascist flourish, an official admission that the department now belongs to the president’s cult of personality. But it’s also an admirable case of truth in advertising.

 

The Trump Justice Department prioritizes the president’s political and personal interests over the rule of law. The least it can do under those circumstances is to drop any pretenses to the contrary, and now it has. With any luck, the few respectable prosecutors who still work there will take this as their cue to head for the lifeboats, leaving Trump and Pam Bondi with only bush-league legal talent to work through their political hit list.

 

Besides, the new banner doubles as a sly, if unintentional, joke. For the past year critics like me have complained about the president being above the law. Now, with his image looming high in the air over placards welcoming visitors to the Department of Justice, he literally is.

 

Literally—but, as of 10 a.m. ET on Friday, not figuratively.

 

The thing to remember about the Trump tariffs that the Supreme Court finally nuked this morning is that the president had a menu of statutes to choose from when he launched his trade policy. I won’t bore you by reciting the differences between them—you’ll find that here—except to say that, predictably, he claimed authority under the one that imposed the fewest restraints on his power.

 

The other statutes were all limited in certain ways, confined to particular industries or specific time periods, or larded up with onerous demands for investigations and explanations by the White House as to why a particular levy might be justified. So Trump opted to base his claim to authority on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), a sanctions law with no restrictions that doesn’t so much as mention the word “tariffs.”

 

He liked that one for the same reason all authoritarians like emergency powers: because it gave him a completely free hand legally. Then he set about doing everything he could to undermine his own argument that there was any actual emergency afoot. He threatened tariffs on countries for no better reason than that they prosecuted his cronies or resisted his bullying or took the wrong tone with him in phone calls. Nor did he spare nations with which America has a trade surplus, even though the “emergency” he cited in claiming vast tariff powers was our persistent trade deficit.

 

A deficit that’s somehow grown to the largest in American history after a year of Trump’s global trade war, by the way.

 

He aims to govern as a king. Apart from the pardon power, no authority he’s wielded as president allowed him to live that fantasy as vividly as his authority under IEEPA did. He exploited the economic power of the world’s wealthiest nation and the cowardice of its legislative branch to punish his enemies and reward his courtiers, forcing every government on earth and every major industry in the United States to seek his favor.

 

No kings, the Supreme Court decided this morning, a welcome change of pace for that body when it comes to Trump.

 

And an extremely lucky break for the president’s party, in theory: By killing off a White House policy that most of the public disliked and that had saddled the GOP with blame for Joe Biden’s economy, the court just made election-year politics easier for Republicans. No wonder John Thune and Mike Johnson sound distinctly non-outraged by the ruling.

 

Will things really be easier for their party, though?

 

Fight on the right.

 

In one way, sure. From now until November, the right can and will blame any bad economic news on the tariff ruling, as stupid as that may be.

 

If only the president had remained free to wreak havoc on global trade, upending the carefully laid plans of businesses and nations without warning because he was in a bad mood that day, GDP would be growing by 5 percent. Trump will doubtless insist that the end of his IEEPA authority means a new economic dark age, even though we’re now momentarily back to the Biden-era trade policies of 13 months ago—a period most Americans remember comparatively fondly.

 

Even so, there are suckers who will buy it. That’s good for Republicans.

 

On the other hand, Democrats are destined to argue that any good economic news between now and November should be credited to the court’s decision, not to Trump. If Americans don’t hand control of the House and Senate to us, Republicans will pass a law granting the president the tariff superpowers that SCOTUS took from him. That’s not a bad electoral pitch either.

 

The larger problem with believing that today’s decision is good for the GOP, though, is that it assumes the White House will acquiesce to it and take the proverbial W that the party has been handed. It will not.

 

There’s zero reason to think Trump will relent on his kingly tariff ambitions and let free trade lift the economy. He announced as I was writing this, in fact, that he’ll reinstitute his tariffs under some of the other laws on the menu I mentioned earlier. (His deputies had been planning for it.) There’s enough on the statutory books for him to “essentially recreate the IEEPA predicament” of setting trade policy by whim, per the Cato Institute’s Clark Packard, which means the judicial reprieve from voter anger over tariffs that the GOP just received is essentially over before it’s begun.

 

Which could make that anger more bitter. Bad enough that the president rewarded Americans’ pleas for relief from the cost of living last year with a trade war guaranteed to raise prices further. But to do it again, after the court told him no?

 

Is he trying to make life more expensive for them? (Spoiler: Yes.)

 

Congressional Republicans will be forced to explain that to swing voters. And then they’ll be forced to explain to their own base why they haven’t moved to pass a law that would restore the royal authority over trade that Trump had claimed under IEEPA until this morning.

 

There’s nothing in the court’s decision that would prevent them from doing so. (I think.) “When Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on behalf of himself and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch in today’s opinion, explaining why tariffs under IEEPA didn’t cut the legal mustard. How “strict” those limits might need to be to pass constitutional muster is an interesting legal question, but Congress could presumably enact some new quasi-monarchical form of trade authority that at least goes considerably beyond what’s currently available.

 

All Republicans need to do is kill the Senate filibuster. Then they could pass new trade legislation (and the SAVE Act!) with simple majorities. Right-wingers furious at the court’s ruling will demand that they do so. So will the president, browbeating congressional Republicans to choose between doing what he wants and, er, what most American voters want. In an election year.

 

Imagine how disappointed he and MAGA will be when they realize Senate Republicans won’t do it. Between centrist maverick Lisa Murkowski, libertarian Rand Paul, ol’ free-trader Mitch McConnell, and the most vulnerable Republican on the ballot this fall, blue-stater Susan Collins, the votes assuredly aren’t there to hand Trump vast new trade powers—let alone to end the filibuster to make it possible. The monarchist right and its king are destined to end up at the throats of Senate Republicans and Majority Leader Thune, demanding to know what the point is of controlling Congress if the GOP won’t fight fight fight with maximum ruthlessness.

 

“There’s no reason to vote for our party” seems like a bad midterm message. And if populist anger ends up scaring Republican candidates into pledging, if elected, to smash the filibuster and hand Trump the rootin’-est, tootin’-est tariff powers they can conjure, that seems like a pretty bad development for the GOP as well.

 

Retribution.

 

The other political problem looming for Republicans is the likelihood that the president and his base will plumb some new depth of demagoguery in protesting the court’s decision.

 

It’s hard to predict what that will look like but Trump has spent many months priming the pump. At various times, he’s claimed that an adverse ruling would trigger a new Great Depression, threaten national security, and—actual quote—“literally destroy the United States.” (Again, he’s talking about reverting to the trade status quo circa January 2025.) The last time he whipped up feral rubes this relentlessly, they ended up smashing windows at the Capitol and trying to hang his vice president.

 

Roberts, Gorsuch, and especially Barrett, all of whom joined today’s ruling, are doubtless being swamped with death threats already this evening. If the president and his fans had had an inkling that the tariff ruling would be issued today, there’s no reason to doubt that a “rally” would have been held outside the court to try to intimidate the justices with the possibility of a new January 6 if things didn’t go Trump’s way.

 

Fascist movement, fascist tactics. It’s to the credit of the six justices in the majority and their institution that they didn’t cower like so many others have, knowing what they were in for by refusing.

 

How sinisterly might Trump and his movement behave in response to their decision? And how will the wider public react if and when they do?

 

Not much more sinisterly, perhaps. Because Trump has other statutes at the ready to revive parts of his trade authority, he might content himself with a few days of “mean tweets” lazily accusing Gorsuch and Barrett of treason. Making bad-faith allegations of corruption against public servants who dispute the White House’s nonsense view of tariffs is de rigueur for this administration, after all.

 

If we’re lucky, we’ll get out of this with nothing worse happening than the most powerful man in the world casually alleging that America’s high court is somehow on the take from “foreign interests” and/or that the Federalist Society is some sort of criminal conspiracy. A pretty mild result for our rotten, embarrassing country in 2026!

 

That’s the optimistic take, though, and you know how I feel about optimism.

 

If Trump’s new tariffs hit a roadblock in the lower federal courts inspired by today’s decision, that’s when we might see him come unmoored. He hasn’t yet squarely challenged the judiciary’s power to constrain presidential authority but it would be strange if he didn’t end up doing so before the end of his term, as the glorious postliberal project to make America a third-world country demands nothing less. The judiciary snatching away his royal tariff scepter a second time is the sort of thing that could plausibly force the confrontation.

 

When the vice president is accusing the Supreme Court of “lawlessness,” you know we’re on track.

 

We might also see a half-hearted right-wing push for court-packing. That’s destined to fare more poorly in the Senate than even new tariff legislation would, given how eagerly Democrats would capitalize on the precedent once they return to power. But Trump will probably give it a go, unable to comprehend Gorsuch’s and Barrett’s votes today as anything other than an act of malevolent personal betrayal. He was hoodwinked by conservatives into appointing disloyal justices, he’ll declare, another “hoax” perpetrated on him by the uniparty. Only by creating two do-over appointments for him can congressional Republicans make things right.

 

If you liked Attorney General Pam Bondi, you’re going to love Justice Pam Bondi.

 

Were I a betting man, though, I’d bet the president’s preferred form of “retribution” against the court will be to have his DOJ start sniffing around the justices’ finances—or their mortgages, maybe, a Trump-goon specialty. It’d be an outrageous abuse of power but not wildly more outrageous than when his administration did the same to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Fed governor Lisa Cook. There’s no downside: Either the fishing expedition reveals an impropriety, forcing the justice to resign and handing Trump a vacancy to fill, or it turns up nothing but raises the price to the justices of future acts of “disloyalty.”

 

Fascist movement, fascist tactics. In fact, when he was asked this afternoon at a press conference whether he’ll investigate the court to see if it’s under the sway of “foreign influence,” the president didn’t say no. The man plastered his face on the farking Justice Department; he won’t be shy about giving it a corrupt new errand to run.

 

How do we think voters will feel when he does?

 

I don’t go to bat much anymore for the decency of Americans but a few facts are undeniable. They don’t like his tariffs, they don’t like him, they don’t like the thought of him confronting the judiciary, and, as with immigration enforcement, they don’t like overbearing authoritarian tactics even when they broadly agree with the underlying policy objective. A majority of the public will support today’s ruling, I’d bet, and so a majority of the public will be primed to resent it when he seeks some sleazy form of revenge on the court—particularly with alarm about his imperious autocratic ambitions growing.

 

That’s one of the best things about today’s ruling, I think. Not only was it right to hold that the president is no king, it arrived at a moment post-Minneapolis when fewer Americans are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt about his good intentions.

 

A monarchy in substance but not in name or a democracy in which the president’s power is subject to constitutional limits: That’s the choice that a confrontation between Trump and the court will present to Americans. At this point, with the White House having squandered so much goodwill over the past year, I like the odds that they’ll choose correctly.