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The president views the nation's highest court as a rubber stamp, not a co-equal branch of government
In Donald Trump’s mind, he is the state, and justice is whatever serves his interests. This is the logic of absolute monarchs, dictators and tyrants, and although it is antithetical to the Constitution and America’s founding principles, the president makes sure to put it on full display.Following the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Feb. 20 to declare many of Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional and illegal, the president responded with rage. He attacked the six justices who ruled against him — liberals Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with conservatives Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts — as “a disgrace to our nation.”
But he heaped special scorn on Gorsuch and Barrett. “They are very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Trump said of the two justices, both of whom he appointed. “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” Later, he said that their families should be embarrassed.
Trump views the courts as his personal servants, not as a co-equal branch of government. By attacking the justices and suggesting they are pawns of some non-existent foreign conspiracy, he is simultaneously imperiling their safety and undermining the Constitution by suggesting they are traitors who are serving foreign interests, making them illegitimate.
Trump also publicly rebuked the Court, albeit in less personal terms, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. The justices looked on, stone-faced, as he lamented their “unfortunate involvement” in the “disappointing ruling” that shattered the cornerstone of his economic agenda. The president claimed that he plans to use older and much more powerful laws to reinstate his global tariff program. But according to legal scholars, Trump’s new tariffs — which he levied in the wake of the Court’s decision, first at 10% and then at 15% — are also illegal.
In his 1941 book on the rise of the Nazis and how they weaponized the law, Jewish legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel described such behavior — of a leader protecting their allies while punishing their perceived enemies — as the “dual state.” This system, as Pema Levy explained in Mother Jones, is “two-faced twice over: it is characterized by a bifurcation in the law, but also by the facade of normalcy obscuring the fact of an authoritarian state.”
Trump views the Supreme Court as a means of rubber-stamping his agenda to make his attacks on democracy “legal,” such as when the right-wing justices ruled that the president has king-like powers, so long as he invokes “presidential responsibilities.” But when a majority of the justices disagree with or oppose him, the Court becomes an enemy.
https://www.salon.com/2026/02/26/trump-sends-supreme-court-clear-message-i-am-the-law/
Donald Trump as Judge Dredd
