The Dictatorship
What the Supreme Court could mean for Trump, tariffs, and foreign policy
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump sees tariffs — or the threat of them — as a powerful tool to bend nations to his will.
He has used them in an unprecedented way, not only as the underpinning of his economic agendabut also as the cornerstone of his foreign policy in his second term.
He has wielded the import taxes as a threat to secure ceasefiresfrom countries at war. He has used them to browbeat nations into promising to do more to stop people and drugs from flowing across their borders. He has used them, in Brazil’s case, as political pressure because its judicial system prosecuted a former leader who was a Trump ally, and in a recent blowup with Canada, as punishment for a television ad.
This week, the Supreme Court hears arguments on whether the Republican president has overstepped federal law with many of his tariffs. A ruling against him could limit or even take away that swift and blunt leverage that much of his foreign policy has relied on.
Trump increasingly has expressed agitation and anxiety about the looming decision in a case he says is one of the most important in U.S. history.
He has said it would be a “disaster” for the United States if the justices fail to overturn lower court rulings that found he went too far in using an emergency powers law to put his tariffs in place.
Trump had said he wanted to take the highly unusual step of attending the arguments in person, but on Sunday said he had ruled it out, saying he didn’t want to be a distraction. “I wanted to go so badly — I just don’t want to do anything to deflect the importance of that decision,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
The Justice Department, in its defense of the tariffs, has highlighted the expansive way Trump has used them, arguing that the trade penalties are part of his power over foreign affairs, an area where the courts should not second-guess the president.
Earlier this year, two lower courts and most judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that Trump did not have power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to set tariffs — a power the Constitution grants to Congress. Some dissenting judges on the court, though, said the 1977 law allows the president to regulate imports during emergencies without specific limitations.
The courts left the tariffs in place while the Supreme Court considers the issue. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to wield them as he has tried to pressure or punish other countries on matters related — and unrelated — to trade.
“The fact of the matter is that President Trump has acted lawfully by using the tariff powers granted to him by Congress in IEEPA to deal with national emergencies and to safeguard our national security and economy,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “We look forward to ultimate victory on this matter with the Supreme Court.”
Still, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the Trump trade team is working on contingency plans should the high court rule against the Republican administration.
“We do have backup plans,” Leavitt said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “But ultimately…we are hopeful that the Supreme Court will rule on the right side of the law and do what’s right for our country. The importance of this case cannot be overstated. The president must have the emergency authority to utilize tariffs.”
Most presidents haven’t used tariffs as a foreign policy tool
Modern presidents have used financial sanctions such as freezing assets or blocking trade, not tariffs, for their foreign policy and national security aims, said Josh Lipsky, a former Obama White House and State Department staffer who is now the international economics chair at the Atlantic Council.
There are other laws that presidents can use to impose tariffs. But they require a monthslong process to justify the rates.
Trump, citing the IEEPA, moves faster and more dramatically. He signs executive orders imposing new rates and fires off social media posts threatening additional import taxes, as he did in late October when he was angered by an anti-tariff television ad aired by the province of Ontario.
“Presidents have typically treated tariffs as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” Lipsky said.
In contrast, Trump has used tariffs as the backbone of his national security and foreign policy agenda, Lipsky said. “All of it is interconnected and tariffs are at the heart of it,” he said.
For example, earlier this year Trump had threatened a 30% tariff on European imports, a major increase from 1.2% before he took office. Seeking to secure Trump’s support for the NATO military alliance and for security guarantees for Ukraine in its war with Russia, the European Union struck a deal to settle for 15% tariffs.
The EU Commission faced criticism from businesses and member states for giving away too much. But Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič argued the settlement was “not only about the trade. It’s about security. It’s about Ukraine.”
Trump has been able “to use it in specific circumstances to get better deals — not just trade deals — but better deals overall than he might otherwise,” Lipsky said. “On the other hand, you would say there’s probably some backlash.”
Supreme Court decision could rattle geopolitics — and wallets
Trump’s tariff strong-arming has rattled relationships with America’s friends and foes. Some have responded by becoming more protectionist or looking to foster relations with China, which has tried to be seen as a promoter of free trade.
There also is the impact on pocketbook. Some businesses have passed on some of the costs to consumers by raising prices, while others have waited to see where tariff rates end up.
Tariffs traditionally have been used just as a tool to address trade practices.
“There’s literally no precedent for the manner that President Trump is using them,” said Emily Kilcrease, who was a deputy assistant U.S. trade representative and earlier worked on trade issues at the National Security Council as a career civil servant during the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations,
“The use of tariffs the way that President Trump is using them is like — just broadscale attack on an economy as a way to incentivize a foreign government to change their posture,” said Kilcrease, now a director at the Center for a New American Security think tank.
But she said the case is not clear-cut. Kilcrease said she thinks there is a “decent chance” the Supreme Court could side with Trump because IEEPA gives the president “broad, flexible emergency powers.”
The case is also coming before a Supreme Court that has thus far been reluctant to check to Trump’s wide-ranging use of executive powers.
If the court constrains Trump, it could leave foreign governments questioning whether to try to renegotiate trade agreements recently struck with the Trump administration, experts said. But there are political realities at play too, because reneging on deals could affect other foreign policy or economic priorities.
The administration could pivot to try to use other laws to justify the tariffs, though that could mean a more complex and bureaucratic process, Kilcrease said.
“It certainly doesn’t take tariffs off the table,” she said. “It just makes them a little bit slower.”
___
Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump is toying around with the idea of yet another war. He said Saturday that he has instructed the Pentagon to “prepare for possible action” in Nigeria because he claims the West African nation is failing to protect Christians from violence there.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to the post with “yes sir” and added, “The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria — and anywhere — must end immediately.”
Trump is pushing a strange, inaccurate narrative about Nigeria.
The likelihood of American boots on the ground — which Trump declined to rule out when asked about it by a reporter — is low. But Trump’s latest bellicose rhetoric provides insight into the way he thinks about foreign policy, and deals yet another blow to the already-battered “peace president” narrative his administration has peddled in a vain attempt to secure him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump is pushing a strange, inaccurate narrative about Nigeria, which has roughly equal-sized populations of Christians and Muslims. Armed conflict in the northeast of the country, which is a majority Muslim region, has gone on for more than 15 years and is not targeted systematically at Christians.
Bloomberg reports that “the reality is that ethnic violence in Nigeria is driven by access to resources, such as land and water, and terrorism by the likes of Boko Haram and the Islamic state — that largely kills Muslims.” Bloomberg observed that “while there is religious violence in Nigeria, most of it is based on resources and criminality.”
Kimiebi Imomotimi Ebienfa, a spokesman for Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that “We are not proud of the security situation that we are passing through, but to go with the narrative” that only Christians are targeted, “is not true. There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria.” He added, “We acknowledge the fact that there are killings that have taken place in Nigeria, but those killings were not restricted to Christians alone. Muslims are being killed. Traditional worshippers are being killed. … The majority is not the Christian population.”
Trump’s misleading rhetoric is not surprising. But what’s more unexpected is that his rhetoric almost sounds neoconservative, in that he’s threatening to intervene in another country on behalf of defending values rather than strict geopolitical interests or claims of self-defense. Why misrepresent facts on the ground in Nigeria? It’s likely that Trump thinks this rhetoric will excite the evangelical part of his coalition, which is generally receptive to messages about Christian persecution around the world. Trump’s rhetoric also appears to parallel his claims that white farmers in South Africa are enduring a genocide in South Africa — and his offering them special refugee status in the States. “Christian” and “white” are not the same thing, but the narratives are analogous in that, in the right-wing American imagination, they are proxies for Western civilization in Africa.
Trump’s future behavior toward Nigeria, which he has now designated a “country of particular concern” over alleged violations of religious freedom, is impossible to predict. But it’s yet another example of how Trump’s “America First” ideology is neither isolationist nor peace-loving.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.
The Dictatorship
Ask Jordan: Could Comey’s case end without resolving his vindictive prosecution claim?
“If there is any hope of Donald Trump ever being held accountable (which may not be possible), I would think the vindictive/selective prosecution might be the strongest possibility. James Comey’s team has raised several grounds for dismissal. If the court finds other grounds for dismissal (e.g. ambiguity in question/literal truthfulness), will it still rule on the vindictive/selective prosecution motion? In other words, will the court rule on each individual motion to dismiss? Or will it stop once it finds sufficient grounds to dismiss?” — Alex
Hi Alex,
James Comey’s case could be dismissed without a ruling on every pending motion, including the one you highlight that argues his prosecution is unconstitutionally vindictive and selective. Therefore, it’s possible that his case ends without a ruling on that issue.
We can look to one of President Donald Trump’s criminal cases for an example of this.
In the classified documents caseU.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed it on the grounds that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed. When the Trump-appointed judge issued that ruling last year, there were still several unresolved pretrial issues, including a vindictive/selective prosecution motion from Trumpwho would go on to win the 2024 election and, as a result, effectively got both of his federal criminal cases permanently dismissed.
(Shortly before she dismissed the classified documents case, Cannon rejected a vindictive/selective prosecution motion from Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta, while emphasizing that the Nauta denial wasn’t to be taken as a comment on the merits of Trump’s motion. The federal judge who worked more quickly in presiding over Trump’s other federal case, Obama appointee Tanya Chutkan, rejected his motion to dismiss on vindictive/selective grounds.)
Like Trump, Comey argues that his prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, is unlawfully serving. Because Smith and Halligan were installed through different mechanisms, the legal issue is somewhat different. But should the courts deem Halligan’s tenure unlawful (as they have done with other Trump 2.0 appointees) and find that Comey’s case must dismissed due to that illegality, then his prosecution could end without resolving other pending motions, including, potentially, his vindictive/selective prosecution claim. As you note, Comey has filed several motions to dismiss, including one asserting a “literal truth” defense. (The former FBI director pleaded not guilty to lying to and obstructing Congress in connection with 2020 Senate testimony.)
At this early point in the litigation, we don’t know when each motion in Comey’s case will be decided. But it could take longer to decide his vindictive/selective prosecution claim than some of his other motions. That’s because instead of immediately deciding whether to grant or dismiss that motion, the judge could order discovery for Comey to investigate and examine the prosecution’s origins and motives. As we have seen, for example, in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s ongoing effort to prove his charges are vindictive, this sort of litigation can be drawn out, and as in that other case, we should expect the Trump Justice Department to resist attempts to explore its motives for charging Comey.
So, because he has raised multiple grounds for dismissing his case pretrial, including the grounds that Halligan is unlawfully serving as his prosecutor, it’s possible that he wins a dismissal before his vindictive/selective prosecution claim is resolved.
Please submit “Ask Jordan” questions through this form for a chance to have your question featured in a future edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
This is the Nov. 3 edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Mar-a-Lago’s glittering “Great Gatsby” party this weekend laid bare the country’s widening economic divide and the president’s disconnect from working Americans. While Champagne flowed in the opulent South Florida club Saturday night, millions faced the loss of food assistance and skyrocketing medical bills because of Republican cuts. Trillion-dollar tax breaks aimed at billionaires, multinational corporations and tech monopolists make the rich even richer while those trying to make ends meet in Red State America head into winter facing rising heating prices and grocery bills.
The “Gatsby” soiree mirrored the Jazz Age excess that led millions blindly into the Great Depression. That Mar-a-Lago event was called “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.” Don’t tell that to families relying on food assistance or a little help with their health care premiums.
For too many working Americans, the music stopped long ago.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess.”
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “THE GREAT GATSBY”
THE SHUTDOWN STRIKES BACK
Republicans may have misread their formerly feckless Democratic rivals. With Congress careening toward a record-long government shutdown, it may be Trump and the GOP who are the ones with reason to worry.
New polls show most Americans blaming the president and his party for the shutdown, according to new NBC numberswith the fallout starting to hit Republicans where it hurts.
And this week, that’s in Virginia and New Jersey, where polls show Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherill with the advantage.
The real problem for Trump and the GOP is that Americans no longer trust the president on the economy. As we reported last week in The Tea, Spilled By Morning JoeTrump’s long-touted economic edge is slipping fast while the “right track/wrong direction” mood has turned grim for the White House.
Meanwhile, only one-third of Americans believe that Trump has lived up to expectations on the economy — while two-thirds think he’s fallen short.
With numbers like these, the president is now reportedly getting involved — pouring millions into the New Jersey and Virginia races.
But it may be a little late. Can Mikie Sherrill really lose when the president boasts that he killed a tunnel that would’ve created thousands of New Jersey jobs and eased workers’ brutal commutes? And how can Abigail Spanberger fall short with federal employees from Northern Virginia facing layoffs while Trump brags about Russ Vought — aka “Darth Vader” — slashing even more?
Chances are good, they won’t.
TALKING BASEBALL WITH BARNICLE
JS: Mike, you believe we just witnessed the greatest World Series ever played. Why?
MB: I had always believed the 1975 World Series between the Reds and Red Sox was the greatest ever played. You had so many iconic moments, like the Carlton Fisk home run. And after baseball had a bad 10-year run, that World Series brought Major League Baseball back into the conversation of popular sports.
But I believe the World Series we just witnessed was actually the greatest World Series that has ever been played.
JS: We know this Dodgers team is historically good. But talk about magic of the Blue Jays?
MB: The Blue Jays were a really good team all along because they played baseball the way it is supposed to be played. They actually put the ball in play. There were a lot of unknown players, but they all did their jobs. They actually hit a lot of singles and a lot of doubles instead of always swinging for the fences, and a lot of those Blue Jay players became heroes through the course of the series by playing the game the right way.
DEATH STAR: 1, BASEBALL: 0
There are nights when fans are reminded why they fell in love with baseball. As Pablo Torre said on “Morning Joe,” the Fall Classic proved again this year to be a timeless event where anything is possible, a game where Miguel Rojas can join the sacred company of Bill Mazeroski with the swing of a bat. In that swing, Rojas delivered October dreams that generations of Dodgers fans will be talking about.
Channeling Pablo here: Game by game, minute by minute, second by second, baseball often seems to stretch time itself. Sometimes that clock runs forever, like the endless night last week when the Blue Jays took the Dodgers 18 long innings before losing.
But baseball fans didn’t just get one classic game from that long night — they got a series packed with them, one magical feat after another, until the story of this entire series became baseball scripture worthy of Cooperstown, N.Y., itself.
BOX OFFICE BLUES
Hollywood wanted a happy ending. What it got instead was a horror show.
This was Hollywood’s worst October in 27 years, pulling in just $425 million domestically. Big titles like “Tron: Ares” and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” failed to catch fire, making this the worst box office weekend of the year.
Halloween weekend only deepened the gloom. “Regretting You” opened to $8.1 million while “Black Phone 2” hovered near $8 million, marking the feeblest Halloween weekend since 1993. The slump capped months of frustration as studios continued their struggle to get audiences back to theaters.
The year 2025 remains way below pre-pandemic highs, and the hope of a blockbuster season has faded.
Studios hope a stacked holiday lineup — “Wicked: For Good,” “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “Zootopia 2” and “The SpongeBob Movie” among them — might turn the tide. Add Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” rerelease and a “Wedding Crashers” nostalgia run, and there’s still some optimism left in the projection booth.
The question heading into 2026 is whether moviegoing has a future — or is as passe as Donny Deutsch’s black Baby Gap T-shirts.
INTERLUDE
Incidentally, we had Mara Gay on this morning to discuss the mayoral race in New York City — but we did find time to ask her about her watch- and playlist:
“I’m reading Ada Limón’s “Bright Dead Things.” I’m listening to Lainey Wilson and Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” album a ton.
And I just finished “Slow Horses,” about the wayward MI6 agents. Desperately sad it’s over for now.”
EXTRA HOT TEA
1 in 7 men report having no friends. Boys are less likely to graduate from high school and college. Men account for 3 out of every 4 deaths of despair. And 98.4% of mass shooters are men.”
SCOTT GALLOWAY, author of “notes on being a man”
CATCH UP ON MORNING JOE
Trump hosts ‘Great Gatsby’ Halloween party as food assistance expired for millions
Joe reacts to new poll numbers breaking against GOP on economy
What to look for on Election Day in Virginia, New Jersey and NYC
SPILL IT!
This week, Maria Shrivernamed to Forbes’ “50 Over 50” list for her work with the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement and other initiatives focused on women’s brain health and impact, joins us ahead of the 50 Over 50 luncheon. Want to ask a question? Send it overand we will pick our favorite to ask on the show!
Missed an edition of The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe? Read previous issues here.
And thank you to our many readers who write to us! We appreciate all your well-wishes, questions and feedback. (For inquiring minds — Joe will have answers about his band soon!)
Have more to say? Just write here.
Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of BLN’s “Morning Joe” alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls “revolutionary.” In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is “The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again.”
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