DOWD

 

Shocker! SCOTUS Schools POTUS

Feb. 21, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ET

 

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Now that the third branch of government has explained to the second branch that the first branch matters, President Trump is in a pickle.

He may need a distraction even bigger than bombing Iran and releasing secret files on U.F.O.s and aliens. He may need to produce Marvin the Martian for an Oval Office meeting and install him on the “Board of Peace.”

(Maybe it should be spelled “Bored of Peace,” since Trump seems itchy to attack Iran, and security guards protecting the Azerbaijani president, who’s on the board, were apparently beating up protesters outside the Waldorf Astoria Hotel here.)

Friday was a landmark day in the Trump reign. It was refreshing to finally see someone tell this petulant man-child: “No, you can’t do that!” And it was especially refreshing that the Supreme Court, which has been awash in its own ethics crises and acting subservient to the megalomaniac in the White House, suddenly found a spine.

The highest court firmly instructed the Emperor of Chaos on why his tariffs were unconstitutional without the blessing of Congress.

And the president responded in the way he always does when he doesn’t get his way: with a Regina George hissy fit.

In a news conference on Friday afternoon, with the lights dimmed to be more flattering, Trump made clear that he was “absolutely ashamed” of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Neil Gorsuch and their three brethren-sisters on the left who shut down his erratic, perverse — sometimes personally vindictive — tariff antics.

Trump railed that the court’s liberals were “a disgrace to our nation” and that the conservatives who joined the majority opinion were merely “fools and lap dogs for the RINOs and the radical left.” He whined that the majority did not have “the courage to do what’s right for our country.” The man who expects fealty singled out two of his picks, Gorsuch and Barrett, calling their decision “an embarrassment to their families.”

As usual, Trump absurdly conflated what he wants with what’s best for the country. And as usual, he projected, charging that the justices who blocked his tariffs were “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution” — and controlled by foreign interests.

Actually, that critique is probably more applicable to the president, not the Supreme Court justices who put the brakes on Trump’s mad careening.

And Trump was barking up the wrong tree on lap dogs. Until now, Justices Roberts, Gorsuch and Barrett have been lap dogs for Trump, helping to upend Roe, giving him immunity for nearly all official acts, weakening the Voting Rights Act, letting DOGE get its grimy little hands on private data and allowing Elon Musk’s backpack wolf pack to slash the federal work force.

The Constitution is vague on so much, and that has allowed Trump to shimmy through wormholes and do things we assumed he would be barred from doing — like tearing down the East Wing without checking with anyone and letting foreign oligarchs enrich him, his family and his cronies. But the Constitution is clear on tariffs: They are the purview of Congress.

Trump has called tariffs “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.” And having his toy yanked away — even for the time it took him to figure out some other ploy to punish countries — brought out his fiendish side. After his unhinged news conference, he let fly a couple of long, unhinged Truth Social posts.

No sooner did moderate Republicans exhale, because they would no longer have to defend Trump’s mercurial tariff scheme — essentially a tax on consumers — than the president signed an executive order on Friday night invoking the Trade Act of 1974, imposing a “Global 10% Tariff on all Countries.” He had crowed earlier at the news conference that he can not only destroy the trade of any country but also “can destroy the country.”

“I’m allowed to destroy the country,” he pouted to reporters, “but I can’t charge them a little fee.”

With Trump’s power grabs, the court finally provided some accountability. Meanwhile, the awful wait to assign blame in the Jeffrey Epstein case, involving powerless young women, continues. The only real justice so far, in this lurid saga of bad, bad men from all around the globe, is that a predatory woman is in jail.

Sure, Les Wexner, the former Victoria’s Secret’s mogul who gave Epstein power of attorney over his vast fortune, was deposed by the House Oversight Committee this past week. But he played Mr. Magoo, crying that Epstein had “conned” him. It was totally unbelievable. Clearly, Wexner was infatuated with Epstein and enabled the monster to acquire the private plane and private island that lured so many famous people into his web.

King Charles, too, gave us a rare blast of accountability this past week. He didn’t stand in the way when British police arrested his brother, the former Prince Andrew, for reportedly passing confidential information to Epstein. It was gratifying to see the stunned, slack look on Andrew’s face as police took him away from his mansion in Norfolk. He is still, however, dodging accusations that he committed sex crimes.

Trump has been madly deflecting from his friendship with Epstein, acting as though he barely knew him, even though it’s clear that hound recognized hound. Trump, Melania, Mar-a-Lago and other related words or phrases are mentioned over 38,000 times in the Epstein files.

And now, the president will also have to distract from his humiliation at being slapped back by a conservative Supreme Court. He’s no doubt going to spend the weekend rewriting his State of the Union address and thinking of more nasty jibes for the justices who choked his leash.

And who knows? We may even see Marvin the Martian show up in the Oval, carrying a cookbook titled “How to Serve Man.”