US May Take Trump Tariff Case to Supreme Court on Friday

President Donald Trump’s appetite for new tariffs remains undeterred, even after a court hit his signature duties with their most devastating blow yet.

White House officials quickly signaled Thursday that Trump will pursue many of the same levies through other legal authorities, if appeals fail. The administration meanwhile is aggressively pushing to overturn the decision, saying it would go to the US Supreme Court as soon as Friday if a federal appeals court does not keep the original ruling from taking effect while the challenge continues.

The ruling was “blatantly wrong” and “we are confident this decision will be overturned on appeal,” the White House posted on X.

But for a president eager to use trade policy to reshape global commerce, other policy options are far from a quick fix.

Some of the other powers are laborious to use and would take months or more to execute, while others are capped in scope and duration. Administration officials made clear they intend to restore the levies one way or another, even as the government appeals the Court of International Trade order faulting the president’s reliance on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, for his sweeping global tariffs.

“We’ve got a very strong case with IEEPA, but the court basically tells us if we lose that, we just do some other things,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told Bloomberg Television on Thursday. “So nothing’s really changed. I want to say this to the world: ‘You’re cheating us. We’re coming after you. Deal, and let’s make this right.’”

Bloomberg Intelligence's Nathan Dean reports.

For all of the confidence on Trump’s team, Wednesday’s court ruling marked one of the biggest setbacks of the president’s second term. Trump campaigned on using tariffs to combat what he calls other nation’s unfair treatment of the US, and the emergency law gave him the fastest avenue to deliver on his pledge.

The ruling would reduce the effective US tariff rate to below 6% from a high of almost 27% last month, according to Bloomberg Economics calculations, an astronomical level that risked stagflation for the US.

The legal order also injected even more uncertainty into a world economy already rattled by Trump’s ever-changing posture on import taxes. It may sap Trump’s leverage as his team negotiates with numerous trading partners seeking tariff relief.

The decision blocked tariffs on Mexico, Canada, China as well as a flat import tax on almost every US trading partner. Trump invoked the law on the grounds that fentanyl and trade deficits are each emergencies necessitating the broad use of executive power. The court ruled he went too far.

The White House on Thursday said it is looking at other options, but advisers acknowledged the potential for them being more time-consuming.

“There are different approaches that would take a couple of months to put these in place and using procedures that have been approved in the past or approved in the last administration, but we’re not planning to pursue those right now,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Thursday on Fox Business.

Yet amid mounting concern about the vulnerability of Trump’s IEEPA-based tariffs, the administration had already embraced separate legal authorities to pursue other levies.

The Trump administration has invoked Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to set the stage for sweeping levies that could touch everything from smartphones to jet engines.

Since Trump took office in January, the Commerce Department has already enacted Section 232 tariffs on on steel, aluminum, vehicles and auto parts, and launched investigations on trucks, copper, lumber, semiconductors, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals and aircraft.

Those tariffs are seen as less legally vulnerable than Trump’s ad-hoc nation-by-nation approach, but take months to enact. The probes typically produce findings within 270 days, but administration officials have stressed they can go faster.

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