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May 29, 2025 - The Charlie Kirk Show
33:33
Can the Courts Trump Trump's Tariffs?
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Hey, everybody.
Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
President Trump's tariffs are blocked, we explain, but also my visit to the Oval Office.
That's right.
I've been in the Oval Office a couple times prior, but this one was uniquely moving, was very special on a deeply spiritual level.
Listen to that and text this episode to your friends.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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Yesterday, I had a very moving day.
One that I don't take for granted.
Yesterday I was in the White House, which thankfully I've been there a few times since President Trump has won the election.
But I was able to visit what could be called the most sacred ground of the American government.
The place where so many decisions have been made, where war has been waged, where the highest decisions of the land I've been there a couple times before, but visiting it yesterday was very moving.
And that, of course, is the Oval Office.
Walking into the Oval Office and into the Cabinet Room with President Trump was overwhelming.
It was larger than life.
Every time I walk into the Oval Office, and it's only been a couple times, it does take your breath away.
What President Trump has done with it is remarkable.
It has really turned into a museum.
I got to see the original copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Amazing photos lining the entire oval from William Henry Harrison to James Polk.
In fact, when President Trump was showing me around, he pointed at James Polk and he says, you know, James Polk is one of the most underrated presidents in history.
I said, well, tell me why, Mr. President.
He says, Well, he didn't do much, except he did add California and Texas.
So that's quite a legacy.
I can see the gears grinding there.
There is a aura when you walk into the Oval Office, and it was not lost on me how things have changed so dramatically and how we should be filled with gratitude and awe and wonder to Lord Almighty, the mystique that you desire.
It is one that is sacred ground in our nation.
Today is Thursday, May 29th.
Exactly one year ago today, President Donald Trump's jury deliberations started in the criminal trial in New York.
Was in what he called the icebox.
Remember, they had quarantined President Trump where he could not raise money.
He could not travel the country.
He could not campaign.
The trial began on April 15, 2024.
And it ended on May 30, 2024.
I want you to think about where we were a year ago.
A year ago, Biden was beating President Trump in many of the polls.
A year ago, our border was completely and totally wide open.
President Trump was largely gagged by the judge.
President Donald Trump turned those press gaggles into campaign opportunities, which was incredibly impressive.
Remember these famous pictures of President Trump who had to sit through this Ridiculous Moscow show trial.
And the people on the left thought they had him dead to rights.
They thought the movement would betray him.
They thought putting him in a courtroom, which was only happening a year ago today, it feels like it's been five years.
And then tomorrow will be the one-year anniversary of when he's actually, quote-unquote, found guilty on the fake 34 accounts.
A year ago, the media insisted that Biden was still totally healthy, and it was misleading videos and cheap fakes that were suggesting otherwise.
Now, Jake Tapper is writing an entire book on how the media got it wrong.
How did President Trump ascend from facing 700 years in federal prison, having to sit in the icebox where the entire system cracked?
I love that picture.
Can we go back to the picture of J.D. Vance there, please?
Remember, this is J.D. Vance looking on President Trump before he was chosen as Vice President of the United States.
Look at that foreshadowing right there.
I love that picture.
We should get that picture framed in our office.
Because very few U.S. senators, I think I see the great Tommy Tuberville there, but very few U.S. senators actually visited President Trump when he was in trial.
J.D. Vance did.
Here's just some of the media commentary of what was happening a year ago.
There were cheers in the Biden headquarters when President Trump was found to be a felon.
Remember, we were still running against Joe Biden a year ago.
Play cut 307.
Our team has heard that there were cheers inside the Biden headquarters in Wilmington as the verdict was read.
Look, President Biden has been very careful in the last weeks not to comment on this trial.
That, I have been told, will now change now that we have a verdict.
Obviously, these guilty verdicts are a political gift to Democrats, a political gift to the president.
He is now running against a convicted felon.
They really thought it was going to work.
They were all in on, hey, we can now change the title on his driver's license, convicted felon President Donald Trump.
They spent millions to try to get that soundbite, convicted felon.
Remember when James Comey was saying they could accommodate the incarceration of a sitting president?
They'd kind of figure out, there's got to be a way to do this security-wise.
A year ago, our movement was still in the wilderness.
But we had a leader.
And we had you.
As I walked into the Oval Office yesterday, I was so thankful for all of you that stood by this program and were in the trenches the last couple of years.
Not just was President Trump on trial a year ago.
Think about three years ago.
Think about the spring of 2022.
We didn't have access to most social media.
X and the Twitter thing was just finally popping up and finally happening.
We were censored.
We were muzzled.
We were in the wilderness.
And to march all the way back to the Oval Office is awe-inspiring, and it takes your breath away.
It goes to show, despite all of the machinations of the unelected administrative state, and look at that contrast.
We should tweet that out, guys.
How a year ago you're in a courtroom and a year later you're in the cabinet room.
From the courtroom to the cabinet room.
And they did everything they possibly could to stop that from happening.
They tried to humiliate him by making him sit there and read off all the charges and all the testimonies.
They were trying to break.
The will of all of you, and yet they underestimated the strength and the durability and the anti-fragile element of this movement.
The more pressure that was applied to all of you, the more pressure that was applied to us, the stronger we got.
It is a very unique American phenomenon.
You do not find this in most European countries.
You do not find this in most places across the world.
The goal was to demoralize us and to get us to give up.
Instead, we rallied to greater heights than ever before.
Where people are even going to say, this is outrageous.
You're going to try to put a political leader in prison because you're afraid that he'll beat you in an election?
And it turns out all of their fears were warranted.
It turns out they were...
They could not win the debate.
They could not win on the facts.
They could not win on the merits.
They had to use leg irons, handcuffs, shackles, courtrooms, and prison sentences.
So it's not a straight line for President Trump to fulfill his mandate.
There will be setbacks, injunctions, political and cultural brawls, but there's a big difference.
Now we have the power.
And a year ago, he was in a courtroom, and Biden was chuckling, eating his ice cream, not really sure what was going on.
And now we have President Trump in the Oval Office.
Full steam ahead, and now the Democrats are in the wilderness.
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Here's James Comey.
Remember this?
was fantasizing about how to logistically arrange President Trump in prison.
They had almost a quasi They have a quasi-fetish.
That was close to a word I was going to use.
Almost like a pornographic mind when it comes to Donald Trump in prison.
It almost gave them a sexual thrill to see a previous president in prison.
Listen to this.
Playcut 351.
Do you agree with that, that it would be difficult or nearly impossible for the law enforcement institutions to put him in actual jail?
No.
They would just put him in a double-wide somewhere out near the fence, out in the grass.
And he would eat there, he'd shower there, he'd exercise there, he'd be away, as Donya Perry said, from general population.
But it's obviously doable.
They really could not help themselves.
If they had not indicted Trump, he may not have completed the comeback.
Every step of the comeback, the left gave him a boost.
You see, you can imagine that there was a meeting.
Now, if Jake Tapper actually wants to do some reporting, here's some reporting that is worth doing.
But I don't know if we'll find this out for another 10 or 20 years.
There was obviously a meeting.
there was without a doubt a meeting of all the smart Democrats.
The meeting probably happened...
There was almost certainly a meeting that Joe Biden wasn't there, but amongst the kind of lawfare architects, the Elias types, the Valerie Jarrett types, the smart Democrats, the masters of the universe, because you don't get four simultaneous indictments within 10 months just saying, No, there was a decision.
There was a signal that was definitely made.
And I almost guarantee you that somebody that was respected put forward a theory of the case.
And their theory of the case was this.
Because remember, President Trump announced for the presidency in November of 2022, right after the midterms.
It was right after.
He said, Mar-a-Lago, I'm running for the presidency.
I'm going to go take it back.
And I bet one or two smart Democrats, their theory of the case was this, that this guy is going to win unless we stop him.
We have to throw everything we possibly can.
We gave him the warning shot.
Remember, the warning shot was in August of 2022 of the raid of Mar-a-Lago on the documents case.
He ignored our warning shot.
The only way we stop this monster is with the full force of every government instrument that we control.
We're going to throw...
We're going to make her into a national icon.
We're going to have Alvin Bragg be the first one.
He will cross the Rubicon.
He will be the opening shot because he's in New York and there's almost no political consequences.
We're going to create this thug Jack Smith to go after all the January 6th stuff, simultaneous document stuff.
We are going to make it seem that he is so unpopular that this will prevent him from winning a Republican primary.
And that is where their great failure was.
You see, if they would have let President Trump be alone, I still think President Trump obviously would have won the primary, and I think he would have won it decisively, but he wouldn't have won it as overwhelmingly and non-competitively.
The indictments almost ended all the momentum, imaginable.
And then Governor DeSantis, a man who I respect, completely blundered.
He's like, oh, you know, he's being indicted on stuff, and the base just said no.
You are trying to go after our leader that they're trying to take out that was wrongfully displaced from power.
So the Democrats actually were the glue that kept the Republican primary voters together.
And then they went a step further.
I mean, to give you an idea, we had Blake wearing a MAGA hat here.
I mean, we were really behind this entire thing, largely because it was the indictment of the...
The lawfare from the Democrats galvanized the base.
And we kept together and we stayed together.
Because we saw what they were going to make the country become.
And we just, on principle and principle alone, we said you cannot indict.
The leader of the opposition party.
Go beat them in an election.
Go and debate them.
Go run a bunch of negative ads.
All that is fine.
You don't get to use the instruments of justice against a political leader that you don't like.
And it was just bigger than primary politics.
The base said that if they can arrest a former president, we must stay together and fight back.
As President Trump leaned in and fought these indictments, he ascended and he won more men, black and Hispanic men, and low-propensity voters because it was Donald Trump against the machine.
As soon as that photograph flashed and they took the mugshot, it was largely the end of Biden, Harris, or the Democrats' chances of winning in 2024.
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Joining us now is John Carney, finance and economics editor at Breitbart.com.
John, thank you for taking the time.
So, John, a lot of people are confused.
Explain to us what the court ruling was yesterday, which was preventing President Trump's use of the IEPA, which was the Emergency Powers Act when it comes to tariffs.
Explain to our audience what happened yesterday.
Right.
In the trade courts, they like to refer to it as IEPA.
So it is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
It was the legal basis on which President Trump had imposed the fentanyl tariffs, fentanyl trafficking tariffs on China and on Mexico and on Canada, and also the worldwide 10% tariff, the reciprocal tariff on everybody.
Traditionally, IEPA is actually a statute that's used to impose sanctions.
The sort of modal version of it is Jimmy Carter is the first person to ever use it.
He uses it to impose sanctions on Iran after they took Americans hostages at the embassy.
So it's typically a sort of freeze assets, impose sanctions, not usually, has never actually been used to have very broad tariffs.
This was a novel legal approach that the Trump administration was doing, saying we can declare an emergency.
We're allowed to block things altogether under this, so we should be allowed to impose tariffs under it.
The Court of International Trade, which is a specialized court in Washington, D.C., that hears trade cases.
And I think it's important that it was the Court of International Trade.
This isn't some, like, radical left-wing district court judge who did this.
This is actually a pretty respectable court and respectable panel.
They said, no, you can't impose tariffs under this act.
That there is nothing in the act that says you have the power to impose tariffs.
That's too broad of a reading.
And they said, if you could impose tariffs under this act, The Constitution says Congress sets tariffs and Congress can't just say to the president, no, we're going to let you do it.
So this same panel, interestingly enough, also tried to prevent some of Trump's tariffs in the first term.
And they got that overturned.
That was under a different act.
It was a different legal basis.
They tried to say you couldn't impose the metals tariffs.
And they got that overturned.
So they don't have a perfect record here.
The Trump administration is obviously going to appeal it, but the decision isn't, you I mean, it has some good, I would say, conservative legal jurisprudence behind it.
Can Trump simply redo the tariffs using the Trade Expansion Act of 1962?
Yeah, he probably can.
He probably can just come back.
He has to do—the thing is, under those acts, under all the other acts where they've imposed 201, 232, you'll hear all these numbers thrown around.
You usually have to have a little bit more procedure.
So you have to have, like, Commerce Department or the U.S. Trade Representative do a study, produce a paper, and then you impose the tariffs based on that.
Now, they can do that.
They can do it pretty quickly.
And the courts are unlikely to say, well, you don't like the outcome of your procedural decision.
But there are hurdles.
I think the very first step is, yes, they're going to look into imposing tariffs other ways.
But what they're really going to do is appeal this.
They have 10 days.
The court says they have to get rid of the tariffs within 10 days.
They're going to appeal it.
And ask the Federal Circuit, that's who hears the appeals from the Court of International Trade, they're going to ask the Federal Circuit to, one, stay it, and two, overturn this decision.
And I don't think we know exactly how that's going to go.
I think the Trump administration probably will win that case.
I don't think that the courts are going to revive non-delegation.
Non-delegation has kind of been a dead law.
Or, you know, a dead judicial interpretation for 100 years.
It hasn't been used to overturn any laws.
But maybe they do.
I mean, it could be ironic, right, that they revive this conservative approach to constitutional law by limiting a conservative president.
Sometimes the courts like to do it cutely like that, I guess.
I have two questions here, the first of which is that partially, not But partially the reason why the southern border was able to be secured so quickly is that Mexico was able to cooperate.
It's much easier to secure a border from the interior than from the exterior.
It is.
Just definitionally, it's much easier to prevent people from leaving your country than from coming into your country.
And one of the reasons why Mexico was very quick to help and cooperate is the threat of tariffs against Mexico.
Does this make those tariffs against Mexico or the threat of them null and void?
And what implications might that have for border security?
Well, I think it would, on its face, basically take away the power of the president to use these sort of tariffs.
That's actually an argument that the Trump administration is likely to use in court because it will say, hey, court, stop second-guessing us in international affairs.
We need this power to conduct.
Our foreign diplomacy.
There is an economic emergency.
There is an emergency at the border.
We need to be able to use this to solve that problem.
And I think they might win on that ground.
I don't think we're going to see, like, Mexico decide, oh, you know, now that Trump lost this tariff power, you know, because of a single court decision, we don't have to listen to him anymore.
That would be quite foolish, because as we were saying, there are other alternatives.
And it's very possible that the appeals court will say, you know, no, the president can do this, actually.
So second this, which is I can imagine there can be immediate action against China, though.
The China case is far easier to prove.
I think those documents have already been done probably by Biden.
And just because there's a new president doesn't mean all the studies I mean.
I think that those can be inherited from one administration to the other.
Absolutely.
So I think the Chinese tariffs are largely untouched.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, the Chinese tariffs.
The one that may be in doubt here is there is like this additional tariff because of fentanyl trafficking.
That could be in doubt, but the administration can just And that is on much steadier legal grounds.
So there's not a real respite for China here.
There's potentially a respite for the Canada and Mexico.
Because basically the court said, we don't think you can link, you can come up with tariffs as a result of fentanyl or illegal immigration.
I think that either the Supreme Court or the Federal Circuit may say that they don't want courts second guessing when a president is elected.
that it's an economic tool, it's a softer touch than sanctions, I think that's the strongest of all the arguments.
Because we are being invaded.
We do have fentanyl coming into the country.
If it's just simply and solely on economic means...
I mean, it's not hard to say that Germany is definitely compromising American auto companies by Volkswagen and Porsche and Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
So I guess the question is here, and the markets have been...
I would have expected a little more of an explosion.
We saw that early and then it went down and went back up.
I guess this is just more of a delay of the inevitable.
President Trump will still be able to use tariffs in one way or another.
Yes, I think that is the way the market's reading it.
They said, okay, this court has said stop, but we imagine that the appeals court will put a stay on this order so that Trump will be able to impose the tariffs.
Outcome of this is pretty unclear, so people don't want to get too excited about it.
And because there are all these other statutes that authorize tariffs, Trump can come back.
Frankly, I think it would be a good idea and welcome for Trump to actually go to Congress and say, I want clear authorization to impose reciprocal tariffs.
Anybody who has an untrade fair trade practice against the United States, the president should be allowed.
To impose tariffs.
Congress, give me that direct, you know, call it the Reciprocal Tariff Act.
Give me that direct power so that the courts can't doubt it and nobody else can second guess it.
I think Congress would probably do it.
Yes, there are free traders and there are people who would be uncomfortable with that.
But I think you probably have a majority in both houses to be able to bring that about.
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Okay, we are continuing now through this breaking news with John Carney, finance and economics editor at brightbart.com.
John, what is this breaking news?
So a judge has ruled that the opioid tariffs, the fentanyl tariffs, in other words, on China also are not authorized by the Emergency Economic Powers Act.
It's actually not really that big of a deal.
This really just repeats what the court said last night.
It is, again, saying that this act doesn't authorize the tariffs.
I don't think that will really matter for China because Trump has so many other Statutory means to impose tariffs on China.
And they did the studies that they needed to do in the first term.
Biden has done them as well.
So they can just raise that.
If the judge says, no, you can't do the IEPA tariffs, now...
So I don't think that this new decision is that big of a deal, but it does highlight that the courts really do not, that at least the Court of International Trade does not think that the imposition of tariffs through this act, and the act does not, and I think The act does not say the president can impose tariffs.
It says he can restrict trade, do trade, he can block things.
It's a logical extension to say he can impose tariffs, but it's not necessarily clear in the statute.
I think the courts are probably going to look at both of these things that just came, the one that just came down last night and say, yeah, Congress actually did.
They really did it, and they didn't put a lot of procedural safeguards.
And I don't think they're going to use this case to revive the theory of non-delegation.
They could, but I don't think the Federal Circuit would do that.
I think that would have to get up to perhaps the Supreme Court for that to happen.
So, John, in closing here, it seems like the president has invented a new way to use tariffs.
Typically, they were either used for economic development domestically or national security reasons.
He now uses this as a negotiation tool and tactic.
More broadly, do you think this will neuter President Trump's ability to bring other countries to the table, or will he find creative other ways to still use the tariff power?
I think he will find creative other ways to still use the tariffs.
I don't think that this is going to substantively affect what they're able to do with tariffs.
I think it puts a stumbling block.
They'll have to pin it on other statutes.
And like I said, I'm not very sure that this gets upheld at all.
So, you know, it's a minor stumbling block.
The Trump's ability to, as you were saying, use tariffs to accomplish diplomacy is going to remain even if this case gets upheld by the appeals court.
John, thank you for your time.
Please plug your stuff.
How can our audience support you and learn more about you?
Absolutely.
The best thing they can do is subscribe to Breitbart Business Digest.
You can go to Breitbart.com.
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There's a little thing that says newsletters.
Click there.
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Alex Marlow, my editor-in-chief, runs it with me.
We try to explain every day what happened in the economy, why it happened, and probably more importantly, what's going to happen next.
We've been right about inflation.
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It's really a great product.
And of course, just go to Breitbart.com.
That's where you'll find me and all my colleagues.
John, thank you so much.
Really appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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