Supreme Court Cut Muscle from Global Tariff Extortion Racket
By Tom Kagy | 24 Feb, 2026

Fast billions had been amassed through crypto ventures powered by erratic tariff policies that scared foreign governments and big businesses into paying tribute for access and favorable policies.

It's not often that the Supreme Court of the United States finds itself in the awkward position of having to dismantle a sitting president's personal lemondade stand. 

Trump's tariff policy during his second term wasn't trade policy in any rational sense of the phrase. It was a protection racket dressed in the language of economic nationalism. Countries that wanted relief from punishing import taxes knew to go to certain investment vehicles famously connected to the Trump clan.

Specifically, they ended up purchasing large amounts of tokens of the World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's cryptocurrency platform, or significant quantities of $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins that had launched in January 2025.

The mechanism wasn't complicated, even if it was audacious. 

A foreign government facing a 40% tariff on its manufactured goods would find that a demonstrated financial relationship with Trump's crypto ecosystem tended to produce exemptions, delays, or renegotiations.  Big pharmaceutical companies worried about drug import policies reportedly did the same.  Sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf made well-publicized investments in Trump-linked entities and watched their trade situations improve within weeks.  Even a convicted felon could secure a presidential pardon through the good offices of Trump cronies and crypto vehicles.

What brought about legal reckoning for this racket was American companies who saw that the tariff regime simply wasn't supported by the IEEPA.  The coalition of plaintiffs that brought tariff cases to the Supreme Court included a brave wine importer as the lead plaintiff, trade associations, municipal pension funds that'd taken losses on market volatility caused by tariff announcements, and a few courageous Fortune 500 executives who, no doubt, couldn't stomach participating in tribute payments.

The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts in what's may become his legacy-defining moment, didn't pull punches.  He wrote that while the president's authority doesn't allow overriding Congressional authority on major questions that had an outsize impact on the national economy. 

We're talking about serious money.  Analysts who've tracked the crypto valuations, the timing of tariff announcements, and the verified investment activity from foreign state entities estimate that the Trump family's collective crypto holdings appreciated by somewhere between three and four billion dollars during the period when the tariff leverage was most aggressively deployed. World Liberty Financial's token sales to foreign investors during trade negotiation windows generated many hundreds of millions more. 

It's the fastest anyone's ever legally, or quasi-legally, extracted that kind of wealth from a presidential term—all in less than 12 months.

The Court's ruling takes away muscle that can be wielded in ways that demonstrably benefit the president's private holdings.  A fuming Trump called the justices "a disgrace to our nation" and stormed out of whatever meeting he happened to be in.  That's pretty much how I'd react if my big beautiful racket were shot down with the help of justices I had personally appointed!

Power attracts opportunists, and Trump's particular genius has always been his willingness to attempt what everyone else instinctly assumed was verboten.  What's remarkable is how long the American system took to yank Trump's chain even as the living standards of American consumers, the operations of American businesses and the global credibility of American trade policy absorbed body blows. 

Sadly foreign governments and even US businesses that paid up had concluded that the US government was simply a more expensive and more powerful version of the kind of banana republics they had dealt with in other corners of the world.

The Supreme Court's ruling is a first step toward our reclaiming our former stature as the one nation that strives to do things the right way, though, of course, Donald has already begun clutching at other straws to keep his lemonade stand going.