David Frum

And one of the questions that should spring to mind is, why is the president so very, very upset that the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs he's been announcing over the past year?

I mean, I get it.

No one likes to lose.

This is an important issue for him.

But it's not like he doesn't have recourse.

He continues to hold a majority in both House and Senate.

The Supreme Court has said your tariff measures would be fine if they came from Congress.

You just can't do them alone.

Why not announce in the State of the Union, I've drafted a tariff bill.

I'm sending it to Congress tomorrow.

I look forward to you enacting it at your earliest convenience.

There are enough Republicans, enough in this House and Senate, and there's some anti-trade Democrats.

You might get a majority.

Why not just pass the bill and do it the legal way that the Supreme Court pointed out to him?

Why is he falling back instead on all these convoluted other schemes for using imaginary balance of payments crises, which don't really exist anymore in a day of floating exchange rates, or false claims of unfair trade practices?

Why not just write a tariff bill and send it to Congress and have them pass it?

Well, once I say it that way, you know why he's so upset.

Because for Trump, the appeal of the tariffs was not just his primitive, mercantilist view of international economics.

He loved the feeling of raw, arbitrary, discretionary power he got from a tariff mechanism that he insisted, and the Supreme Court just corrected him on, that he insisted he could apply to anyone at any time for any reason, without permission from anybody, Congress least of all.

What he is mad about is not that he's lost his tariffs.