Episode 5160: Iran Tensions Grow; President Of Korea Sentenced To Life In Prison

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Tonight, Trump's signature economic policy, it is in shambles. The sweeping tariffs he falsely promised would liberate hardworking Americans have been illegal all along. Today, the Supreme Court struck down a huge chunk of the president's trade agenda. The court ruled he illegally deployed emergency powers, authority that he does not have, to slap crushing tariffs on nearly every country.

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The historic decision on presidential power was handed down six to three. Even two of Trump's appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, ruled against him. Trump then unleashed this unhinged tirade against the justices who dared to put him in his place.

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I'm ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what's right for our country. They're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. They don't want to do the right thing. They're afraid of it.

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I think it's an embarrassment to their families. You want to know the truth, the two of them.

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There's a reason why Trump is attacking our country's separation of powers. The New York Times writes the court's ruling, quote, amounted to a declaration of independence. But let's be real, it took more than 10 months to get here. Trump's illegal tariffs were in effect for 321 days before the court stopped the president's unlawful tax on the American people.

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And voters, well, they have felt the pain, with 60% of Americans disapproving of Trump's whiplash trade policy. But that is not stopping Trump. Breaking just minutes ago, Trump says he signed a new executive order imposing an additional 10 percent tariff on all countries, a new effort to bypass the court's ruling.

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You know, the Constitution requires you to get this affirmative approval of the Congress, and you can't just do this on your own. In America, the stroke of the president's pen is not enough to impose taxes on the American people, and terrorists are nothing else but taxes, the chief justice said.

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And I think it's notable that this decision wasn't just written by some group of lefty justices, to the extent there even are any. It was written and joined by six justices, including two justices appointed by Donald Trump himself, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both of them saying in full that these tariffs were unconstitutional.

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And so, you know, when I presented the argument to the Supreme Court on November 5th, I made about six key points. Every single one, Nicole, of those six points was accepted 100 percent by all six justices today on the Supreme Court.

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Well, Jackie, first of all, it's hard to make sense of U.S. policy because it's somewhere between incoherent and opaque. The United States has assembled all these forces. It's not clear what the objectives would be, what would be our definition of success. It's not even clear what triggered it.

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The only new thing coming out of Iran the last couple of months is not their nuclear program, not their missile program, not support for proxies. It's their slaughter of Iranian dissidents. And it's not at all clear how American aircraft carriers and the like and airplanes could protect individual Iranians or bring about regime change or anything else. So I literally do not understand.

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American policy. And by the way, the administration hasn't bothered to explain it. Congress hasn't bothered to hold hearings and ask questions about it. This idea of a limited strike. Yeah, the president may feel compelled to do something because threats don't seem to have moved the Iranians. The problem with limited strikes, by definition, is what happens if they don't do the trick?

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Do you then double down or triple down? Then we find ourselves in a large war. And by the way, Iran has all sorts of ways to inflict pain on oil shipping, on oil refineries and wells, on American forces in the region. So we shouldn't kid ourselves that simply because we want to keep an interaction limited, the Iranians do.

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It only takes one to start something, but it takes two to manage it and end it. Today in Seoul, they watched and cheered as if it were a play-by-play, a judge making the final call on the sentencing of former President Yoon Seok-yool. And after Yoon's fate was sealed, his critics celebrated. I was watching the martial law, which is something I'd only seen in history books, unfold in real time.

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I hoped for a harsher punishment so that history wouldn't repeat itself. His supporters were left shocked. Watching what appears to be a collapse of rule of law today, I'm compelled to question whether we should proceed with an appeal or continue to participate in these criminal proceedings at all. It was December 2024 when President Yoon declared martial law.

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That bought time until a unanimous vote lifted martial law. From start to finish, it was only six hours, but it was and has been a test of South Korean democracy. To me, the most remarkable story is the resilience and the sustainability of South Korean democracy in the face of unprecedented challenges. Frank Genuzzi is the president of the Mansfield Foundation, which works on U.S.

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relations with Asia. He calls Yun's the most momentous domestic trial in more than 30 years in a country that has a history of presidents who've been impeached, jailed or overthrown.

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Over the last 14 months, South Korea has emerged from this process with due process sustained, rule of law sustained, democracy itself was in the docket in this trial. And the South Korean people affirmed the value of that democracy, the resilience of that democracy without personalizing the crime. The outcome from Yoon could have been much worse. The prosecution asked for the death penalty.

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and also allowed him to focus really on where he needed to focus, which was his foreign policy priorities, sustaining an outreach to Japan and reassuring the United States that South Korea would be a loyal, faithful ally.

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Over the past year, South Korea has faced pressure over trade and promised to increase defense spending. It's been a balancing act for a democracy that has now sent a former president to prison for life. Richard, real quickly, let's say the president does indeed does some kind of kinetic action in Iran. How destabilizing will that be to the region?

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Again, it all depends upon the Iranian response. I think internally Iran has institutions, can probably absorb it. The real question is whether they retaliate and whether they go after the Saudis or go after shipping, in which case the oil prices go up. So in a funny sort of way, after we strike, if we do, it seeds the initiative to Iran. They've got to decide how they want to manage the crisis.

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So many businesses are in this no hiring, no firing, no growth. They're bracing themselves, right? Foreign investors are not feeling great about investing in the U.S. And a funny thing, as happy as people have been about the markets in the last year, look abroad. Markets abroad have been stronger than ours have. Well, the amazing thing is that they don't react badly to Trump anymore.

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They just kind of grin and bear it and hope to get through. And the positive for the markets is that they hope that Trump won't like regulation. But when something like this happens today, they really like it because it means that we do adhere to the rule of law here.

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And if we're a country that doesn't adhere to the rule of law, then expect your markets to fly out the window because nobody's going to invest a red cent here.