How Rich for Trump to Impugn the Supreme Court as ‘Swayed by Foreign Interests’

I am in violent agreement with every word of Jim’s post this morning – and I wish to God he could explain judiciary nomenclature to my native New York, where the state “Supreme” Court is the lower tribunal. (The higher courts are the Appellate Division and, ultimately, the Court of Appeals.)

The outbursts Jim spotlights cannot be allowed to pass, though, without observation of how rich it is for this president, uniquely among all others in American history, to claim that some other government officials are being “swayed by foreign interests” — in this instance, the justices of the United States Supreme Court, who exhibit no hint of foreign influence, whatever you may think about their decision in Learning Resources v. Trump (Friday’s ruling invalidating the steep Trump tariff tax on Americans, with which, like our editorial, I happen to agree).

President Trump refused to enforce the TikTok statute that Congress enacted and that the Court upheld — and upheld precisely because, just as first-term Trump contended, TikTok is a massive Chinese espionage operation. That’s because the president is swayed by both TikTok (deluding himself that it helped him win the 2024 election) and its puppeteer, the anti-American regime of Xi Jinping (with whom Trump hopes to cut deals at a high-profile summit). Because the Republican-controlled Congress refuses to vindicate its statute and its oversight authority, there have been only the usual rumblings but no substantive hearings on the president’s TikTok deal. Hence there is insufficient public information to assess whether the transaction Trump orchestrated eliminated Chinese influence over TikTok’s operations. (The president’s touting of China-controlled ByteDance’s reduction to just under 20 percent ownership does not answer pertinent questions about who controls TikTok’s algorithms, data-collection, etc.)

The president has declined to take sides in a war of aggression against Ukraine (an aspiring Western democracy) and, increasingly, our European allies, waged by the virulently anti-American regime of Vladimir Putin because he doesn’t want to offend the Russian despot.

The president has given access to cutting-edge American microchip technology, a piece of the TikTok action, a place at the table in Stargate (the administration’s major AI infrastructure project), and outsized geopolitical prominence to the United Arab Emirates after its agents poured $2.5 billion into his family’s start-up crypto venture — notwithstanding the alarm of national security officials and (in Trump’s first term) congressional Republicans over the UAE’s history of extensive ties to China involving dual-use technology.

The president awarded a pardon to a Chinese-born Canadian crypto entrepreneur, Changpeng Zhao, who resides in the UAE and runs the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance (which, like Zhao, was also convicted of money-laundering because Zhao ran the exchange as a covert funding channel for terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers). Turns out that prior to the pardon, (a) Binance — which is banned in the United States because of its criminality — helped the Trump family crypto business build its stablecoin technology, and (b) Trump was lobbied by agents of the UAE to pardon Zhao; and after the pardon, Binance orchestrated promotions that swelled by $2 billion the value of the Trump family cryptocurrency, USD1, that trades on the exchange. (Because stablecoin cryptocurrency operates like a bank, issuers like the Trump family business earn revenue by investing the reserves. Attributable in large part to investments by the UAE and maneuvering by Binance, there is now an estimated $5 billion of USD1 stablecoin in circulation, which could generate $200 million per annum for the Trump crypto enterprise.)

In likely violation of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause and the 1966 Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act, the president accepted a luxury airliner — the $400 million “palace in the sky” — from Qatar, a sharia-supremacist regime that (a) has served as a key ally of Iran (the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American jihadist terrorism, according to the State Department) and (b) has been among the chief sponsors of Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, which has been a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law for three decades).

And don’t even get me started on the “Board of Peace” — that requires separate, intensive perusal.

This is just a partial list of the effects of influence on a president who has eviscerated government conflict-of-interest rules and norms, exploited the executive’s foreign affairs powers to generate business opportunities and prodigious revenue for his family business, and, as Forbes puts it, “presided over the most lucrative presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth.”

But we’re to understand that it’s actually the Supreme Court that’s under the sway of foreign interests.

Back when we had a conservative political party, I’d have wondered what Republicans would say if, on this record, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton had smeared the justices as the incumbent did — an incumbent who wouldn’t be the incumbent had the same Supreme Court not indulged his immunity claims. Note that three of the conservative justices castigated by the president in the wake of the tariff ruling (Chief Justice John Roberts and two Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett), were in the 6–3 majority in Trump v. United States (July 1, 2024), the immunity decision that delayed and ultimately derailed the trial of Capitol-riot-related charges on which the president would almost certainly have been found guilty by a Washington, D.C., jury.