Supreme Court Ruling on Tariffs Has Made Trump Stronger: Analyst

President Trump's saying on Truth Social that he plans to raise the global tariffs from 10% to 15%. This comes after the Supreme Court ruled to strike down the use of tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Joining us now to discuss is Kristen Briggs, economist and CEO of Hard Asset Management. So good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. And as you know, the president called the ruling ridiculous. He said during that press briefing, he can destroy trade basically, but he can't charge a little fee. Can you just talk to us about this? What are you thinking about this ruling? Well, first, thanks for having me. It's a great topic. So the constitutionality of what President Trump was trying to use in terms of imposing the tariffs was something a little more outside the conventional box, let's say that. But it wasn't without good reason. So what President Trump did was he utilized the value of I call it the emergency context. It's the context of that. It's kind of a catastrophic event. You know, people are talking about the debt and the deficit and trying to be able to make fair trade a lot more palatable for the trading partners that we have and for the United States. In other words, he wanted a level playing field. The bottom line is he went through all of these hoops to be able to create a level playing field. The Supreme Court was probably not out of the box. When I look at things like the ACA back in the day, the Affordable Care Act, you know, people said, oh, you can't do that because of the interstate commerce law about taxation across the state lines. And Roberts said, no, we could do it. And then the Supreme Court came back and looked at this and said, you know what, we're not going to give it to the president because the constitutionality is going to come into more of a play here. In other words, it's going to be first and front row, the reasoning behind our decision, even though I believe that many of the justices thought what President Trump was doing was the right thing for the country. But now he's got a kind of circumvented again. I think Monday he's going to come out with a whole new plan. OK, so I mean, at the end of the day, Christian, do you think this ruling is good for the economy, bad for the economy somewhere in between? Is there going to be much change after this? Well, it's going to be good for the country that we maintain constitutionality within the way the Supreme Court looks at every piece of legislation or an executive order, because an executive order is legislation until the Supreme Court either yays or nays it. So it is good for the country from a from a constitutional standpoint. It puts everybody back in check. Now, the other but the bad part is the tariffs do have some strong fundamental value in order to be able to maintain the consistency of trade negotiations. That's the key. As in the past, sometimes the Supreme Court will rule and give the president favor because the genie is already out of the box. And again, I bring up the ACA, that part of the reasoning why Roberts was the the final decision maker on that was the genie was already out of the box regarding the amount of people that were on health care. So this ruling is good for constitutionality. It's good that President Trump now has some type of understanding the borders, if you will, about where he can play within and kind of what the Supreme Court is telling him, you can't go past this. So come tomorrow, Monday, I think what we're going to do is we're going to have a new set of versions of how he thinks the tariffs can stay in place. And the economy needs these tariffs, in a sense, because it makes our domestic manufactured goods more appealing, less expensive. And it encourages international manufacturers to come to America to avoid the tariffs and bring that manufacturing back within the United States. OK, so on that note, maybe you can elaborate a bit more on the impact that these tariffs have had on the U.S. up to this point to the ruling. OK, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked that one because a lot of people kind of miss the value of the pros and cons on the tariff. So good. Good question. Let's talk about that. The pros are that we have actually increased already the presence of domestic manufacturing from international trading partners. This is a fact, whether it's automotive, whether it's making just small little widgets, whatever it is, there's already increased jobs are starting to come back to America, both from internal manufacturing as well as international manufacturing that's either expanding here or coming here altogether. So the good parts of the tariffs are as follows, increasing competitiveness within domestic manufacturing. Import prices are still high, so it makes domestic products more attractive. It encourages the economy to be able to look to manufacturing as the next wave of GDP growth. Now, the downside of tariffs and there are some downsides, but it's it's not the kind of downside that people look for long term. The internal amount of tariffs that are being charged to the American people is about one hundred and fifty billion dollars right now that people have paid in additional costs for those goods. Now, those things range from different things. But knowing that the that imported parts or imported items have about one hundred and fifty billion dollars now in additional costs that the American people did pay. The question is, is how does that one hundred fifty billion dollars impact the economy or impact the bottom half of America? Because that that is the amount of money that these people because, you know, if you're making quite a bit of money, those tariffs don't have quite the the disadvantage effect on on incomes or people's discretionary income as it does the bottom half of America. However, I've said this before. Whatever we may pay a little bit more in tariffs on the bottom half can be offset dramatically by wage increasing. And how do we get wage increasing? Manufactured jobs. So what Trump's saying is, look, a little pain right now on the tariffs for long term gain, and the gain is going to be significant, I believe, in the second half of this year. But twenty seven, we could have a four and five percent GDP consistently because manufactured goods has the largest amount of impact in the economy, period. So, Christian, I'm sure you're aware of this on the day that this was announced Friday, Friday morning. Stock markets had a little bump up immediately following this news. Can you just talk to us as well about what investors are thinking? Yeah. OK, let's talk about that. I did notice that as soon as the Supreme Court came out with its ruling and then gave the White House kind of the perimeters that it would need to be working within the context that the market took that as saying it wasn't a full blown. You can't do tariffs. You just can't do tariffs in the way of which you're trying to do them. Now, I've said this before. When the market reacted like that, it was very positive, at least from from a decent gain within the Dow, of course, the Nasdaq, which means the investor community liked the way the Supreme Court came back to President Trump, even though President Trump wasn't really pleased or happy with the way the ruling was. They did give him some latitude in some of the language that said, look, you can't do it this way. However, there might be some other ways in which you can do it unless, of course, you go right to the legislative body, which is Congress, and get the permission and get them to say, yes, we're going to vote for these tariffs because in a sense it's taxation. But the investor community were really happy the Supreme Court said what it did, given President Trump again some latitude and possibly a little pivoting opportunity on Monday, which I believe that's what President Trump plans on doing. OK, just one final thing, Christian, and I was talking about this issue a couple of days ago with some of my guests, and the question came up whether this diminishes President Trump, whether it's domestically or on the global stage, because President Trump has said he ended wars with these tariffs. He used these tariffs as a negotiation tactic. And you alluded to, I think, earlier that now with this ruling, President Trump will have to jump through a bit more hoops. So, I mean, what do you think? Do you think this sort of diminishes him in terms of foreign policy, national security on the global stage? What do you think? OK, let's talk about that. Will President Trump in the eyes of his beholders, OK, the world, the world stage of international trade and, of course, international negotiations, diminish him? Not at all. Let me tell you why. See, one of the things that President Trump, the man I was talking about, Donald J. Trump, whenever he looked at real estate deals and there were challenges ahead of him, and some of the times I'm sure he tried to get his permits and work with all the unions to be able to get these big, beautiful buildings built, whether hotels or residential towers back in Manhattan. You see, a man like Donald Trump doesn't look at challenges as adversity roadblocks. What he does is he says, OK, that's just one way not to try to make that happen. It's like Dale was saying, it's how many times that Edison tried to make the light bulb work a thousand times. None of those were defeats. They were just ways of which not to do it. So what I look at is President Trump, because of his success in real estate and success in business overall, he doesn't look at this as a roadblock. What he says is, OK, that's just one way we can't get it done. So let's look at another way to get it done. So the international community is not going to look at President Trump in any diminished light whatsoever. That would be a complete falsehood. They're going to look at him and say he's even stronger because a man that can overcome challenges becomes stronger when he finds the direction he needs to go in order to be successful. They always say don't invest in a person that's never had challenges or some defeats because then when that happens, he won't know what to do. So Trump looked at this and said, hey, you know what? What we're looking at here now is one way not to make the light bulb work. Let's look at the ways we can make it work. And so that's what they're going to do come Monday. And I'm sure the White House counsels and all of his legal team and constitutional lawyers were looking this over the weekend and even prior to that. I can tell you right now, there's no way that they didn't have A and B ready to go. A, if he got the ruling and B, if he didn't get the ruling and he didn't get what he wanted. So you know what? They've got a plan. It's no different than being delayed on building a building. He'll work through it. He'll get it done. It does not diminish him. In fact, I would tell you this. He's probably stronger now than any time in the second term. Yeah, I mean, you make a great point there, Christian. And in the press briefing, President Trump said as well that this ruling actually gives him more powers, gives the president more powers to impose tariffs. And I was following that press briefing as well. And he didn't portray himself in any light of weakness. Actually, to the contrary, he seemed even stronger. That's what stood out to me. But thank you for explaining to us today, Christian. Pleasure speaking with you. You too. Thank you so much for having me.