Trump’s trade train derails in court revolt, TACO talk and Musk grenades

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“It’s called negotiation,” Trump snapped. “They wouldn’t be over here today negotiating if I didn’t put a 50 per cent tariff” on Europe.

“The sad thing is, now, when I make a deal with them — it’s something much more reasonable — they’ll say, ‘Oh, he was chicken. He was chicken.’ That’s unbelievable. I usually have the opposite problem. They say ‘you’re too tough, Mr President’.”

Despite Trump’s protestations, investors are picking up on his Michael Jacksonesque moonwalk in his trade policies – appearing to walk forward but going backwards.

The timing of his legal failure was especially poignant as it coincides with his “first buddy” Elon Musk publicly farewelling his DOGE duties and returning to his real day job of running the increasingly challenged electric carmaker Tesla.

Musk grenade

The billionaire threw a decent-sized grenade as he exited, taking aim at Trump’s signature legislative priority to cut taxes and lift border security spending, which he said increases America’s budget deficit and undermines the work of his government efficiency team.

According to reports in the New York Times, Musk also made it clear that he was disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, which the newspaper suggested raised questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.

Musk’s comments surely stung, but it was an electric toy maker, a sewerage pipe manufacturer, a sake distributor, a producer of fishing equipment and a retailer of women’s cycling gear who bizarrely became the thorns in Trump’s side.

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This motley bunch of US businesses banded together to mount a case that Trump overstepped his legal authority to impose tariffs on the rest of the globe.

They, alongside a swag of US states, successfully argued that Trump could not invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act which was designed to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during a national emergency as justification to impose tariffs.

It should be noted that the ruling does not affect tariffs issued by the Trump administration under separate legal authorities, including levies on steel, aluminium and cars, and others that Trump has threatened on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and other critical products.

Still, there will be plenty of world leaders reassessing their negotiating positions and reaching for that 50-year-old Scotch for a celebration – prematurely or not.