Fox News hosts have warned Donald Trump not to mention the Supreme Court’s decision to knock down the president’s tariff policy during his State of the Union speech.
Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress Tuesday night and is expected to focus on his handling of the economy and aggressive immigration crackdown.
Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade and Harold Ford Jr. urged the president to avoid harping on the conservative-leaning high court’s Friday ruling, which determined that his sweeping tariffs on both enemies and allies were unlawfully imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Ford Jr. told Kilmeade on The Five Tuesday afternoon, “Brian, I’ll be curious if the president criticizes the Court. He was very critical after the tariff decision. I hope he does not, but it’ll be very interesting to see if he refers to them as ‘unpatriotic fools’ like he did after the decision.”
Kilmeade replied, “I hope he doesn’t because remember the blowback President [Barack] Obama got, justifiably,” referring to when the former Commander-in-Chief spoke out against the Supreme Court’s decision to repeal a ban on corporate and union election spending during his 2010 State of the Union speech.
“Mr. President, please don’t comment on the Supreme Court justices,” he said.
Trump rebuked the Court’s 6-3 ruling on his tariff policy, calling it “deeply disappointing” during an appearance in the White House briefing room Friday.
“They’re just being fools and lap dogs for the RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] and the radical left Democrats … they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Trump said of the three conservatives who ruled against him.
Chief Justice John Roberts and the president’s own appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sided with liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson to strike down the global levies.
Also on Tuesday, Fox News’ Bret Baier said Trump will likely react to the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling.
“You wonder how that’s going to go with the Supreme Court Justices, several of them in the front row listening to the speech,” Baier said.
Baier also warned that “people are feeling pain from this economy, and you see that in polls.”
An AP-NORC poll from earlier this month found that just 39 percent of respondents said they approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 59 percent disapprove.
