A Supreme Court ruling, an unauthorised war and open defiance of legal limits point to a presidency no longer constrained by institutions – but defined by them being ignored.

On 20 February, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump, holding 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act never granted the President authority to impose tariffs. The $164.7 billion collected was never the federal government’s to take. The ruling was final. The constitutional question was settled.

Within hours, the President attacked the Court publicly, praised the three justices who sided with him by name, and invoked Section 122 emergency tariff authority; new tariffs, he promised, worse than before.

He got so far ahead of his own legal team that his Solicitor General, who had just argued the other side of this precise question before the same Court, was left with no arguable position for appeal. You cannot petition for rehearing of a ruling your own client spent the afternoon publicly attacking while simultaneously acting as though the ruling never happened.

The President did not just lose Learning Resources. By his own conduct and with full knowledge beginning on 20 February, he ensured no future action was professionally or legally tenable. He locked the door. Then he locked it again.

His Treasury Secretary moved in parallel. Scott Bessent throughout the legal process and after, postured the legality of the tax tariffs while at the same time told judge after judge and the media refunds “won’t be a problem.” Hours after the ruling, he changed that tune; the legal issue was resolved and his boss made it unrecoverable.

When Customs and Border Protection (CPB) subsequently told Judge Eaton of the Court of International Trade that processing refunds would require a minimum of 75 days, Eaton rejected the claim entirely, placing CBP on a weekly reporting schedule beginning 6 March. By approximately 20 March we suggest, a fully electronic ACH refund system, a system CBP itself had been transitioning to since 6 February (weeks before the ruling) will be fully operational.

The 75-day claim was not an administrative estimate. It was the continuation of a fabrication that began in the courtroom and ended in the Treasury Secretary’s and the President’s public contempt for a binding judicial order. Not once, not twice, but time and time again.

Eight days after Learning Resources, on 28 February, Operation Epic Fury began. The largest American military operation in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq was launched without a declaration of war, without congressional authorisation, and in direct violation of the War Powers Resolution Act of 1973. Senators from both parties said so immediately and explicitly.

The same Treasury that would not return $164.7 billion in illegally collected tariff taxes to 300,000 American businesses was now financing an unauthorised war against a civilisation that has outlasted every power that has underestimated it.

The war is now in its third week. Thirteen American service members are dead. More than 200 have been wounded. Coalition casualties span multiple neighbouring nations. Thousands are dead in total on all sides across the war theatre and Trump claimed on 16 March that “nobody” expected Iran to extend the war theatre to neighbouring countries in the region – this assertion is impossible to believe.

At a press conference at the White House, the President spoke about the war for the first ten minutes, reiterating calls for allies to help secure the Strait of Hormuz while also saying the United States did not need help. He did not mention the 13 Americans who had died since the war began. For the next 30 minutes he spoke about his track record as a project manager, a ballroom under construction at “the People’s House” where he lives as a guest, and the private medical history of a Republican congressman that he had no right to disclose. The 13 dead went unmentioned from beginning to end.

In recent days he has gone further. The President of Cuba, he announced, must go. And then, with a simplicity that requires no interpretation: “I can do anything.”

The night before the press conference, on Truth Social, he attacked the Supreme Court in a post remarkable even by the standards of a presidency that has normalised institutional assault. He praised Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito by name while condemning the remaining six as corrupt, politically motivated, and deliberately disrespectful to the presidents who appointed them. He called the Court little more than a weaponised political organisation. He said it was “his duty to say so”. He posted this the night before he knew the Learning Resources window closed permanently.

On 17 March, that window closed. The ruling is permanent and unappealable. The $164.7 billion is constitutionally settled as having always belonged to the 300,000 American businesses and the consumers who ultimately absorbed it as higher prices. Not a dollar has been returned. Not a word of apology has been offered for using those funds to justify the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the most consequential fiscal legislation in a generation, built on a constitutional violation the Court has now permanently confirmed.

What these weeks illuminate is not a presidency in crisis. It is a presidency revealing, with the compression that crisis produces, what it has always been.

A convicted criminal awaiting sentencing in New York State attacked the institution his own appointed justices sit on the night before he knew it no longer mattered. He launched an unauthorised war without telling Congress, without acknowledging the dead it produced, without once using a press conference to look the American people in the eye and account for the lives spent in their name. His Treasury Secretary lied to the courts, then lied to the public, then watched a federal judge put his agency on a weekly compliance schedule. And in the spaces between, he told the world he can do anything.

“I can do anything” is not a boast. In the context of these 25 days it is a confession. It is the precise statement the presidential oath was designed to make impossible.

The Heritage Foundation built the blueprint. The Federalist Society supplied the judges. The immunity decision cleared the legal field. What 20 February through to 17 March illuminates, with a forensic precision that requires no inference, is what that architecture was built to serve.

Not originalism. Not limited government. Not the rule of law.

This.

The records exist. The dead are countable. The money is traceable. The obligation – to the people named in the Preamble, to the posterity the founders placed there deliberately – is unmistakable.

What remains is the choice Franklin described leaving the Convention. Not a guarantee. Not a gift.

A republic – if we can keep it.