Trump warns buyers after fiery tariff verdict rant.
The ruling says he can ask, not charge—frustrating for a man who sees deals everywhere.
The “terrible” things he wants to do are really just about money. It’s not about national security or some grand strategy. It’s the feeling of being taken advantage of, of watching other countries get rich while American factories closed down. For a man who built his identity on winning deals, that feeling is personal. It’s the immigrant shopkeeper on the corner who undercuts his prices. It’s the guy at the poker table who keeps raising the stakes. Trump has spent his life believing that the world is a zero-sum game, and for decades, he thinks, America has been losing.
The Supreme Court ruling, in his mind, is just another sucker punch. They took away his favorite tool—the fee, the penalty, the tangible cost he could impose. It’s like being the sheriff in a Western and having your gun taken away. You can still glare at the bad guys, you can still make them walk through the front door slowly, but you can’t draw. And to a man who sees power as the ability to act, to punish, to extract a price, that feels like emasculation.
His solution—using licenses to do “terrible” things—is the workaround of someone who has spent a lifetime finding loopholes. If you can’t charge a toll, you make the road so long and winding that people give up. You make them wait. You make them beg. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of leaving someone on hold for hours. It’s petty, yes, but it’s also deeply human. When you feel powerless, you find power in the smallest obstructions.
And then there’s the lowercase letters. This is the detail that reveals everything. A sitting President of the United States, the leader of the free world, is so stung by a legal setback that he decides to punish the highest court in the land by refusing to capitalize its name. It’s the digital age equivalent of a child sticking out their tongue. It’s immature, yes, but it’s also achingly human. We’ve all done it. We’ve all been so angry at someone that we’ve resorted to the smallest, most symbolic act of defiance. We’ve all typed an email in lowercase to signal our displeasure, hoping the recipient feels the chill. Trump just does it on a global stage.
But beneath the petulance, there’s a real loneliness to this. He talks about countries “ripping us off for decades,” and you can hear the echo of every American who feels left behind, who watched their jobs go overseas, who believes the system was rigged against them. Trump channels that anger because he feels it himself. He sees himself as the champion of the forgotten, the guy who will finally stand up to the bullies. The problem is, his methods are those of a bully himself.
The incoherence of the post—the jump from tariffs to licenses to fees to conspiracy—is the sound of a mind racing to find a win. He knows the ruling limited him, but he can’t admit defeat. So he reframes it as a secret victory. It’s the logic of a man who has to believe he’s always winning, even when he’s clearly lost.
And in that moment, he’s not the President. He’s just a guy who got told “no” and can’t handle it. He’s the friend who, when you beat him at chess, insists the win doesn’t count because you moved the pieces wrong. He’s the relative who, when confronted with a mistake, doubles down and claims it was actually part of the plan all along.
The tragedy is that this isn’t how leadership is supposed to look. Leadership is absorbing the blow and moving forward. It’s accepting the rule of law even when it stings. It’s explaining to the country why diplomacy is still the path, even when the courts tie your hands. But Trump has never been about absorbing. He’s about deflecting. Every setback is a conspiracy. Every loss is a secret win. Every criticism is “fake news.”
And so the world watches as the most powerful man in the world types in lowercase, throwing a digital tantrum because he can’t charge a fee. It would be trivial if the licenses he’s talking about didn’t affect real people—workers in factories, farmers selling crops, families trying to make ends meet.
In the end, it’s just a man, sitting alone, typing into his phone, trying to convince himself and anyone who will listen that he’s still in control.