President Donald Trump keeps struggling with the Supreme Court’s tariffs ruling against him — and his statements on the matter still misunderstand what the ruling said and why. 

That was evident when he spoke on Wednesday at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington. 

On top of continuing his tirade against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two of his appointees who ruled against him — “They sicken me,” the president said — Trump remains confounded by the fact that the government must refund the tariff money it illegally collected.  

He complained that the 6-3 ruling from February, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, “didn’t want to put one little sentence that all money taken in up ’til this day doesn’t have to be paid back.”

It’s true that the majority didn’t address refunds. That led Trump’s other high court appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, to observe in dissent that the court “says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the Government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers.”  

But the president should keep in mind, or be informed by his staff, that government lawyers had acknowledged that refunds would issue if the Supreme Court were to deem the tariffs illegal. For example, in convincing the lower courts not to halt the tariffs while litigation proceeded toward the justices, government lawyers wrote that there’d be no harm to plaintiffs because, if the administration were to lose in the end, then plaintiffs “will assuredly receive payment on their refund with interest.” 

Having now lost the case, no one in the government can be surprised that it must go through a refund process — certainly not the leader of the government. 

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