‘Disturbing': Legal expert warns fuming Trump just sent an ominous new 'signal'

A legal scholar and former Pentagon official warned Friday that President Donald Trump’s attacks on the Supreme Court following his tariff defeat could send a troubling signal across the court system.

Appearing on CNN, NYU professor Ryan Goodman, a former Department of Defense special counsel, said Trump’s rhetoric toward the justices in the aftermath of his sweeping loss at the high court was “very disturbing and unfair.”

“I think it's very disturbing and unfair,” Goodman said. “It's disturbing in the sense that he's calling them unpatriotic and disloyal. And that is a signal to people in this country in which we're sitting in a political environment in which there are death threats against the justices and the judges across the country.”

Goodman emphasized that while the Supreme Court justices themselves are unlikely to be intimidated, Trump’s language could still have consequences for the court system.

“I don't think these justices will cower,” he said. “But it also might mean that it's sending a signal to lower court judges.”

Goodman, in his appearance on Friday, also rejected Trump’s claim that the ruling was partisan or illegitimate, noting that the decision matched what most legal experts expected.

“And the reason I say it's unfair,” Goodman explained, “this is a six-member majority, and the judges below in the lower courts are almost uniformly the same way as the outcome today.”

He said only one lower-court judge dissented and added that “most lawyers and the conservative legal community saw that the outcome was writing on the wall, that this is how they would decide this opinion, because the law really did not give him the basis for these tariffs.”