“They want the madness to stop.” The court case challenging Trump’s tariff chaos. Plus:

Cristian Farias 
A legal journalist who writes about courts and the law for Vanity Fair and elsewhere.

It is now India’s turn to face a fresh round of retaliatory tariffs: earlier today, Donald Trump announced a fifty per cent tax on goods from the country. Tomorrow or next week? No one knows. Trade deals and deadlines for deals come and go. Economic uncertainty abounds. Could the courts put an end to it all?

Last Thursday, on the same day that Trump blitzed the world, yet again, with a new round of tariffs on a broad range of goods, a specialized appeals court in Washington, D.C., inched closer to a definitive pronouncement on whether the President can legally make such sweeping economic demands—on a whim, whenever he feels like it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears disputes concerning international trade, government contracts, and patents, among other clearly delineated areas, doesn’t normally make waves. But the court, sitting en banc—that is, all eleven active judges present—is soon expected to pass judgment on a defining, and deeply disruptive, feature of the second Trump Presidency. On its docket is V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a consolidated case involving businesses and states that say they have been harmed by the President’s tariffs. They want the madness to stop.

In one sense, as I’ve written before, judging the legality of Trump’s tariffs, as a matter of basic statutory and constitutional interpretation, is open and shut: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or I.E.E.P.A., which Trump has invoked, and which grants the President broad authority to take urgent economic actions concerning other nations, doesn’t mention the word “tariffs.” Likewise, the statute, by its plain terms, allows the nation’s chief executive only to deal with “any unusual and extraordinary threat.” A mere trade deficit with another country, one of Trump’s chief justifications for tariffs, is neither unusual nor extraordinary. And under the Constitution, Congress, not the President, gets to set taxes on goods that the rest of us end up paying.

At arguments for the V.O.S. case this past Thursday, the appeals court wrestled with all of this. “Tariffs and taxation are always tempting for kings and Presidents,” Neal Katyal, the star lawyer representing one of the plaintiffs, said. More than one judge on the Federal Circuit seemed deeply incredulous that Trump, or any President, could, willy-nilly, call anything that moves a national emergency, and then go unchallenged.

No matter how the court rules, the case is almost certain to be appealed, and the Supreme Court will have the final say. So far during Trump’s second term, the Justices have made a string of emergency rulings in the President’s favor, blessing the chaos that Trump himself unleashed, and with little regard for the work of lower-court judges. On tariffs, the Court could very well do the same. That should give us all pause—and temper our expectations that the courts, to say nothing of Congress, will put Trump’s trade war to an end.

Last Monday, a twenty-seven-year-old man killed five people with an assault rifle in an office tower on Park Avenue. Michael Schulman’s childhood friend, Wesley, was among the victims. He shares the story of their parallel paths, recalling her nursery-school face, “lit up with wild, happy eyes and an outsize smile, haloed with Slinky-like curls of dirty-blond hair.” And he warns that faraway-seeming problems, such as gun violence, will come to touch us all. Read or listen to the story »

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced yesterday that the Department of Health and Human Services had cancelled nearly five hundred million dollars’ worth of existing or planned federal investment in the development of mRNA vaccines, affecting research universities and companies including Pfizer and Moderna. We reached out to Dhruv Khullar, a physician and contributing writer to the magazine, to better understand the implications of this decision.