Appeals court rules most of Trump's tariffs illegal.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in a 7–4 decision that President Donald Trump had overstepped his authority in imposing tariffs unilaterally, upholding a lower court decision. The appeals court’s decision targeted the tariffs Trump justified by declaring a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), including the “reciprocal tariffs” Trump imposed on all U.S. trading partners, but does not apply to the industry-specific duties that the president invoked under a different authority. Additionally, the court did not rule on whether the IEEPA justified any presidential tariffs. The Trump administration plans to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. |
| 0:08.4 | Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. |
| 0:27.9 | I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the tariffs ruling, breaking down the fact that a federal appeals court just said Trump's tariffs are legal, |
| 0:39.2 | or at least many of them are. |
| 0:41.1 | We're going to explain exactly what happened, share some views from the left and the right, |
| 0:45.3 | and then, of course, my take. |
| 0:47.0 | It is Tuesday, September 2nd. |
| 0:49.7 | And there's a lot of news to catch up on after the long weekend. |
| 0:53.4 | Before we jump in, though, a couple quick notes about some stuff happening here at Tangle. |
| 0:57.3 | First of all, on Friday, we republish an essay that I wrote about the shooting in Uvaldi, Texas, |
| 1:03.8 | given the recent mass shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. |
| 1:07.3 | We felt the original piece was once again relevant, unfortunately. So relevant that sadly we could |
| 1:14.0 | basically run it again in the exact same form that it was written three years ago. I did a |
| 1:20.9 | readdown of that piece over the weekend for the podcast. You can check that out. If you haven't yet, |
| 1:26.2 | it's just an episode or two back in our feed. |
| 1:29.5 | And I also published the piece on our website where you can go find it right now if you'd like. |
| 1:35.2 | Second, I want to give you a heads up that today we're debuting something. A new blurb, |
| 1:40.5 | something we're going to try and do in the newsletter and the podcast pretty regularly called staff dissent. |
| 1:47.2 | One thing Tangle readers rarely get to see is the diversity of thought that exists among our staff. |
| 1:53.5 | For a long time, it was just me writing this newsletter, but now there are 12 people who work here full-time, about half of whom are on the editorial side. So today, we're |
| 2:02.9 | launching a new blurb in the my take section called staff dissent. We're going to use this blurb to |
| 2:08.2 | occasionally feature a few sentences from a staff member who disagrees with me on a particular |
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