Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Monday that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are constitutional and argued the administration’s legal team made a major mistake by relying too heavily on statutory arguments instead of presidential authority under the Constitution.
Appearing on Newsmax’s “The Record With Greta Van Susteren,” Dershowitz weighed in after Trump criticized Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett for siding against his administration’s tariff policies. Trump said the justices had “hurt our Country so badly” with their rulings — a frustration many conservatives share as courts continue inserting themselves into executive decisions involving trade and foreign policy.
Dershowitz argued that once Trump’s legal team framed the issue around federal statutes, the administration was almost guaranteed to face trouble before the Supreme Court.
“Once the lawyers for President Trump decided to cite statutes, they were guaranteed to lose,” Dershowitz said. “Because who interprets statutes? The Supreme Court interprets statutes. That’s their job.”
According to Dershowitz, Trump’s attorneys should have focused immediately on the president’s constitutional authority over diplomacy and foreign policy.
“He should have gotten up there in his first sentence and said, ‘may it please the court, the tariffs that President Trump threatened save 30 million lives between Pakistan and India,’” Dershowitz explained.
“The job of the president is to administer diplomacy and foreign policy, and tariffs are essential to that,” he added.
Dershowitz went even further, arguing that Congress itself may not have the constitutional authority to limit presidential use of tariffs in matters tied to foreign affairs and national security.
“Congress simply doesn't have the authority to impose limitations on the president's power to conduct foreign policy and military operations by using tariffs as one of his weapons,” Dershowitz said. “Tariffs are better than bombs.”
The longtime legal scholar suggested that if Trump’s lawyers had framed the case as a constitutional Article II issue rather than a technical statutory dispute, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett may have sided differently.
“Generally, you don't reach constitutional issues unless you first resolve statutory issues,” Dershowitz explained. “But if the president had argued” from executive authority grounds, “a good lawyer [would have] gotten those two justices to go along with the three other justices.”
He also argued that courts have limited authority when presidents invoke constitutional powers tied directly to diplomacy and military strategy.
“When the president claims presidential authority under Article Two for military and diplomacy, the court has no role to play,” Dershowitz concluded.
The comments highlight a growing debate among conservatives over how aggressively courts should be able to restrict presidential power in areas involving international negotiations, trade leverage, and national security. For many Trump supporters, tariffs were never just about economics — they were tools used to protect American interests without dragging the country into endless foreign conflicts. And as Dershowitz bluntly put it, tariffs are a lot cheaper than wars.