On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled against the majority of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, including those enacted using a decades-old law reserved for a national emergency. These 2025 tariffs led to a last-minute Switch 2 pre-order delay as well as increased video game console and accessory prices. It’s a major setback for the president, and it could help alleviate rising gaming costs, but it also might all be for nothing as Trump will likely move to reactivate the tariffs using different legal methods.
In 2025, President Trump used the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to enact tariffs against a large list of countries. No previous president had ever used the law to impose tariffs against other nations. The court was split 6-3 in its decision to rule that Trump’s unprecedented use of the IEEPA was illegal, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion.
“The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope,” wrote Roberts. But the Chief wrote that Congress has never said the language in the IEEPA applied to tariffs, adding: “We hold that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.” Roberts was joined by the three liberal justices as well as two conservatives, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. It should be noted that not all of Trump’s tariffs are now gone, as not all of them were enacted using the IEEPA, but many of his so-called reciprocal taxes have now been ruled illegal.
Last year, Trump’s reciprocal tariffs and his trade war against countries like China and Canada directly led to Nintendo delaying pre-orders for the Switch 2 in April.
“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start on April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged,” said the company.
In August, the company quietly raised the prices on many Switch accessories and on various models of the original console. Other companies like Sony and Microsoft followed suit with similar price increases on hardware and accessories as a result of tariffs against countries that produce many of the parts needed to manufacture gaming hardware.
In a better, less horrible timeline, most of Trump’s trade war tariffs being deemed illegal would lead to video game hardware prices going down. But we don’t live in that timeline. President Trump has many different legal avenues for reinstating many of the now-illegal tariffs, as helpfully pointed out by Bloomberg in this chart.
Even if all of these legal backup plans fail and he’s unable to get all or most of his precious tariffs made legal again, console and gaming PC prices are likely to keep going up and up and up due to the ongoing memory shortage caused by AI hyperscalers racing to build massive datacenters. But at least you can take comfort in knowing that Trump is having a bad day today. That’s something, right?
