“Conservative Movement Anti-Trump on Most Issues”

“A powerful sign that President Trump’s tariff-driven trade war is at risk came in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in April by a coalition that included many prominent conservative and libertarian lawyers, scholars and former officials.

The brief was also a signal of a deepening rift between Mr. Trump and the conservative legal movement, one that burst into public view last week with the President’s attacks on the Federalist Society, whose leaders helped pick the judges and justices he nominated in his first term.

Among the people who signed the brief in the tariffs case was Richard Epstein, who teaches at New York University and is an influential libertarian legal scholar.

“You have to understand that the conservative movement is now, as an intellectual movement, consistently anti-Trump on most issues,” he said.”