In a petition long on pathos, the Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to overturn a federal appeals court decision from a week ago that declared most of the president’s tariffs to be illegal.

At times, the government’s arguments as to why the high court should grant Trump the ability to arbitrarily set tariff rates, impose massive taxes on US companies and consumers, and plunge global trade into chaos read like one of the president’s social media posts.

As we explained last week, one of the administration’s best bets of convincing the Supreme Court to allow an apparently illegal action to continue is to make the case that reversing the tariffs now that they are in effect and have raised billions of dollars from American businesses would disrupt the economy too much.

Such a decision would not be legally sound, but the court’s conservative majority has proven itself to be wholly subservient to Trump in several instances already.

Therefore, the government’s lawyers focused a lot less on legal arguments in their petition than on the president’s thoughts on the matter.

“The President has determined that those tariffs and the ensuing trade negotiations with all our major trading partners are pulling America back from the precipice of disaster, restoring its respect and standing in the world, eliminating decades of unfair and asymmetric trade policies that have gutted our manufacturing capacity and military readiness, and inducing our trading partners to invest trillions of dollars in the American economy,” the petition states.

In other words, the government is saying in no uncertain terms that, if the Supreme Court were to rule against Trump, it would risk plunging the US into economic chaos.

That is not a legal argument.

It is the Supreme Court’s job to rule based on existing laws and precedent as to whether Trump has the authority to impose these tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), i.e., whether a trade deficit constitutes an emergency that allows a president to seize powers the Constitution granted to Congress, and not what effect its decision would have.

Otherwise, what would ever stop presidents from taking illegal actions that would be difficult to reverse?

To drive home the point of how important the tariffs are to Trump, the petition begins by stating that they constitute the administration’s “most significant economic and foreign-policy initiative.”

In addition, the government’s lawyers throw a few big numbers around.

“Due to IEEPA tariffs, six major trading partners and the 27–nation European Union have already entered into framework deals with the United States, accepting tariff arrangements heavily recalibrated in America’s favor and agreeing to make approximately $2 trillion of purchases and investment in the United States’ economy — with trillions more under negotiation with countries across the world,” the government states.

While that sounds impressive, it is a far cry from what Trump has claimed when he reacted to the appeals court decision.

“More than 15 trillion Dollars will be invested in the USA, a RECORD,” the president wrote on Monday. “Much of this investment is because of Tariffs. If a Radical Left Court is allowed to terminate these Tariffs, almost all of this investment, and much more, will be immediately cancelled! In many ways, we would become a Third World Nation, with no hope of GREATNESS again.”

And that, more than the government’s petition, is giving the Supreme Court its marching orders: Fail to do Trump’s bidding, and the US would find itself right back at the “brink of a major economic and national-security catastrophe.”

The law seems to be of secondary consequence to the government’s lawyers.

And they might be onto something. After all, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about the Constitution either these days.