President Donald Trump said Sunday he won’t be in attendance at the Supreme Court this week for a pivotal legal showdown that could gut the tariff policy at the center of his economic agenda.

Trump had flirted publicly with going to the oral arguments in the tariff case Wednesday, even though such a move by a sitting president would appear unprecedented. But as he returned to the White House from Florida on Sunday, he told reporters on Air Force One that he doesn’t plan to go.

At about the same time, Trump posted a longer statement on Truth Social, slipping in confirmation he won’t be at the crucial high court session.

“I will not be going to the Court on Wednesday in that I do not want to distract from the importance of this Decision,” Trump wrote.

Still, the president doubled down on the case’s importance and his predictions of disaster if the high court forces him to abandon his most sweeping tariffs.

“It will be, in my opinion, one of the most important and consequential Decisions ever made by the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote. “If we lose, our Country could be reduced to almost Third World status — Pray to God that that doesn’t happen!”

The justices are set to weigh a pair of legal challenges to Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs on several countries by invoking a nearly 50-year-old law. No president before Trump has used the law, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to impose tariffs, which have brought in tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. government.

Trump’s decision came after at least one prominent Trump ally indicated it would be unwise for the president to attend.

“I think it’s a mistake,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told POLITICO last week. “I’m sure the president is interested in the arguments,” Kennedy added. “Some may interpret it as an attempt to put pressure on the justices, and I think if the justices receive it that way, I’m not saying they will or they won’t, but if they do perceive it that way, I think it will backfire.”

Some Democrats also said the move Trump was mulling was likely to be counterproductive.

“It is a fairly unsubtle effort to intimidate the Supreme Court. Parties have a right to attend Supreme Court arguments, but the president could listen to it in a variety of other ways, and I think it’s just an attempt to bully the court, and frankly, I think it will backfire,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

However, speaking to journalists last month, Trump said he felt obliged to go given the stakes.

“It’s one of the most important decisions in the history of the Supreme Court and I might go there. I really believe I have an obligation to go there,” Trump said.

The move would have given the president a first-hand view as the justices weigh whether to uphold his wide-ranging tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners — a policy Trump has made a signature of his second term.

Since suffering a defeat at an appeals court earlier this year, Trump has used almost apocalyptic terms to warn about the impact of a similar ruling from the justices.

In a social media post in August, the president suggested the U.S. would be left destitute if his tariffs were deemed illegal. Such a ruling “would literally destroy the United States of America,” he wrote.

The official request the administration made to the high court in September for urgent consideration of the case was only slightly more reserved. “The President and his Cabinet officials have determined … that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.

Historians and lawyers who practice regularly before the court said they were not aware of any prior occasion in which a sitting president attended oral arguments. Presidents do grace the Supreme Court’s ornate courtroom on occasion for the formal investiture of new justices and typically visit the building during events marking the death of a justice.

Trump attended the official installation of two of his nominees to the court: Justices Neil Gorsuch, in 2017, and Brett Kavanaugh, in 2018. He also visited the court in 2020 for ceremonies related to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (He did not attend the investiture of his third Supreme Court nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. That event was delayed until 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump was out of office at the time.)

“In general, the justices are very protective of their status and prerogatives and they really don’t like it when it looks like they’re being bullied,” said Washington University law professor Daniel Epps.

Stephen Wermiel, a Supreme Court historian, said it would be “a very awkward situation for him to attend.”

“If he is there to remind the justices how important the case is to him, that is extremely superfluous. They are quite aware of the importance of the case. If he is there as a form of jawboning, that is even more inappropriate,” he added.

Trump has previously shown up to lower court proceedings where his attendance was not required.

In January 2024, Trump flew from his Florida home to a Washington federal courthouse a few blocks from the Capitol to watch Sauer, then one of his personal attorneys, argue that Trump’s service as president immunized him from criminal prosecution. Special counsel Jack Smith, who had obtained the criminal indictment claiming Trump illegally conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was also present.

Whatever Trump’s intent in turning up that day — and breaking courtroom protocol by sitting at the counsel table with his lawyers — the D.C. Circuit judges didn’t back down. Despite the then-ex-president’s presence, all three judges, including a Republican appointee, rejected Trump’s immunity arguments.

When Trump’s appeal of that decision went before the Supreme Court about two months later, Trump was sitting in a separate criminal trial in Manhattan on charges he illegally covered up hush money payments to a porn star. The former president asked to be excused from the trial to attend the immunity arguments at the high court, but the state court judge, Juan Merchan, declined.

“Arguing before the Supreme Court is a big deal; I can understand why your client wants to be there,” Merchan said to Trump’s lawyers. “Your client is a criminal defendant in New York County Supreme Court. He’s required to be here.”

Sauer, who argued the immunity case for Trump at the high court, had a strong, if unsupervised, outing. In a decision that broke largely along ideological lines, the high court declared Trump immune from criminal prosecution for some actions he took as president,effectively kneecapping Smith’s election-related prosecution.

When Trump returned to office this year he named Sauer to his current post as the federal government’s top lawyer at the Supreme Court. He’s set to defend Trump’s tariff policy on Wednesday.

Epps, who served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, said one factor Trump or his advisers might have considered is whether he would have the patience to endure what could be two or even three hours of arguments on rather dry legal topics.

“I have no idea how he would conduct himself. … Do you think he could sit there respectfully while people are debating this?” Epps said. “He would presumably want to be on his phone … The whole thing sounds horribly, horribly awkward.”