I can’t say that Trump has thought out an end game in California. but if there were one, what would it be? Because, thinking or not, Trump is likely to go there eventually.

From what I can see from the other coast, the revolt against military occupation going on in Los Angeles is escalating. I would have advised the Angelenos to not react to the Guard at all.  As Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, Trump is using the Guard as bait.

By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.

He’s been eager for such a confrontation for awhile. I believe he wanted it in his first term, but then he had people around him who had the sense to say no. Now he’s got the likes of Pete Hegseth.

During the George Floyd protests in 2020, Trump was furious at what he saw as the fecklessness of military leaders determined to thwart his attempts to use deadly force against protesters. He’s learned his lesson: This time, he has installed a hapless sycophant at the Pentagon who is itching to execute the boss’s orders.

He thinks sending troops to put down lefties makes him cool. But there’s more to this than just confronting protesters. Trump has a beef with the whole state of California, remember.

Philip Bump writes in WaPo that Trump is going to war with California the same way he’s going to war with Harvard.

What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. His team, The Post reported, was “asking federal employees to develop rationales for the funding cuts” — perhaps looking at conflicts with his executive orders about cutting costs or ending diversity initiatives.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) responded by noting that the state contributes far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. But the point wasn’t really the money. The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel, precisely as it had sought to bring elite universities to heel, similarly by contriving reasons the government might strip funding. The methodology was the same because the intent was the same: inflict pain on an entity that Trump viewed as hostile to his presidency.

So Trump wants to bring California “to heel.” What would that look like? What would make Trump happy with California? Whatever that is, I don’t think deploying some National Guard is going to make it happen. That’s just a first step.

I believe he wants escalation. And the escalation won’t stop with California. Because ultimately what Trump craves is to turn the nation and then the world into a perfect reflection of himself. He wants no disagreement with his beliefs, no doubts of his superior judgment of all things. And just as he wants control of Harvard — he’s seeking “input” into hiring, admissions, and eventually curriculum — he will want control of California and every other city or state he feels is a threat to his authority.. And the Constitution doesn’t give him that.

Robert Reich writes that we are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state. At The Atlantic, David Frum goes even further.

If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control. Or he might suspend voting until, in his opinion, order has been restored. Either way, blue-state seats could be rendered vacant for some time.

Trump hasn’t yet trotted out the Insurrection Act, which he wanted to use in his first term but got no cooperation from most of his staff. He could declare phony emergencies and insurrections everywhere there are majorities of Democratic voters and send in the troops.

And it wouldn’t completely surprise me if he were to try to revoke California’s statehood so that it reverts to being a federal territory. Then he can personally dismiss the entire state government and run the state any way he likes. That’s the only “end game” that would give Trump the victory he wants.

I doubt it’s possible for Trump to feel genuine contentment about anything. If you gave him absolute control over the galaxy he’d still crave more, because that craving is coming from a bottomless hole within himself. There is no filling it. That’s why he’s not going to stop until something stops him. Let’s hope that something involves the due process of law and the Constitution.

Update: Trump has added a Marine battalion to the National Guard in LA. The Guard in LA. haven’t been provided beds or food.

State troops sent to Los Angeles by the Trump administration, without the approval of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, were expected to sleep on floors or outdoors, a source told the Chronicle.

[image or embed]

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle.com) June 9, 2025 at 2:45 PM

Trump federalized the California National Guard over the objections of California’s governor and sent Guard into Los Angeles to put down the “riots.” About midnight last night Trump posted this:

Only the Guard didn’t begin to arrive until about 7 o’clock this morning. And apparently it was pretty quiet in LA last night, with the LAPD making only a handful of arrests.

Also, if masks are not to be worn at protests, does that mean the thugs from ICE can’t wear them either? Probably not.

That’s a New York Times headline; here’s the accompanying article. LAPD kept the peace well enough last night. So now the Guard in Los Angeles are standing around trying to look purposeful.

#USNORTHCOM can confirm that elements of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team from the California National Guard have begun deploying to the Los Angeles area, with some already on the ground. Additional information will be provided as units are identified and deployed. pic.twitter.com/BxqZM2YG1G

— U.S. Northern Command (@USNorthernCmd) June 8, 2025

Let’s hope the folks in Los Angeles have enough sense to not react to the Guard. Let Trump look foolish for sending them. Trump wants protesters to act up so he can arrest them and even shoot them and pretend to be defending the nation.

Federalizing Guard without the permission of a state’s governor is a controversial move, although I can’t say it hasn’t been done before. CNBC:

The law cited by Trump’s proclamation places National Guard troops under federal command. The law says that can be done under three circumstances: When the U.S. is invaded or in danger of invasion; when there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government, or when the President is unable to “execute the laws of the United States,” with regular forces.

But the law also says that orders for those purposes “shall be issued through the governors of the States.” It’s not immediately clear if the president can activate National Guard troops without the order of that state’s governor.

Again, I’d have to do some research, but I can’t say this has never happened before. But it hasn’t happened in a very long time, anyway.

I hope some of you watched the “Good Night and Good Luck” live broadcast last night. I’d seen the movie awhile back, but the play was good, too, and very timely. It underscored what happens when media outlets censor themselves because they’re afraid of a politician, in this case Joe McCarthy.  It also underscores what can happen when journalists say “screw this” and tell the truth, anyway. If you missed it, it ought to be available for streaming, somewhere.

So today I read that ABC suspended an anchor because of some tweets he wrote about Stephen Miller. I can kind of understand ABC’s position, but still …

I just want to acknowledge some things that happened over the last few hours.

Some big deal went down between protesters and ICE agents in Log Angeles yesterday. It may take a couple of days before the whole story is told.  See also:

Regarding the Abrego Garcia indictment: Yesterday a top federal prosecutor in Tennessee –where a grand jury indicted  Kilmar Abrego Garcia — abruptly resigned. “Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons,” according to ABC News.

Yesterday the Supreme Court sided with Trump in two DOGE cases.

 Over the objections of the court’s three Democratic appointees, the justices cleared the way for members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to access the records of the Social Security Administration. And the court temporarily paused an order by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that would have required DOGE to provide information in a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, the justices sent the dispute back to a federal appeals court with instructions for those judges to take another, more skeptical look at the order.

If all our Social Security numbers get leaked, I look forward to the biggest class-action lawsuit of all time.

Medicare is a target as Senate GOP faces megabill math issues. Yeah, they’re admitting they’re looking to cut Medicare to pay for the tax cuts.

Trump is preparing to cancel all the federal funding he can think of for California. “Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California,” says CNN.

Somebody ought to explain to Trump that California has the fourth-largest economy in the world. That’s “world,” not “U.S.” It is fourth behind the U.S., China and Germany, I question where the U.S. would rank without California. See Visualizing America’s $29 Trillion Economy by State.

See also Trump to Ax Federal Funding for California as Revenge Tour Escalates at The New Republic. A bit:

California Governor Gavin Newsom responded to CNN’s report in a post on X, with a threat of his own.

“Californians pay the bills for the federal government. We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back. Maybe it’s time to cut that off, @realDonaldTrump,” wrote Newsom, whose state generates the highest tax revenue of any state in the country. 

I’m  nor sure how “cutting that off” would work, but if Newsom can figure it out, I hope he does it.

Some idiot Republican congresswoman who is not Marjorie Taylor Greene flew into hysterics after a guest chaplain named Giani Singh led the House in a morning prayer. “It’s deeply troubling that a Muslim was allowed to lead prayer in the House of Representatives this morning. This should have never been allowed to happen,” she wrote somewhere on social media. The problem was that Giani Singh is a Sikh, not a Muslim, and was introduced as such. Second, some Muslims are American citizens and lovely people. I hope if we ever get our country back a Muslim cleric will be asked to be guest chaplain in the House and lead a prayer.

The feud continues, although both the Trump and Musk camps are putting out signals of a possible détente. It may be that they’ve decided to not go nuclear and destroy each other. For now.

There’s more evidence the Silicon Valley tech bros are walking away from Trump.

Trump’s slim win in 2024 was no doubt due in large part to Musk, and not just the eye-popping quarter-billion-plus Musk spent to push the old man’s orange carcass over the finish line. It’s because Musk and other influential figures, especially those associated with Silicon Valley or who pretend to be former liberals, were able to convince a chunk of more secular, largely male voters to throw their lot in with the Christian nationalist base that is the backbone of the MAGA movement. But while these two groups joined together based on a shared animosity towards racial minorities and women, it was always a far more uneasy alliance than Musk or Trump wanted to admit. And now it’s getting shakier as two narcissistic billionaires are at odds. …

… But while I have no doubt Musk is way more concerned about his bottom line than about government spending — his ostensible reason for hating the bill — his anger would be impotent if it didn’t tap into existing tensions between the newfangled technofascist wing of the GOP and more traditional Republicans. 

“The Silicon Valley tech world does not like this bill,” Tim Miller of The Bulwark explained on his podcast Wednesday. It’s not just Musk, but many wealthy leaders who are deeply invested in the energy and tech areas that President Joe Biden’s administration invested so heavily in. They stabbed Democrats in the back as a thank-you for that money, and now are shocked they are being similarly betrayed by the Republicans they joined up with. 

Stay tuned.

I didn’t watch the Chancellor Merz-Trump meeting yesterday, so I’m hearing about it in bits and pieces.  I found a transcript for those of us who can’t stand to watch. You’ll notice Trump did almost all of the talking. Among other things, after yesterday there is no question that everyone in Europe realizes Trump is an idiot. If they didn’t know it before, now it’s undeniable.

At one point, Trump actually said this:

“When I was telling the Chancellor, this is where it is. People come in here, even from Germany. They come in and they walk into the Oval Office, and it’s just a special place.

“It’s — you know, World War I, it started and it ended here, and World War II, and so many other things. Everything big comes right from this beautiful space. It’s now much more beautiful than it was six months ago. A lot of good things are happening in this room. And I’ll tell you, it’s not — he’s not the first. People leave my administration and they love us. And then, at some point, they miss it so badly. And some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile.”

So much to unpack. First, World War I started in the Oval Office? That would have messed it up rather badly, I would think. I thought it started in Sarajevo and ended in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. (Unless you count the treaty of Versailles, then it ended in Paris.) And as I remember, the war went on for about three years before the U.S. got involved.

But this underscores my theory that Trump learned everything he knows about American history from watching John Wayne movies. John Wayne never made a World War I movie. Therefore, World War I is a total blank for Trump. He’s heard of it, but he doesn’t know anything about it.

Europeans know World War I history. Poor Chancellor Merz had to sit there and not gag.

I assume Trump knows a bit more about World War II, since John Wayne made lots of movies about it, but of course it didn’t start or end in the Oval Office, either. Maybe John Wayne should have made a documentary — What You Need to now About World War II. As we learned a few weeks ago, Trump seems to think the entire war ended on VE Day, May 8, 1945. That would have been news to the Allied and Japanese troops fighting the Battle of Okinawa at the time.

Then we go on to Trump’s comment about how everyone who comes into the Oval Office loves it. I think they’re probably trying not to laugh at the tacky gold crap Trump has splashed all over it. But the part about becoming hostile only makes sense in the context of Elon Musk. Trump was talking about Musk just before these remarks. He’s decided Musk’s hostility to Trump is a reflection of how much he misses the glory of the Oval Office.

There’s more to comment on, but I need a rest after that.

Update: So this just happened — the Department of Justice is bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, as they could have done all along. He’s been charged with smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S. and will stand trial for that.

Finally, the long-predicted fallout between Musk and Trump appears to have happened. Is it for real?  When Musk announced his “retirement” from DOGE a few days ago, a lot of people thought it was an act, that he’d just shift to being a less visible player. And that might have been the plan. but I think this is for real now. Musk is continuing to trash Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which is kicking Trump where it hurts.

Josh Marshall:

I don’t have more than speculation on what these two guys are thinking or feeling. But the White House took a big swipe at Musk by canning Musk’s handpicked NASA chief the day after his cringey departure ceremony. That action both took something valuable away from Musk and treated him with a very public disrespect. So while Musk is clearly trying to undo the ocean of brand damage he brought on himself and his companies, I don’t think the White House is playing along and trying to help with that project. I think they’re really trying to show him who’s boss, a classic example of Trumpian dominance politics.

These two are capable of doing a lot of harm to each other. Musk could put his money into defeating MAGA candidates. Trump could cancel the contracts Musk arranged for himself while he had his fingers in the government. I don’t know those things will happen. And as of Wednesday afternoon I can’t find any reaction from Trump about what Musk said, which is uncharacteristic of Trump. I do think Musk’s ravings — which are about how the bill spends too much money, not about how it cuts too much taxes — might possibly soften support for the bill in Congress. And there are little signs that might be happening. See, for example, After Muscling Their Bill Through the House, Some Republicans Have Regrets.

However, they’re still in denial about what the BUB would do to the deficit. The CBO just came out with the official score:

The sweeping Republican bill for President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to a new estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It is slightly higher than an earlier version of the bill, which the CBO projected to add $2.3 trillion in new debt.

The report also says that 10.9 million Americans would lose their health care coverage if the bill becomes law. I doubt you’ll get many congressional Republicans on record acknowledging this. But there may be a few.

I am cheering for anything that slows the bill down, because I suspect the longer it stalls, the less likely it will pass, or at least pass without substantial changes. There appear to be a handful of Republican senators, including Josh Hawley, who realize the fallout of gutting Medicaid and probably Medicare would have real-world consequences that could hurt their constituents and, worse, hurt their re-election chances.

I also think that Trump is not exactly growing political capital. If he’s really lost Musk, what about the rest of the Tech Bros? There are news stories going back a couple of months saying that tech leaders were “breaking up” with Trump, which I hadn’t noticed.

But Trump also recently burned bridges between himself and Leonard Leo, and the Federalist Society generally, and that might be more significant than losing Musk. See Elie Mystal at The Nation, Trump Is Headed to War With the Federalist Society—and It’s Gonna Be Huge. Mystal is writing about judicial appointments, but it’s also the case that pretty much all conservative judges on the bench today are Federalist Society judges. And they are more loyal to Leonard Leo than they are to Trump. This is not going to help Trump in court. At some point he’s going to start looking pretty damn ineffectual.

I realize that most Americans have no idea what’s going on. I say that because Trump’s disapproval numbers are staying stubbornly stuck in the upper 40s. But as the year goes on I suspect at least some of the low-info crowd will notice the real world. Because as much incompetence as Trump has packed into his administration there will be screwups, and some of those screwups will be so big and splashy that even the low-infos will notice them. At least, we can hope. I don’t want another Hurricane Katrina-level disaster, but do remember what that did to George W. Bush. He never recovered.

The MAGA movement is basically a nihilistic one. It doesn’t know what it’s for, just what it’s against. It looks to Trump to restore an America that never existed, without realizing that Trump is destroying everything that did make America great. I don’t expect them to learn. But according to YouGov, “Among the entire population of adult citizens, the share of MAGA supporters has never risen above 20%.” I would have guessed 30%, but I’ll take 20%. That means there’s a lot of room for approval numbers to go down before they hit the 20% floor.

And at some point, maybe even Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene will start to ignore him.

Some updating to the last couple of posts — yesterday Trump held a rally in Pittsburgh and announced he is raising tariffs on imported steel and aluminum to 50 percent. He says this will be good for the steel industry.

Some media outlets are trying to understand why he is doing this. Like there’s a reason. From Time:

Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, argues that the Trump Administration has yet to fully explain the exact math behind the number for the steel and aluminum tariffs.

“They’ve never given any justification why 25% is the right number, let alone why 50% is,” Winegarden says. “It was just doubled.”

Numbers shmumbers. Steel and aluminum were not affected by last week’s trade court decision. Instead of taking authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which the court said he couldn’t do, he had placed tariffs on steel and aluminum by virtue of Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. And so far, no court has said he couldn’t do that. He raised the tariffs on steel and aluminum because he could. He gets off on messing with tariffs and making big headlines about it. Back to Time:

The back-and-forth on tariff dates and rates has left many businesses in limbo, though Felix Tintelnot, professor of economics at Duke University, says that with steel and aluminum, the Administration has generally followed through on the timings they’ve announced.

The question, he says, is how long the 50% will stand, as he’s seen the rates “flip-flopping all the time.” Tintelnot argues that the resulting uncertainty is causing real harm to U.S. businesses and thus, in turn, impacting workers, despite Trump’s claims that the tariffs will bring large amounts of money to the U.S. steel industry.

“We’re talking about expansion of capacity of heavy industry that comes with significant upfront investments, and no business leader should take heavy upfront investments if they don’t believe that the same policy [will be] there two, three, or four years from now,” Tintelnot says. “Regardless of whether you’re in favor [of] or against these tariffs, you don’t want the President to just set tax rates arbitrarily, sort of by Executive Order all the time.”

All you need to know about anything Trump does is that he gets off on playing god-king.

Trump can’t grasp anything more complex than a Happy Meal toy. But he really, really gets off on throwing tariff numbers around. He doesn’t understand what the numbers indicate, but bigger numbers get more attention. And that gives him the ego fix he incessantly craves.

Today’s tantrum is aimed at Leonard Leo, the guy at the Federalist Society in charge of the project of putting right-wing judges in all our courts. This is from Politico:

President Donald Trump leveled unusually pointed criticism of a prominent conservative legal activist and organization Thursday as he railed against a ruling that struck down his sweeping tariffs.

The president, in a post on his social media platform, slammed Leonard Leo, the former chair of the Federalist Society, calling him a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America.”

It was a striking characterization of Leo, who played a key role in working with Trump to shape the conservative Supreme Court.

Translation: Trump thinks he owns the entire Department of Justice and expects judges he appoints to be loyal to him, not to Leonard Leo.

Everything with Trump is transactional. And everything with Trump is personal. In his mind, his opponents don’t oppose him over principles but because they don’t like him. I don’t think he grasps the concept of principles. And if all these judges are saying that his genius tariff plans are unconstitutional, that must be because they don’t like him and Leonard Leo is incompetent. I don’t think he grasps the concept of “unconstitutional.” In his mind, if he wants to do something, it must be constitutional.

What’s worse, the big baby might not ever get his fancy plane from Qatar. This is from the Washington Post:

Despite claims by the Defense Department to the contrary, legal teams representing the U.S. and Qatari governments have not finalized an agreement for transferring the luxury Boeing 747-8 jetliner that President Donald Trump wants for Air Force One amid outstanding requests by Qatar for Washington to clarify the transaction’s terms, said officials familiar with the matter.

The plane from Qatar is currently in the United States, according to sources familiar with the matter as well as President Donald Trump, who confirmed the plane was here. However, Qatar wants to clarify the details surrounding the transfer, specifically emphasizing that the Trump administration was responsible for initiating the discussions about the donation of the luxury jet to the U.S. government, sources familiar with the negotiations said.

In brief, the Qataris want the world to know they didn’t initiate the offer to just give Trump a jet. Qatar wanted to sell the jet. Trump somehow steamrolled them into giving it to the Defense Department for his use. I also understand the Qataris want nothing to do with any future transfer of the jet to the Trump presidential library. And even if the Department of Defense does get full ownership of the jet, we still have the issue of how much time it will take and how much money it will cost to retrofit the jet for presidential use. The jet is a massive white elephant that may end up rusting away on a tarmac somewhere, unused. If Trump wants it, he can damn well spend the billions he’s making with his meme coin scam and buy the thing. And when he doesn’t get his “free” jet, watch him throw a tantrum at Qatar.

Back to the tariffs. In yesterday’s post I wrote about various laws passed by Congress in the past that he could still use to manipulate tariffs. The problem with all of them is that they all come with limits. Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo that Trump’s not going to be happy with those limits.

There are a series of laws Congress has passed to give trade authority to presidents. But they tend to be focused on two things — protecting industries with a strong connection to national security and protection in response to unfair trade practices. Those are two areas in which Congress, not unreasonably, thought it might not be able to move with sufficient speed. Those laws require comment periods and investigations. They still give the President a lot of leeway to make “findings” of what threatens U.S. national security or constitutes unfair trade practices. But those criteria and processes and comment periods, even for this administration, significantly reduce the unilateral and willful authority Trump has used to go about all of this.

It’s not just a matter of easier or harder, quicker or slower. A huge amount of the drama of the last two months has been precisely the spectacle of Trump’s purportedly total and unchecked power. Trump can wake up one morning and totally upend the whole global economy. He can just tweet about 50% tariffs on Europe and well … now we’re up for a totally new drama.

Messing up the world’s economy  gives Trump god-like power! He sees himself as an ancient jealous god who throws lighting bolts at mortals who piss him off and sends locusts and floods to torment people for his amusement.

These other laws work very differently. They tend not to apply to consumer goods. The cheap measuring cups you buy on Amazon have no impact on U.S. military capacity. They’re focused on things like steel production, high-end computers, uranium — again, things that the government can’t just leave to the market because control over them is required for military power and national security. If there are specific unfair trade practices, you need to say what they are. They need to be at least kind of real.

Assuming the SCOTUS doesn’t give Trump all his magic tariff powers back —

If it does stick, that means not only that Trump’s capacity to wage trade wars will be much more limited — though by no means ended. It also means the spectacle of his total power will be diminished as well. And that’s significant in a way that goes beyond the narrow confines of trade policy. I’d really urge you to focus almost as much on the curtailment of the spectacle of total power as the impact on trade policy itself.

So he may well use those other laws discussed yesterday to continue his trade wars, but it won’t be nearly as satisfying to his ego and he’s likely to lose interest and move on to some other outrage.

And then there’s Trump vs. Harvard. I haven’t been following all the twists and turns, but I understand at the moment Harvard is enjoying some court protection. But the all-out war on Harvard is utterly irrational on Trump’s part. This is not to say that no one could ever have reason to be miffed at Harvard over one thing or another, but Trump’s actions are outside all rational bounds. Trump’s antipathy to Harvard points to something personal to him, on some level, but I don’t know exactly what. There was a web rumor that Harvard rejected Barron, but the Trumps deny that.

Trump is also suddenly really pissed at China. The State Department is moving to revoke Chinese students’ visas. And Trump is screaming that China is in violation of some tariff deal, but he isn’t saying exactly how. There’s something going on with Chinese technology and advanced AI chips. Whatever it is, Trump is now having a tantrum at China after years of claiming he and Xi Jinping get along so well.

If I had any money, I’d pay some to find out what Trump’s blood pressure is these days.

Update: More on Trump’s tirade against Leonard Leo, from Greg Sargent at The New Republic:

I’d like to highlight something else in Trump’s tirade because it constitutes an actual argument on his part about his exercise of unilateral power on tariffs. Trump said this:

The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly. If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power—The Presidency would never be the same!

“Under this decision, Trillions of Dollars would be lost by our Country,” Trump fumed. “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.”

Here Trump derides the very idea that Congress should have a good deal of authority over the levying of tariffs. Trump claims this can’t apply in the case of his new tariffs because it prevents him from acting to protect the country in an emergency. In this case, that emergency is the one Trump has invoked—our trade deficits—to appropriate for himself virtually unlimited power to levy sweeping taxes on products imported from all over the world….

…  Trump is openly declaring that he should have the power to circumvent Congress in levying these tariffs to address emergencies. Yet as Trump himself demonstrates here, in claiming this authority, he’s invoking an emergency that is not real. Trillions of dollars are not being “lost” by our country due to trade deficits, as his rant proclaims. That is not how trade deficits work, and they certainly do not constitute “emergencies.” As Trump’s tirade plainly shows, he made up the “emergency” to grant himself extraordinarily sweeping authorities.

Very fundamentally, Trump doesn’t understand separation of powers and how the federal government functions. And you really can’t call trade deficits an “emergency.” The last time the U.S. didn’t have trade deficits was 1970. We’ve been running deficits for 55 years.

Photo by Stockcake

Well, well. So last night the U.S. Court of International Trade found most of Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional. And as of today ports are not supposed to collect the tariffs. And if the ruling stands, companies are to be reimbursed for whatever tariffs they have paid so far.

The Constitution is unambiguous in giving the power to impose tariffs exclusively to Congress. The question before the court was whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”) delegates those powers to the President. The decision of the court (you can read it here) seems to me to make an airtight argument that, even assuming we were in some emergency, the IEEPA just plain doesn’t extend to tariffs.  Congress may delegate some limited tariff-imposing functions to the POTUS, as long as it “lay[s] down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise that authority] is directed to conform.” I take that to mean that any such delegation must  be limited and must conform to a specific situation. What Trump has been doing is way off the charts.

If you don’t want to wade through the whole decision, you can read a good summation at Reason magazine. (If the title of the column, The Volokh Conspiracy, sounds familiar, it started out as an independent right-wing blog by a law professor named Eugene Volokh, who was all in the tank for George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq back in the day.)

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux pulls this quote from the decision as the core of the argument:

Underlying the issues in this case is the notion that “the powers properly belonging to oneof the departments ought not to be directly and completely administered by either of the other departments.” Federalist No. 48 (James Madison). Because of the Constitution’s express allocation of the tariff power to Congress, see U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1, we do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President. We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers. Two are relevant here. First, § 1702’s delegation of a power to “regulate . . . importation,” read in light of its legislative history and Congress’s enactment of more narrow, non-emergency legislation, at the very least does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs lack any identifiable limits and thus fall outside the scope of § 1702.

Second, IEEPA’s limited authorities may be exercised only to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared . . . and may not be exercised for any other purpose.” 50 U.S.C. § 1701(b) (emphasis added). As the Trafficking Tariffs do not meet that condition, they fall outside the scope of § 1701.

In summation, Scott writes, “the statute simply does not authorize extremely high across-the-board tariffs, changed at random intervals, in better-than-usual economic conditions. Emergency powers are being exercised in the absence of an emergency, and this exceeds the power delegated by Congress.”

The White House already has declared it will file an appeal to the Supreme Court by this Friday. And nobody can be certain what the SCOTUS will do. Which is probably why the markets are a tad subdued today. Nobody’s ready to celebrate yet. And so far I haven’t seen any of the legal pundits I respect, like Andrew Weissmann or Joyce Vance, weigh in on this. Maybe later today. And do see The Supreme Court May Not Step in and Save Trump’s Tariffs at Politico. I have a hard time believing that the SCOTUS will just reverse the decision and let Trump go on as before, because the violation of the Constitution is too nakedly obvious. But if recent decisions are any guide, they’ll try to give him something.

What else might happen? This article at Tahoo Finance says there are two other statutes Trump could use to exercise tariff powers.

The most prominent quick strike option is the so-called balance-of-payments authority derived from Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That power could allow Trump to move quickly, but with a 150-day limit on how long any tariffs can be in place.

The second route is a possible renewed focus on sectoral duties such as “Section 301” or “Section 232” tariffs.

These long-established tariff authorities (one derived from the Trade Act of 1974 and another from a separate Trade Expansion Act of 1962) are ones Trump has used in the past, but with the downside, from his perspective, that they can take time to implement.

Perhaps the most intriguing scenario involves the president moving on both fronts to try to quickly implement a short-term patch followed by a permanent fix.

One assumes he could ask the Republican-controlled Congress to impose tariffs for him, but I’m betting he won’t do that because he wants to be in control and make up the rules to fit his moods. It makes him feel special, I’m sure. It’s more likely that if he asks Congress to help him out, it would be to craft a new law that lets him continue to be the Tariff King for a while longer.

Paul Krugman:

Until he announced the massive “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, Trump mainly relied on Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which empowers the president to impose tariffs when imports “threaten to impair national security.” Such tariffs are supposed to follow a quasi-judicial process in which the Commerce Department investigates the claim, reaches a decision, and the president then chooses whether to act:

But hey, this is the Trump administration, so if the president wants his flunkies’ officials’ opinion, he’ll tell them what it is. The result has been a series of absurd claims — Canadian aluminum is a national security threat? — but no real pushback.

Even so, that didn’t give Trump has much of a free hand as he wanted. So he began relying on the IEEPA. And I suspect that’s over.

At CNBC, see Four tools at the Trump administration’s disposal after a U.S. court blocks tariffs. In addition to the Sections 122, 301, and 232 tariffs mentioned above, there is also Section 338 of the Trade Act of 1930. This “allows the president to impose levies of up to 50% on imports from countries that discriminate against the U.S.” Trump hasn’t tried to use it before, but it sounds right up his alley.

The other possibility is that the SCOTUS will give Trump a decision that allows him to impose tariffs, but with with some conditions and limitations. And Trump decides he don’t need no steenking conditions and limitations, and he tells SCOTUS to kiss his ass and goes on doing what he’s been doing. That would be … interesting.

And I have one final question, which is that if Trump’s tariff options are limited, will that impact the Big Bill of Evil now being considered in the Senate? Because part of Trump’s argument for the tax cuts is that we’re going to have all this tariff money rolling in, so the cuts doesn’t matter. Which is nonsense, but Republicans pretend to believe it. I’d like to think that at least some Republicans in the Senate would realize there is no choice but to scale back the tax cuts. However, current Republicans are more likely to call for just shooting Medicaid recipients as a cost-saving measure. So I’m not too hopeful.

Update: From Axios:

A federal appellate court on Thursday temporarily stayed a ruling that effectively wiped out most of President Trump’s tariffs.

Why it matters: The intervention will deepen the chaos around the Court of International Trade’s Wednesday order, which threatens to upend global commerce.

Catch up quick: The trade court ruled that Trump did not have the authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping reciprocal and retaliatory tariffs.

The administration immediately appealed, and suggested Thursday it could go straight to the Supreme Court to seek relief if other courts did not act quickly.

Driving the news: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an order Thursday staying the trade court’s ruling while it considers motions from both sides.

It ordered the plaintiffs in the case to file a response by June 5, and the government to reply by June 9.

This may delay taking the case to the Supreme Court. But then there’s also this. From Politico:

A second federal court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs on imports from around the world, dealing another blow to his trade agenda and efforts to strike new deals with dozens of countries.

“The International Economic Emergency Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose the tariffs set forth” in four executive orders Trump issued earlier this year, D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras said in a decision ordering a preliminary injunction on the collection of the duties on the two plaintiffs who brought the case.

I don’t know which decision came first. So are tariffs being collected, or not?

Over the past few days I’ve seen much commentary about how the Democratic Party is still unpopular and what it must do to win elections. And IMO a lot of this advice is really terrible. A lot of it is just variations of the don’t-scare-the-chickens, appeal-to-the-center crap that Dems have been telling each other since the debacle of 1972.The Democratic Party has spent the past 50+ years trying to appeal to the “center” and running in terror from anything remotely resembling the muscular New Deal liberalism that had once been its strength. And too many Dem candidates fail to offer a clear contrast to what the Republicans are offering. “Centrism” apparently translates into Republican Lite; mostly right-leaning, but nicer.

I’ve said this before, but I’m damn tired of Dem candidates in television ads promising to “reach across the aisle” to “get things done.” What things?

Nobody in the Dem party notices that the Republicans have been promising BIG RADICAL CHANGE, often in reactionary terms, meaning change going backward, since Reagan. And that wins for them. The electorate isn’t as afraid of change as Democrats are.

Bernie Sanders recently spoke in Ireland:

He stated that America is broken as a country, and that Trump came in with promises to fix a system that needed fixing – and people believed him.

Speaking in Ireland, Sanders said: “Understand that most young people in America will have a lower standard of living than their parents.

“When you want to understand Trumpism, and why people are angry, they are angry because in America over the last 52 years, despite huge increases in worker productivity – the average American worker is worse off in inflation-accounted-for dollars than he or she was 52 years ago.”

He continued: “When it comes to elections, Democrats say that they’re going to tinker around the edges, but they ultimately feel the status quo is pretty good.

“Then Trump comes along and says ‘The system is broken, and I Donald Trump will fix it’. Well, he got half of that right. The system is broken, he’s correct. But his solutions will only make a terrible situation even worse.”

At the other end of the scale is Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.  There’s an interview of Slotkin by David Leonhardt in the New York Times. (I’m debating whether to use my last gift link for the month on it. I think I’ll use a “regular” link, but let me know if you can’t live without reading it.) The thing is titled “How to Turn the Middle Against Trump.” What she says isn’t necessarily awful — it’s basically “focus on middle-class issues” — but added up it’s the same tepid, let’s not scare the chickens stuff that has been eroding the Dem brand lo these many years. And while she and Leonhardt dismiss Bernie Sanders as a “socialist,” she doesn’t offer any concrete ideas about what she wants to do for the middle class, or even whether she understands what’s happening to the middle class. And, frankly, I think Kamala Harris did focus almost exclusively on middle-class issues last year.

(You may remember Slotkin from her response to the SOTU this year, in which she said “As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s.” She was trying to draw a contrast between Reagan and Trump, but as far as I’m concerned Reagan paved the way for Trump.)

Another thing that Leonhardt says (after talking about Bernie Sanders):

I agree with you that most Americans don’t want socialism and they want to believe in the country that we have. I also can’t help but notice that when you think about the most successful politicians of our modern era, they’ve basically all run as change agents. It’s true of Bill Clinton, it’s true of Barack Obama. It’s obviously true of Donald Trump. And it seems to me that one of the things that the Democratic Party is sort of groping for is some way to develop a message that is authentic, anti-establishment and also gives people some hope that the future can be better than the present. I’m interested if you see any ways to tie an anti-establishment message to the hunger that Americans want for fixing these pretty deep problems that we have.

Bill Clinton was a “change agent” for sensibly raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit and balance the budget for the last time that ever happened. And as soon as he took office George Dubya Bush blew that change out of the water and turned the clock back to Reaganomics. But I mostly remember Clinton being a non-change agent, someone who was okay with prevailing conservative ideas about a lot of things. Clinton was a leader of the neoliberal “third way,” New Democrat crowd that pretty much cut all remaining ties to the New Deal tradition and pulled the party to the right. And as much as I like Barack Obama as a person, in a lot of ways he was over-cautious as a president and didn’t really deliver on the promise of “yes we can.” Perhaps the fight to get the Affordable Care Act passed discouraged him from trying much else. I acknowledge he didn’t get much help from Congress. But I do think that he didn’t so much win re-election as Mittens Romney lost. Nobody could mistake Mittens as a “change agent,” I guess.

I don’t disagree with Slotkin about the Dems needing a message that is anti-establishment and promises hope for the future. But the only members of the Dem party who have anything tangible to offer in that regard are the progressives — e.g., Liz Warren, AOC. And independent Bernie Sanders. And note that Slotkin has voted for about nine of Trump’s nominees. The only senator with a worse record in that regard is John Fetterman. She’s trying to cast herself as a leader in the fight against Trump, but in other recent interviews she’s advised Dems to stop being “woke” and also drop the term “oligarch” from their vocabularies. So, yeah, she’s starting to annoy me.

At least it’s almost sorta kinda being acknowledged by Dems that they have a communication problem. I don’t think the way to solve that problem will be found in seminars on “how to speak to young men.” They need a better understanding of why so much of the electorate is frustrated with them and speak to that. And they need to see the nation through the eyes of Americans who are trying to square their day to day lives with the image of America as a land of opportunity. The future I expected as a young person, which isn’t necessarily what I got, was much nicer than the one young people are looking forward to right now. And I don’t think a lot of the Dems in Washington understand that.

Of course, it’s also the case that a lot of Trump’s appeal is just old-fashioned racism, sexism, and jingoism. Maybe a really nasty recession caused by Trump’s policies will persuade people they have more dangerous things to be afraid of than too much diversity.

Update: This just happened.

A federal court on Wednesday ruled President Trump does not have the authority under economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping global tariffs.

Why it matters: The U.S. Court of International Trade’s ruling could bring the administration’s trade war to a screeching halt.

By blocking entirely most categories of tariffs, the court effectively wiped out most of the regime Trump put in place since taking office.

Driving the news: The court, ruling in two separate cases, issued a summary judgment throwing out all the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

Poor Trump’s going to be up all night POSTING IN ALL CAPS and using up most of the nation’s supply of exclamation points.

I hope y’all are enjoying Memorial Day. I’ve been taking a bit of a break, as I had to haul my head out of politics for a couple of days. But here’s a new development. See the Associated Press, President Donald Trump says Russian leader Vladimir Putin ‘has gone absolutely CRAZY!’

President Donald Trump made it clear he is losing patience with Vladimir Putin, leveling some of his sharpest criticism at the Russian leader as Moscow pounded Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles for a third straight night.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post on Sunday night.

Trump said Putin is “needlessly killing a lot of people,” pointing out that “missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.”

Russia has ben engaged in a military assault of Ukraine, needlessly killing a lot of people, since bleeping February 2022. Trump is just now noticing this?

The U.S. president warned that if Putin wants to conquer all of Ukraine, it will “lead to the downfall of Russia!”

Exclamation points! Trump must be really concerned. I mean, concerned!!

But Trump expressed frustration with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as well, saying that he is “doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does.”

“Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop,” Trump wrote on social media.

Trump is still a moron. Some things don’t change. The Kremlin has dismissed Trump’s lèse-majesté as “emotional overload.” Note that his is what abusive men always say about women. She’s just being hysterical.

David Sanger writes in the New York Times,

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” President Trump told reporters on Sunday afternoon, just before boarding Air Force One for a short trip from his golf club in New Jersey to Washington. Hours later, he posted about the Russian leader, saying, “He has gone absolutely CRAZY.”

Mr. Trump’s rare criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia came after a weekend of the largest bombardment of Ukrainian cities over the past three years, mostly aimed at civilian targets, from residential areas in Kyiv to university dormitories. The Russian attacks also happened only days after Mr. Trump had what he described publicly as an “excellent” two-hour phone call with Mr. Putin that Mr. Trump promised would immediately lead to direct peace negotiations.

Mr. Trump has long said he enjoys a “good relationship” with Mr. Putin, and it was not the first time he expressed shock that the Russian president was unleashing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. A month ago Mr. Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP” as a barrage of missiles and drones hit Ukraine, including crowded playgrounds. But Mr. Trump has never linked the attacks with his own decision, reaffirmed last week, to refuse to join the Europeans in new financial sanctions on Russia, or to offer new arms and help to the Ukrainians.

The result is a strategic void in which Mr. Trump complains about Russia’s continued killing but so far has been unwilling to make Mr. Putin pay even a modest price.

The pattern is a familiar one, several outside experts and former government officials said. Mr. Trump signals he is pulling back from a conflict he often describes as Europe’s war, then expresses shock that Mr. Putin responds with a familiar list of demands that amount to a Ukrainian surrender, followed by accelerating attacks. Mr. Trump episodically insists he is “absolutely” considering sanctions, including on Sunday.

And his culties think Trump is such a tough guy. What a joke.

Yet each time when he is forced to make a decision about joining Europe in new economic penalties, he has pulled back.

“Russia said no cease-fire and Trump is increasingly washing his hands of it,” Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm, wrote on Monday. The result is that “support for Ukraine continues to recede in importance for the Americans,” he added. Mr. Bremmer predicted that “what comes next is more fighting — expanded Russian attacks across Ukraine, fewer restraints on Ukraine targeting inside Russia.”

The latest cycle of this odd interaction between the American and Russian leaders happened just last week. Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his desire for a summit meeting soon with Mr. Putin, declared that only he and the Russian leader had the power and influence to end the war. Yet by the time they were done talking in their call last week, Mr. Trump had changed his position, saying it was now up to Ukraine and Russia to end the war in direct negotiations.

Trump may have really thought Putin would back off of Ukraine if he asked nicely. But now he may have accepted that Putin is not going to give him a diplomatic win, so he’s lost interest.

In a subsequent conversation with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy and Finland, along with the European Commission, Mr. Trump had yet another view: Mr. Putin thought he was winning the war and would press his advantage. According to several officials briefed on the conversation, Mr. Trump made it clear he had no intention on putting pressure, much less harsh economic sanctions, on Russia.

“He said, essentially, ‘I’m out,’” said one of the officials, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to describe the conversation.

Maybe with Trump out, other European countries can step in.