The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Supreme Court has finally looked at Trump’s "everything is an emergency if I say so" tariff regime and decided: actually, no, the president does not get to run the global economy like a casino he’s already bankrupted. In a 6-3 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to slap massive, wildly fluctuating tariffs on imports is unconstitutional. That’s Trump’s signature economic policy, vaporized — and not even on the shadow docket this time.

Trump had jacked tariffs to at least 10% on most imports, up to 145% for China, and 25–35% on supposed "allies" like Canada and Mexico, because nothing says strategic genius like declaring trade war on maple syrup. Businesses, somehow unthrilled by having their supply chains tied to the president’s mood ring, sued, arguing he’d blown past his legal authority. After years of rubber-stamping Trump’s power grabs on the emergency docket, the justices finally took a real case, did full briefing, and told him no. Roberts plus five others sided with the Constitution; Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh dissented, presumably from an alternate universe where "emergency powers" means "whatever the guy with the loudest rally crowd wants."

The upshot: Trump’s trade policy — a chaotic protectionist cosplay justified by perpetual "emergency" — just hit a constitutional wall. The Court, which has spent years enabling his authoritarian cosplay, has now drawn at least one line: you don’t get to rewrite global trade law by executive order and call it Tuesday. Whether this slows the broader project of turning emergency powers into a permanent presidential cheat code is unclear, but for today, the imperial presidency took a rare loss.

Marco Rubio flies to the Munich Security Conference as Trump’s slightly more house-trained emissary and delivers a speech about defending "white, western, Christian civilisation" from allegedly contaminating brown people. European elites respond by giving him a standing ovation, because nothing says "we learned from the 20th century" like politely clapping along to civilisational race talk in a German conference hall.

Rubio coats the message in soothing words about "sovereignty" and border protection, but the core is the same old white-supremacist fever dream that powered the war on terror: Muslims and migrants as the existential threat, Europe and America as a fragile, superior club under siege. Meanwhile, the Trump State Department is reportedly gearing up to bankroll "policy-aligned" European thinktanks and charities, so Washington can export Maga brainworms directly into EU policy circles instead of just relying on Fox News clips and Orbán fan mail.

While Spain’s Pedro Sánchez tries the radical approach of acknowledging migrants as human beings with rights, Brussels fixates on "simpler and more effective return procedures" – bureaucratese for EU-wide ICE cosplay, complete with raids, surveillance, and offshore dumping of undocumented people. European leaders, who allegedly know something about where dehumanizing rhetoric leads, are mostly too busy nodding along to Rubio’s flattery about their glorious colonial past to say: "We’ve heard this script before, and last time it didn’t end great."

The punchline: language that once would have been recognised as explicitly racist and dangerous is now treated as respectable statesmanship, provided it’s delivered in a blazer and not a red hat. Trump and Rubio get to launder Maga’s xenophobic ideology through NATO cocktail hours, and Europe’s political class, terrified of losing Washington’s favor, smiles, applauds, and pretends this isn’t how democracies rot from the inside.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, now moonlighting as the Department of Fragile Male Feelings, has filed its first lawsuit targeting a workplace diversity program since Trump returned to office. The alleged civil rights emergency? A Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast networking event that let about 250 women go to a Connecticut casino for two days of team-building, speakers, and not having to listen to Steve from sales explain Bitcoin.

This is the test case for Trump-world’s new religion: DEI is discrimination. EEOC chair Andrea Lucas and friends have been loudly insisting that common diversity, equity and inclusion programs are actually “reverse discrimination”, and now the agency is putting federal muscle behind that narrative. They’re already investigating Nike and Northwestern Mutual, and demanding DEI data from 20 big law firms; the Coke bottler suit is just the first time they’ve decided that a women’s networking retreat is the line where civil rights must be heroically defended.

Acting general counsel Catherine Eschbach announced that excluding a protected class like men from an employer event is illegal and that the EEOC is committed to “equal access” for everyone. Fascinating how that fierce commitment to equality mainly kicks in when it’s time to kneecap programs designed to help historically excluded groups. Under Trump, the civil rights agency isn’t dismantled; it’s repurposed as a precision tool to make sure corporate America understands that the only discrimination this government truly cares about is the kind that inconveniences the already comfortable.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council and full-time reality-denial specialist, has decided that Federal Reserve economists should be "disciplined" for the high crime of doing math. Their New York Fed paper found that about 90% of Trump's tariffs are being paid by US firms and consumers, which is awkward when the official White House line is "foreigners are paying, don't look at your grocery bill."

Hassett went on CNBC to declare the paper "an embarrassment" and "the worst" in Fed history, which is a bold statement from an administration that treats numbers the way Elon treats NDAs. He insisted consumers are actually better off because prices fell, inflation dropped, and "real wages" rose, a miraculous outcome where Americans somehow get richer by paying more for imports. The economists who pointed out this basic incidence-of-tariffs problem, he says, should be punished for producing analysis that "wouldn't be accepted in a first-semester econ class"—a fascinating critique from the political team that thinks the deficit is just a vibe.

This is all unfolding while Trump is already pressuring the Fed to slash interest rates, cheering on a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell over building renovations, and trying to push out Fed governor Lisa Cook. Meanwhile, every serious analysis—from the Kiel Institute to the National Bureau of Economic Research—confirms the same thing: the US is paying almost all the tariff costs. So naturally, instead of rethinking the policy, the White House is floating professional consequences for economists whose charts don't worship the Dear Tariff Leader. Independent central bank? Cute 20th-century concept.

The Trump administration has finally released $127m in overdue federal funds for the New York–New Jersey Gateway rail tunnel, plus another $127m on top, after a federal judge basically reminded them that "president" is not a synonym for "ransom broker." Construction on the country’s largest infrastructure project can now restart, because the White House temporarily stopped treating a critical tunnel used by 200,000 daily commuters like a prop in a reality show.

This sudden burst of compliance comes after Trump spent months withholding $205m in reimbursements, running the project out of cash and forcing work to stop. During his little funding hostage situation, he allegedly demanded that Washington Dulles airport and New York’s Penn Station be renamed after him in exchange for unfreezing the money. So yes, the sitting president tried to swap essential infrastructure funding for personal branding opportunities, like a discount Mussolini with a merch store.

Governor Kathy Hochul and Chuck Schumer are calling it a huge win for workers, commuters, and the regional economy, because when the bar is on the floor, "the president obeyed a court order and stopped sabotaging a rail tunnel" now counts as a triumph. Trump, naturally, is still raging on Truth Social that Gateway is a future "boondoggle" and "financially catastrophic" — which is rich coming from the man who thinks the real emergency is that there aren’t enough buildings and airports named after him.

The bottom line: a century-old, Sandy-damaged tunnel finally gets repaired not because the administration cares about safety or transit, but because a judge and a political backlash briefly made it more painful to keep breaking things than to let one project proceed. Rule of law 1, petty autocrat 0 — at least until the next appeal.