CSotD: Dear Leader Gets Some Bad News
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Obviously, the Supreme Court decision on tariffs was the major story, not just yesterday but for some time, and I’m not waiting around for cartoonists to catch up with it, because it should have driven them to their drawing boards immediately.
Bennett is correct that it has ended the tariffs, or at least the president’s ability to declare them from his throne. Dear Leader disagrees, but he’s wrong: Tariffs are a tax and taxation is the job of the legislature. However, this isn’t the end of the bitching and complaining and attempts, and, for that reason, I think Bennett’s imagery is a bit optimistic.
By contrast, Deering shows Trump crushed by a ruling that confirms the separation of powers, and I like it better because it captures more significance of the ruling, and the way Trump is drawn suggests only that he got nailed but not that it’s his end. He’s still there; there’s no splat depicted, but the hammer is bigger than he is, and Deering doesn’t over-reach by labeling the hand that wields it.
And I suspect Lalo may have had much the same experience I did: I saw a reference to the decision on line, so switched on the TV to see what was happening and stumbled into Dear Leader’s whining, complaining childish press conference.
I will say that he was more focused than usual and perhaps his fury kept him from wandering off into his usual side comments, though he repeated his farcical lie about having won a landslide. But as he leveled insults at the Court and its members and boasted of how he would evade their ruling, it occurred to me that, while I’m sure the pay is great, I cannot imagine having to sit in Cabinet meetings and listen to him go on like that.
Alcaraz got it right: Someone told him “no” and the crybaby threw a fit.
Juxtaposition of the Day
An interesting contrast: Bramhall illustrates the litany of threats while Boris mocks them.
Bramhall depicts him on a pile of wreckage, and he’s right that Trump has already demonstrated an ability to destroy actual buildings and well-established traditions, both cultural and governmental. I think he’s correct that we need to take things seriously.
However, Boris notes the solidity of the Court, which is an entire branch of government and one in which Dear Leader not only can’t fire the people he doesn’t like but, if he decided to stack the court with Pam Bondi and Alina Habba, he’d have to get their nominations through the Senate.
The greater threat is that, like Homeland Security, he’ll simply ignore the Court’s rulings, at which point we enter a serious Constitutional crisis. But perhaps we’re already there, the good thing being that, between the predation and lawlessness of ICE and the dangling revelations in the Epstein Files, Dear Leader is losing his grip on the nation.
He could still, no doubt, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing a vote from the MAGA crowd, but shooting people in Minneapolis didn’t go so well, even with the less dedicated followers who voted him into office. I guess we’re gonna see.
We never were going to really get those $2,000 checks. That was just one of his foolish, off-the-cuff boasts that nobody with any sense took seriously.
But there is a question now of what happens to the $200 billion in wrongful taxes that he took with his illegal tariffs, and his claim that they were being paid by foreign governments has been utterly disproven. Whether he said it out of genuine ignorance or deliberate lying doesn’t really matter.
I would assume importers have plenty of records of what they’ve paid in tariffs, if there were a move to compensate them for the illegal taxation, but they passed most of those costs on to consumers, which becomes much more problematic.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker suggests that Dear Leader start writing checks to people for $1,700, the average that his families have paid, and while he, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, loves to poke the temperamental baby and make him squeal, the suggestion is not so far afield from Trump’s own promise of $2,000 checks.
On the other hand, there’s little doubt that Dear Leader, having failed with a major economic fantasy, will be looking to distract us, and himself, from this humiliating set-back, and, given that there is nobody in his Cabinet or many in the GOP legislatures with the cojones of Pritzer and Newsom, we need to worry that he will attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, which he claimed he’d completely destroyed a year ago.
He’s now considering a limited strike, and Iran is considering signing an agreement to prevent it. This shouldn’t make anyone terribly comfortable.
It must be remembered that the people who negotiated the original treaty limiting Iran’s nuclear program, which Trump threw out, were not the conservative mullahs of the Supreme Council but westernized, largely western-educated scientists and diplomats.
But it’s the mullahs, and their pitbull enforcers, the Revolutionary Guard, who will be responding to threats and to any “limited strikes” that may come about.
Bok seems to find it amusing, but he wouldn’t be going there himself.
I’ll admit my familiarity with Iran’s government is several years old, but we went through a period in which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would seize a small craft in the Gulf that had wandered into their waters. They would take the crew prisoner and make a lot of noise, and then the moderates in Iran’s parliament would intervene and they’d let them go.
Rinse and repeat.
I don’t know that the parliament is as moderate today or that they currently have any influence with the Supreme Council. I do, however, assume that if we start blowing things up, the Iranian people will react as any nation does when it’s attacked.
We were told that, when we invaded Iraq, “People will greet the [U.S.] troops with sweets and flowers.” And, by golly, if you go to Arlington Cemetery, you’ll see lots of flowers.
Iraq and Iran don’t much like each other, but I think they each like invaders even less.
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