…while proceeding to do exactly fuck all about it.

Honestly, this is one of the rare times that even I have to say that Trump needs to pick his battles carefully.

The venn diagram of “MAGA” and “Walmart Shoppers” is basically a circle. And they’re the ones with the guns. Seeing their walmart bill spike from $100 last week to $235 or whatever the next week may be the straw that breaks some of the camels’ backs. There’s only so long that Trump can deflect blame to Biden before even they start asking “But you’re President now. What are you going to do about it?”.

If Walmart is successful at making sure that their shoppers know that Trump’s tariffs are to blame for the price hikes, there is a non-zero chance that it causes the leopards he unleashed to turn around and look at his face with that hungry look in their eyes.

Has anyone told Trump that Bruce Springsteen hasn’t been relevant since before any of his kids were born?

I hope you’re not holding your breath waiting for that to happen…

Only for federal charges. If people are breaking state laws to push his agenda, he cannot pardon them. It’s a little thing, but it’s something.

For now.

No President has ever tried to issue a pardon for state crimes. Given this President and this Supreme Court, I would not be nearly as confident that that rule would hold if push were to come to shove. Especially in a political climate where virtually every institution that we expected to hold their ground has basically caved in to Trump at the first sign of pressure. I could easily see an argument made by this administration in front of this Supreme Court that the Supremacy Clause grants Trump the right to pardon state crimes easily being successful on a 6-3 split.

And I could also see Trump just physically imposing his will by sending people down to the state to physically free whoever is being held with a very similar mindset: “Are you going to stop me? You and what army?”, having anybody who attempts to stop him arrested.

This story is about a specific legal mechanism (universal injunction) that has been used by federal judges in dozens of cases throughout decades. It’s a controversial mechanism that has been used on both sides of the political spectrum.

And it’s also necessary to allow the courts to keep the justice system from getting overwhelmed. Without nationwide injunctions, it would lead to courts being swamped with hundreds of thousands of lawsuits from individual citizens instead of just dealing with a handful of lawsuits meant to represent people nationwide.

The lack of nationwide injunctions also means that the government would be able to trample on the rights of poor people with impunity, knowing that they very likely wouldn’t have the knowledge, money, or resources needed to seek relief from the courts. They would also have the comfort of knowing they can continue trampling on their rights for years while these individual cases make their way through a bogged down court system.

Constitutional protections would only essentially be available to those with the money and resources to have legal representation. The Trump administration was basically arguing that they have the right to trample on the rights of those who cannot afford to defend themselves, and no federal judge should be able to stop them.

Trump’s lawyers are arguing that this very specific mechanism shouldn’t be permitted in current cases regarding immigration.

Actually, no. His lawyers are arguing that this mechanism shouldn’t be permitted at all. That’s the whole point of this case to begin with. The case itself is patently unconstitutional on its face. But the underlying goal – the essential neutering of judicial review – is the real prize. That’s what this case is about.

They’ve also argued that this particular mechanism is unconstitutional. His lawyers are wrong, and shitty, but they are in no way arguing that “the constitution doesn’t apply to the president.”

Actually, they are. First, as I said above, the Trump administration is literally asking for the right to ignore Constitutional amendments and the rights granted by the Constitution. They’re asking the Supreme Court to say that Trump can issue unconstitutional executive orders and that the courts have little to no right to judicial review or to do anything about it.

And more importantly, they literally admitted that the only court they’re going to even listen to is the Supreme Court. Maybe.

They literally admitted, after being repeatedly questioned over it and after many attempts at tapdancing around it, that they have no intention of listening to lower courts and would abide by Supreme Court rulings that they agree with.

So yes. They absolutely are arguing that the Constitution doesn’t apply to the President. The headline is accurate.

Sauer’s reply was an awfully wordy way of saying “No.”

Can’t wait for SCOTUS to rule that the immunity ruling somehow applies only to Trump.

And exactly how do you plan on enforcing this without mods? And where are all these people who will somehow know the laws of all the users’ jurisdictions come from?

No community guidelines, no censorship, no annoying mods or bots flagging your posts, promote what you want, say what you want,

Or

child exploitation is strictly prohibited as well as incitement of violence and supporting terrorism

Which one is it?

No community guidelines, no censorship, no annoying mods or bots flagging your posts, promote what you want, say what you want, Po set what you want, you even have instant messaging and file sharing capabilities not just pics and videos

So in other words, “4chan: Now with new and improved ways to spread kiddie porn”.

For the record, even Trump admits this won’t actually bring drug prices down in the US:

From the article:

Trump added that the cost of prescription and pharmaceutical drugs would “rise throughout the World in order to equalize and, for the first time in many years, bring FAIRNESS TO AMERICA!”

So his goal isn’t to even drive prices down in the US. It’s to bring the prices of drugs up everywhere else.

Otherwise known as a national security risk with wings.

Does anyone believe that (a) Qatar or one of its allies hasn’t planted more bugs than a termite infestation, and (b) Trump’s team is even remotely close to competent enough to find any of them?

The important question is this: How effective has this been?

How many judges, whether or not they’ve been targeted by this tactic, have made rulings in favor of Trump that they would not have made otherwise, out of fear of retaliation by one of Trump’s followers? How many judges going forward are going to rule in Trump’s favor out of fear that they’ll be targeted?

People have historically used these tactics because they fucking work. And we already know that senators have voted in Trump’s favor on numerous issues up to and including his removal from office based on fear of retaliation from Trump’s followers. We have seen officials ranging from local school boards right up to state officials either drop from races or resign from their positions due to intimidation and harassment tactics from hardline opponents.

We’ll never be able to answer the question of how effective this has been since no judge will ever admit to ruling in Trump’s favor because of these tactics. But the chances that this has happened, and possibly even happened quite often, is very, very real. How many laws are still on the books because the judge that was assigned the case was intimidated by Trump supporters? How many things has Trump gotten away with because prosecutors and judges feared retaliation or even civil unrest?

And since it’s what will be viewed as “Democrat” judges that are targeted, I’d be willing to bet that the Senate isn’t exactly going to put too much faith into investigating this until Aileen Cannon starts getting orders from Domino’s.

Honestly, at this point I’d be willing to bet that those officials who actually still give half a shit about national security don’t give Trump anything that isn’t essentially public information already. Or at the very least, largely harmless if it does become public. It’s not like Trump would know or care about the difference.

Remember that multiple sources have said that during his first term, the Presidential Daily Briefings were largely little more than fluff pieces with pretty pictures, easy to understand words, and random references to him just to keep his attention, much like trying to keep a 3 year old occupied with a coloring book and a handful of crayons.

$100 says Trump couldn’t find Palestine on a map.

To be fair, this is a problem that has always existed with our Constitution. The Constitution gave us a framework for government and rules to abide by, but its fatal flaw is that it said exactly nothing about what to do when someone breaks those laws. The entire document is basically little more than a glorified gentleman’s agreement. There’s nothing in the document that says what to do if those elected to support and defend the Constitution instead decide to take a shit on it.

If anything, we should consider ourselves lucky for a couple of things. One is the fact that it took 250 years for someone to realize that our Constitution has absolutely no teeth to it and the answer to the question of “What are you going to do about it?” is effectively “Nothing.” The other is that the first person to go down that path is an inept moron. Now granted, the man has still done permanent and irreparable harm to our country and our standing in the rest of the world. But imagine the damage the man would be able to do if he were competent. Imagine if Trump had the political savvy and intelligence of Mitch McConnell. We’d be in a fuck of a lot more trouble.

He’s not “trying to undo” it. He’s largely already undone it.

He has done permanent and irreversable damage to our relationships with our allies around the world. Countries like Denmark and Canada now have to look at us as potential adversaries as we repeatedly threaten to use military force to annex their territories.

He has obliterated our ability to maintain strong political and economic ties. Sure, with every administration comes tweaks to various foreign and economic policies, but American policies in general have been considered stable and reliable over the long term. Countries now believe, and have every right to believe, anything the US says only has a shelf life of 4 years before the next administration comes in and flips the table on a whim, and that anything Trump says only has a shelf life of until he has a conversation with someone else and randomly changes his mind. Businesses and governments can’t be expected to function under those conditions, and it is going to take us decades at best to show the rest of the world that Trump and MAGA were just short blips on the radar and that the US can once again be trusted in the long term. That’s assuming we ever get that trust back.

Even domestically, how many collective centuries of experience has been purged from federal government operations as a result of Trump’s mass firings? Even if these agencies were re-opened and fully re-staffed tomorrow, how long would it take them to wind things back up and get back up to full strength? If they’re re-instated after the Trump administration, how much damage would be caused in the interim, and how many years or even decades will it take to fix it? How much data that these agencies relied on has already been permanently lost?

How many years of scientific research has already been destroyed as time-sensitive experiments and studies get cancelled due to de-funding? Again, even if these institutions would be able to restart work tomorrow, how many experiments have already been invalidated in the interim? How many years are we now going to be behind in scientific research?

Same goes with vaccinations. Environmental damage. Race relations. The list goes on and on and on. What he has already destroyed in four months will likely take four decades to repair.

First it was slapping tariffs on penguins. Now we’ve entered the “War on Dolls” stage of the Trump administration.

I wish I was joking.

I hate this timeline.

Most likely was one of those people who “didn’t think Trump was serious about that”. Until he realized he was.