Make nomistake, this is huge over here, and fairly unprecedented.
One massive difference is that Trump has a large base of supporters, nobody really likes Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, not even Royalists.
In the United Kingdom this morning, Thames Valley Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, on suspicion that he committed misconduct in public office. Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last October because of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice suggest that when Mountbatten-Windsor represented the United Kingdom as a trade envoy, he gave confidential government documents to Epstein.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest is the first arrest of a senior royal since 1647, when supporters of Parliament arrested King Charles I during the English Civil War. Today is Mountbatten-Windsor’s 66th birthday.
King Charles III said the investigations into his brother have his “wholehearted” support and that Buckingham Palace will cooperate. He said that “the law must take its course.”
In South Korea, Seoul Central District Court Judge Jee Kui-youn sentenced former president of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison after he was found guilty of leading an insurrection against the government. With his approval rating plummeting as his administration was engulfed by scandals, on December 3, 2024, Yoon declared martial law and tried to paralyze the parliament by using troops to blockade the National Assembly building and arrest opposition politicians. As Lim Hui Jie reported for CNBC, five other conspirators have also received prison sentences of up to 30 years.
During the trial, prosecutors told the court that Yoon had declared martial law “with the purpose of remaining in power for a long time by seizing the judiciary and legislature.” Yoon claimed that he was within his constitutional authority to declare martial law and that he did so to “safeguard freedom and sovereignty.”
After Yoon declared martial law, 190 of the 300 lawmakers in the National Assembly fought their way into the chamber and overturned his edict, forcing Yoon to back down about six hours after his martial law announcement. Lawmakers impeached him 11 days later and removed him from office. Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty for Yoon. The judge said that in sentencing Yoon, he had taken into consideration that Yoon is 65 and that he did not order his troops to use lethal force during the period in which he declared martial law.
In Washington, D.C., today, President Donald J. Trump held the first meeting of his so-called Board of Peace at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), newly renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace,” a change being legally challenged. Last year, officials from the Trump administration seized the USIP building, which housed an independent entity created by Congress in 1984, and fired nearly all the employees.
Trump has made it clear he wants his new board to replace the United Nations. Twenty-seven countries have said they will participate, but so far none appear to have tossed in the $1 billion that would give them permanent status. The countries participating include Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Trump extended invitations to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
Trump withdrew an invitation to the board from Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced Trump’s foreign policy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, so Canada is out. Rejecting Trump’s invitation are Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the Vatican. They cite their continuing support for the United Nations, concerns about Russian influence in Trump’s board, and concerns about the board’s organization, which gives Trump final say in all decisions, including how to spend the board’s money.
Today, Trump announced that the U.S. will put $10 billion into the Board of Peace, although since Congress is the only body that can legally appropriate money in our system, it’s unclear how he intends to do this.
The event at the board appeared to be the Trump Show. Representatives from the countries who had accepted Trump’s invitation stood awkwardly on stage waiting for him while his favorite songs blared. Once he arrived, he rambled for an hour and then appeared to fall asleep at points in the meeting as dignitaries spoke.
Lena Sun and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported today that having pulled out of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Trump administration has called for creating an alternative run by the U.S. that would recreate WHO systems. The cost would be $2 billion a year funded through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), up from the $680 million the U.S. provided to the WHO. The secretary of HHS is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Public health experts told the journalists it was unlikely that any new U.S.-based system could match the reach of the WHO. Director Tom Inglesby of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said: “Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship. We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere [near] the influence we had.”
Only sovereign nations can join the WHO, but California, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, as well as New York City, have joined the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.
Today Trump’s Commission of Fine Arts swore in two new members, including Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience in the arts. Then the commission, now entirely made up of Trump appointees, approved Trump’s plans for a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand, although the chair did note that public comments about the project were over 99% negative.
According to CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty, Harris said the White House is the “greatest house in [the] world. We want this to be the greatest ballroom in the world.” Trump says the ballroom is being funded by private donations through the Trust for the National Mall, which is not required to disclose its donors.
Today workers hung a banner with a giant portrait of Trump on the Department of Justice building.
On Air Force One as Trump traveled to Georgia this afternoon for a speech on the economy, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor. “Do you think people in this country at some point, associates of Jeffrey Epstein, will wind up in handcuffs, too?”
Trump answered: “Well, you know I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated. It’s very nice, I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. To see it, and to see what’s going on with his brother, who’s obviously coming to our country very soon and he’s a fantastic man. King. So I think it’s a very sad thing. It’s really interesting ‘cause nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive, but now they speak. But I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing. In fact, the opposite—he was against me. He was fighting me in the election, which I just found out from the last three million pages of documents.”
In fact, Trump has not been exonerated.
When he got to Georgia, Trump’s economic message was that “I’ve won affordability.” More to the point was his focus on his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to secure elections. In fact, in solving a nonexistent problem, the law dramatically restricts voting. Republicans in the House have already passed it. If the Senate passes it, Trump told an audience in Rome, Georgia, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”
Today, in a 6–3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that President Donald J. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were unconstitutional.
Shortly after he took office, Trump declared that two things—the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China, and the country’s “large and persistent” trade deficits—constituted national emergencies. Under these emergency declarations, he claimed the authority to raise tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
The U.S. Constitution is clear that Congress, and Congress alone, has the authority to tax the American people, and tariffs are taxes. But with the IEEPA, Congress gave the president the power to respond quickly to an “unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” The law specifies that any authority granted to the president “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.”
Although the law does not mention tariffs, Trump claimed the authority under IEEPA to impose a sweeping new tariff system that upended the free trade principles that have underpinned the economy of the United States and its allies and partners since World War II.
Trump promised his supporters that foreign countries would pay the tariffs, but in fact, studies have reinforced what economists always maintained: the cost of tariffs falls on businesses and consumers in the U.S. Similarly, Trump promised his tariffs would make the economy boom and bring back manufacturing jobs, but the latest report on U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter of last year, released just this morning, shows that tariffs and the government shutdown slowed growth to 1.4%, bringing overall growth down from 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% in 2025.
While the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, it added only 181,000 in 2025. Manufacturing lost about 108,000 jobs in 2025.
Trump also used tariffs to justify his extension of the 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, insisting that fees on foreign countries would fund the U.S. government and cut the deficit.
It was always clear, though, that Trump’s reliance on tariffs was mostly about seizing power. Trump’s advisors appear to be using the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies.
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26, 2025: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Instead, he has operated under emergency powers. Since he took office thirteen months ago, Trump has declared at least nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. Since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term.
Having declared his power to do whatever he wished with tariffs, Trump used them for his own ends in both foreign policy and economics, punishing countries for enforcing the law against his allies—like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, jailed after trying to overthrow the elected government—or strong-arming countries like Vietnam into giving real estate deals to his family.
Trump changed tariff rates apparently on his own whim. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, a month after imposing a 10% additional tariff on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20%. A month later, he removed the legal exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing reciprocal tariffs, he increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34% to 84%. The very next day, he jacked them up to 125%. That meant the total tariff rate on Chinese goods was 145%.
Trump’s tariffs destabilized the global economy, while the wild instability made it impossible for U.S. companies to plan. Increasingly, other countries have simply cut the U.S. out of their trade deals, while U.S. growth has slowed. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household about $1,000 in 2025. They projected that cost to be $1,300 in 2026. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee–Minority, made up of Democrats, estimates that number to be low. They say the actual cost has been $1,700 per household.
It was a huge tax increase on the American people, imposed without reference at all to Congress, which is the only government body with the power to raise taxes. Now the Supreme Court has said that the chaos and cost of Trump’s tariffs was for nothing. Trump’s claim of authority to levy tariffs under IEEPA was unconstitutional all along.
Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles wrote of the decision: “[A]ll this reinforces that the tariffs were arguably both the most reckless act and the greatest abuse of power by a President in American history.” He added: “In most democracies Trump’s reckless and wild abuse of power through his tariffs would cause the government to fall or the leader to be removed. The imposition of these tariffs against the will of Congress, the courts, our allies, and the American people. It’s clear grounds for removal.”
As Ryan Goodman of Just Security pointed out, the justices in the majority expressed “deep skepticism of claims to open-ended emergency powers,” although it is not clear that they will recognize the same problem in other contexts.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that “today’s decision is…an indictment of the Court.” In August 2025, almost six months ago, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision striking down the tariffs as illegal. Now “[t]hese tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.” Marshall said there is no future for the American republic without thoroughly reforming the court of its current corruption.
Trump did not take news of the court’s decision calmly. Trump was at a private breakfast with governors at the White House when an aide handed him a note about the decision. A source told Reuters White House reporter Jarrett Renshaw that Trump was “visibly frustrated” and said he “had to do something about the courts.” Then he left the room.
Three hours later, Trump delivered a public response in which he lambasted the justices in the majority, including two of the three on the court he nominated. He said the justices appointed by Democrats are “against anything that makes America, strong, healthy and great again. They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.” The Republicans in the majority are “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats and, not that this should have anything at all to do with it, they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” As a whole, he claimed, “the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” He asserted that “obnoxious, ignorant and loud” people were frightening the justices to keep them from doing what was right.
Trump heaped praise on his appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas in the minority.
Trump continued in this vein for forty-five minutes, ranting that he had created a booming economy that “all of the Nobel Prize winners in economics” had said was impossible. He returned to his fantasy identity as peacemaker, reiterating that he had “settled eight wars, whether you like it or not,” saving 35 million lives, and claimed tariffs had made that possible. He claimed that he “was very modest in my ask of other countries and businesses” because he didn’t want to sway the court. He said: “I want to be a good boy.”
He told reporters that there were other ways to impose tariffs and that he intended to do so. Indeed, he said, “the Supreme Court’s decision today made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear, rather than less. I don’t think they meant that. I’m sure they didn’t. It’s terrible…. There will no longer be any doubt, and the income coming in and the protection of our companies and country will actually increase because of this decision. I don’t think the court meant that, but it’s the way it is.”
Trump’s tariffs are unpopular enough that he could have interpreted the Supreme Court decision outlawing them as providential, but instead he vowed to sign an order imposing 10% global tariffs under a law that permits him to do so for 150 days. When a reporter asked him why he couldn’t “just work with Congress to come up with a plan to push tariffs,” Trump answered: “I don’t have to. I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs. And it’s all been approved by Congress, so there’s no reason to do it.”
Tonight Trump posted on social media that he had signed an order to impose “a Global 10% Tariff on all Countries, which will be effective almost immediately.” Economist Justin Wolfers asked: “What problem is Trump’s new global 10% tariff meant to solve? If it’s about leverage, ask: How much leverage do you get from a tariff that disappears in 150 days? If it’s onshoring: Who builds new factories based on tariff[s] that disappear before the factory is built? It’s a tax. That’s all it is.”
The court did not say anything about how the government should remedy the economic dislocation the tariffs caused or, for that matter, return the billions of dollars it took illegally. Simon Rosenberg wrote that “Democrats can now credibly call for the repeal of the Trump tax cuts and the clawing back of the additional ICE funding as a way of offsetting the revenue loss from the ending of the illegal tariffs.”
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an interviewer: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see” refunds. Nonetheless, Representatives Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Janelle Bynum (D-OR) immediately introduced a bill to require the Trump administration to refund tariff revenue to U.S. businesses within 90 days.
This afternoon, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker sent an invoice to Trump, charging him $8,679,261,600, or $1,700 for every family in Illinois, as “reimbursement owed to the Illinois families for illegally imposed tariffs.” It said: “Illinois families paid the price for illegal tariffs—at the grocery store, at the hardware store, and around the kitchen table. Tariffs are taxes and working families were the ones who paid them. Illinois families paid the bill. Time for Trump to pay us back.”
In a cover letter, Pritzker said: “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof. This morning, your hand-picked Supreme Court Justices notified you that they are unconstitutional…. This letter and the attached invoice stand as an official notice that compensation is owed to the people of Illinois, and if you do not comply we will pursue further action.”
In the US it is a political football, in the UK it is a constitutional one. It may be the first time US lawmakers have ever praised the British police and legal system.
Quote:...
The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household about $1,000 in 2025. They projected that cost to be $1,300 in 2026. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee–Minority, made up of Democrats, estimates that number to be low. They say the actual cost has been $1,700 per household....
hcr
Still, I have never seen the weekly grocery bill higher than it was today.
On February 22, 1889, outgoing Democratic president Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill that divided the Territory of Dakota in half and enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older Territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted to the Union in nine months.
Republicans and Democrats had fought for years over admitting new western states, with members of each party blocking the admission of states thought to favor the other. Republicans counted on Dakota and Washington Territories, while the Democrats felt pretty confident about Montana and New Mexico Territories.
In early 1888, Congress had considered a compromise by which all four states would come into the Union together. But in the 1888 election, voters had put the Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, and while the popular vote had gone to Cleveland, the Electoral College had put Republican Benjamin Harrison into the White House.
Democrats had to cut a deal quickly or the Republicans would simply admit their own states and no others. The plan they ended up with cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood but admitted Montana, split the Republican Territory of Dakota into two new Republican states, and admitted Republican-leaning Washington.
Harrison’s men were eager to admit new western states to the Union. In the eastern cities, the Democrats had been garnering more and more votes as popular opinion was swinging against the industrialists who increasingly seemed to control politics as well as the economy.
Democrats promised to lower the tariffs that drove up prices for consumers, while Republican leaders agreed with industrialists that they needed the tariffs that protected their products from foreign competition. Republicans assumed that the upcoming 1890 census would prove that the West was becoming the driving force in American politics, and admitting new states full of Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. The one new representative each new state would send to the House would be nice, but two new Republican senators per state would guarantee the Republicans would hold the Senate for the foreseeable future.
Then, too, the new states would change the number of electors in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of the state’s U.S. senators and representatives. Harrison’s men were only too aware that Harrison had lost the popular vote and won only in the Electoral College, and they were keen to skew the Electoral College more heavily toward the Republicans before the 1892 election.
In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the administration’s mouthpiece, Harrison’s people boasted that Republicans could take Montana, and gleefully anticipated that the new western states would send eight new Republican senators to Washington, D.C., making the count in the Senate forty-seven Republicans to thirty-seven Democrats. The newspaper also pointed out that changing the balance of the Electoral College would stop the Democratic-leaning state of New York from determining the next president.
In May 1889, elections for members of the constitutional conventions in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington Territory went Republican. Montana went Democratic, but Republicans blamed the result on Democratic gerrymandering. In October 1889, congressional elections in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington confirmed that those territories would come into the Union as Republican states. Frank Leslie’s counted the numbers: Republicans had garnered 169 seats to the Democrats’ 161. Republican legislatures would also give six new Republicans to the Senate, putting the count in that body at forty-five Republicans and thirty-nine Democrats. Frank Leslie’s reported the numbers, then explained what they meant: Republican control of Congress was pretty much guaranteed.
As for Montana, when it appeared the legislature would be dominated by Democrats, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud. They did have to admit that a Democrat had won the governorship, but they insisted he had done so by fewer than three hundred votes. The governor, Joseph K. Toole, was so popular that he was reelected twice, but the Republicans tried to weaken him by harping on what Frank Leslie’s called his “arbitrary, partisan, we might almost say indecent official conduct.”
In a little over a week in November 1889, four new states entered the Union. On Saturday, November 2, President Harrison signed the documents admitting North Dakota and South Dakota. On Friday, November 8, he welcomed Montana to the Union. The following Monday, November 11, he declared Washington a state.
Just as they had planned in February, Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union and had come close to capturing a fourth. The West seemed to be the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as if Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves. Republican dominance in the new western states, Frank Leslie’s wrote, would tip the scale that had balanced the parties for more than a decade. The votes of the new states would virtually assure the Republicans the presidency in 1892, and the tariffs would be safe.
But by summer 1890 it was no longer clear that the Republicans would keep their majority. The economy was faltering, and Americans blamed the tariffs. They were looking favorably on former president Cleveland, who, after all, had won the popular vote in 1888. The Harrison administration seemed out of touch with the American people. Mrs. Harrison had drawn up plans for a $700,000 addition to the White House with conservatories, winter gardens, and a statuary hall, “so as to make it a fit home for a Presidential family.” The Harrisons’ ne’er-do-well son Russell insisted it was “shameful” for the head of the nation to be forced to live in cramped quarters, although observers noted that the cramping came from the fact that Russell Harrison and his wife and child had moved into the White House with the president and the first lady. And then President Harrison accepted a handsome plate of solid gold from supporters from California on his birthday in August.
Republicans turned again to the idea of protecting their majority by adding more states. They looked toward Wyoming and Idaho. Since Wyoming had boasted a non-Indigenous population of fewer than 21,000 people in 1880 and the Northwest Ordinance had established 60,000 as the necessary population for admission to statehood, it was a stretch to argue that it was ready, but the Republicans were adamant that it should join the Union.
They also wanted to add Idaho, which had a population of fewer than 33,000 in 1880. They were in such a hurry to admit Idaho that they bypassed the usual procedures of state admission, permitting the territorial governor to call for volunteers to write a state constitution, which voters approved only months later.
Democrats pointed out that there was no argument for Wyoming and Idaho statehood that did not apply to Democratic New Mexico and Arizona. “The picking out of the two Territories and plucking them into the Union by the ears looked like an operation that was not to be justified by any sound principle of statesmanship or of public necessity, and that only found justification in the minds of its promoters by the fact that they were thus increasing their political influence in the next presidential election,” a Democratic representative charged.
Republicans countered that Democrats were opposing the admission of new states out of partisanship, saying they would not add a new state unless it pledged allegiance to the Democratic Party.
On July 3, 1890, after a vote that fell along party lines, Wyoming and Idaho were admitted to the Union. The Republicans had added six new states to the Union in less than a year. Administration loyalists were elated, but Democrats and moderate Republicans were not enthusiastic. The Democratic Boston Globe pointed out that the two new states together had a population of “a fair sized congressional district in Massachusetts” but would be represented in Congress by four senators and two representatives.
The moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly was also concerned. It pointed out that the admission of the new states badly skewed congressional representation. The estimated 105,000 people of Wyoming and Idaho, it complained, would have four senators and two representatives. The 200,000 people in the First Congressional District of New York, in contrast, had only one representative. Harper’s Weekly pointed out there were fifteen wards in New York City that each had a population as large as the population of Wyoming and Idaho put together. To get their additional Republican senators, the magazine noted, the Harrison administration had badly undercut the political power of voters from much more populous regions, a maneuver that did not seem to serve the fundamental principle of equal representation in the republic.
Administration men did not stop at redrawing the map to ensure the success of their party. They manipulated the 1890 census to favor Republican districts, projecting their count would give fifteen more Republican congressmen while only seven for the Democrats. They erected statues of Civil War heroes and passed the Dependent Pension Act, which put money in the pockets of disabled veterans, their wives, and their children. And all the while, they blamed their opponents for partisanship. Frank Leslie’s lectured: “It behooves the citizen, regardless of party affiliations to think of the calamities that must in the end result from the intensifying of party feeling and the subordination of right and justice to the desire to advance party success.”
And yet the public mood continued to swing away from the Republicans, who continued to insist that the workers and farmers suffering under the Republicans’ policies were ungrateful and were themselves to blame for their own worsening conditions. In turn, opponents accused Republicans of stealing the 1888 election and believing they didn’t have to answer to voters so long as they had moneyed men behind them so they could buy elections.
In the 1890 midterms, voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed their opponents a majority of more than two to one. A new “Alliance” movement of farmers and workers had swept through the West “like a wave of fire,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, calling for business regulations and income taxes and working quietly through new, local newspapers that old party operatives had largely ignored. Republicans held power in the Senate only thanks to the admission of the new states, but even those did not deliver as expected: Republicans held a majority of only four senators, but three of them opposed tariffs.
In the presidential election of 1892, Harrison won four electoral votes from South Dakota, three from Montana, four from Washington, and three from Wyoming. Idaho’s three electoral votes went to the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver. North Dakota split its three votes among the three candidates. It was not enough. Grover Cleveland returned to the White House for a second term, and Democrats took charge of Congress for the first time since before the Civil War.
On February 6, four direct descendants of President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to United States senators to ask them to vote against a measure that opens up the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in Minnesota to the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota. Antofagasta wants to build a copper-nickel mine just outside the BWCAW on national forest land.
The BWCAW is made up of more than a million acres, or over 4,000 square kilometers, of pristine forests, glacial lakes, marshes, and streams in the Superior National Forest in the northeast of Minnesota. It runs along 150 miles (about 240 kilometers) of the border with Canada, linking with the slightly larger Quetico Provincial Park on the other side of the border. The BWCAW is the most visited wilderness in the U.S., with about 250,000 visitors annually. The Interior Department estimates that it contributes more than $17 million annually to the economy in northeastern Minnesota by supporting industries in the outdoor recreation business.
In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the lands that include the BWCAW as the Superior National Forest. Since then, presidents of both parties have protected the region, and in 1964 the BWCAW became part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. In 1978, after logging threatened to destroy the area, Congress passed the BWCAW Act, ending logging and snowmobiling in the wilderness area and restricting mining.
But in the early 2000s, mining companies proposed new copper mines in the national forest near the wilderness, and according to Luke Goldstein of The Lever, the owner of Antofagasta, Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic, began to try to get leases from the U.S. government for exclusive mining rights to the lands near the BWCAW in 2012. In 2013, conservationists began a campaign to ban mining there, and in 2016 the Obama administration blocked Luksic’s plans. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, Luksic bought a mansion in Washington, D.C., that he then rented to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In 2023, then–interior secretary Deb Haaland issued Public Land Order 7917 closing more than 350 square miles (900 square kilometers) of the Superior National Forest, upstream from the BWCAW, to mineral and geothermal leasing for 20 years after a comprehensive review by the U.S. Forest Service found sulfide-ore copper mining could cause irreparable damage.
Minnesota has a long history of iron mining, but the state has never had a copper-sulfide mine. Such mines are usually located in the Southwest, where there is little rain and not a lot of transfer between groundwater and the surface, for the simple reason that water compounds the dangers of sulfide mining. Copper-sulfide mining blasts rock from underground to claim the rock that has metal-bearing ore: less than 1% of it. Once exposed to the air, the sulfide minerals in the rock oxidize and combine with water to create toxic materials, including sulfuric acid. That toxic waste picks up heavy metals as it runs into watersheds or pits.
“Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy,” Haaland said in a statement. “With an eye toward protecting this special place for future generations, I have made this decision using the best available science and extensive public input.”
In response, Twin Metals said it has a mining design that would enable it to mine without generating acid mine drainage. It claimed it could limit the exposure of the sulfide-bearing ore to air and water. People who want to protect the BWCAW called for the state legislature to pass a “Prove It First” law that would require mining companies to prove their methods have worked safely elsewhere before they are imported into Minnesota.
Trump has pushed for mining to reopen in the area, and Republican Minnesota representative Pete Stauber called the moratorium on mining near the BWCAW “an attack on our way of life” and “a dangerous, purely political decision.” On January 21, 2026, Republicans in Congress pushed through House Joint Resolution 140, a resolution introduced by Stauber to end the moratorium on mining.
Crucially, Stauber based his resolution on the 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA), which established a way for Congress to overturn a rule by a federal agency, so long as the procedure was begun within 60 days of the agency submitting the rule to Congress for review. CRA resolutions are generally passed in the Senate as “expedited procedure,” which means they cannot be filibustered and can pass with a simple majority. Once Congress rejects a rule, it cannot be reinstated without an act of Congress.
In its first 20 years, the CRA was used only once, but after Trump took office the first time, Republicans in Congress invalidated 16 rules that had been issued by the Obama administration. The Democratic-dominated Congress under Biden used the CRA 3 times. But once Trump got back into the White House, congressional Republicans dramatically expanded the authority of the CRA to include agency actions far beyond rules and the ability to claw back authority far beyond 60 days.
Stauber’s Joint Resolution 140 would overturn a Public Land Order, something that has never before been considered a “rule.” And it targets a Public Land Order that was issued a full three years ago. Jack Jones and Richard L. Revesz of The Regulatory Review said the Republicans’ expanded use of the law “violates the law, threatens to disrupt countless long-settled agency actions moving forward, and imperils the stability of agency action and the reliance interests of regulated entities.”
The authors noted that Congressional Republicans have been using the CRA primarily to overturn environmental regulations. If this measure, with its expanded parameters of time and scope, passes, those who want to protect the environment from industrial development worry that Congress can target virtually any action to protect the public lands, retroactively.
The Senate is set to vote this week on the measure to reopen the lands above the BWCAW to copper-sulfide mining. Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) is leading the charge against its passage. “We appreciate that mining is crucial to our economy and our national security and our way of life, but that is not what this mine is about. This mine is about a very well-connected, foreign mining conglomerate, Antofagasta,” she said outside the Minnesota State Capitol on Wednesday. “It wants to develop this mine, dig up the copper, leave us with the mess, then send the metal most likely to China, and then sell it back to us or whoever is willing to pay the highest price.”
It will take four Republicans joining the Democrats to block the measure from moving forward.
In their February 6 letter, descendants of three of Roosevelt’s sons—a fourth, Quentin, died in combat in World War I and left no children—stated that its purpose was “to strongly recommend all Senators vote against H.J. Res. 140, to ask you to work with President Trump to seek ways to permanently protect the Boundary Waters, and to send a unified message that America is still a land that relentlessly protects its greatest wilderness terrain.”
The Roosevelts noted that the proposed mining is “the opposite of America First.” “The mining company in question is foreign owned, will use Chinese state-owned smelters, and will then sell the extracted metals on the open market.” Opening the area to mining “removes the American public from public land decision making,” as hundreds of thousands of Americans have made it clear they overwhelmingly want the BWCAW protected forever.
Opening up the land for mining “disregards sound science,” they wrote, noting that a detailed scientific review had “documented the substantial risk copper mining poses to this highly valued ecosystem.” Copper mining near the BWCAW “would deal a crushing blow to a great rural American economy—it would kill jobs, dampen growth, decrease affordability, and erase any meaningful prospects for future economic prosperity in the region.”
Overturning the Public Land Order “sets a very bad precedent for other public lands.” “Using the CRA in this fashion, which has never been done before, would put at risk other public land withdrawals across America to similarly irresponsible actions.”
“Finally,” the Roosevelts wrote, “the proposed resolution is diametrically at odds with the conservation legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt (TR),” who protected around 230 million acres of land during his presidency. TR protected the Superior National Forest in 1909, and “there’s no doubt TR wanted Minnesota’s greatest natural resource, its most beloved Boundary Waters ecosystem, protected in perpetuity for all future generations to enjoy.”
They “strongly” asked senators of both parties to “vote no on this resolution and any other similar legislation proposed in the future.” Theodore Roosevelt IV, Tweed Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt III, and Mark Roosevelt concluded their message: “The four of us…have never collectively co-signed a letter together, which should give an indication of how strongly we support voting no on this resolution—and then voting yes on permanent Boundary Waters protection.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court found that the tariffs Trump levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are unconstitutional, Trump has attacked the court and continued to insist he has the power to issue the tariffs that give him economic leverage over other countries and companies.
After the decision was announced on Friday, Trump announced he was putting a 10% tariff on foreign imports. Then, on Saturday, he posted that his social media announcement would “serve to represent that I, as President of the United States of America, will be, effective immediately, raising the 10% Worldwide Tariff on Countries, many of which have been ‘ripping’ the U.S. off for decades, without retribution (until I came along!), to the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15% level.”
At 7:06 this morning, Trump tried to reaffirm his unchecked power when he posted on social media: “The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling.” He claimed that he could “do absolutely ‘terrible’ things to foreign countries” and that the court has approved other tariffs that “can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used.”
On Sunday the head of the international trade committee in the European Parliament, Bernd Lange, posted: “Pure tariff chaos on the part of the US government. No one can make any sense of it anymore—just open questions and growing uncertainty for the [European Union] and other US trading partners.” Lange noted that it is unclear if the United States will adhere to its trade deals, “or even be able to at all.” He proposed pausing the process of approving the E.U.’s trade deal with the U.S. “until we have a comprehensive legal assessment & clear commitments from the US side.” This morning, the European Parliament agreed.
After the decision, officials from India postponed a trip to the U.S. to finalize a trade deal. Late last month, India and the E.U. completed a trade agreement that creates the largest free trade zone in the world. Experts say the deal will support economic growth in the E.U. and India.
At 9:34 this morning, Trump threatened: “Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have ‘Ripped Off’ the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to. BUYER BEWARE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Fifteen minutes later, he posted: “As President, I do not have to go back to Congress to get approval of Tariffs. It has already been gotten, in many forms, a long time ago! They were also just reaffirmed by the ridiculous and poorly crafted supreme court decision! President DJT”
Trump’s tariffs are enormously unpopular. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers yesterday, an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll taken before the Supreme Court decision found that 64% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs. He had tried to shore up support for them by promising Americans a $2,000 check as a “dividend” from the tariffs, but as financial planner Stephen Kates told Jessica Dickler of CNBC today, “Tariff dividends were a long shot from the beginning.” Now, he said, the odds of their moving forward are “effectively zero.”
Eighty-two percent of Americans, including 76% of Republicans, say the president must obey rulings of the Supreme Court. Morris adds that 50% of Americans think Trump’s policy decisions have hurt the economy while only 26% say they have helped. And the Washington Post reported yesterday that 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, his lowest approval rating since shortly after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This morning, in remarks to so-called “Angel Families”—a right-wing name for the families of Americans killed by undocumented immigrants—Trump spoke in a slow monotone as he complained about the “fake polls” that show his popularity falling. “We actually have a silent support,” he said.
Today Jason Beeferman of Politico reported that the “silent support” to which right-wing figures point as evidence of their popularity is not necessarily authentic. An examination of social media accounts that pushed Nicki Minaj’s new right-wing persona showed that 18,784 of the profiles boosting her content, or about 33% of them, are fake. The report “assesses with high confidence that a coordinated fake campaign was actively amplifying political content on Nicki Minaj’s X account during the period reviewed.”
The report found that “[w]hen the conversation is limited to toxic content, a substantially stronger amplification effect emerges. These accounts predominantly amplify content produced by Nicki Minaj and Turning Point USA, indicating a notable overlap between the two within this discourse.”
In his speech this morning, Trump returned again to his complaints about the 2020 election, which he continues to insist the Democrats rigged against him. As for the 2024 vote, in which Trump got about 77.3 million votes, he claimed: “I won, I got probably 85 million votes, they say 78 million, 79 million, they cheated in this election too, it was just too big to rig. But they cheated like hell.” Nonsensically, he claimed that Republicans don’t receive their mail-in ballots, while Democratic voters are showered with them. “Republicans don’t get theirs and they’re calling frantically to get their ballot. A Democrat will get three, four, five, six, and even seven ballots,” Trump said. “And then we’re supposed to win? That’s what they’re good at, they’re professional cheaters.”
The stock market fell sharply today as investors worried about the uncertainty of Trump’s tariff threats and about the implications of AI.
The New York City Bar Association issued a statement condemning Trump’s attacks on the Supreme Court, saying they “constitute a calculated and dangerous assault on the independence of the judiciary and on our constitutional system of separated powers.”
Today House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) acknowledged that Congress has no appetite for levying the tariffs Trump and his MAGA supporters in Congress want. Johnson told reporters: “It’s going to be, I think, a challenge to find consensus on any path forward on the tariffs, on the legislative side. And so that is why, I think, you see so much of the attention on the executive side, the executive branch, and what they’re doing and how they’re reacting to the ruling.”
Meanwhile, prominent federal officials aren’t helping the popular image of the administration.
After the U.S. men’s hockey team won the gold at the Olympics yesterday, video and images circulated of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel wearing a USA jersey, screaming and chugging a beer in the team’s locker room rather as if he were at a frat party. MS NOW reporters Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig said eight former officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent them the video, which they said was infuriating FBI and DOJ officials.
When Dilanian questioned the trip, spokesperson Ben Williamson insisted on Saturday that Patel, who is a big fan of hockey, flew to Milan on the FBI’s private jet for official events. Williamson even demanded that Dilanian “correct” his “false” theory that Patel “went to hang out at the Olympics on the taxpayer dime.” Williamson did not respond after Dilanian and Leonnig asked him to comment on the video.
From Italy, Patel posted yesterday that the “FBI is dedicating all necessary resources in the investigation of this morning’s incident at President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago—where an armed individual was shot and killed after unlawfully entering the perimeter.” He was referring to the fact that the Secret Service shot and killed 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin outside Mar-a-Lago on Sunday. Reporters say Martin is from a family of Trump supporters and lately had become fixated on the “evil” in the Epstein files.
Today Reuters reported that U.S. ambassador to France and Monaco Charles Kushner has been banned from contact with members of the French government. Kushner is the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump pardoned the elder Kushner in December 2020 after he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, lying to the Federal Election Commission, and retaliating against a federal witness. Kushner has twice refused to meet with French foreign ministry officials after interfering with French politics and being summoned, a breach of diplomatic protocol. Max Rego and Laura Kelly of The Hill reported a French official’s explanation: “It’s a question of the basic expectations attached to the mission of an ambassador.”
Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) is facing calls to resign after allegations that he pressured a staff member into a sexual relationship. Gonzales, who is married and has six children, has denied the allegations, but published text messages are explicit and show the staffer warning him he was “going too far.” The woman later died by suicide. House speaker Johnson has endorsed Gonzales for reelection and cannot lose another Republican from the House, but pressure is mounting for Gonzales’s resignation.
Judge Aileen Cannon today blocked the release of Jack Smith’s report about his investigation of Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021. It is usual procedure for a special counsel’s report to be made public, but Cannon is a Trump appointee who has, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse noted, done everything she can to bottle up Smith’s report. Vance notes that few people initially thought there would be much new in the report, but Trump’s fierce fight to keep it under wraps has led to speculation that there might be something surprising in it.
“It’s hard to miss the glaring similarity to the Epstein Files,” Vance wrote, “where it increasingly appears attempts to avoid disclosure were meant to protect wealthy, powerful people. Why not just release Volume II if Trump, as he says, is innocent? You’d think that might help him prove his ‘case’ and set the matter aside for once and for all.”
U.S. Southern Command posted today that it struck another small vessel, killing three people. This brings the total killed in these small-boat attacks to at least 137 people. U.S. Southern Command claimed that those operating it were “engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” although there remains no proof of the government’s allegations.
Tomorrow Trump will deliver the State of the Union address. “It’s going to be a long speech,” he said today, “because we have so much to talk about.” But in a sign of his slipping control, many Democrats are skipping the speech to attend the “State of the Swamp” event at the National Press Club or the “People’s State of the Union” rally on the National Mall.
“Ever since taking office a year ago, the President has shown no respect for the principles upon which this country is based—the Constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law, and the rights guaranteed to every person under the Constitution. His actions have done tremendous harm to the American people, to our standing among nations, and to our institutions of government,” Senator Angus King (I-ME) said in a statement. “For this reason, I cannot in good conscience participate in a function with this President at its center. To do so would require me to ignore all that has gone before and to pay him a measure of respect which he has not earned. I will not be attending the State of the Union address.”
