I’m pleasantly surprised that the Trump 2.0 momentum has continued generally unabated with a couple of lulls since January 20th. Sure, there have been some tangents, like the tariff-related stock market correction and uppity judges pushing the envelope as to their power, but those appeared to have been taken into account. Those contingencies appear to have been planned for. In other words, these are fights we knew we’d have to have, and we’re having them right when we want to have them. Why is Trump doing all the tariff stuff now? Because now is the furthest possible time from November 2026. His goal is to force the bitter medicine down America’s throat now so that we will be feeling good just in time for the midterm elections. As for the judges, Trump is leveraging the world‘s largest law firm to fight back. He’s bringing test cases. And he is strategically finding ways around the outrageous rulings. He’s forcing a resolution on his terms, one way or the other.
Trump is serious about all the winning and it shows.
Look, the tariff stuff was hard because it’s no fun watching your 401(k) drop lower than the standards of a Bulwark staffer’s wife. However, those of us who’ve been doing this for a while know that things go up and things go down, and then they go up again, particularly when Republicans are in office and have a chance to do Republican things. That’s what Trump is trying to do. There’s a problem with our trade policy and it’s been a problem for as long as I can remember, and since I’m super old, I remember a long time. America has a huge trade deficit with almost all the rest of the world. That means we’ve import in more stuff than we export out. Similarly, countries around the world have huge tariffs against us, and you would think that America would have the same tariffs against them, but that’s not so. We don’t have reciprocal tariffs. We let these little pipsqueak countries, like Canada, tax our goods while they subsidize their own producers, and we spent the last few decades shrugging and asking, “Well, what are you going to do?” even as our jobs migrated overseas, and vast swaths of America are impoverished. Now, that doesn’t matter to the people making the rules. The three richest counties in America are the ones surrounding Washington, DC. Think about that. The rest of the country is going through economic turmoil while the people making the decisions that, incidentally, contributed to said economic turmoil are raking in the cash.
We keep hearing about free trade, but that’s not what people who don’t like American tariffs want. If we had free trade, we could freely sell to other countries just as they could freely sell us without their home government covertly subsidizing local producers to artificially lower the costs. But just like giant corporations don’t really want free enterprise – what they want to do is use the government to regulate their smaller competitors out of existence – the free traders don’t really want free trade. They want America to continue taking it on the chin and other places. Trump is onto that scam, and he’s trying to change the system. He’s doing it the smart way, acting right at the beginning of his term, leaving lots of runway to land a revitalized economy before November 2026.
As for the court stuff, he’s also doing the smart thing. Understand what’s going on here. All these bizarre District Court rulings are bizarre – nothing like them ever happens in normal litigation. For you non-lawyers, this is totally freakish stuff. You are not hallucinating. Your gut is correct. This is all wrong. So, why isn’t John Robert stepping in with the Supreme Court?
Recommended
Great question. That’s because he’s an institutionalist who wants to try to get back to normality. In other words, he wants these cases to proceed like other cases where you have proceedings in the district court, get a reasonable order that at least complies with the substantive law, and then go through an appellate process. That’s how normal stuff works, but he’s one of those people who doesn’t understand that you can’t normal abnormality back into normality. When you are faced with people doing things outside the normal procedures, you can’t strictly insist on using normal procedures because they’ve already sidestepped those. You are got to prevent them from being rewarded for their misconduct. Unusual wrongdoing requires unusual acts to remedy it.
Think of it this way. Violence is generally wrong. We all accept that, at least normal people do. But when someone’s doing violence to you, you need to do violence to them. Under John Roberts’s theory, by doing violence in self-defense, you’re contributing to the violence. But that’s not so. You’re stopping the violence the only way you can. The only way Justice Roberts is going to stop this stuff, which is essentially the mass violation of the rules of procedure to exceed the proper power of lower courts, is by unusual procedural responses. A court typically doesn’t step in right away to resolve a bad ruling. It usually goes through a multi-step process. But when these district courts stop Donald Trump’s administration from exercising its legitimate power – the power invested by the American people, and they elected it – the wrongdoers get what they want. They win. And what gets rewarded gets repeated. You can’t wait for a long, drawn-out appellate process to fix the wrongs because that doesn’t fix the wrongs. It rewards the wrongs.
And John Roberts is going to find himself with an ugly choice. He can step into this extraordinary situation with an extraordinary response and shut it down. That’s the smart choice. He doesn’t want to do that, and we shouldn’t want him to have to do that, but he does have to do that. Trying to honor norms that no longer exist merely encourages more norm-breaking. We learned that from Republicans who played by rules that no longer exist for far too long and cost us a great deal.
His other alternative is to do nothing and pretend everything is normal. That’s going to force Trump to respond because Trump can’t have a hundred liberal judges micromanaging the executive branch forever. We saw a preview of the endgame when some random judge ordered three planes full of Third World scumbags turned around in the air from Central America. Well, they landed, and their scummy foreign criminal cargo is now residing in El Salvador’s terrorist prison. Now, there’s enough ambiguity in the situation that it’s unclear that the administration, considering the timeframe, could have even complied with the order even if it wanted to. And while the administration is publicly sounding the “whomp whomp” horn on social media, and anonymous leakers are claiming it was outright defiance, the Administration is not admitting outright that it ignored this judge’s order. That’s smart. To the extent possible, while doing everything it can to circumvent these rulings as written, the administration should not outright refuse to obey the judiciary – yet. You use a can of Raid on a roach, not a tactical nuclear bomb. While the judiciary has no enforcement mechanism, meaning that if it gets too obnoxious, the executive can conceivably just refuse to follow its directives – this itself is a component of the Constitution’s checks and balances, not an aberration – it doesn’t make sense to do it now. We don’t want to change the focus from “Democrat judges want to keep gangbanger illegal aliens in America” to “Donald Trump is refusing to obey the courts.” He can keep his H-bomb in his pocket for if and when it becomes clear Justice Roberts will not get a hold on his out-of-control branch.
Still, these tangents aside, every day we’re getting more wins. Agencies are being closed. Bureaucrats are being fired. Contracts are being ended. The left doesn’t know what to do. It can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, and even if it could, the regime media isn’t what it once was. Look at the approval numbers. Trump‘s down a little bit, down to numbers that he would’ve killed for last term. And the Democrats? America is disgusted by them. Hemorrhoids poll better. They have managed to get themselves on the wrong side of every single 80/20 issue there is, and it’s beautiful.
Look, someday, the momentum will slow down. Nothing goes on forever. Everything goes in cycles. We’re going to have bad days and bad weeks. But that’s called “life.” Today, we are winning. We will be winning for the foreseeable future. And we’re setting the foundation for more wins to come.
Do not get blackpilled. Do not get discouraged. The people telling you the sky is falling are lying to you. The sky is where Elon Musk is rescuing the astronauts the government bureaucrats couldn’t bring home.
We’ve got this. Let’s run up the score.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!
Look, you need to keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and the Unredacted podcast every Monday! Plus, some stuff from Larry O’Connor – and a bunch of other stuff. My super-secret email address is kurtschlichter@townhall.com.
