Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump taxes (tariffs) are illegal, but it’s not going to make one whit of difference because in the ruling, they said the way Trump enacted the tariffs was illegal, giving him a broad hint that he just needs to do it again in a different way. Which he did immediately, or immediately after he had the expected whine fest that he always has after he hears something he doesn’t like. He had already said he was going to keep doing it well before Friday in case they ruled against him.
The reports are varying on the amount, but Trump put a 10% to 20% global tariff in place. Since the Supreme Court did not say anything about the existing tariffs had to be rolled back, the money given back, or anything else like that, everything imported into the U.S., regardless of where it comes from is now 10% to 20% higher than it had already become.
Prices had been slowly going up since “Liberation Day” in April 2025 as companies tried to figure out how to handle the increased costs and how much they could absorb of those costs before they had no choice but raise prices.
Well, time just ran out. What a lot of companies did between November 2024 and March 2025 was to import as much as they could to avoid the tariffs. November 2025 is when those stockpiles started running out. Some companies announced this week they’re at the “we’ve got no choice anymore” point. Their prices are going up and they’re going up significantly.
Oh, and one company that is the top manufacturer of brass musical instruments in the U.S., whose head honcho is a big supporter of Trump, said this week he’s moving manufacturing to China. He’s still really a big supporter of Trump, but not so much that he doesn’t see the advantage of the lower costs of Chinese-made products and will go to the expense of having everything done there instead of keeping it here in the U.S. He needs to make sure he sets aside money for changing the branding from “Made in the USA” to “Made in China”. Or, maybe he’ll go the “Assembled in the USA” route.
A couple months ago, Trump ordered a team to go into Venezuela and extract its leader. It didn’t take long for his reason to change from there was just so much drugs flowing out of that country to he wanted the oil. It will make oil prices cheaper, he said. U.S. oil companies will be able to make use of the refineries, he said. And so they don’t have to be out of pocket too long, the U.S. government will reimburse the U.S. oil companies for the billions of dollars they will have to spend over the next several years to rebuild the infrastructure necessary to make use of the oil there. While this is going on, Trump will “run” Venezuela while still running the U.S.
Guess which other country is a significant producer of oil? Guess which country to which Trump has said “bad things will happen” if they don’t get their act together with their nuclear program"? Guess which country Trump ended a nuclear deal with during his first term that would have meant their nuclear program would have been a lot more palatable and beneficial to the world today?
If you said Iran to all of those, you’d be correct. In another example out of the Republican playbook of “say something is a problem and then create the circumstances to make it a problem and then say, ‘See, we told you it was a problem’”, Trump is moving military assets towards Iran. The “anti-war” president who campaigned on being anti-war, yet quickly changed the name of the Department of Defense to “Department of War”, who created a “Board of Peace” with a $1B to $5B buy-in to be a part of, is making noises like he’s going to attack Iran. The duck is quacking a lot louder this time and it won’t be a small team that goes in and extracts Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or President Masoud Pezeshkian. It will be more than that, and we’ll see how quickly his reason for attacking them changes from taking out a rogue nuclear power to it’s really about the oil.
The bright spot in all of this is more Republicans in the House have said they’re not seeking reelection this year and some decided they’re getting out while the gettin’s good. One of those is Marjorie Taylor Green, who quit on January 5th, one day before the five year anniversary of the attack in the U.S. capitol by Trump’s supporters. She’s decided to go scorched earth on Donald Trump when it comes to the Epstein files.
She said Charlie Kirk being killed made her take a look at what was going on and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like that Trump had turned his back on Republicans. She didn’t like how Epstein’s victims were being treated during this time of demands for the files to be released and the constant excuses coming from the DOJ about “we already released everything” suddenly becoming “oops, we found more files so we need more time” and “oops, we redacted the wrong things”. She wants them released and she wants them released now.
But don’t get her wrong. She still supports Trump. And she’s yet to apologize in any meaningful way for her own past poor behavior, like harassing another member of Congress so much that person had to move to a different office to get away from her. Or anything else she’s said. But now she’s turned over a new leaf and is a brand new person and is getting brownie points from all the right people for standing up to Trump. Who she still supports.
With all of the people who are leaving this year, the traditional “whichever party gets the Presidency loses the House in the mid-terms” is looking more like Republicans are going to lose the House by a lot. It’s getting bad enough for Trump and the GOP that the Senate flipping to a Democrat majority is a possibility when it wasn’t even being thought of a few months ago.
However, don’t count those chickens until they hatch. The U.S. Post Office said not long ago that they could no longer guarantee that mail would be postmarked the day it’s deposited. So mail-in ballots that are dropped off the day of an election might not be processed until later, making them ineligible to be counted. With Trump still firmly opposed to mail-in ballots, it would be to his benefit if ballots just happened to not get postmarked on election days.
Trump’s looking at other ways to influence the November election. If you don’t think so, remember two things.
First is he’s built his image on always being a winner and using the word “loser” as an attack on others. Even though he’s not on the ballot in November, he’s on the ballot in November because the GOP has no identity separate from him. They can’t because they don’t want to lose his support and of his supporters. So if a Republican loses, he’ll switch to his usual “I knew they were a bad person all along” tactic, but it still counts to a vote against him.
The second is what he said about voting in 2024. At the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on on July 26, 2024, he said:
"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.
“I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
During the 2024 campaign, he said:
“I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.”
He immediately turned it into a joke, but if you look at Trump’s life and behavior, when he repeats things, he isn’t joking.
And then you have what he said on December 5, 2023 in response to Democrat concerns about the U.S. turning into an autocracy if he won in 2025:
- When asked if he would become a dictator, he said “No. No. Other than day one.”
- He was asked twice about confirming he would not use presidential power to seek revenge on political opponents. He did not say he wouldn’t.
Which country has all of the hallmarks of turning into an autocracy since November 2024? The United States of America.
