The Case

I am not going to tell you Donald Trump is a bad person. I do not know him, and neither do you, and that argument has never once changed anybody’s mind.

I am going to do something narrower. I am going to describe what is in the documents. Financial disclosure forms he signed himself. Court rulings. Government audits. The Federal Reserve. The Government Accountability Office. Republican secretaries of state. And then you can decide what it adds up to.

I am going to tell you when something is unproven, because a few of these things are. If I overstate one, you should throw out all of it, and you would be right to.

Here is the whole thing in one sentence: the presidency became a revenue stream, the people who were supposed to be watching got removed, and the bill went to everybody else.

Start with his own filings, because he signed them.

In his first year back in office, he reported more than two billion dollars in income. Over half of it came from crypto ventures his family launched while he was president. That same year his accounts recorded about twenty-one thousand individual stock trades. The year before, it was roughly eight hundred.

Some of those trades have dates that are hard to look away from. On June eighteenth, a purchase of up to five hundred thousand dollars of Boeing stock. The same day, the Navy awarded Boeing a contract worth up to eight hundred and eighty million. Snopes checked that one and confirmed both things happened on that date.

Two weeks before Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a two hundred and twenty million dollar plan to buy Tasers, his account bought up to five million dollars of the company that makes about ninety percent of the Tasers sold in this country.

And ten days into the term, his brokers started buying the two companies that run immigration detention. Twenty-nine trades. Over the next year, one of those companies’ profits rose nearly seven hundred percent.

That same year was the deadliest year on record for deaths in ICE custody. Forty-seven people. A death rate eleven times what it was in 2022.

Now here is the part I said I would tell you. Nobody has produced evidence that he directed policy to move those stocks. The disclosures report ranges by the month, so no single trade can be matched to a single decision. And the federal conflict-of-interest law that would forbid every bit of this for any other federal employee does not apply to the president.

That is not a loophole he invented. It is one he is the first to use like this.

In August, Trump Media launched a product called the Truth API. What it sells is early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts, before the public sees them. It reportedly costs about a hundred thousand dollars a month, and it is aimed at hedge funds and high-frequency traders.

His posts move markets. That is not disputed by anybody. So the product being sold here is a head start on the president of the United States moving the market.

He controls a trust that owns roughly forty percent of that company. Congressman Jamie Raskin, who opened an inquiry into it, called it the depraved essence of insider trading.

And it is not only him. His teleprompter operator, who loads the speeches and therefore knows the words in advance, is believed to have made over a hundred thousand dollars betting on which phrases Trump would say. The betting platform’s own surveillance team caught it and referred it to federal regulators.

On March twenty-third, his accounts bought energy and defense stocks the same day he publicly described talks with Iran as very good. Oil then fell nearly eleven percent.

Then there is what the government itself was selling.

Fourteen of the twenty-seven corporate donors to his four hundred million dollar White House ballroom won more than fifty billion dollars in new or expanded federal contracts within six months. Lockheed Martin alone accounted for about forty-four billion.

He became the first president in modern American history to pardon corporations. Nine of them, erasing roughly two hundred million dollars in penalties. A crypto exchange fined a hundred million for violating money-laundering law simply never paid it.

Across all his clemency grants, about two billion dollars in court-ordered restitution and federal fines was wiped out. One point three billion of that was money owed to fraud victims. They are not getting it.

And in August, the Treasury permanently ended the requirement that American companies disclose who actually owns them, then ordered the ownership records people had already filed to be deleted. A future administration can restore the rule. Nobody can restore the records.

If you hunt, fish, hike, or graze cattle on public land, this part is yours.

An amendment to the budget bill would have mandated the sale of up to three million acres of public land across the West, with most of the money going toward tax cuts. Hunting and angling groups killed it. Not environmentalists. Hunters.

The Forest Service is closing fifty-seven of its seventy-seven research stations and moving its headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City. The chief running that reorganization is the first person to hold the job who never worked for the agency. He came from one of the largest lumber producers in the country. Nine months in, he signed an agreement to roughly double federal timber sales in that company’s home state.

I will give you the other side of that one, because it exists. Utah is where most Forest Service land actually is. Colorado’s Democratic governor welcomed the research consolidation in his state. Firefighting was explicitly left alone. It is not a cartoon.

But the shape underneath it is the one you have already heard twice tonight. A decision gets made, and somebody standing close to that decision does very well out of it.

He said foreign countries pay the tariffs. The Federal Reserve studied it and found that tariffs caused the entirety of the excess inflation in consumer goods, passed through dollar for dollar. A Fed and Columbia study put the American share of the cost at about ninety-four percent. Estimates of what that costs a household run between fourteen hundred and seventeen hundred dollars a year.

Without the tariffs, the Fed found, consumer goods prices would have fallen below where they were before the pandemic.

Meanwhile the Treasury is paying about three billion dollars a day just in interest on the debt. Net interest now costs more than Medicare, and more than Medicaid.

So that is the trade. You paid more at the register, the country pays more in interest, and the people who wrote checks for the ballroom got fifty billion dollars in contracts.

In November of 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It requires the Justice Department to release the files. It is not a request. It is a law, and the president signed it.

In April, the acting Attorney General went on Fox News and said the Department had released all of the Epstein files. The Department’s own records showed about three and a half million pages out of six million. Roughly half. Congressman Thomas Massie, a Republican, said he had thirty days to release the rest before becoming criminally liable.

In June, a federal judge ruled the Department had effectively conceded it was violating that law. The judge’s words were that the Attorney General has conceded that he is in violation of the Act. He gave them a week to remove the redactions or justify them.

And in February, NPR and the New York Times reported that the Department had withheld more than fifty pages concerning a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was thirteen. The FBI interviewed her four times. One summary was released, the one about Epstein. The three about Trump were missing.

I want to be exact here, because this is the easiest place in the whole talk to go too far. That allegation has not been proven in any court. What is documented is narrower and, I would argue, bad enough on its own: a law was passed requiring disclosure, and the records specifically concerning the president are the records that did not come out.

Here is who was making those decisions.

Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney. He defended him in his New York criminal trial. Then he was made Deputy Attorney General, and then acting Attorney General of the United States, and then nominated to hold the job permanently.

A former Justice Department official put it this way: Blanche has never stopped seeing himself as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

In May he testified under oath to the Senate that he had met with Epstein survivors. The next day, eighteen of them issued a joint statement saying he had not met with any of them.

When his nomination reached the Senate, Epstein survivors filmed a public service announcement asking senators to vote no. The New York City Bar Association formally opposed him and called him unfit.

Set aside what you think of Trump for a second and just hold the structure in your head. The president’s personal defense lawyer is running the department that decides what to investigate, what to charge, and which files about the president stay sealed.

Before we leave the files, look at what happened to the people who wanted them out.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House four hundred and twenty-seven to one. That is close to unanimous in a chamber that cannot agree on anything. Trump opposed it and pushed Republicans to vote no anyway.

The two members who led the effort were Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had been one of his loudest defenders in Congress, joined them.

Greene says Trump called her, and that her staff heard it. She says he told her that if the files came out, my friends will get hurt. She also says he told her the Epstein survivors had not done anything to earn the honor of visiting the Oval Office. He then called her, publicly, wacky, a ranting lunatic, and a traitor.

Massie lost his primary in May, fifty-five to forty-five, to a Trump-endorsed challenger. The Secretary of Defense personally campaigned against him, which is not a thing Secretaries of Defense do. Days earlier, Senator Bill Cassidy, who had voted to convict Trump after the second impeachment, lost his primary runoff too.

So the record is this. A near-unanimous law demanding the files. A president who told his party to vote against it, whose Attorney General then said everything had been released when half of it had not, whose department a judge found to be violating the law, and whose two most prominent Republican critics on the subject are now out of Congress or out of favor.

So what has that department been doing?

It indicted James Comey a second time. The charge was that an Instagram photograph of seashells arranged on a beach constituted a threat against the president. Two counts, ten years each. The indictment was signed by Todd Blanche.

NOTUS reported that the FBI runs a team that people inside the bureau call the payback squad, building cases against Trump’s political opponents. A senior FBI official confirmed the team exists under the formal name Director’s Advisory Team, and disputed the nickname.

The Justice Department is also running what CBS News calls the largest campaign to strip Americans of their citizenship in modern history. Nearly ninety denaturalization cases filed since the start of this year, with officials aiming for at least two hundred and fifty by October. The Biden administration filed about twenty-four in four years.

And then there is the lawsuit he filed against himself. In January he sued the IRS for ten billion dollars, personally, over the leak of his tax returns. The IRS is in the executive branch he runs. The Justice Department negotiating against him is also in the executive branch he runs. A federal judge flagged the obvious problem: there are supposed to be two sides.

It settled in May. The Justice Department created a one point seven seven six billion dollar fund to compensate people it deems were wrongfully targeted, and a separately signed addendum barred the IRS from ever auditing his past returns. The Treasury’s top lawyer resigned over it. At least twenty-five Republican senators broke with him publicly. The Senate Majority Leader said he was, quote, not a big fan.

When twenty-five Republican senators tell you a thing has gone too far, that is not a partisan objection anymore.

Every piece of reporting in this article is the kind of thing he calls fake news. So it is worth looking at what his government does to the people who produce it.

In September he banned three news organizations from the White House. CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. He announced it on Truth Social in the afternoon, and the next morning the Secret Service collected their reporters’ badges at the security kiosk. A CNN correspondent who has covered that building since 2018 was told her pass had been deactivated and that there was no further information. He named no article and no story. He said the ban could be lifted if the outlets straightened themselves out.

There is a case that governs this. Sherrill v. Knight, from 1977, says that once the White House opens its doors to reporters it cannot throw them back out over the content of their coverage, and that taking a credential requires notice, a chance to respond, and a decision in writing. The reporters got none of those three things. The officers who took the badges referred them to a press office that has said nothing.

Asked how the ban squared with his oath of office, he said it was because they are fake news, and you get so tired of reading and seeing fake news. Asked whether it would survive a court challenge, he said he did not think a court should allow fake news to be written day after day after day. He said the ban would go as far as you can, and that other outlets would follow.

One correction, because an earlier version of this page got something wrong. I wrote that the phrase ban on the free press belonged to the correspondents’ association, and that he did not say it. The transcript of that Oval Office session shows he did. A reporter asked what the ban would look like, there was crosstalk, and he answered, oh, the ban on the free press, right, a very simple ban. He seems to have been repeating a phrase thrown at him rather than choosing it, and you should weigh it that way. But the words are his, they are quoted in the lawsuit, and I told you they were not.

The objection to it was not partisan. The White House Correspondents’ Association, whose president is Fox News’s senior White House correspondent, defended them. Ari Fleischer, who was George W. Bush’s press secretary, said he agreed several outlets covering the building are biased and unfair, and that banning them is still not the solution. His reason was one sentence long. Or one day they’ll ban us.

Three days later the three outlets sued him, on due process and First Amendment grounds. The case went to Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who in 2018 ordered Trump’s own White House to give a CNN correspondent his pass back. The night before, the White House had pulled CNN from its turn as the television pool, the crew whose footage every other network and more than a thousand local stations rely on. And that morning he offered a reason he had not mentioned before. He wrote that he was not assaulting the free press, which he said he cherishes, only the fake news, which is a threat to our national security and must be stopped, now.

Then the other networks answered. The television pool is chaired right now by Fox News’s Washington bureau chief, and he told the other members that the pool would not cover the president’s pool events and that there would be no replacement for CNN. Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN said together that no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting. They kept covering him with their own crews. They just would not do it on terms that excluded one of their own. The first event without them was the opening of a new helipad, and on the White House’s own livestream the helicopter drowned him out.

That was September. It did not come out of nowhere.

In April, Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Melania. Five days later the FCC ordered Disney to file license-renewal applications for every television station it owns, two years early. License revocation is a power the FCC has not used in more than forty years. The trigger was a joke.

In February, CBS lawyers told Stephen Colbert’s staff, in no uncertain terms, that he could not broadcast an interview with a Democratic Senate candidate, and told him not to discuss it on air. He discussed it on air anyway. CBS cited the FCC equal-time rule, from which late-night comedy had been exempt for decades, after the FCC chairman sent a letter suggesting the exemption no longer applies to shows he considers partisan.

And the FBI investigated a New York Times reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, for writing about the SWAT escorts the FBI director’s girlfriend was receiving. Agents ran her through databases and recommended stalking charges, for what they described as aggressive reporting techniques. Justice Department officials internally called it retaliation and shut it down. The FBI confirmed the investigation happened.

Then there is how he talks to reporters, and specifically which reporters. In November, aboard Air Force One, a Bloomberg reporter named Catherine Lucey asked him about the Epstein files. He told her, quiet, piggy.

That is not an isolated thing and it is not new. Megyn Kelly, blood coming out of her wherever. Mika Brzezinski, bleeding badly from a face-lift. Carly Fiorina, look at that face, would anyone vote for that. It goes back a decade, and the pattern in it is not subtle.

You have already met the president’s personal defense lawyer running the Justice Department, and the man with no intelligence background running intelligence. They are not exceptions.

The official leading the federal government’s response to a hantavirus outbreak is an Alabama urologist who specializes in penile implants and hosts a YouTube series called Erection Connection. Before his appointment he had promoted coronavirus conspiracy theories.

Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming she had rigged the jobs numbers. His nominee to replace her was a Heritage Foundation economist who had been at the Capitol on January the sixth, and who had previously suggested the Bureau stop publishing monthly jobs reports altogether. The nomination was withdrawn.

Think about what that second one actually proposes. The jobs numbers came out wrong for him, so the person he wanted running the agency was someone who thought the country should get those numbers four times a year instead of twelve.

The pattern is not that these people are conservative. Plenty of qualified conservatives exist. The pattern is that the qualification being tested for is something other than competence.

There is a thing you have to be willing to say now, to hold a senior job in this government.

In May, the acting Attorney General of the United States told Fox News there is a ton of evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. He also conceded the Department has not released any of it, despite it supposedly existing for many, many years.

In July, Trump replaced his intelligence chief with Bill Pulte, who has no intelligence background, and dozens of intelligence officials began receiving termination notices. Trump said he expected Pulte to find out some things about the rigged elections. The previous director had spent about eighteen months trying to substantiate those claims and found nothing.

And in May, four of his judicial nominees sat in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and were asked a direct question: does the 22nd Amendment bar this president from a third term? Not one of them would say yes. One said he would have to review the actual wording.

I am not going to tell you there is a written loyalty oath, because I have not seen one and I am not going to invent it. What I can tell you is what the record shows. Saying the last election was stolen is now compatible with running the Justice Department. And affirming a plain sentence in the Constitution has apparently become optional for people who want to be federal judges.

None of what follows makes sense without the thing underneath it, so here is the thing underneath it.

He lost an election in 2020 and said he had not. Dozens of lawsuits by his campaign and his allies were dismissed. His own Attorney General, William Barr, said the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome. An Associated Press investigation of the six battleground states found fewer than four hundred and seventy-five potential cases of fraud, in an election of a hundred and fifty-eight million votes.

He called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and asked him to find votes. He spoke at the Ellipse on January the sixth. A federal judge ruled last year that the speech, the Georgia call, and his posts that day were all acts of a man running for office rather than acts of a president, which is why he cannot claim immunity for them.

Then, on his first day back in office, he pardoned about fifteen hundred people connected to that day. That included leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy. It included more than six hundred people convicted of assaulting police officers, and a hundred and seventy convicted of using deadly weapons. It erased an estimated one point three billion dollars in restitution. The Capitol Police condemned it.

Hold that next to the rest of this. The man who pardoned six hundred people for assaulting police is the same man whose Justice Department indicted James Comey over a photograph of seashells.

Which brings us to the elections themselves.

In February, at a rally in Georgia, he said that eliminating mail-in ballots means Republicans will not lose a race for fifty years. That is not my characterization of his motive. That is his stated reason, out loud, at a podium.

He also said Republicans should take over the voting, and named Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta as corrupt. Then denied on camera that he had used the word nationalize, two days after being recorded saying it. Asked whether he would accept the midterm results, he said he would, if the elections are honest. And if not, something else.

He signed an executive order putting the federal government inside mail voting and directing agencies to build federal lists of who is eligible to vote. Courts have blocked pieces of it repeatedly. The judge overseeing one case noted that the administration offered no evidence of mail-ballot fraud, against what she called an overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement.

His Justice Department sued roughly thirty states demanding their voter files, and lost twenty-one straight cases. Twelve of those losses came from judges appointed by Republicans.

In Louisiana, the Republican governor suspended the state’s congressional primaries by executive order. Not moved them. Suspended them.

And then Georgia audited its own voter rolls. Georgia, run by a Republican secretary of state, in a state Trump has attacked for six years. Seven point nine million registrations. More than ninety-nine point nine percent accurate. The errors they did find traced back to coding mistakes at the Department of Driver Services. Not fraud. The DMV.

Nearly two dozen states have now run reviews like that one. They keep finding the same thing.

None of this has been abstract for everybody.

The United States lost its measles elimination status after twenty-five years. And the official American measles death toll for this year is zero, because when Pennsylvania reported its first measles deaths in three decades, Reuters reported that the Health Secretary personally asked the CDC director to take them off the national tally. The department says that report is false. The deaths are still not on the tally.

Deportation flights to Haiti now run weekly, carrying US-born children to a country the FAA considers too dangerous for American civilian aircraft to fly over.

And we are nearly seven months into a war with Iran that Congress never authorized. Eighteen American service members dead, by the Pentagon’s own public count. Forty-five billion dollars, by its own estimate, which leaves out the damage to American bases. Three combatant commanders and the Chief of Naval Operations formally put their objections in writing. The president called it, and I am quoting him, a relatively little war.

In April he announced a deadline and said this: a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. More than a hundred legal experts signed an open letter saying the threat described a war crime. Former military lawyers said the orders ran counter to decades of legal training and were plainly illegal.

On September second, an American missile hit a fisherman’s house in southern Iran during his daughter’s wedding. Four people died. One of them was four years old.

I want to spend a little time on something smaller, because it tells you something the big numbers do not.

In December he installed bronze plaques along the White House colonnade, under the portraits of the other presidents. He is reported to have written many of them himself. The plaque under Joe Biden calls him Sleepy Joe Biden and the worst President in American History. Biden’s portrait was replaced with a photograph of an autopen machine. The plaque under Barack Obama calls him one of the most divisive political figures in American history.

For the country’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the State Department is issuing a commemorative passport with his face and his gold signature inside the cover. He is the first living president ever put on an American passport.

And once you start counting the things he has put his name or his face on, it is difficult to stop.

The money, first. The Mint has drawn up designs for a one dollar coin with his likeness on both sides, breaking more than a century of precedent against putting living people on American currency. The Treasury has designed a two hundred and fifty dollar bill with his face, which the Treasury Secretary confirmed, saying we have to be prepared. In the same stretch, the department quietly abandoned the Harriet Tubman twenty, which would have made her the first Black woman on American paper money.

Then the map. The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America. In August he renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America by executive order, and gave the Interior Department thirty days to remove every federal reference to the old name from every map, contract, and document. His own comment on it was this: we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we will have to change the name of the Atlantic.

Then the buildings and the ships. Palm Beach International Airport is now President Donald J. Trump International Airport. It dropped the airport code it had used for decades, PBI, and took the code DJT. The rebrand cost two point seven five million dollars, and the airport sits about five miles from Mar-a-Lago.

The Navy is working to strip the name Doris Miller off an aircraft carrier and put Trump’s on it instead. Doris Miller was a mess attendant at Pearl Harbor who manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to use while the harbor burned. That ship was going to be the first American carrier named for an enlisted sailor, and the first named for a Black sailor.

The Department of Defense is now the Department of War. Giant banners with his face have gone up on federal buildings, on taxpayer contracts worth a hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars that Senator Adam Schiff turned up, in a country where Congress has barred spending appropriated money on self-aggrandizement for decades. And to build a two hundred and fifty foot triumphal arch in Washington, his Interior Department had to argue that a 1910 law capping buildings in that city at a hundred and thirty feet was never meant to apply to monuments.

And then the merchandise, which is where it stops being funny. He has personally collected a million and a half dollars licensing his name to a God Bless the USA Bible, which is printed in China. Trump Mobile took a hundred dollar deposits for a gold phone that, a year later, still does not exist. And his meme coin: nearly nine hundred and eighty-nine thousand people lost a combined three point eight billion dollars on it, roughly two out of every three buyers, while he collected six hundred and thirty-six million in fees.

None of that hurts anybody. That is exactly why I am telling you about it. Those plaques are in the people’s house, under other men’s faces, and they exist for no reason at all except that he wanted them there.

Except that last one did hurt somebody. Nine hundred thousand somebodies. The vanity and the extraction turn out to be the same machine.

Ask yourself what kind of person spends the anniversary of the republic putting his own face inside your passport.

If you have read this far and you are still inclined to file all of it under partisan noise, this next part is the one I would sit with.

On April the first, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted the words WAR WAR WAR. On April the fifth she said he had gone insane. On April the seventh, after he said a whole civilization would die that night, she posted: twenty-fifth amendment, exclamation points. Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.

Alex Jones asked on his own show how they might invoke the 25th Amendment. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens said versions of the same thing. Senator Ron Johnson, an ally, said he did not want to see the country start blowing up civilian infrastructure.

These are not his critics. These are, or were, some of the most committed defenders he has ever had. They did not turn on him over taxes or immigration or the courts. They turned on him over a threat to kill a civilization overnight, and several of them have since been driven out of the party or attacked by name for it.

One more, and this one is for anybody here who served, or whose kid serves.

The New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than eighty generals and admirals. He has refused to explain the reasoning.

On August thirty-first, the Secretary of the Army resigned in the middle of a war, over that purge. The Army chief of staff had already been fired in the spring. So the largest service in the United States military currently has no Senate-confirmed leadership at all. Not civilian, not uniformed.

And in August, three combatant commanders and the Chief of Naval Operations formally recorded their objections to extending the Iran war. A nonconcur means an officer disagrees with an order and will carry it out anyway. Someone familiar with the assessment summed up the military’s view at the six-month mark as too much, for too long.

These are not activists. These are four-star officers putting their disagreement in writing, in a classified document, which is the only way the system gives them to say no.

Almost everything in this article is about a law. I want to spend a few minutes on the document those laws sit under, because he has run into it more than once, and the record of what happened each time is unusually clean.

On his first day back in office he signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. It was ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship to people who had been enslaved, and the Supreme Court held in 1898 that it covers everyone born on American soil.

Four federal judges blocked the order. One of them, John Coughenour, was put on the bench by Ronald Reagan. He called the order blatantly unconstitutional and said the citizenship clause is one of the most clear provisions in the Constitution.

In April he became the first sitting president to attend oral argument at the Supreme Court. He sat there about ninety minutes while his own appointees took the case apart. Amy Coney Barrett told his lawyer that his reading was not textual and asked how he got there. Neil Gorsuch asked whether Native Americans are birthright citizens under that same test, and the lawyer said he would have to think it through. Chief Justice Roberts said it is a new world, and it is the same Constitution. Trump left abruptly, and posted that America is the only country in the world stupid enough to allow birthright citizenship. In June the Court struck the order down, six to three.

In August he signed two more orders taking a narrower route to the same place. On September the second a federal judge blocked one of them, writing that it is almost certainly unconstitutional for the simple reason that the Supreme Court already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth.

In February the Court struck down his tariffs, also six to three, holding that a president cannot use emergency powers to impose import duties without Congress. Roberts wrote that the statute contains no reference to tariffs or duties, and that no president had ever read it to confer such a power.

What he did next is the part worth sitting with, more than the ruling itself. He said he was absolutely ashamed of certain members of the court. He called Gorsuch and Barrett, two of the three he appointed himself, an embarrassment to their families, and fools and lap dogs, and very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. Then, within hours, he signed a new order imposing the same kind of tariff under a different statute, and said plainly that the point was to get around the decision. The next day he raised it to fifteen percent, the maximum that statute allows.

And when an order is simply disobeyed, here is what that turns out to be worth. In March of 2025 a federal judge ordered deportation flights turned around. They were not turned around, and a hundred and thirty-seven Venezuelan men were delivered to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. CBS News later found most of them had no criminal record. The judge opened a criminal contempt inquiry. A year later an appeals panel shut that inquiry down, two to one, and both judges in the majority were appointed by Trump. The dissent ran eighty pages. Its author wrote that contempt of court is a public offense, and that the fate of our democratic republic will depend on whether we treat it as such.

His Justice Department has also begun declaring laws unconstitutional by itself. In April it issued a fifty-two page opinion concluding that the Presidential Records Act, the post-Watergate law making presidential records the property of the public, intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the president, and that he need not further comply with it. This is the same man who was indicted on forty felony counts for taking about three hundred classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.

Now the other side of this, because there is one and it cuts against the way I have been telling it. The courts have not only been stopping him. In June the Supreme Court ruled that he may fire the members of independent agencies at will, and overruled a unanimous 1935 precedent that had protected them for ninety years. Roberts wrote that subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him. That is a permanent enlargement of the office. It was handed to him rather than taken by him, and whoever sits in that chair next will have it too. Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, which justices do rarely and deliberately, and said the decision gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown.

So the honest summary is not that the Constitution stopped him. It is that he has tested it in public, repeatedly, and that on the occasions it held, he said the judges who held it were disloyal, and went around them the same afternoon.

Every single thing I have described is supposed to have somebody watching it. So look at what happened to the watchers.

Seventeen inspectors general were fired on the first day, without the notice to Congress that federal law requires. The Justice Department unit created after Watergate to prosecute public corruption went from about thirty-six career lawyers down to two.

And in March, V-Dem, the largest democracy-measurement project in the world, downgraded the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral autocracy. Our ranking went from twentieth in the world to fifty-first. In one year. That is the steepest single-year decline they have ever recorded for this country.

They are not an American political organization. They are researchers at a Swedish university who have been scoring every country on earth the same way for decades.

Here is what I am not asking. I am not asking you to like anybody else. I am not asking you to change what you believe about taxes, or the border, or abortion, or guns, or anything else you walked in here with.

I am asking one question. If a president you did not vote for had done these exact things, in this order, with these numbers, would you have accepted it?

If your honest answer is no, then the problem was never the party. It was the conduct. And a standard that only applies to the other side is not a standard. It is a team.

Everything I just said traces back to a document you can pull up yourself tonight. Financial disclosures. Court rulings. A Republican secretary of state’s own audit. Not one word of it depends on you trusting me.

Go check it. That is the whole point.