Donald Trump Really Is the Biggest Loser

The Trump administration repeatedly lost in court this week. A federal judge in California ruled that Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act when he deployed federal troops to Los Angeles. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Trump violated the law when he attempted to cut off federal funding to Harvard. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. And a panel of judges from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—the most conservative and reactionary appellate court in the country—ruled that Trump’s targeting of Venezuelans was an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act.  

That’s a lot of losses. Donald Trump continues to be the losingest president, in court, in American history. He is the biggest loser. 

In a normal country, this string of rebukes from courts of law would dominate the news cycle. Editorials and think pieces would abound about why the president can’t seem to follow the law. People would question why the tyrant at the head of the government can’t put two executive sentences together that don’t obviously violate some kind of statutory or constitutional principle. 

In our country, nobody really cares, and we all know why. None of these losses are final. Every single one of these cases will be appealed to the Supreme Court, and we all expect the Supreme Court to reverse these decisions to further the president’s MAGA agenda. Trump also expects that. He’s not even pretending to be chastened by his losses. He’s not firing his lawyers and demanding better service. He’s going to go to the Supreme Court and expecting them to do his bidding, which they almost certainly will. 

The president lost four court cases in a week, and none of it matters. That is the evidence that we’re living in an autocratic dystopia. 

The Bad and the Ugly

• In Trump’s one court win this week, a panel of MAGA judges on the DC Court of Appeals ruled that the president is allowed to rescind $20 billion in environmental funding. The fact that Republicans continue to be allowed to pillage and poison this planet has become my go-to data point to support the proposition that God is dead.
• Trump is going to ask the Supreme Court to throw out the $5 million verdict E. Jean Carroll won against him. Normally, the court wouldn’t weigh in on such a matter, but given that the Republican justices are just there to give Trump what he wants, he knows it’s worth a shot. 
• Politico published an almost farcical excuse for “journalism” this week in the form of an article titled “Chief Justice John Roberts is wary of entering the political fray, his chief political adviser says.” The outlet later changed the title to “…his top adviser says.” But the first version was better because it made the mistake of telling the truth.
• The Supreme Court’s approval rating remains at near-historic lows, so maybe Politico needs to do more sanewashing of the Roberts political agenda. 
• In some happy news, Cardi B won again. She was found “not liable” in a $24 million assault claim that was brought against her by a security guard who made one of the most bogus claims I’ve ever heard. Cardi B is undefeated in court, and I don’t know why fools keep testing her. She is the opposite of Trump. She will dog walk you. 

Inspired Takes

• This is a really thoughtful piece by The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuval about the dangers of trying to out-Trump Trump in the name-calling game. The most important part of her argument, to me, is that if you’re going to talk the talk, you also have to walk the walk. Trump doesn’t just engage in schoolyard insults while desperately seeking the attention his father never gave him (see what I did there). He also takes bold (illegal, unconstitutional, immoral) actions to back up his online bluster. That’s the part that many Democrats who seem eager to get into the insult-comedy business seem to lack. You can’t talk like a dominating dog online and then govern like a scaredy cat. 
• Sometimes I dread reading Gregg Gonsalves in The Nation because he reminds me that the people in charge of public health in this country are psychopaths who will kill us all. But, anyway, his latest piece is about how RFK Jr. is a psychopath who will kill us all. 
• In her new book, Amy Coney Barrett positions herself as a helpless cog in a legal machine that gives her no choice but to rule the way she does, even if she doesn’t like it. As Joe Patrice explains over at Above the Law, her entire act is risible. But it’s an act we’ve seen from every first-year, fascist-curious law student who wants to make a career as a Federalist Society judge.

Worst Argument of the Week

Trump’s latest attempt to institute martial law involves his threat to use non-federalized National Guard troops to police cities in blue states where Black people and Latinos live. His current focus is Chicago. According to Governor J.B. Pritzker, he has threatened to send troops from Texas but not said he will call them up under his personal control.

While this would avoid Trump’s various problems with the Posse Comitatus Act, it would create a new problem. Namely: starting a civil war. 

Trump claims he has authority to call up non-federalized troops to support his policy directives, provided states volunteer the forces. That might be true, but it’s complicated. (Georgetown law professor Steve Vladek does an excellent job of parsing Trump’s questionable legal authority to do this.) Even if he does have the authority to request the troops, he doesn’t have the authority to direct them to another state to conduct law enforcement in that state. He can’t just say, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent state?” and let Texas figure out what to do from there. Sending troops from one state to another over the other state’s objection is an act of war. Trump is essentially threatening to let Texas invade Illinois if Texas Governor Greg Abbott feels like it. 

I hate to bring this up because I’m not Neil Gorsuch, but one state’s invading another state would have been anathema to the people who wrote the Constitution. The whole point of our federalized system, our confederacy of states, is that each state has broad authority to police itself. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly reserves the “police power” of the government to the states. There are only rare cases when the federal government is allowed to usurp that power from the states (and all of them involve foreign invasion), and there is literally no case when one state’s troops are just allowed to show up, uninvited, in another state, and do anything. Texas sending troops to Illinois to get rid of all the immigrants would be the equivalent of New York sending troops to New Jersey to get rid of all the Phillies fans.

Should Texas invade, Illinois would have a couple of legal options. It could sue the Trump administration for its abuse of the National Guard’s power. Or it could sue Texas directly for, you know, invading its sovereign territory. The latter kind of lawsuit would be heard directly by the Supreme Court, because lawsuits between states are among the ones where the court has “original jurisdiction,” meaning that such disputes start and end at the Supreme Court.

Of course, another option would be for Illinois to fight. Pritzker could raise his own National Guard troops, and citizens of Illinois could be enlisted to fight the invaders from Texas.

But… you can see where that leads us. Civil wars start when people are compelled to defend their homes from outsiders who have no right to be there. 

I don’t know how many Texans Gregg Abbott is willing to send to Chicago to die so that some guy fleeing persecution gets deported from a parking lot at Home Depot. But if this keeps up, we’re going to get an answer to that question. 

What I Wrote

The Nation’s Sasha Abramsky asked me “how is it legal?” for Trump to use military lawyers as immigration judges. I said something to the effect of: “It’s not, but the whole [expletive] system is [expletive] broken and we haven’t fixed that for [expletive] reasons.” Then I wrote about it, without the expletives. 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Vikram Murthi wrote a truly brilliant article in The Nation exploring Tom Cruise’s physicality and how his commitment to doing all his own stunts, even in this era of computer-generated special effects, makes him essentially “the last action hero.” Whatever you think about Cruise as a media amalgam or religious weirdo, Murthi’s point is, I believe, undeniable. 

But there’s one aspect of Cruise’s on-screen physical talents Murthi glossed over: Tom Cruise’s running. I watch Cruise’s movies just waiting to see him run. It is perfect. Tom Cruise is the actor greatest at running in cinema history. 

If you watch enough sports, and watch enough movies, you will quickly realize that most actors have no idea how to run. Athletes know how to run; actors can’t even pretend to. There is no actor in all of the Jurassic Park movies who has credibly run away from a dinosaur. There is no actor in any superhero movie who has credibly run at superhuman speeds. Ezra Miller, who plays the freaking Flash in DC movies, functionally has no idea how to run fast (he’s also, by all accounts, a punk). He could be replaced by any Olympic sprinter and all his movies would look better. 

Tom Cruise puts most of these other actors to shame. If you Google “Tom Cruise running,” you will find that there’s basically a cottage industry devoted to dissecting his run, imitating it, and figuring out how he’s learned to do it so well. It’s a deep rabbit hole. 

My belief is that Cruise’s secret is not in his body but in his face. Running is a desperate act. People over the age of 15 run as fast as they can only when they’re under incredible duress.

They’re chasing something, or being chased, and the penalty for failure is such that people push their bodies to their maximum physical speed. Nobody is casually running as fast as they can. Something has happened, usually something very bad, to push them to this limit. 

With Cruise, you can see on his face the bad thing that is happening. “The bomb is on the plane! If I don’t get there as quickly as humanly possible, we’re all dead!” Just go back and watch The Firm. Cruise spends most of the movie in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase; when he takes off and runs out of his law firm with his briefcase, you believe that he is literally running for his life. He’s so committed to the bit that your mind naturally asks, “Why won’t he get rid of the briefcase? It’s slowing him down!” Then, later in the movie, you learn what’s in the briefcase and it all comes together. 

There are other great running actors. Sylvester Stallone’s most famous scene in his long-ass career is, still, running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Will Smith is also great at running, much better than he is at slapping. Jennifer Garner put in serious running work in Alias.

But none of these actors can match Cruise. Maybe everybody else is just weighed down by bad Thetans?

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