Yesterday, I wrote that Trump’s week had already started out very badly, with federal judges knocking him back on the questions of immunity and civil liability for January 6 and rejecting his beloved but entirely unauthorized ballroom.
And I surmised that his day was going to get a lot worse, once oral arguments on his birthright citizenship executive order began.
I wasn’t wrong on that point. The day delivered more than just another SCOTUS-level humiliation, as Trump once again managed to make things worse for himself and his regime.
The Wong Kim Ark of the universe is long
Yesterday began with Trump attending the SCOTUS oral argument on his plainly unconstitutional order banning birthright citizenship. Most observers expected him to lose; the only question was by how many votes. After all, birthright citizenship was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Wong Kim Ark case in 1898, and no one until Trump and Miller has ever seriously sought to question it.
Trump’s attendance was a presidential first, but as Sherrilyn Ifill, a Howard University law professor and former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, pointed out,
“President Trump did show up and sat discreetly in the back. I think it was a good lesson for him—there are just places in which he is very small.”
If Trump thought his presence might intimidate the justices, there was little evidence of that.
Indeed, in response to Solicitor General John Sauer’s statement that we’re in a “new world” where “eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a US citizen,” Trump got to hear Chief Justice John Roberts respond with a line for the ages: “It’s a new world, it’s the same Constitution.”
Even Justice Amy Coney Barrett, his most recent appointee, wasn’t buying it. At one point she observed that we can’t know the “domicile” of the parents of a U.S. born baby, as the White House demands, if we don’t know who the parents are.
His most controversial appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wondered aloud whether this could be quite a short opinion if the Court simply affirmed Wong Kim Ark. The lawyer for the ACLU, Cecillia Wang, grabbed the moment and declared “yes”—to laughter from the attendees.
And in one of the most embarrassing moments for the regime, Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch stumped the U.S. solicitor general, who couldn’t quickly answer whether Native Americans would be entitled to birthright citizenship under the White House’s proposed test.
Pro-tip: Showing up to a Supreme Court oral argument about birthright citizenship and not preparing for a basic question about Native Americans from Justice Gorsuch is like going into an interview with Kevin Costner without knowing anything about Dances with Wolves or his 500 Nations documentary.
Wait, you released the video feed?!
Trump snuck out midway through to attend a private Easter lunch event at the White House. The lunch featured several eyebrow-raising moments, including when his Senior Faith Advisor Paula White-Cain drew a direct comparison between Trump and Jesus.
“Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” she declared, “It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.”
As The Independent noted, this produced a quick backlash among Christians. Catholic theologian Rich Raho labeled it “Blasphemous” and added, “It’s stunning to see a U.S. Bishop standing right there on the stage while Paula White compares Trump to Jesus Christ.”
But the day was just getting started. Apparently emboldened to speak freely among his closest supporters, Trump promptly stepped in it by suggesting that the federal government should no longer fund big social programs, and that the states should instead raise their taxes to pay for them.
Recalling what he’d said to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, Trump said, “I told him, ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare.’ That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people.”
“We’re fighting wars,” he emphasized, pairing one of his most unpopular moves with the threatened loss of social services. “We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.
Then came the price tag. “They should pay,” Trump said of the states. “They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up.”
And Trump, unsatisfied with the hole he’d dug, went further, threatening the foundational social safety nets of Medicaid and Medicare in favor of more military spending.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place … you have to let states take care of them.”
The White House then accidentally posted the video feed from that speech on YouTube. They took it down quickly—but not before Democrats grabbed copies for midterm ads.
Goin’ ‘round committin’ war crimes
Last night, a clearly struggling Trump delivered a 19-minute rambling, lie-filled speech justifying the Iran war. As the New York Times summarized (because honestly it hurts my own head to listen to him again):
The end of the war. Trump offered no clear timeline for ending the war, saying that “discussions are ongoing” but that in the meantime, the bombing would continue. “We are going to hit them extremely hard,” he said. “Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
The economy. “Remarkably, Trump barely acknowledged the economic consequences of his war, as Americans around the country continue to feel the sting of high gas prices,” wrote economic reporter Tony Romm. Trump simply said, “This is a true investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future.”
Iran’s remaining nuclear material. Trump is in no hurry to retrieve the material after bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. As David Sanger noted, “Perhaps this is deception, and he will attempt to seize that cache. If not, he will have left the nuclear material exactly where it was before the war started — underground, and within Iran’s reach.”
The Strait of Hormuz. It’s not America’s problem, Trump said, because our oil and gas does not move through it. To those who depend on oil moving through the Strait, Trump said. “We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.”
Now you’re caught up, except for one last point. Trump also threatened to commit war crimes by blowing up Iran’s electric power facilities unless it agreed to a deal soon. Should he carry out this order, he would be no better than Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, who has illegally targeted dams, power plants and utility transmissions to inflict misery upon the civilian population.
The morning after his speech, stocks tumbled and crude oil futures topped $110 per barrel, up over 10 percent, where they remain as of the time of this writing. Art of the deal, indeed!
Reminds me of Monty Python: “The flogging will continue until morale improves”
I literally cannot hear that war criminal's voice without experiencing visceral anger