The Dictatorship

Trump says US would be on ‘brink of economic catastrophe’ unless justices rule his tariffs are legal

Published

10 months ago

September 5, 2025

Trump says US would be on ‘brink of economic catastrophe’ unless justices rule his tariffs are legal

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is seeking a swift and definitive decision on tariffs from the Supreme Court that he helped shape, saying the country would be on “the brink of economic catastrophe” without the import taxes he has imposed on U.S. rivals and allies alike.

The administration used near-apocalyptic terms that are highly unusual in Supreme Court filings as it asked the justices late Wednesday to intervene and reverse an appeals court ruling that found most of Trump’s tariffs are an illegal use of an emergency powers law. The tariffs remain in place, for now.

The Supreme Court Building is seen in Washington on March 28, 2017. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

The case comes to a court that has so far been reluctant to check Trump’s extraordinary flex of executive power. One big question is whether the justices’ own expansive view of presidential authority allows for Trump’s tariffs without the explicit approval of Congress, which the Constitution endows with the power over tariffs. Three of the justices on conservative-majority court were nominated by Trump in his first term.

The tariffs and their erratic rollout have shaken global markets, alienated U.S. trading partners and allies, and raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth.

But the Republican president has also used the trade penalties to pressure the European Union, Japan and others into accepting new deals. Revenue from tariffs totaled $159 billion by late August, more than double what it was at the same point a year earlier.

Raising the stakes even higher, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to decide in a week’s time whether to hear the case and hold arguments the first week of November. That is far faster than the pace of the typical Supreme Court case.

“The President and his Cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe,” Sauer wrote.

President Donald Trump speaks about the relocation of U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

He wrote that it is not just trade that is at issue, but also the nation’s ability to reduce the flow of fentanyl and efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The tariffs will almost certainly remain in effect until a final ruling from the Supreme Court. But the Republican administration nevertheless called on the high court to intervene quickly and reverse the ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

“That decision casts a pall of uncertainty upon ongoing foreign negotiations that the President has been pursuing through tariffs over the past five months, jeopardizing both already negotiated framework deals and ongoing negotiations,” Sauer wrote. “The stakes in this case could not be higher.”

The filing cites not only Trump but also the secretaries of the departments of Treasury, Commerce and State in support of the urgent need for the justices to step in.

“The recent decision by the Federal Circuit is already adversely affecting ongoing negotiations,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote.

The stakes are also high for small businesses battered by tariffs and uncertainty, said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center.

“These unlawful tariffs are inflicting serious harm on small businesses and jeopardizing their survival. We hope for a prompt resolution of this case for our clients,” he said.

The businesses have twice prevailed, once at a federal court focused on trade and again with the appeals court’s 7-4 ruling. Their lawsuit is one of several challenging the tariffs.

Most judges on the Federal Circuit found that the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, does not allow Trump to usurp congressional power to set tariffs. The dissenters, though, said the gives the president the power to regulate importation during emergencies without explicit limitations.

The ruling involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency: the tariffs first announced in April and the ones from February on imports from Canada, China and Mexico.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose taxes, including tariffs. But over the decades, lawmakers have ceded authority to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.

Some Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos, were not covered by the appeals court ruling. It also does not include tariffs Trump imposed on China in his first term that were kept by Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump can impose tariffs under other laws, but those have more limitations on the speed and severity with which he could act.

The government has argued that if the tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it’s collected, delivering a financial blow to the U.S. Treasury.

The tariffs are expected to reduce deficits by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, the administration said, citing analyses by the Congressional Budget Office.

In an analysis from June, the CBO also found that the import taxes would slow growth and increase price pressures. The June analysis estimated that inflation would be 0.4% higher annually in 2025 and 2026 than it otherwise would be, hurting the purchasing power of U.S. consumers and businesses.

Trump has since revised and changed his tariff structure, making some of the estimates speculative.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned in an August speech that tariffs are already pushing up the prices of some goods, but “there is significant uncertainty about where all of these polices will eventually settle and what their lasting effects on the economy will be.”

___

Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

The Dictatorship

How Trump’s first-year blitzkrieg stalled out

Published

16 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 21, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

After President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, he signed a series of executive orders designed to reshape America’s political landscape. The waves of action from the White House deluged the press, put elected Democrats off balance and left liberal groups scrambling to respond. “When you’re winning, it’s like blitzkrieg,” longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon crowed to The Washington Post early last year. The president’s opponents, Bannon said, were “surrendering without a fight.”

By blowing up so many norms and taking on so many battles at once, the Trump administration created the very shrapnel that has slowed its efforts.

A year and a half later, what seemed like a relentless flood from the White House has weakened to a trickle. New reporting from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan shows that fears of overreach expressed inside the administration proved prescient; the multifront assault has proved vulnerable to counterattack — and in many ways it has been abandoned by the commander in chief. By blowing up so many norms and taking on so many battles at once, the Trump administration created the very shrapnel that has slowed its efforts. The “blitzkrieg” has stalled out.

According to Haberman and Swan, at least one senior staffer worried about a White House strategy reminiscent of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and an archconservative lawyer, reportedly had misgivings about efforts within the administration to flex its muscles to further its anti-immigration agenda. Last spring, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller publicly suggested that Trump could suspend habeas corpus for migrants seeking hearings challenging their detention. Later, as protests raged against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s heavy-handed raids, internal debate bubbled up again over whether to invoke the Insurrection Act to shut down the demonstrations.

In each of these moments, Scharf drafted memos to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles explaining the ways that these aggressive moves might well backfire. (MS NOW has not independently confirmed Haberman and Swan’s reporting but has reviewed the memos that the Times published.) The memos themselves resemble anodyne briefing memos that any lawyer could produce for decision-makers. But the carefully worded drafts are a major departure from the bombastic phrasing in legal filings that we’ve come to expect from this administration.

Scharf’s memos express concerns about, as the Times put it, “actions that promised Mr. Trump quick results but kept producing costly entanglements in court.” In a memo written last October, after the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the National Guard to Illinois, Scharf’s warning was remarkably direct. He wrote that while the act provides broad powers to the president, “it is likely that any invocation of the Act would result in vigorous litigation potentially obviating any advantage to be gained in terms of the flexibility that it would provide to the President.”

Trump neither suspended habeas nor invoked the Insurrection Act. But time has shown that Scharf and other skeptics were right to worry about how bold moves could become self-inflicted wounds. The administration already has racked up a wild number of court losses on many of its most daring gambits, and dozens of cases remain open. The departures of thousands of experienced Justice Department lawyers certainly hasn’t helped matters, nor have the unconvincing slapdash efforts to twist the law’s meaning to fit the administration’s preferred narratives.

As the unpopularity of the Trump agenda grew, already bumpy terrain became a major slog, especially after the president launched a war against Iran in late February. The conflict has theoretically ended, but there are no details on what, if anything, has been gained, aside from a clear legacy of higher prices. Focus on the war has likewise sapped any political capital that the White House may have hoped to spend in preserving Republican majorities in Congress in this fall’s midterms.

Any remaining momentum in reshaping the government has ground to a near halt with the president’s focus on his own vanity projects.

Any remaining momentum in reshaping the government has ground to a near halt with the president’s focus on his own vanity projects. Although they’re still corrupt overreaches in their own way, Trump’s plans to gild equine statues around Washington and paint the bottom of the reflecting pool blue don’t rise to the same level as deploying the U.S. Army against protesters. As My colleague Zeeshan Aleem recently noted, “having started a disastrous, failed war of choice and holding record-low approval numbers, Trump has retreated to party planning and interior decorating.”

There are clearly portions of the initial “flood the zone” agenda that are still chugging forward. Mass deportation efforts remain ongoing in the background, though ICE has yet to release updated arrest data since scaling back its more attention-grabbing operations in late January. Likewise, the administration continues to undercut Congress and wage Trump’s retribution campaign against his enemies. Federal departments and agencies out of step with the MAGA ethos remain under threat, as new efforts to downsize the Education Department Tuesday show. And the Supreme Court is still due to weigh in on several cases that could further empower the executive branch.

But the radical period of transformation that those around Trump hoped to foster has not come to pass. There has been simply too much resistance for the administration to fully overwhelm the system. There is no time for Trump’s foes to let down their defenses, however. The retrenchment we’re seeing from the White House ahead of the midterms could precipitate a renewed campaign next year. But rather than simply accept the oncoming storm as inevitable, there is still time to ensure that in the long term Trump’s sound and fury signify nothing.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.

The Dictatorship

Markwayne Mullin’s investments in the kratom industry look like a clear conflict of interest

Published

16 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 21, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByDonald K. Sherman

What do gas station drugs, conflicts of interest and the Trump administration have in common? Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

A New York Times report earlier this week revealed the significant role Mullin has played in an influence campaign advocating for kratom, a supplement commonly sold at gas stations that allegedly relieves pain or boosts energy, but is linked to risk of liver toxicity, seizures and substance use disorder. Kratom has also been found in the system of thousands of people who died of drug overdoses.

As a senator from Oklahoma, Mullin endorsed proposed federal restrictions on kratom’s more potent competitors. He also reportedly urged officials in the Department of Health and Human Services to remove language from the Food and Drug Administration website about the possible dangers of using kratom, both as a senator and as DHS secretary. It is unclear why the homeland security secretary would be involved in such decisions. (Mullin hasn’t commented on the Times’ reporting, but DHS said in a statement that the secretary “follows all ethics and conflict of interest standards and has not lobbied for any individual or company.”)

Mullin has apparently gone out of his way to advocate for a supplement that is not regulated by the FDA and whose effects on the body are not well understood.

What we just learned from Mullin’s financial disclosure paperwork is that the secretary owns an investment worth as much as $1 million in a kratom company, Botanic Tonics. It’s not clear when he acquired this stake, but he has not filed paperwork to say he divested from it. Mullin has said in March that he would divest from dozens of potentially conflicting investments should he be confirmed as DHS secretary. Botanic Tonics does not appear to have been part of that list at the time, but given Mullin’s reported advocacy for kratom as part of the Trump administration, he should certainly divest now.

This looks like a textbook conflict of interest, where it is impossible to know if Mullin is advocating for policies that are best for the public or if he is prioritizing his own bottom line at the expense of public health and safety.

Mullin’s history doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence. He did not come to DHS with an ethically clean slate, having violated the STOCK Act by failing to properly report years of stock and bond trades. Some of his activity involved stock trading closely tied to industries he regulated and may have had sensitive knowledge of. Even if Mullin has a third party managing his portfolio, as he claims, as an officeholder, he is legally responsible for avoiding and remediating his own conflicts of interest.

The public should never have to question whether government officials are using their power for their own benefit, but Mullin’s conduct is particularly galling because President Donald Trump fired his predecessor at DHS, Kristi Noemafter she faced serious ethics issues that often distracted from her critical government role. These included her apparent failure to report outside income from a dark money group earned while serving as governor of South Dakota, and a subcontractor tied to Noem secretly receiving a DHS ad contract, outside of the normal competitive bidding process. (Noem’s lawyer told ProPublica“Then-Governor Noem fully complied with the letter and the spirit of the law; and Noem said she followed proper procedures with regards to the DHS ad contract.”)

While this seemed like a rare moment of accountability and possibly correcting course, appointing and confirming Mullin appears to have been more of the same.

The public should never have to question whether government officials are using their power for their own benefit.

And then, there’s the kratom itself. Mullin has apparently gone out of his way to advocate for a supplement that is not regulated by the FDA and whose effects on the body are not well understood. As part of this effort, he has reportedly tried to downplay health concerns about kratom. The supplement’s health risks can include addiction and withdrawal, liver damage, anxiety, hallucinations and psychosis. (Botanic Tonics, the company Mullin invested in, insists its products are safe and says it “has consistently advocated for regulations that distinguish between authentic kratom leaf products and synthetic derivatives.”)

All of these facts together raise another important question: How can someone who did not proactively divest from an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest, and who could not effectively manage a third-party adviser overseeing his investments to ensure compliance with the STOCK Act, ethically lead a massive agency consisting of more than 260,000 people covering everything from aviation, election and border security, to emergency response?

It’s up to Mullin to start building trust with the public by divesting his interests in kratom, and if he does not, Congress must intervene.

Donald K. Sherman

Donald K. Sherman is executive director and chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Before joining CREW, he was an oversight and ethics lawyer in the House, the Senate and the Obama administration. He also was chief oversight counsel to the late Rep. Elijah E. Cummings on the House Oversight Committee.

The Dictatorship

I love my father deeply — which is why I want him to die quickly

Published

16 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 21, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

My father is dying. I suppose we all are, but he is actively closer to death than anyone else I know.

My father began declining in 2020. First, his body started to give up on him. He has Parkinson’s disease. One day he tried to get out of bed and his legs didn’t work, so he fell out of bed, and ended up in the hospital. Another day, his right hand stopped working, so he could barely use his phone or computer, his only points of contact with the outside world (he’s almost entirely lost his ability to write), making him further isolated. A few years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, my father’s mind started to give out on him, too. He developed dementia, a diagnosis he steadfastly refuses to admit or discuss, which makes taking care of him even more challenging.

As an academic and intellectual, this is a perceived humiliation my father cannot bear. He has fits of anger, confusion, fear, frustration and disorientation. I spoke to him last week while he was in the hospital for yet another issue (a now semi-regular occurrence) and he started shouting, “I don’t know why the hell I’m here! Get me out of here, talk to someone!”

This is an incredibly difficult piece to write — one I almost didn’t.

To make matters more complicated, he now lives in Pakistan, where he is from, while I live in the United States and my mother, who co-caretakes with me, is based in South Africa. He lived in the States for most of his adult life, but we simply could not afford the cost here of the full-time care he needs. Even with the privilege of being upper-middle class, the more than $20,000 a month for full-time care was way more than we could afford, and this is not even for any specialized care.

This is an incredibly difficult piece to write — one I almost didn’t. There are serious ethical implications to consider as I discuss my father’s health. But I have ultimately decided to share my experience because I think it’s important to have conversations about the isolation and inhumanity of the end-of-life care systems that fail us. These are conversations we too often turn away from out of fear and discomfort. The intention here is to honor my father because approaching death with dignity honors the dignity of his life, too.

So, as I watch my father’s body and mind slowly and increasingly fail him, and I see the fear and suffering he endures on a daily basis, I can only hope that the end of his life is not drawn out.

I spoke about this with a dear friend recently, about how excruciating this process has been to witness and partake in, about our caretaker burnout, about the many, many systems that fail the sick and elderly, about how each week there is a new crisis. She gave me Atul Gawande’s book “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.” Gawande’s central argument is that both the medical community and modern society are woefully ill-equipped to deal with mortality in a dignified way and that the most humane thing we can do is to focus on the quality of life of the elderly and terminally ill, rather than longevity.

As I explained to my friend, I’ve been sitting with an intense polarization around how I think about my father’s death: some parts of me wishing the end of his life is not drawn out, while others feel guilt and shame for wishing that my father dies quickly. Gawande’s book has been a profound balm in this process. “Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need,” he writes. “Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.”

Medicine, technology, and strangers. This trifecta now rules my father’s waning life. His full-time carers are strangers to him, and he to them. And some combination of technology and medicine is helping to prolong an existence full of fear and suffering.

What I have ultimately come to realize is that the only true solution here is not a medical one but a spiritual one. Death is too big for the human mind to hold. And grief, when we try to hold it alone, tears away at our lives. The only way any of this becomes manageable, in my experience, is if we hand these over to something bigger than ourselves. My faith is a big part of my life, so, for me, that something is god. For someone else, it might be a different spiritual belief or it might look like surrendering to the present. But the answer is certainly not in the illusion of control that medicine alone can create for patients and their families.

Mortality — our own and that of our loved ones — demands that we meet it with expansiveness in order to stay sane, otherwise our fear (an inherently constricting emotion) of death takes hold. Modern medicine tends to make everything smaller, with its hyperspecialization, its focus on how things are working at a cellular level. My father has a cadre of doctors, each focusing on a different part of his body.

I do not mean to dismiss the miracles of modern medicine, which have saved me and my body in so many ways over the course of my own life. But I invite us, like Gawande, to consider when the most loving thing we can do is to not interfere.

I wonder how different the end of my father’s life would feel to him if everyone around him was focused on offering him spiritual care rather than on the technical measures to keep him alive for as long as possible. I have tried in my own ways to reorient our approach to his care, but our collective resistance to mortality — sometimes my own included — and the concomitant systems that do exist to take care of the elderly make it feel impossible sometimes. And I can see his body and mind desperately attempt to prepare him for death even as parts of him, and everyone around him, resist it. This untended anxiety is leaking out of him. He calls me in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep to apologize for all the ways he failed my brother and me when we were children, his voice scared and desperate as he attempts to clean his fading conscience as much as he can, while he still can.

He calls me in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep to apologize for all the ways he failed my brother and me when we were children, his voice scared and desperate as he attempts to clean his fading conscience as much as he can, while he still can.

Interventions of modern medicine and carers to prevent falling (a common cause of death for people with Parkinson’s) could potentially prolong my father’s life for some time. He is in that precarious place that the elderly often find themselves in, where he could die in six months or in six years. But to what end are we prolonging his life? Our collective approach to end-of-life care is driven by distorted priorities, which come at great personal and financial cost. “The soaring cost of health care has become the greatest threat to the long-term solvency of most advanced nations, and the incurable account for a lot of it,” Gawande notes. “In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit.”

In his book, Gawande anticipates criticisms of his argument, suggesting some might fear that it “raises the specter of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged.” He aptly responds, “But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed — victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle?”

There is a strange paradox to death. It is at once incredibly straightforward and deeply complicated. Maybe this is what separates the act, an uncomplicated one, from the process, which is almost always complex.

And if there is one thing I’ve learned watching my father disintegrate, it’s that our various approaches to end-of-life care are not working. The helplessness and fear is consuming him. It is out of a deep and abiding sense of love that I hope his suffering is minimized and his life is brought to a merciful end.

Noor Noman is a writer focused on culture, race and LGBTQ issues.