“Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has run roughshod over Congress and its constitutional prerogatives. Trump’s decision to ignore the TikTok ban on his first day in office may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, but it foreshadowed a series of far more aggressive moves to usurp much of lawmakers’ constitutional authority: dismantling congressionally-created agencies, redirecting congressionally appropriated funds and implementing a massive tax hike on the American public in the form of Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.
The vast majority of this was made possible by congressional Republicans, who have largely turned a blind eye to all of Trump’s gambits, and by the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who have handed Trump a series of victories this year in his wide-ranging efforts to both unilaterally slash the federal government while dramatically expanding the powers of the presidency.
The acquiescence to Trump’s TikTok reprieve this year has been a far more bipartisan affair, but it has been a constitutional farce all the same, and it is not over yet.”
Why have a Congress if the president can just ignore its laws? Why have a Constitution if the president can just ignore it? The power to spend is clearly given to Congress. The President is supposed to execute that spending. This is the president refusing to faithfully execute those laws, clearly violating the division of powers spelled out in the Constitution.
“The Supreme Court on Friday extended an order that allows President Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.
With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court’s conservative majority granted the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.
The Justice Department sought the high court’s intervention after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.”
“Trump’s Nashville speech discussed bitcoin interchangeably with “crypto,” but bitcoin is fundamentally different from other cryptocurrencies. It runs on a decentralized, peer-to-peer software network and issuance schedule that, by design, can’t be tampered with by centralized authorities. It provides a way to send value over the internet without trusting third-party intermediaries. Like the gold standard, it’s a neutral monetary system; unlike gold, it has no physical properties, making it harder to seize or censor. If bitcoin fully succeeds, governments will no longer be able to steal from their citizens by printing money, and they’ll no longer be able to cut people off from payment networks and banking services.
“Crypto,” on the other hand, typically describes a set of centrally issued tokens, usually administered by foundations, neobanks, and tech companies. Most “crypto” projects are outright scams or pyramid schemes; most have failed to find (or never looked for) real-world adoption.
The major exception is “stablecoins,” which have emerged as the crypto industry’s killer application. They work like casino chips: a stablecoin company issues $100 worth of digital dollar tokens and simultaneously backs them with $100 of “high-quality” assets, typically U.S. Treasuries. Stablecoins aren’t routed through the conventional banking system, so they move easily across borders and are readily accessible in parts of the world where the dollar is in high demand.
Stablecoins’ key innovation isn’t technical; it’s regulatory arbitrage. They mean dollars for anyone, with no rules. Like bitcoin, they’re a quasi-permissionless, internet-native form of money; unlike bitcoin, they rely on the U.S. dollar for their value and are almost entirely administered by companies.
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As early as 2018, millions of people in Iran, Turkey, Nigeria, and Argentina began using Tether as an “offshore” dollar that local authorities couldn’t easily confiscate. With stablecoins, a refugee in a war zone can access dollars just as easily as a London bank. A recent study from ARK Invest estimated that there are 200 million stablecoin holders, compared to a billion holders of paper dollars. As countries like Russia and Iran attempt to coerce their citizens into using collapsing local currencies, the people are increasingly turning to stablecoins, which are hard to ban.
There is significant bitcoin adoption in authoritarian countries and collapsing economies as well, but many prefer stablecoins to mitigate price volatility. Stablecoins track the dollar, while bitcoin floats. Like the dollar, stablecoins gradually lose value over time, but they don’t experience wild price swings.
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unlike bitcoin, stablecoins require users to trust the companies that issue them. The tokens can be frozen, inflated, or remotely confiscated—and if the company issuing them commits fraud, they can become worthless. They’re a useful tool, but they aren’t in the same category as bitcoin, which is essentially freedom money.”
Trump’s H1b Visa 100k fee will increase the cost of doing business in America, which means a smaller economy and less jobs. It also incentivizes companies to offshore labor rather than use people in the U.S. who spend some of their salaries in-country.
“Although Trump frames his unprecedented use of the U.S. military to summarily execute drug suspects as “self-defense,” it plainly does not fit that description. By his own account, he has unilaterally decided to impose the death penalty on alleged drug traffickers for the sake of deterrence. That policy represents a stark departure from both military norms and criminal justice principles.
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The Trump administration “has not even seriously tried to present a legal argument to justify the premeditated killing of the people aboard these two vessels,” former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told The New York Times. “The U.S. president does not have a license to kill suspected drug smugglers on that basis alone.”
Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who served as the Navy’s top judge advocate general from 2000 to 2002, concurred. “Trump is normalizing what I consider to be an unlawful strike,” he said.
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Trump does not claim the men whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. The justification in both cases was that the targets were “transporting illegal narcotics,” which Trump dubiously equates with violent aggression.”
“Whether he is waging the drug war, imposing tariffs, deporting alleged gang members, or fighting crime, the president thinks he can do “anything I want to do.””
“rather than straightforwardly listing the facts of the case, the complaint spends dozens of pages histrionically detailing how great Trump is and how terrible The New York Times is. It reads less like a formal legal document than one of Trump’s social media posts, calling the Times a “full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” engaging in “wrong and partisan criticism.”
“This lawsuit has no merit,” the Times said in a statement. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting.”
In its very first statements of fact, the lawsuit brags that Trump “won the 2024 Presidential Election over Vice President Kamala Harris in historic fashion, emerging victorious in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and securing a resounding mandate from the American people,” which it calls “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” It even includes a screenshot of the election results. (During his first term, Trump often passed out copies of the 2016 election map to visitors.)”
This guy obviously has serious personality issues; personality issues that don’t make a good president!
“The RICO Act allows prosecutors to define more or less anything they want as a mafia organization, and the charges are nearly impossible to defend against, partly because the government can seize the defendant’s assets before trial, making it impossible to pay a defense lawyer.”