If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
House Advances New Sanctions on Russia and Aid to Ukraine (Robert Jimison, June 3, 2026, NY Times)
Defying Republican leaders, the House voted on Wednesday to take up a bill to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia and provide additional aid to Ukraine, after a bloc of G.O.P. defectors joined Democrats in an effort to ratchet up pressure on Moscow more than four years into the war.
All the President’s Losses: Courts are telling Trump “No” (Joyce Vance, Jun 01, 2026, Civil Discourse)
The courts continue to let the White House know how this democracy works. It’s become hard to keep track of all of Trump’s losses in court as they continue to add up.Here are the details on some of the newest ones…
Donald who?
The triple toll of Trump’s terrible tariffs: Ultimately, American workers and consumers suffer three different ways. (Tom Schaller, May 25, 2026, Public Notice)
Yes, tariff receipts temporarily ended up in Washington. But those taxes were paid indirectly, via increased retail prices, by every American who bought imported goods or products made from imported components. Yale Budget Lab estimated the price tag per American at $2,400 per year, which is almost how long tariffs were in effect until the Supreme Court’s February 20 decision. Because it’s nearly impossible for individual citizens to compute how much they paid in tariffs, no less apply for reimbursements, most will get nothing.
Woodrow Wilson Reconsidered (Christopher Cox, Spring 2026, American Heritage)
Although his years as university president coincided with the entrenchment of segregation throughout the South, segregation was in disrepute among the elite colleges of the Northeast, impelling him to warn his Princeton colleagues against the danger of any Black student entering. At the same time, the publication of his History of the American People in the year he became university president spread his disparagement of Reconstruction and his rationalizations of Ku Klux Klan violence far beyond the confines of the Princeton campus.
Wilson’s multivolume history was particularly well received by his longtime friend and classmate Thomas Dixon, who leaned on it heavily as source material for his romantic trilogy on the Klan. All three of Dixon’s volumes would be published during Wilson’s tenure as Princeton’s president. Sales of the second volume, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, surpassed a million copies. The book dramatized (and grossly distorted) the Reconstruction period between 1865 and 1870, building on Wilson’s narrative.
When The Clansman was later adapted into the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation by Hollywood impresario D. W Griffith, direct quotations from Wilson’s History of the American People appeared as intertitles throughout the movie. A stage production, which followed less than a year after the book, drew sellout crowds, instigated riots, and inflamed theater reviewers throughout the country.Even in the South, the racism was too much for some to take: the Chattanooga Daily Times called the play “a riot breeder,” designed “to excite rage and race hatred.” Alabama’s governor called it a “nightmare” and “disgusting beyond expression.” The Knoxville Journal and Tribune called Dixon, the playwright, “a servant of the devil.”
How the Supreme Court Defeated Trump: A conservative court watcher explains why the president has failed to bend the judicial branch to his (Hosted by Ross Douthat, 4/16/26, NY Times)
Isgur: There’s very little that Donald Trump has done — in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything — that is wholly unique. What Donald Trump has done is turned the amp up to 11 on places that his predecessors had built on in the past.
On the one hand, we can go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” moment.Archival clip of Barack Obama: I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.
In a lot of ways, you can see Trump using a much bigger pen and a much bigger phone and really having done all of government by executive action.
In another lens, you could go all the way back to the progressive era, to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, where they think Congress is a bunch of dumb-dumbs coming from wherever, saying: What if we did government by experts in the executive branch? And instead of having Congress decide this, we’ll have the smartest people, because there are right and wrong answers. And instead of representative democracy that’s so passé, we will basically have this constitutional revolution and move power from Congress over to the executive branch?
In another sense, Trump is the end point of this hundred-year experiment that we’ve been running, of, “Meh, let’s just have the presidency do it all.”
Douthat: So it’s the endpoint. Where are we ending? What has Trump actually succeeded in claiming, and where have his claims fallen short or not achieved as much as it looked like they might?
Isgur: I say it’s an endpoint because it has so obviously failed. He has failed to implement any of his major policy initiatives through executive order in any realistic sense. Think about the Alien Enemies Act, federalizing the National Guard, worldwide tariffs, birthright citizenship. These are the main pillars of Donald Trump’s policy presidency, the substantive aspects of it. And they’ve all failed, with the exception of birthright citizenship, which is going to [fail].
In a few years it will be like Donald never existed.
The Long Odds of Undoing Birthright Citizenship (Ruth Marcus, April 1, 2026, The New Yorker)
The legal website Just Security maintains a “litigation tracker,” chronicling all the lawsuits filed against the second Trump Administration. On Wednesday morning, that tally stood at a hefty seven hundred and thirty-four, with cases ranging from the President’s immigration policies to his dismantling of disfavored agencies to his effort to punish law firms to his ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. Each of these is important in its own way, but none more so than the challenge taken up on Wednesday by the Supreme Court, to the legality of Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Issued in the first hours of his first day back in office, the order is Donald Trump’s bid to abolish the long-standing rule that, with narrow exceptions, citizenship attaches automatically to those born on U.S. soil. By executive fiat, Trump would eliminate the guarantee of birthright citizenship for children whose parents are in the country without legal authorization or on a temporary basis—a position once considered so fringe that he shied away from it during his first term. His edict contravenes the language of the Constitution, the high court’s own rulings, legislation passed by Congress, and the consistent practice of previous Presidents. As Trump himself seems to recognize, it is difficult to imagine that the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court, with its conservative super-majority—will let this order stand, and the tenor of the two-hour-plus oral argument seemed to bear that out. If the questions from the conservative Justices offer a reliable guide to their thinking, the mystery is not so much whether Trump will lose but how resoundingly.
Europeans Are Angry at Trump, but Often Forgiving of Americans: A generation ago, foreign fury over the Iraq invasion often blurred into anti-Americanism. Now, some Europeans seem ready to distinguish between the president and the American people. (Jason Horowitz, March 27, 2026, NY Times)
“Trump is beyond the pale,” said Jesús Tello, 75, a conservative voter who diagnosed the U.S. president as a “pathological narcissist” who did not care about the consequences of his actions and only saw enemies. But his dim view of the American president did not, Mr. Tello said, extend to all the Americans who had the “bad luck” of living with Mr. Trump.
“Americans are always welcome,” he said.
This too shall pass.
Another Big Loss for the Little Bully (Joyce Vance, Mar 02, 2026, Civil Discourse)
This morning, the Erin Mulvaney and C. Ryan Barber at the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department plans to “abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms.” Until now, the administration had been pursuing the cases it suffered early losses in.
Perhaps someone in the Solicitor General’s office pointed out that the cases were inevitably doomed to failure and suggested dropping them while the news cycle is focused on Iran. After the administration’s loss in the tariffs case, the president may have a newfound concern over the sting of losses like this. So far, four different federal judges have held the orders are unconstitutional. While one of those judges was appointed by Barack Obama and another by Joe Biden, two of them were appointed by George W. Bush— bad math for the administration.
Trump’s Challenge to Free Market Capitalism: Stakes in private companies. Handshake deals with chief executives. The president’s economic policy has drifted far from principles that long defined the Republican Party. Is it capitalism at all? (Ben Casselman, Feb. 22, 2026, NY Times)
Since returning to the White House last year, President Trump has gotten the government involved in the private sector in ways that Mr. Obama and other past presidents, of either major party, would never have considered.
The Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in corporations, intervened in business deals and negotiated a cut of the revenue of American companies’ overseas sales. Mr. Trump has unilaterally deployed tariffs and other policy levers to help industries he favors, like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and to punish those he dislikes, like wind power. He has wielded the powers of the federal bureaucracy to pressure executives, sometimes in ways that blur the lines between his policy objectives and his personal business interests. […]
So far, however, the public seems just as unhappy with Mr. Trump’s economy, which has not delivered the manufacturing jobs and lower prices that he promised on the campaign trail. It remains uncertain whether the Republican Party will continue down the path charted by Mr. Trump after he leaves office, or turn back toward the version of the party he left behind.
Democrats, in their own way, are engaged in a similar debate. President Joseph R. Biden Jr., too, embraced tools like tariffs and industrial subsidies, and while some moderate Democrats were unhappy with that shift, many of the party’s rising stars come from a progressive wing of the party that has long called for more government involvement in the economy.
Joe’s failure was a function of aping Donald.
