Brothers Judd Blog

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)

Presidents

Cheeto Jesus

DONALD KILLS EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES:

Democrats Gain Edge as Trump Drags Down G.O.P., New Poll Finds (Shane Goldmacher, Ruth Igielnik and Sophia June, Sept. 15, 2026, NY Times)

A majority of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of every major issue included in the poll: the economy, immigration, tariffs, the war and, especially, the cost of living.

And voters said they trusted Democrats more than Republicans on not just health care and foreign wars but also on the two issues that powered Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory: immigration and the economy.

He’s failed at everything he ever tried in his life; why would governing be any different?

It's a RICO case

DONALD’S TWO DADS:

The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything. (Kai Bird, Susan Goldmark, 8/09/26, The New Yorker)

Trump’s father, Fred, appears to have had a long history of racism. On Memorial Day, 1927, when Fred was twenty-one, he was arrested for refusing to disperse during a violent confrontation between police and a band of white-hooded Klansmen in Queens; he was released shortly after. (It’s unclear what role he played in the riot.) Almost thirty years later, a tenant living in one of Fred’s first major developments, the Beach Haven apartment complex, in Brooklyn, was so disturbed by the racial discrimination he observed from the management that he wrote a song about it. The song was called “Old Man Trump.” The tenant was Woody Guthrie.

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts . . .
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no Black folks come to roam

By 1973, when Trump met Cohn, the evidence that Fred’s company had discriminated against Black people seemed undeniable. According to the Justice Department filing, thirty-nine Trump-owned apartment buildings had systematically barred Black people from renting. The Feds had found four Trump superintendents or rental agents willing to confirm that applications were coded by race; the forms would be marked by a large capital “C” to indicate that the applicants were “colored.” One Trump employee described the policy to an F.B.I. agent: “Fred Trump told me not to rent to Blacks. He also wanted me to get rid of the Blacks that were in the building by telling them cheap housing was available to them at only five hundred dollars down payment, which Trump would offer to pay himself.” These activities would have been a clear violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

The Feds would have been satisfied had the Trumps merely signed a consent decree, agreeing to integrate their approximately fifteen thousand units; there would have been no fine and no admission of guilt. But Cohn encouraged Trump to reject the decree, and to assert that the Feds were pressuring the company to rent to “welfare recipients.” Exasperated, the Justice Department filed a formal discrimination suit, whereupon Cohn countersued the government for defamation, seeking a hundred million dollars in damages. Cohn and Trump held a press conference at the New York Hilton to announce their suit. Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer, later said that he had been stunned that any reporters had shown up: “You couldn’t get through your second day of law school without knowing it was a totally bogus lawsuit.”

The stunt, a show of bravado, dominated local headlines, but, a month later, a federal judge dismissed the Trumps’ suit as frivolous, scolding Cohn that he was “wasting time and paper.” Trump and Cohn refused to back down, and they refused to engage with the accusations of racism. A friend of Cohn’s told us that, in private, Cohn routinely referred to Black people as “the Schvartze,” a slur he’d picked up from his mother, Dora, and that on at least one occasion he was heard using the N-word. Trump always said that he was color-blind and that his only criterion for tenants was the income of the male head of household: “We don’t generally include the wife’s income. We like to see it for the male in the family.”

It's a RICO case

CONSERVATISM IS NOT TRUMPIST:

The Roberts Court vs. the Trump Court: Why Trump lost big in the Supreme Court cases he cared the most about (Damon Root | 7.7.2026, reason)


Take the tariffs case: Trump wanted unilateral executive control over something that the Constitution simply does not place in the hands of the president. Once upon a time, when Joe Biden was president, or earlier, when Barack Obama was president, Republicans were vocally opposed to that sort of executive overreach. But then Trump came along, and most of the GOP abandoned its previous position or just kept quiet.

The chief justice, however, did not abandon his previous position. To his credit, Roberts ruled against Trump’s unilateral tariff scheme for the same legal reasons why he ruled against Biden’s unilateral student debt cancellation scheme.

In other words, in the tariffs case, the Roberts Court stuck to its professed principles (something that does not always happen, to be sure). If there is any sign of the Trump Court lurking in that case, it is to be found in the dissent only.

A similar thing happened in the birthright citizenship case. At issue there was something that conservatives and Republicans claim to value: the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Yet Trump wanted the Supreme Court to adopt a legal theory that would have done a grave injustice to the text and history of the Constitution. Once again, however, and once again to his credit, the chief justice declined Trump’s unconstitutional invitation.

Cheeto Jesus

WHEN THE POINT OF YOUR WAR IS OIL, YOU ARE THE VULNERABLE PARTY:

All the ways Iran beat Trump into submission (Jim Lamson and Matthew Moran, June 17, 2026,Asia Times)

Iran absorbed all the punishment inflicted by its attackers. And, crucially, it retained the capacity to retaliate with missile and drone strikes on Israel and US bases in the Gulf. Iran also attacked energy and other infrastructure in Arab Gulf states. This undermined the stated US goal of protecting its regional allies and upended their reputation as havens of stability.

Iran’s attacks also signaled clearly that in this regional conflict, support for the US was a liability rather than an asset. In addition to all this, Iran caused havoc by closing the Strait of Hormuz to commercial vessels. This cut off a critical global supply artery for oil, gas and fertilizer with disastrous consequences for energy and food supply around the globe.

All the while, Iran has forced Israel, the US and the Gulf states to burn through critical, expensive and slow-to-replenish munitions, another vulnerability that emerged for Tehran to exploit.

In terms of escalation, Iran has threatened to further increase economic costs. It has threatened to expand attacks on Israeli and Gulf energy and infrastructure targets and to target undersea cables in the Strait of Hormuz.

And it has threatened to push its Axis of Resistance partners in Yemen, the Houthis, to disrupt the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea.

FDR One Economy to Rule Them All

SAVED BY HITLER:

Did New Deal Spending End the Great Depression?: George Selgin’s ‘False Dawn’ empirically demolishes the claim that Franklin Roosevelt pursued a Keynesian recovery strategy. (Marcus M. Witcher, June 11, 2026, Daily Economy)

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA) were “the twin pillars of Roosevelt’s recovery program” and Selgin finds both wanting. The AAA set out to raise farm commodity prices by incentivizing farmers to restrict supply. The goal was to increase farmers’ purchasing power. Unfortunately, the program had unintended consequences and was especially bad for sharecroppers (who were disproportionately black). The increased spending by farmers “tended to be more than offset by reduced spending by displaced former farm laborers, sharecroppers, and tenants.” One post-New Deal assessment concluded it was “extremely doubtful whether the AAA restriction policy did anything to increase total purchasing power” and another found no evidence that the program was “a stimulus to recovery in the economy as a whole.” After evaluating the latest empirical evidence, Selgin concludes that “it’s hard to imagine a plausible social welfare function that would yield a positive balance, let alone a substantial one” toward encouraging economic recovery.

In Selgin’s account, the NRA performed even worse than the AAA as a vehicle for economic recovery. The goal of the NRA was to lift wages to increase purchasing power across the economy to address underconsumption, which many New Dealers blamed for the Great Depression. To this end, the NRA established “codes of fair competition” that established working conditions, set maximum working hours, and uniform wage rates. The point was to replace competition with cooperation. The result was the cartelization of the American economy.

Selgin gives voice to the NRA’s many critics, among them Keynes, who “was especially critical of the National Recovery Administration…describing it, accurately, as pretending to promote recovery while actually impeding it.” In 1935, the Brookings Institution released a report on the NRA, which condemned the program keeping “business in a churn, preventing re-employment, and consequently retard[ing] American development.” In short, the twin pillars of the First New Deal did not promote economic recovery and likely impeded it.

Cheeto Jesus One Economy to Rule Them All

AS IF HE WAS SECRETLY TRYING TO DISCREDIT THE ECONOMICS OF THE lEFT:

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.

Identitarianism Presidents

THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO DONALD BEING WORST EVER:

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.”

Cheeto Jesus

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

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.

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