Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
The thing that could do Trump in isn’t Epstein. It’s THIS.
Ever since Donald Trump turned American politics upside down some decade ago, his opponents and detractors have been desperate to find the thing – anything – that could expose just how awful, immoral, unethical, incompetent, corrupt, cruel, and criminal he is. The overly optimistic hope was that if people only knew he was an adulterer, or a scammer, or an imbecile, or a cheat, for example, enough people would come to their senses and vote him off the island for good.
This, it goes without saying, never materialized.
Not for lack of effort. First it was Access Hollywood. Then Stormy Daniels. Then Russian interference. Then criminal fraud convictions. Then impeachments. Then sexual abuse. And so on and so on.
To enough Americans, unfortunately, none of this mattered. Not only weren’t these otherwise damning revelations disqualifying, they somehow endeared him to many of his voters, who justified these categorically bad behaviors and actions as proof he was being persecuted. To MAGA, Trump is always either the strongest man in the known universe or the biggest victim of all time. There’s no in between.
Now, the hope is apparently that at some point the Jeffrey Epstein debris field will be big enough and serious enough to finally do Trump in.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.
I don’t know what – if anything – will end Trumpism and Trump’s grip on the Republican party. And I’ve been advising Democrats to stop relying on him to hang himself – it isn’t working.
But Trump may have bigger problems than Epstein. There is a thing looming out there in the not too far off future that could be seriously wounding to Trump, his agenda, and his seeming invincibility. It would be, in the words of his own cabinet secretary, “catastrophic and devastating.”
Trump’s signature agenda item this term has been his tariffs. He’s used them to threaten our allies, if only to moderate success. He’s claimed trillions in new revenue from tariffs, albeit falsely and provably so. And he’s made them the centerpiece of his economic plans to lower inflation, unemployment and cost of goods. That hasn’t happened either.
Instead, tariffs have already driven up the cost of goods like appliances, toys and shoes, and are expected to continue to spike prices; the unemployment rate is up; and economists expect to see more tariff-driven inflation.
But the folly of Trump’s tariffs could be exposed in an even crazier way.
This week, the Supreme Court could rule that Trump has to refund as much as $1 TRILLION in illegal revenue accrued from his ill-conceived tariffs. That’s according to his own Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is begging the court to rule them constitutional.
The US government has already collected tens of billions in tariffs from foreign nations, but two lower courts have ruled those money-grabs were a breach of power.
If the Supreme Court agrees, the US would have to return between $750 billion and $1 trillion, and believe me – that’s not a check Trump wants to cut.
The court could also wait to rule next summer, and the administration is urging SCOTUS not to delay. But regardless of when, a ruling against him would be disastrous for his agenda.
“Unwinding them could cause significant disruption,” Bessent told the court.
That’s no lie.
Trade lawyers are telling companies affected by tariffs to keep records in case they need to file claims; importers could seek refunds; third party firms are trying to buy the legal rights to potential refunds from importers; US Customs would be bogged down in a mountain of legal work. It would be an unmitigated MESS.
And who knows what kind of trickle-down effect that would have on US consumers, if money already spent has to be refunded to companies who were reluctant to part with it in the first place. The economic uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff disaster would be cataclysmic.
None of this is good news. The economy will suffer. Consumers will suffer. Trust in institutions will continue to erode. We’ll all pay a significant price for Trump’s unhinged economic lunacy.
But we’re already paying the price – literally. And we’ll continue to pay more for things than we did in January if Trump’s tariffs are allowed to continue.
Trump got another shot at the White House primarily because of how people felt about the economy. He promised unprecedented growth, a booming job market, an end to inflation, cheaper groceries, slashed energy and electricity prices, lower housing prices – none of that has come true.
In fact, largely because of tariffs, most of those issues are just worsening.
If Trump has to return billions, maybe even a trillion in ill-begotten tariff revenue, his entire economic platform comes crashing down. He can continue to tackle crime and immigration, crowd-pleasers for many voters, but without a successful economic agenda, everything matters so much less.
And then the midterm elections are shaped ENTIRELY by a conversation around Trump’s doomed tariffs, his terrible judgment, his economic idiocy, his administration’s incompetence, and the GOP’s foolishness in blindly letting him do Congress’s job. Not a bad place for Dems to be in.
