Apr 1
The president couldn’t get back to the White House quickly enough!
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The president couldn’t get back to the White House quickly enough!
Imagine going before the Supreme Court to attack birthright citizenship and being unable to say Native Americans are American citizens. This was never about the Constitution. It’s about exclusion.
GORSUCH: Do you think Native Americans are birthright citizens under your test?
SAUER: Ah, I think ... so. I have to think that through.
Historically, the 14th Amendment was interpreted to exclude most tribal Native Americans from birthright citizenship due to tribal sovereignty; they gained citizenship via the separate Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
John Sauer
Trump's stupidity and narcissism shift into overdrive
August 14, 2025
Robert B. Hubbell
Trump's stupidity and narcissism shifted into overdrive on Wednesday. Does observing that fact matter to our efforts to defend and reclaim democracy? Yes. We have long ago learned that there is no “Rubicon” that will mark the definitive turning point against Trump. But we also learned in 2018 and 2020 that Trump alienates Independents and enough of his supporters to make a difference in election outcomes.
He alienates swing voters by taking positions and actions that are just too stupid for words. And yet, we have the burden of putting that stupidity into words so that we can remind swing voters (again) that Trump and his enablers are unfit to run the federal government.
In this newsletter, I will focus on three stories that highlight the heights (depths?) of Trump's idiocy and incompetence. Tell a friend.
Trump claims that invalidating his tariffs will lead to a 1929-style “great depression.”
You can’t make this up.
Trump has collected more than $100 billion in illegal tariffs in 2025 from American businesses (not foreign countries)
Trump’s tariffs were declared illegal by the US Court of International Trade in a ruling in May that is now on appeal before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
Trump is now arguing that if the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals declares the tariffs to be illegal, such a ruling “could lead to a 1929-style result . . . people would be forced from their homes, millions of jobs would be eliminated, hard-working Americans would lose their savings, and even Social Security and Medicare could be threatened.”
Wait, what?
Trump collects illegal taxes from American businesses and then argues that refunding those taxes to those same businesses would lead to another Great Depression.
Why would returning illegal taxes result in a Great Depression? Answer: It won’t.
More importantly, how stupid does Trump believe the judges on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals are?
Even more importantly, if the government attorneys making that ludicrous argument actually believe it to be true, how did they pass the bar exam, or even dress themselves this morning?
The short answer to all of the above is that lawyers in the Department of Justice have stooped to “cutting and pasting” Trump's incoherent ramblings from Truth Social into a letter brief to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. See MSNBC, Trump’s DOJ warns of another Great Depression in court filing to save tariffs.
Per MSNBC,
On Monday, the Justice Department basically copied and pasted a hysterical plea from Donald Trump’s Truth Social account, in which the president claimed the country would experience another Great Depression if the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit confirms and enforces a May decision from a Court of International Trade panel that found many of Trump’s tariffs on foreign countries were illegal. Judges at the appeals court have already expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s arguments.
The letter brief was signed by one of Trump's former criminal defense attorneys, John Sauer, who is now the Solicitor General of the United States.
Sauer wrote,
These deals for trillions of dollars have been reached, and other countries have committed to pay massive sums of money. If the United States were forced to unwind these historic agreements, the President believes that a forced dissolution of the agreements could lead to a 1929-style result. In such a scenario, people would be forced from their homes, millions of jobs would be eliminated, hard-working Americans would lose their savings, and even Social Security and Medicare could be threatened.
It is difficult to express how stupid this argument is. If the tariffs are invalidated, the illegally collected funds would be pumped back into the economy by refunding the money to American businesses. It is Republican orthodoxy that allowing companies to keep their money rather than giving it to the government is the road to prosperity and growth for the American economy. Trump (through John Sauer) now says that allowing companies to avoid US tariffs will cause another Great Depression.
John Sauer is a smart guy. Duke University. Harvard Law. Rhodes Scholar. He knows that the letter he submitted to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is garbage. If he has an ounce of self-respect left in his rapidly evaporating reservoir of dignity and pride, he is probably silently sobbing into his pillow tonight, wondering how he ever allowed himself to throw away such a promising career.
Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter
Fed Governor Lisa Cook looks safe in her job for now. No justice was eager to back Solicitor General John Sauer's arguments for Trump on Wed
Chris Geidner at Law Dork:
President Donald Trump doesn’t like rules. Last May, in a shadow-docket order, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially told Trump, “Fire anyone you want, but not governors of the Federal Reserve Board.”1 Announcing that “the Fed is different“ carve-out was all but a dare to a man like Trump, and, on August 25, he tried to fire Lisa Cook as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, via a letter in a Truth social post. As her lawyers wrote in filing a lawsuit to stop Trump’s effort, “This case challenges President Trump’s unprecedented and illegal attempt to remove Governor Cook from her position which, if allowed to occur, would the first of its kind in the Board’s history.“
After two quick hours of arguments on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appeared almost certain to allow Cook to remain in office at this time — although it could send the case back down to let lower courts to fully consider Cook’s case while she remains in office or to require Trump to provide Cook with an opportunity to respond to the president’s purported reasons for firing her. It was “an extraordinary application” as Cook’s lawyer, Paul Clement, told the justices at one point of DOJ’s request. With this president, many have been saying that a moment like this was inevitable. More than that, though, it was the combination of a president like Trump with this court’s recent executive authority expansion that brought us to Wednesday. Despite that expansion, though, it was an extraordinarily difficult argument for Solicitor General John Sauer — due to the pushback and skepticism he faced from across the bench. The moment, and questions raised, were made all the more stark not only by Cook’s presence in the courtroom, but also by the presence of Fed Chair Jerome Powell — another target of Trump’s ire and the subject of a highly questionable Justice Department investigation.
In the matter before the justices, two lower courts backed Cook in preliminary rulings — blocking Trump’s firing from being given any effect during litigation. Then, the Justice Department, as it had done in other firing cases, ran to the Supreme Court seeking a stay of the lower-court orders. Unlike in those other firing cases, however, the Supreme Court here did not grant the requested stay — instead deferring a ruling on the shadow-docket request in an October 1 order and setting it for oral argument in January.
Yesterday at SCOTUS’s oral arguments in Trump v. Cook, even the right-wing SCOTUS majority is likely set to hand Donald Trump a loss in his illegal bid to fire Lisa Cook from her Federal Reserve Board seat.
See Also:
The Guardian: US supreme court appears skeptical of Trump’s bid to oust Lisa Cook from Fed board
Democracy Docket: Supreme Court appears skeptical of Trump’s ouster of Fed governor Lisa Cook
A President could order the assassination of his political rival and not ever face prosecution unless the House successfully impeached him and the Senate convicted him for that crime, according to the ex-president’s attorney, in oral arguments Tuesday morning attempting to convince judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals of Trump’s claims of absolute […]
From the January 9, 2024 article:
“There it is,” national security attorney Bradley Moss wrote on X. “Trump’s lawyers conceding that Biden could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate Trump and Biden could not be prosecuted absent impeachment and conviction.”
Moss played out the logical conclusions of Trump’s lawyer’s argument.
“How would he ever get impeached, let alone convicted, if Biden could just assassinate legislators who would vote in support of that?” he posited. “Do you get how insane this is?”
...
Listen to the portion of Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, arguing that a president can order assassination, essentially commit murder, and not be prosecuted unless first impeached and convicted, below...
"Calling the Dog" by John Sauer
