Booed, Sued, and Screwed: Trump’s Rough Week

From US Open jeers to courtroom rebukes and Chicago backlash, the only thing multiplying faster than Trump’s delusions are the lawsuits against him.

Good morning! Donald Trump opened his week the way he ended his weekend: drowning in boos and trying to pretend otherwise. At the U.S. Open in New York, he was met with thirty seconds of uninterrupted jeering, the kind that rattles rafters and egos alike. Bless you New York! “They were really nice,” Trump insisted later, insisting the progressive crowd embraced him warmly.

From the stadium to West Point, humiliation followed. The Military Academy abruptly canceled its plan to honor Tom Hanks with its prestigious Thayer Award. The actor’s great sin? He once admitted to voting for Biden. In the Trump era, even “Duty, Honor, Country” gets replaced with “Loyalty, Obedience, MAGA.” Forrest Gump could run across America on a broken leg and it still wouldn’t be enough to get past this president’s litmus test.

Then came the press gaggle at Joint Base Andrews, where Trump gave us a master class in alternate realities. Asked about his immigration raid at a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, where hundreds of South Korean nationals were arrested, he somehow managed to step on every possible rake at once. “When they’re building batteries, if you don’t have people in this country right now that know about batteries, maybe we should help them along,” he mused. Americans, he explained, don’t know how to do “complex things.” His plan? Let Asian workers “stay for a little while and help.”

Pause to admire the trifecta. In one breath he insulted American workers as too dim to master modern industry, demeaned South Koreans as disposable tutors who can be shipped in and out like spare parts, and undercut his own ICE raid by admitting the people he’d just had rounded up were, in fact, indispensable. Call it a gaffe grenade lobbed in all directions.

And it’s not happening in a vacuum. Trump had just wrapped a “great relationship” meeting with South Korea, crowing about their new trade deal. Now he’s publicly reducing that ally’s skilled workers to day-labor trainers, useful only until “our people” catch up. It’s precisely the kind of blundering that Max from UNFTR warned about: a foreign policy built on ignorance, transactional bullying, and casual insult, leaving allies confused and adversaries emboldened. America looks weaker, not stronger, when its president simultaneously arrests and begs for the expertise of the same people.

On Ukraine, Trump doubled down on his claim that nobody was tougher on Russia than he was, while also promising that peace was right around the corner. “They’re losing now, I used to tell you 5,000, they’re losing 7,000 between Ukraine and Russia. 7,000 soldiers every single week,” he said, pulling numbers out of thin air as if war was just a weekly box score. “I settled seven wars,” he bragged, as though Rwanda and the Congo were mere items on a to-do list he ticked off between golf rounds. For the record, he didn’t settle a single one.

On Gaza, the math grew even darker. “We got them all back, but 20,” he mumbled about hostages, before revising mid-sentence: “We have, let’s say, 20 people and we have about 38 bodies. Bodies meaning bodies.” Glad he cleared that up. In Trump’s telling, even young hostages “tend to die,” because, well, that’s what happens in his bleak arithmetic. These are the words of a man trying to project strength but landing somewhere between callous and incoherent.

And then there was his proud boast about Washington, D.C. “DC now is 100% and I don’t want to say 100, but it’s pretty close to 100% healthy, happy, thriving. It’s a crime-free zone,” Trump said, inviting a reporter named Jeff to go out for dinner on his dime. “You could go out to dinner and you most likely will not be harmed.” Reporters chuckled. Trump doubled down: “In other words, on the 12th day, we had the crime just about solved.” If only Gotham had known all Batman needed was twelve days and some National Guardsmen mowing the park lawns.

The surreal theater of Trump’s gaggle might be laughable if it weren’t paired with his very real threats. “We’re going in,” he declared about Chicago, promising to flood the city with immigration agents and the National Guard. But here, too, his bluster is backfiring. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who just months ago was polling below ten percent, has found new life as the man standing up to Trump. At a Labor Day rally he led chants of “No federal troops!” and suddenly the least popular mayor in America is positioning himself as the one Chicagoan willing to stare down the bully in the White House. “There’s a little bit of gangster in every Chicagoan,” a consultant quipped, and right now Trump is the perfect foil.

Meanwhile, the legal resistance keeps grinding away. As The Atlantic reported, a coalition of lawyers, unions, and watchdog groups has filed nearly 400 cases against the administration. They’ve already blocked or delayed Trump’s cuts to AmeriCorps, forced funding back into the CDC, and challenged his Education Department purge. Norm Eisen likens it to Ali versus Frazier, Trump versus the rule of law, and so far the judges are landing more blows than the president. “Trump v. the Rule of Law is like the fight of the century,” Eisen said, and for once the metaphor feels too small.

And the judges aren’t pulling punches. Just last week, Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui tore into the Justice Department over its lawless overreach in Washington, D.C. He condemned the administration’s “rush” to bring federal felony charges, only to drop many of those cases later, as a source of “embarrassment and shame” and accused them of playing “cops and robbers, like children.” He warned the government endangered civil liberties and constitutional norms, and delivered perhaps the sternest reminder of all at the hearing’s close: “It’s Sept. 4. As of now, we still have a constitutional democracy.” Judges don’t usually talk like prophets unless they think the end times are knocking at the door.

So here stands Donald Trump: booed by tennis fans, stripped of West Point’s veneer, babbling about “bodies meaning bodies,” bragging about wars he never ended, fantasizing about cities where crime evaporates in twelve days, and threatening invasions of Chicago that only make his enemies stronger. He insists “the fans were great,” “the city is safe,” and “I settled seven wars.” The reality? His only victories are in his imagination. The only things he’s really producing in abundance are boos, lawsuits, and judicial rebukes that sound like history’s warning flares.

Marz is taking me to the beach for my birthday today. A little fresh air and a long walk by the Pacific seem like the perfect antidote to Trump’s toxic fumes. If today’s roundup feels a touch sunnier, blame the anticipation of salt spray. I’ll be back tomorrow, hopefully a little windblown, maybe sunburned, and definitely grateful for your company through all of this.