The Kakistocracy vs. The Constitution

Trump’s pirates, his plumbers, and the last sane adults in the room, the legal eagles saving America one injunction at a time.

Good morning! It’s another bright morning in dystopia, friends, or as the White House calls it, “Thursday.” The republic is still technically standing, the courts are still issuing orders, and somewhere, a president is still rage-posting about feeding people as if hunger were a Democratic conspiracy. Let’s take a tour of the latest chapter in the Great American Unraveling.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shuffled onto Capitol Hill this week for what the administration billed as a “routine” briefing, the kind of “routine” that involves 66 people dead, 16 covert boat strikes, and no one in Congress having the faintest idea what’s going on.

Trump’s been playing Battleship with live ammo again, ordering attacks on “narco boats” in the Caribbean and Pacific that, in the absence of congressional approval, are little more than “piracy with better branding.”

The briefings, lawmakers complained, were as transparent as a brick wall. Senator Mark Warner, who’s clearly running out of synonyms for “this is insane,” called it “corrosive to democracy and dangerous to national security.” The Pentagon’s moved 20 percent of the Navy toward Venezuela, because nothing stabilizes global markets like spontaneous militarization on two oceans.

The administration insists it’s all above board, which, in Trumpworld, usually means “we’ve already deleted the evidence.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cheerfully told reporters it was the ninth such “briefing,” which sounds reassuring until you realize most of them were Republicans talking to other Republicans in a secure room, nodding along while democracy burns outside.

Max from MeidasTouch, wielding spreadsheets and gallows humor like a modern-day Cassandra. His latest segment isn’t economics so much as disaster porn: the repo market’s bone dry, liquidity’s vanished, and the Fed has apparently misplaced control of interest rates, always a great sign when your central bank is just hoping for the best.

His metaphor is perfect: the economy’s plumbing is full of sludge, the pipes are leaking, and the people with the wrenches are cartoon plumbers named Larry, Moe, and Curly, or, in real life, Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Fed whisperer Steven Myron.

Hiring is tanking to 2009 levels, inflation’s hovering above 3 percent, and the administration’s only measurable success has been rebranding mass unemployment as “labor freedom.” Tariffs, Max reminds us, have wrecked the industrial base, while wage growth is flatter than Trump’s empathy curve. The consumer, he says, is dead. Which, to be fair, is the most accurate economic statement anyone in this administration has made.

If Max diagnosed the plumbing problem, Robert Reich just found the mold. In a recent dispatch, he paints crypto as the perfect vector for Trumpian corruption: untraceable, unregulated, and unimaginably lucrative. The Trumps have raked in roughly $3 billion in crypto grift since returning to power, a number so obscene it should come with its own ethics waiver.

Foreign billionaires with fraud charges are buying Trump’s tokens, lawsuits are quietly vanishing, and the SEC’s doing the bureaucratic equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Reich calls it a “kraken-like threat to democracy.” I call it capitalism, but make it treason.

The so-called GENIUS Act, yes, that’s the actual name, presumably because “Corruption Made Easy Act” didn’t poll well, now lets banks, corporations, and possibly your local gas station create their own digital currencies. One false move, Reich warns, and your 401(k) becomes Monopoly money with Melania’s face on it.

While the rich trade digital bananas for billions, 42 million Americans are waiting for food. Literally waiting. President Trump, ever the humanitarian, announced that food aid under SNAP would resume only when “Radical Left Democrats open the government.” Yes, he held the nation’s hunger hostage to a political tantrum.

A Rhode Island court had to force the administration to dip into emergency funds just to feed people, funds designed for war, catastrophes, and, apparently, presidents behaving like Dickensian villains. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins gamely warned that payments would be “cumbersome and delayed,” which is bureaucratese for “hope you like fasting.”

The shutdown is now 37 days old, the longest in U.S. history. In Trump’s America, starving your citizens counts as fiscal discipline. His press secretary framed the court-ordered aid as an unfortunate burden on the poor president’s contingency fund. “It’s supposed to be for war,” she said. “Not food.” You almost have to admire the consistency: cruelty, weaponized and rebranded as leadership.

Halfway across the world, Gen Z is showing us what actual civic engagement looks like. In Nepal, when the government tried to smother dissent by banning social media, young activists simply tunneled under the digital wall, VPNs blazing, Discord servers spinning up, and launched the first revolution run like a group chat.

Their “Youths Against Corruption” server ballooned to over 150,000 members, coordinating protests, rescues, even blood donations. After deadly clashes left 72 dead and the prime minister fled, the same Discord channel that once traded memes and safety tips became a forum for direct democracy. They held a poll, an actual Discord poll, to select an interim leader. The winner? Sushila Karki, Nepal’s first female prime minister.

It was chaotic, messy, gloriously unfiltered, democracy by Wi-Fi. And somehow, it worked. Compare that to the U.S., where our president is threatening to withhold food unless people clap louder. Nepal’s youth toppled a regime on Discord; we can’t get our government to reboot the FAA without a GoFundMe.

There is a plot twist. For once, a branch of government remembered it has a spine. During this week’s Supreme Court arguments over Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, his favorite hammer for every nail from China to Canada, even the conservative justices sounded unconvinced that “I said emergency” equals “I can tax the planet.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, fresh from the courtroom, described a “skeptical bench” and, in the kind of legal understatement that belongs on a protest sign, noted that “a tariff is a tax.” And taxes, quaintly enough, belong to Congress, not the guy live-tweeting trade policy from Truth Social.

Justice Gorsuch delivered what may go down as the first moment of constitutional sanity this decade: “The power to reach into the pockets of the American people is just different,” he said. “It’s been different since the founding.” Translation: remember that whole “no taxation without representation” thing? It wasn’t a suggestion.

Even Amy Coney Barrett, patron saint of judicial ambiguity, seemed to be searching for a polite way to say “what the hell is this.” And Chief Justice Roberts, the eternal institutionalist, looked like a man mentally drafting the opinion that saves the republic from the fever dream of economic fascism.

If the Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs, it’ll be a rare case of the system self-correcting: the Constitution snapping back after years of abuse. A reminder that there are limits, even for a man who’s never met one he didn’t ignore.

So, to recap: the Navy’s in Venezuela, the economy’s on life support, the president’s selling crypto to foreign oligarchs, the poor are being told to wait for food until morale improves, and the Supreme Court may, may, finally remember that tyranny is supposed to be unconstitutional.

Abroad, young people are rebuilding democracy on Discord servers; at home, we’re watching our institutions duct-tape themselves back together. It’s chaos, yes, but for the first time in months, it feels like the chaos might be turning.

If today has a moral, it’s this: while grifters run the Treasury and ideologues run the Pentagon, it’s the lawyers, judges, and state attorneys general who are quietly saving what’s left of the republic. The bench, not the ballot box, is where democracy’s last nerve endings are firing.

California’s Rob Bonta stood in the Supreme Court this week to remind the justices, and by extension, the rest of us, that Congress taxes, presidents don’t. His argument wasn’t just about tariffs; it was about boundaries, the kind that keep a democracy from collapsing into a monarchy with better lighting.

In Rhode Island, another federal judge had to literally order the government to feed its people, forcing Trump’s USDA to pry open its contingency fund to keep 42 million Americans from going hungry. Call it triage, yet, the system still worked. The courts stepped in where conscience failed.

These aren’t glamorous fights. They don’t make for stirring campaign ads or fiery rally chants. But every injunction, every oral argument, every line of constitutional text invoked against executive chaos is an act of resistance. America’s survival isn’t coming from Truth Social posts or flag-waving photo ops, it’s coming from the rule of law, defended by people who can still tell the difference between power and abuse.

The irony is thick: the same legal system Trump tried to corrupt is now his most effective opponent. While he governs by tantrum, these lawyers are doing something truly radical, upholding the law.

The nation is leaking from every pipe, militarily, economically, morally, but it’s the legal eagles who keep showing up with the duct tape. They’re the ones refusing to normalize the abnormal, or to confuse chaos with charisma.

If democracy is a patient, the courts are still in the operating room, hands steady, pulse faint but present.