"Too Late Jerome” and the Almond Rebellion

As Trump targets the Fed, Harvard, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, California picks up the Constitution and sues like hell.

Good morning! If you tuned in hoping for governance, you may have been disappointed to find instead a one-woman tragedy performance in the Oval Office yesterday. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s endlessly grinning mouthpiece, summoned the grieving mother of Rachel Morin onto the national stage, not for truth, not for policy, but as a living prop in the administration’s grotesque propaganda play.

Leavitt didn’t mention the crashing markets. She didn’t explain the economic whiplash from Trump’s tariff spasms. No, she used the emotional devastation of a family to smear Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father deported in violation of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling, and imply, without evidence, that he was somehow linked to Morin’s murder. This, despite the fact that Abrego Garcia has never been connected to the crime and remains imprisoned in El Salvador under MAGA guard, his name now tossed around like confetti at a fascist wedding.

Pam Bondi, meanwhile, is out there recycling the same fiction that Garcia is MS-13 and was in the country illegally. Neither is true. But in Trumpworld, the truth is just another liberal talking point, and due process is something to be mocked on Truth Social.

Contrast that with someone who is a danger: Jonathan Braun. Freed by Trump in 2025 as part of his end-of-first-quarter clemency spree, Braun has spent his post-pardon freedom allegedly assaulting toddlers, battering his wife and father-in-law, threatening people in synagogue, attacking a nurse with an IV stand, and sexually harassing his nanny. Yet somehow, Braun isn’t locked in a Salvadoran prison without access to legal counsel, he’s free, angry, and possibly fundraising for a congressional run.

So while innocent people are being slandered and deported, violent Trump loyalists are walking free. The moral compass here isn’t just broken, it’s spinning wildly like a rigged carnival wheel, and everyone not wearing a red hat is getting thrown off the ride.

Not to say I told you so, but, well I have.. Donald Trump has now made it clear that he wants control of the Federal Reserve. Calling Chair Jerome Powell “Too Late Jerome,” Trump posted that Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough”, a statement that would sound absurd if it weren’t so chillingly on-brand. Trump’s Treasury Secretary is already lining up interviews to replace Powell this fall, even though Powell’s legal term extends into 2026. The message is clear: independence be damned. Trump wants an obedient Fed, one that can juice the markets and crush inflation narratives on command, like a loyal dog with a Bloomberg terminal.

This assault on Fed independence joins a longer list of agency purges, from the FTC to the NLRB. Trump’s interpretation of checks and balances? If it doesn’t say I win, it’s getting fired.

Meanwhile, Trump’s war on Harvard has entered a new phase of vengeful performance art. After freezing over $2.2 billion in funding and threatening to revoke the university’s nonprofit status, the administration is now trying to strip Harvard of its ability to admit international students. Puppy killer, Kristi Noem, who somehow ended up as Homeland Security Secretary, has issued a fascist-flavored ultimatum: turn over records of foreign students’ “illegal and violent” protest activities, or lose your SEVP certification and visa privileges.

Nothing says “free country” like threatening to deport students for participating in campus protests.

Harvard’s crime? Refusing to dismantle diversity programs, ban face coverings, and hand control of hiring decisions to MAGA-approved “merit” bots. The university has said it won’t surrender its rights. We’ll see if the Constitution still matters in Trump’s second season—or if this time, he’s brought writers willing to burn it for ratings.

Also on the vengeance tour: Letitia James. After winning a $454 million civil fraud case against Trump, she’s now the target of a retaliatory criminal referral for, wait for it, mortgage fraud. The same thing Trump was convicted of doing. It’s projection, plain and simple. But in this White House, projection is the official language, and irony is just fuel for the fire.

And now, at last, a flicker of hopeful rebellion: Gavin Newsom, striding through an almond orchard like the legal Avenger of the West, has filed suit against Trump’s tariffs. Not content to let the president keep invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act like it’s a magic wand, Newsom is challenging the legality of the tariffs in federal court.

He’s not alone, California and other Blue States have filed 15 lawsuits against Trump since January. But this one hits hard: California feeds the nation, manufactures what Trump claims he wants to “bring back,” and represents the fifth-largest economy in the world. This lawsuit doesn’t just argue legal precedent, it argues reality. That thing we used to all live in together.

Trump’s team dismissed the lawsuit with its usual deflection, “Why isn’t Newsom fixing homelessness?!” but the real panic may come when the Supreme Court is forced to confront its own precedent. The same bench that blocked Biden’s student loan forgiveness for being a “transformative expansion” of executive power is now being asked to explain how Trump’s tariff regime isn’t precisely that. Newsom, smiling with a farm field of legal ammo behind him, put it simply: “If they’re consistent, this is a lock.”

And honestly, that’s the kind of hopeful defiance we need right now.

Because if the rule of law is flickering, if agencies are being bent to the will of one man, if grieving mothers are turned into props, and if criminals are walking free while asylum seekers rot in cells, then the resistance must get louder, sharper, and yes,more litigious.

Let Trump wage war by executive order. The rest of us will meet him in court, with almonds in hand and the Constitution in our filing cabinet.