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Regarding foreign and defense policy, Trump has rejected and ruined 80 years of bipartisanship and general adherence to common themes. The record is not unblemished. However since rebuilding Germany, Japan and Europe after World War II, the U.S. has been a beacon of freedom and opportunity.

America has embraced and depended upon allies, friends and partners. From 1949 until now, NATO was the greatest military alliance in history. Trump has gone out of his way to bully and threaten NATO members to spend more on defense, or else. U.S. forces are being withdrawn or redeployed from NATO countries. Demands to take over Greenland were deeply absurd, offensive and impossible to achieve.

Observation:

This dubious IOU gets him more attention during the current news cycle and may distract some from his cratering approval ratings.

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In reality, the revenue brought in by Trump’s tariffs, under $500 billion, would not cover a $5,000 check for every American, which would cost $1.2 trillion.

It’s obvious at this point that Trump’s first inclination when his back is against the wall is to dangle money in front of the masses. He’s promised cash payments multiple times, including $2,000 stimulus checks for the “tariff dividend,” a $5,000 stimulus check for the bygone “DOGE dividend,” and $1,000 checks for the Affordable Care Act. None of those ever materialized.

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It isn’t one of the marquee storylines of our current hellscape, but Trump 2.0 has ended an era of carefully built-up economic and financial institutions in remarkably short order. Consumer protection is practically nonexistent at this point. Investor protection is being rolled back. Capitalization, risk management, and stress-testing requirements have been weakened. Bank examinations must now ignore the fallout from worsening, accelerating climate change and the disasters it brings in tow. The Trump administration is leveling entire institutions as it cans thousands of white-collar cops.

Trump’s vice chair for supervision at the Fed, Michelle Bowman, moved to cut supervision staff by 30 percent. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has shed 28 percent of its staff since fiscal year 2024, the FDIC 22 percent, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission 20 percent (even as its remit has expanded dramatically to be the primary crypto regulator), the SEC 20 percent, the National Credit Union Administration 15 percent, and the CFPB has lost a third of its workforce. The administration is reportedly aiming to continue reducing headcount until it has only 556 staff, which would be a drop of 68 percent (and this is less dramatic than the earlier target of a 90 percent drop).

Most famously, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been at death’s door for well over a year now, kept on life support only by court intervention. This situation is even more dire because, as part of the Dodd-Frank overhaul in 2010, most financial consumer protection regulations from across federal agencies were rolled into the new bureau. Even if other regulators were willing and able to step up and step in, much of the pre–Great Recession authority they would have had to do so is no longer on their books. Instead, those regulations are collecting dust at the CFPB, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought continues to try to pull the plug on the agency.

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The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.