Greetings and welcome to this 77th edition of the Carnival of Fools! We’re all still a bit bleary-eyed with the hangover from Team USA’s victory in Olympic hockey — a full trouncing of Canada by our women’s and men’s teams for dual golds — but, alas, the party’s over. It’s time to wake up, rub our eyes, and remember that the president is currently at war with his own Supreme Court and is set to give a nationally televised speech about it.
Yes, tonight’s State of the Union address is probably going to be a dumpster fire, or, for that matter, a zeppelin fire. Donald Trump has already warned: “It’s going to be a long speech. Because we have a lot to talk about.” (Imagine the futility of speechwriting for Trump, knowing that a full 65 percent of your material will never be spoken, given his improvisational tendencies.) Rest assured that we at NR will provide ongoing coverage of the anticipated conflagration, like announcers at the Hindenburg landing who have been tipped in advance that something might go terribly wrong. (“Oh, the verbality!”) Until then, let’s ponder why Trump seems set to explode tonight.
The Supreme Court Says No
Back in January, I warned readers that, snow and ice notwithstanding, the real storm coming to Washington, D.C. was the Supreme Court’s anticipated ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, a.k.a. the “tariff case.” Would the Court overturn Trump’s expansive interpretation of executive power and his arrogation of the powers of trade and taxation from the legislative branch under the flimsy pretext of a poorly crafted statute from the late Seventies designed to do the opposite? Can our fundamental structure of government be undone or bypassed simply by employing semantic legerdemain, as the Trump administration has attempted?
The Court emphatically said no, in a 6–3 vote. It was the right decision — and the one I predicted — but nobody could have predicted the exact contours of the judicial split, which put Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito in the minority and John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch in the majority. (Roberts’s opinion controlled, but Gorsuch’s concurrence — in which he took issue with Kavanaugh’s dissent while politely denouncing the hypocrisy of the Court’s progressives who joined the majority — spoke eloquently for my own position.)
The real question, then as now, remains: What comes next? As I wrote in January:
Does anyone expect Donald Trump to meekly submit to having his entire political agenda declared unconstitutional? I expect a wholesale rhetorical war of the most destructive and toxic sort imaginable. . . . It has long been the object of the left to destroy the credibility and prestige of the Court, over which they lost ideological control. Imagine a world where they are joined by the most voluble activists and grifters on the MAGA right.
The lead cantor has begun singing his tune. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Trump staged an emergency press conference on Friday, claiming that the Supreme Court is corrupt and beholden to undisclosed interests: “It’s my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” (His phrasing is acutely revealing: It’s all about the size of “movements” — not constitutional principles — and no “movement” is ever larger or more imperative in his mind than MAGA.) Not only are Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett “disloyal” and “unpatriotic,” they’re “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.”
Given that we’re talking about Trump, it could have gone worse. Of course Trump immediately announced a new round of tariffs (this time on even more dubious statutory grounds). Of course he has issued splenetic threats against any and every party that might try to recover money from the government. Of course he has no intention of backing off his tariff regime. It is the only economic policy he has ever believed in — consonant as it is with his authoritarian and capricious style — and he will no sooner part with it than a colicky baby would with his Binky. (On Monday morning, Trump added that from this point onward he would be referring to the “supreme court” in lowercase.)
As Jim Geraghty pointed out yesterday, the most remarkable thing about Trump’s various squawks and threats is not that he is making them but the fact that for many of us they’ve become priced in. “For Donald Trump, it was just another Friday,” as Jim says. We’ll see what happens tonight; something tells me it may not be just another Tuesday.
Gavin Newsom Wants You to Know He’s Dumb, Just Like You
Readers are no doubt familiar with my opinion of California Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Party’s most visibly hungry undeclared candidate for the 2028 presidential race: He’s as oleaginous as lukewarm margarine and every bit as authentic. Regardless, he’s making an enormous push in advance of the 2026 midterms, desperately seeking to be anointed as the presumptive front-runner in the 2028 Democratic contest, which will take proper shape only after November.
Newsom has looks, power, and money — why, he’s even got a picture-book wife — but what he utterly lacks is the ability to talk to working-class voters or African Americans without sounding as if he’s spent his life soaking mindlessly in carefree privilege. And this is what I have kept my eye on as his campaign develops, because all the money and establishment support in the world won’t mean a thing if (as the old joke goes) the dogs just won’t eat the dog food. Will this scion of wealth and insider power ever find a way to talk to normal people without sounding condescending? (This has long been one of Trump’s great strengths, though he is similarly situated.)
Not yet, it would seem! Newsom’s latest gaffe is minor but worthy of attention precisely because it is so very telling: During a discussion with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens at an event to promote his “up from the upper class” memoir Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom’s reflexive attempt at “people-pleasing” blew up in his face. You see, Newsom was trying to explain to the audience how hard he had it as a kid, what with being the quasi-adoptive son of billionaire oil heir Gordon Getty. (Newsom’s father managed the Getty family trust.) All those hot-air balloon safaris and trips to meet the king of Spain clearly took a toll on the young man, who nursed a hidden shame throughout that period: He was a secret moron.
Yes, Newsom wanted to unburden himself on Sunday night about his childhood dyslexia, which apparently is a topic in his campaign book. “I’m not trying to impress you, I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy,” Newsom confessed to Dickens. “And I’m not trying to offend anyone,” he went on. “You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.”
Everybody in conservative media immediately bashed Newsom for casual bigotry. And why not? It was an impossibly flat-footed appeal given the racial distribution of the audience. “I did terribly on my SATs — just like all you black people!” (Understand: The reason Newsom is doing appearances with politicians like Dickens is precisely because he’s attempting to build appeal with black Democratic primary voters, who will decide the nomination in 2028.)
But I want to give him a bit more credit than that. Even though I knew exactly how his gaffe would be spun the second it left his mouth, I also knew he wasn’t intentionally Doing a Racism. What he was doing was even worse: He was revealing that he thinks about the world in terms that the voters he’s hunting find increasingly alien. Even his down-market appeals are hilariously elitist. People who scored well on their standardized tests should, as a rule, never talk about it in public — it’s hideously gauche, an act of obvious insecurity. Newsom’s flex is a fascinating inversion of that principle. “Look at how I succeeded in life despite having no inherent intellectual talents — you too can win the game of life if you’re functionally adopted by a billionaire!”
Newsom is a born chameleon, so don’t be surprised if he changes his rhetorical approach from here on out. Nobody wants to hear about his childhood “struggles” considering his life of otherwise decadent glamour. If he’s expecting sympathy, he’s terribly misjudged the mood not only of the general electorate but also of his own party. I recognize Newsom as a formidable 2028 candidate, but I’m increasingly amenable to the idea that we haven’t heard much about the real Democratic nominee yet, and that whoever that is will end up winning the gig by slaying Newsom in the arena of authenticity.
Until next week.