Photo by Ripu Qi
It hasn’t been a good week for the guy who decided he was going to be a king and spent his first four months in office ignoring the law, declaring phony “national emergencies” and issuing “royal edicts” disguised as executive orders.
But things didn’t go exactly as he hoped — to put it mildly.
To start, Wall Street, which has been wracked by his on again-off again tariffs, came up with a new moniker for him: TACO. That stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out” and is rooted in his failed attempts to pressure the nations of the world — including our longest and most loyal allies — with crushing tariffs to sell goods in the U.S.
Of course this didn’t sit well with his fragile ego and he demeaned a reporter who asked him what he thought of Wall Street’s label, falsely claiming our nation was “stone cold dead” before he took office and warning her to never use the term or ask that “nastiest question” again.
That did not keep TACO Don out of the headlines, however.
Next up on the hit list was Elon Musk announcing his time with the Trump administration has “come to an end.” While Tesla sales were cratering and his latest Starship rocket was blowing up, he added insult to injury by declaring that the “big beautiful bill” Trump has been arm-twisting Congress to pass would accomplish the opposite of what he tried to do with the phony “Department of Government Efficiency” to cut government spending.
Although causing incredible hardship and damage abroad and at home — including here in Montana — by Musk taking a chainsaw to government agencies, DOGE didn’t come close to meeting the goal of slashing a trillion dollars from the deficit. In fact, on his way out the White House door he warned:“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
The worst, however, was yet to come when the Court of International Trade issued a permanent injunction against his tariffs, ruling: “The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined.” The unanimous ruling, including a Trump-appointed judge, found the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which Trump attempted to use to declare his emergencies, “does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs” and halted them immediately.
Even though a federal appeals court halted the trade court’s injunction for now, it is obvious that the law doesn’t allow the president to slap the nation and world around, the entire premise on which his emergency declarations were based is phony. There is no Canadian fentanyl emergency and there is no rare earth minerals emergency threatening the nation’s defense capacity. As noted in a recent article on the potential for recovering those minerals from Montana’s Berkeley Pits which contains 50 billion gallons of toxic water: “A single F-35 fighter jet uses 900 pounds of rare-earth metals.” If our national defense was so threatened, one might credibly ask why we then sell F-35s all over the world?
TACO Don’s “golden age” is unravelling faster than “the weave” of lies and threats in his incoherent speeches. One might think it would be a good time for Congress, including Montana’s all-GOP delegation, to acknowledge the failed policies and propaganda, get up off their knees, and get back to working on realistic, humane, and long-term policies that benefit the nation and their constituents here in Big Sky Country — not prop up the would-be dictator in the Oval Office.
