The POTUS was angry — angry at pal Putin, who had gone “absolutely crazy” and wouldn’t stop the needless killings in Ukraine, angry at the haughty Harvard for not doing his bidding and a lot more.
He was furious at that audacious reporter too for questioning his toughness on tariffs at — of all the places in his gilded Oval Office — and above all angry at all those ‘out of control radical left judges,’ including some of his own picks, who had ruled against him a staggering 180 times in his first 130 days.
And now adding insult to injury, the U.S. Court of International Trade had “incredibly” ruled against his desperately needed terrific tariffs despite his assertion that it was a strategic tool that for one had averted “a full-scale war” between two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan.
As the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Court stayed the order, Donald Trump wondered, “How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?”
Trumpiana: It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a castle in the air! (May 17, 2025)
The stay means that Trump can, for now, maintain many of the tariffs he imposed on China, Canada and Mexico as also keep hanging the threat of suspended “reciprocal” rates on other nations.
Trump hoped the friendly neighborhood Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority and three of his own appointees, will finally “reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY. Backroom ‘hustlers’ must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!”
Trump was also horrified at the court’s decision “that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs” — leaving decisions to hundreds of politicians who would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months — saying “this would completely destroy Presidential Power.”
But leaving nothing to chance, “Trump appears to be declaring independence from outside constraints on how he nominates judges, signaling that he is looking for loyalists who will uphold his agenda,” the New York Times suggested citing an attack on the Federalist Society, which heavily influenced his selection of judges during his first presidency.
READ: Trumpiana: One, two, three, cha-cha-cha (May 3, 2025)
Hours earlier, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees.
“Together, the moves suggest that Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees,” the Times said suggesting, “such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained” him in the first.
Even as India rejected suggestions of a U.S. role in reaching a tenuous ceasefire with Pakistan, Trump doubled down on his claim that he had stopped them from fighting to avert what “could have turned out into a nuclear disaster.”
“Also, we talk trade, and we say we can’t trade with people who are shooting at each other and potentially using nuclear weapons,” he said during a press conference with a disillusioned first buddy Elon Musk, who left Washington with a black eye — no, not a sock from his spouse or Trump, just a little injury from horsing around with his 5-year-old son, X — and a golden key to the White House.
“They’re great leaders in those countries, and they understood and they agreed, and that all stopped, and we’re stopping others from fighting,” he said ignoring the fact that neither praise nor harsh criticism had stopped Putin from escalating attacks on Ukraine.
READ: Trumpiana: Tariff tango, Harvard hoopla, judges jiggle and Russian rumba (April 27, 2025)
Warning that attempts to conquer all of Ukraine will lead to ‘downfall’ of Russia, Trump cautioned that “what Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”
Yet despite the rhetoric, Trump has shown no eagerness to bite with new sanctions against Russia. He simply washed his hands off the whole affair forgetting his boast that he could stop the war within 24 hours of becoming President.
“This is a War that would never have started if I were President. This is Zelenskyy’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not ‘Trump’s,’” he declared. “I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that have been started through Gross Incompetence and Hatred.”
Meanwhile, amid his continued onslaught on Harvard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans to “aggressively revoke” the visas of many Chinese students – ignoring the fact that a record 1.1 million foreign students, including 331,600 from India, contributed $44 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2023-2024 school year, as a new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) noted.
“We are still waiting for the Foreign Student Lists from Harvard so that we can determine, after a ridiculous expenditure of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social as a judge halted his bar on the Ivy League school to take foreign students.
As the world reeled from his assault on institutions at home and abroad, Trump grandiosely declared, “Our Nation is staging one if the greatest and fastest comebacks in history… This is, indeed, THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA!!!”
Yet that audacious reporter had the temerity to ask him about a new acronym being used on Wall Street: TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — coined by a columnist for The Financial Times, suggesting that he never really follows through with his tariff threats, and implies a warning to buy or sell accordingly.
“Don’t ever say what you said,” he told the female reporter sternly. “That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”
“That’s so unbelievable,” he said offering a little defense of his trade manoeuvring. “Usually, I’m the opposite. They say, ‘You’re too tough.’” But by then, relish or not, a thousand TACO memes had sailed!