The week that proved Trump is far from invincible

This week, court decisions suggest that Trump's lawless actions will not go unnoticed.
US President Donald Trump in the White House Oval Office on May 28, 2025.
(Chris Kleponis / CNP / Bloomberg)
There are weeks when, it seems, everything comes to the head. This week could well be considered, with hindsight, as one of them – when the wheels started out of the Trump train.
Wednesday, a panel of federal judges for the American Court of International Trade judged that the vast majority of the prices of the “Liberation Day of Donald Trump were illegal. The two proceedings against the unilateral taxation of the president's prices were brought by a libertarian outfit, the Liberty Justice CenterAnd by a coalition of 12 states, led by Oregon, which all claimed that Trump abused the international emergency economic law by using his authority to set up the most extensive pricing regime in the country for more than a century.
While the Trump administration instantly called on this decision and obtained a temporary break on its implementation, paradoxically, it could give the imperial presidency something of a tariff war ramp which was characterized by radical measures, generally promulgated via the publications of the social media early on the morning of Trump, followed by a rapid recovery. This has become so frequent that adversaries ridicules these actions as “Taco prices“, With the acronym standing for” Trump Always Chickens “.
Now Trump, who has passed the Memorial Day assignment About the judicial “monsters” which continue to oppose its agenda, can blame the courts for the decline in prices, then rotate the real endless Grift affair. Witness Last week crypto dinnerHold in a Trump golf club outside DC, during which the best donors of the parts program even $ Trump had personal access to the chief grifter to put pressure on their pet projects, to push the deregulation of the cryptographic industry and to present their list of personal conmen favorites which deserves a presidential forgiveness. Roller reported That the average amount that the participants have punished was $ 1 million. And The Wall Street Journal calculated These 148 million dollars were spent on the same by dinner participants. It was a claw masterclass – and which can come back to bite the administration.
Since Trump would not even have talked to most participants and that food was apparently mediocre at best, we could argue that it was a surprising example of waste, abuse and fraud. The waste came from the participants, who were gullible enough to fall for the rank of Trump. The abuses and fraud were abundantly distributed by the host. This is the kind of thing that, if the administration was serious about its mission to eliminate these three evils which would have divided the government and those who have control of the levers of power, Doge would have been everywhere.
But, if you have read the news this week, you will know that Trump and Elon Musk have had a long -awaited fall – one that has always been inevitable since the two men have known their own megalomaniac ambitions. It was, in other words, a bromance dedicated to the direction of the divorce courts.
In a CBS interview Musk has denied the “big and beautiful” Trump budgetary bill; It follows the heels of his Recent criticisms Trump pricing policies. Trump reacted in kind; In recent weeks, he has Arrested tweet applause From its favorite technology, and no longer mentions it in briefings and press conferences of the White House. The manic energy of the first months of Trump 2.0, when the saw channel – musk, could not hurt maga -man's eyes, was replaced by an end of the Sly relationship.
On Wednesday, the White House reported that the “Musk outboard will start tonight”. For an administration that feeds on the public spectacle, there was a remarkable shortage of pizzazz accompanying the return of Musk to the private sector after its vicious term as DOGE sweeten the chief-copres-president. The man who has not celebrated Trump's victory so long with not one but two Sieg Heil Gestures were simply away, alone and unwavering, in his exile from Tromplandia.
While Musk stands out from the political foul field in which he was anchored – and helped feed – in January, the courts seem to stiffen their spine in their resistance to many unconstitutional policies of Trump. This week, not only did the New York court put Kibosh on Trump's pricing wave, but other Trump decrees targeting individual law firms; on the efforts of the administration to punish Harvard by refusing him the right to register international students; On his refusal to request the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the Salvador prison in which he is detained; On his efforts Bilious to expel a group of migrants to the country desperately impoverished and torn by the war in South Sudan; and on detention in progress Mahmoud Khalilthat a judge has concluded is probably unconstitutional.
None of this means that Trump will not continue to trigger enormous acts of vandalism against vital American institutions, as the efforts show this week to hurry Harvard to the point of destruction; by the movements of band A large number of Chinese students from their right to study in American universities; by The despicable effort of the congress to neutralize the courts when they govern against the administration by making it essentially impossible to impose enforceable civil sanctions against civil servants judged in the court; and by the Ministry of Health and Social Services led by RFK JR. MRNA vaccine technology And bar threatening Government scientists publication in the main medical and scientific journals in the world. The latter will surely accelerate the already accelerated brain flight of the best talents of the American government and universities to research establishments abroad.
But that is to say that the momentum could move subtly. An administration which, for almost 20 weeks, sought to be done as invincible, turns out to be anything but. The Trump-Musk Alliance broke down, the courts did not buy what Trump sells and, day by day, the nudity of Trump's corruption and cruelty has become more difficult to ignore. I may be wrong, and all this can prove to be more than diving in the Trump motorway. But this week is slightly different. Trump seems a little more vulnerable than him, and that must be a good thing.