The Week That Proved Trump Is Far From Invincible

There are weeks when, it seems, everything comes to a head. This week could well be viewed, in hindsight, as one of those—as the moment the wheels started to come off the Trump train.

On Wednesday, a panel of federal judges for the US Court of International Trade ruled that the vast majority of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs were illegal. The two lawsuits against the president’s unilateral imposition of tariffs had been brought by a libertarian outfit, the Liberty Justice Center, and by a coalition of 12 states, led by Oregon, all of whom asserted Trump was abusing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in using its authority to put in place the country’s most wide-ranging tariff regimen in more than a century.

While the Trump administration instantly appealed this ruling and secured a temporary pause on its implementation, paradoxically it could give the imperial presidency something of an off-ramp from a tariff war that has come to be characterized by sweeping measures, usually enacted via early morning social media posts from Trump, followed by rapid backpedaling. So frequent has this become that opponents are ridiculing these actions as “TACO tariffs,” with the acronym standing for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Now, Trump, who spent Memorial Day posting about judicial “MONSTERS” who continue to oppose his agenda, can blame the courts for the rollback of tariffs and then pivot to the real business of endless grift. Witness last week’s crypto dinner, held at a Trump golf club outside of DC, at which top donors to the $Trump meme coin scheme got personal access to the grifter in chief to lobby for their pet projects, to push deregulation of the crypto industry, and to present their personal favorites list of conmen who deserve a presidential pardon. Rolling Stone reported that the average amount attendees ponied up was $1 million. And The Wall Street Journal calculated that $148 million was spent on the memecoin by dinner attendees. It was a masterclass in grift—and one that may come back to bite the administration.

Given that Trump reportedly didn’t even speak to most of the attendees, and that the food was apparently mediocre at best, one could make an argument that this was a startling example of waste, abuse, and fraud. The waste came from the attendees, who were gullible enough to fall for Trump’s grift. The abuse and fraud was copiously doled out by the host. It’s the sort of thing that, if the administration were serious about its mission to root out these three ills that reputedly plague government and those with control over the levers of power, DOGE would have been all over.

But, if you’ve been reading the news this week, you’ll know that Trump and Elon Musk have had a long overdue falling out—one that was always inevitable given that both men hew to their own truly megalomaniacal ambitions. This was, in other words, a bromance doomed to head for the divorce courts.

In a CBS interview Musk denigrated Trump’s “big and beautiful” budget bill; this follows on the heels of his recent criticisms of Trump’s tariff policies. Trump has reacted in kind; in recent weeks he has stopped tweeting plaudits of his favorite tech-bro, and no longer mentions him in White House briefings and press conferences. The manic energy of the first months of Trump 2.0, when the chain saw–wielding Musk could do no wrong in MAGA-man’s eyes, has been replaced by a soupy end-of-relationship miasma.

On Wednesday, the White House reported that Musk’s “off-boarding will begin tonight.” For an administration that feeds off of public spectacle, there was a remarkable dearth of pizzazz accompanying Musk’s return to the private sector after his vicious term as DOGE enforcer-in-chief-cum-copresident. The man who not too long ago celebrated Trump’s victory with not one but two Sieg Heil gestures, simply wandered off, alone and unmourned, into his exile from Trumplandia.

While Musk is extricating himself from the foul political terrain he has been embedded in—and helped nurture—since January, the courts seem to be stiffening their spine in their resistance to many of Trump’s unconstitutional policies. This week, not only did the court in New York put the kibosh on Trump’s tariff spree but other courts pushed back on Trump’s executive orders targeting individual law firms; on the administration’s efforts to punish Harvard by denying it the right to enroll international students; on its refusal to seek the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the prison in El Salvador in which he is being detained; on its bilious efforts to deport a group of migrants to the desperately impoverished and war-torn country of South Sudan; and on the ongoing detention of Mahmoud Khalil, which a judge concluded is likely unconstitutional.

None of this is to say Trump won’t continue to unleash tremendous acts of vandalism against vital American institutions, as seen by the efforts this week to squeeze Harvard to the point of destruction; by the moves to strip vast numbers of Chinese students of their right to study at US universities; by Congress’s despicable effort to neuter the courts when they rule against the administration by essentially making it all but impossible to impose enforceable civil penalties against officials found to be in contempt of court; and by the RFK Jr.–led Department of Health and Human Services waging war against mRNA vaccine technology and threatening to bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical and scientific journals. The latter, surely, will hasten the already-accelerating brain drain of top talent from American government and universities to overseas research establishments.

But it is to say that the momentum could be subtly shifting. An administration that has, for nearly 20 weeks, sought to make itself out as invincible, is being shown to be anything but. The Trump-Musk alliance has broken down, the courts have not been buying what Trump is selling, and, by the day, the nakedness of Trump’s corruption and cruelty has become harder to ignore. I may be wrong, and this all may turn out to be no more than dips in the Trump highway. But this week feels slightly different. Trump seems slightly more vulnerable than he has been, and that’s got to be a good thing.