Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/6/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Today’s terrific roundup includes: the Supreme Court roped a dope around Judge Ali and his USAID-funding TRO; Democrat senators self-own with bizarre copycat TikTok videos; progressives explode on Trump’s Joint Address launch pad; Democrat disarray increases toward point of no return; ActBlue faces investigations and rats begin fleeing the sinking ship; EU moves to hold latest “action not words” emergency summit and Trump’s long play takes form; and entertaining video from former blue voter confirms today’s theme.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Yesterday afternoon, the New York Times raced to run a top-of-page story headlined, “Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to Freeze Foreign Aid.” This morning, it was all but missing, shrunk to a small-font trailer on the Times’ home page. They figured out that it wasn’t good news for them.
So far as I can tell, the phrase “waiting for the other shoe to drop” reportedly first appeared in a joke printed in Tacoma, Washington’s Evening News in 1902. It went something like this:
“What was that?” A lodger in a New York apartment house had just gone to bed when he heard a shoe fall on the floor in the room above.
A minute later, he was still wide awake, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finally, unable to stand the suspense, he shouted at the top of his lungs: “For heaven’s sake, drop the other shoe!”
For perfectly understandable reasons, conservatives these days are overwhelmed with all the good news. It is almost too much. We can’t believe our good fortune. And one side effect of all this relentless blessing has made us nervous as sheep before a shearing. We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. At the first sign of stormy weather, some of us are far too quick to start pointing the bony finger of blame and forecasting falling skies.
It happened again yesterday, after a minor Supreme Court setback stirred the conservative-sphere into furious anger. Corporate media piled on, of course, and inflated the tiny scrap of good news (for them) into one of those wavy-armed marketing balloon men. But as I have counseled many times, we must learn to ignore the hot takes and await calmer waters before engaging our emotions.
👨⚖️ The news was that, on procedural grounds, in a brief (one page) 5-4 split decision, the Court denied President Trump’s request to stay Judge Ali’s bizarre TRO ordering the Administration to pay out $2 billion in totally wasteful (or worse) USAID money. The four justices in the minority signed a scathing seven-page dissent, which fueled even more conservative angst. Conservative commenters eagerly discarded stare decisis in favor of reams of posts analyzing Justice Coney Barret’s stares of death at Tuesday night’s presidential address.
Maybe. I have no idea what anti-Trump motives may lurk in Justice Coney Barrett’s mind, or whether she was just thinking about how, if her husband asks her one more time to find the spicy pickles when they were literally right there on the top shelf, that’s it, she’s getting a divorce. Same face.
Either way, it is far too soon to throw the Supreme Court baby out with the TRO bathwater. Nor should Amy give up on her marriage, either, since any replacement husband will be just as helpless when it comes to locating condiments. It’s a biological imperative.
👨⚖️ Let’s dial down the burners of outrage and seek understanding of the decision itself. It was unsigned. It did not order Trump to pay anybody anything. Both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Coney Barrett joined. (Which is another reason to ignore all the “Coney Barrett hates Trump” memes— remember, Chief Justice Roberts was who originally stayed the TRO that required Trump to pay the $2 billion by midnight. He joined the Majority, and nobody’s analyzing his body language. Let the libs think Coney Barrett hates Trump.)
The motion had arrived at the Supreme Court in an odd procedural posture. The DC Circuit had refused to hear the appeal, since it was an appeal from an “unappealable” short-term TRO. So one of the confusing issues was … exactly which order was on appeal to the Supremes? Judge Ali’s TRO order? Or the DC Circuit’s order refusing to hear the case? If the latter, which makes much more procedural sense, then the Supremes’ only option was to reverse the DC Circuit, uselessly bouncing the case back down so that hostile bench could performatively render an opinion that everybody knows would have upheld the TRO anyway.
I get it; we were all frustrated that the Court didn’t break the chain of command by reaching right over the lower appellate court and slapping Judge Ali’s TRO order right out of his hand, and that’s unfortunate. For its own reasons, the Court decided not to break several standing protocols. But … did it really toss President Trump under the bus and burn two billion dollars? Or did it throw Judge Ali under the bus?
The Court’s weapon is brains, not brawn. And if we stop to read the Court’s order, we find it slyly pulled Ali’s fangs, pushed him onto procedural quicksand, and invited Trump to appeal again as soon as Ali overreaches. Despite corporate media’s fondest wish, this was not a ‘whee! Trump just lost!’ moment.
It was a temporary strategic defeat teeing up a win. I’ll prove it.
The brief order included one long sentence that threw Trump several lifelines. Since, given all the conservative black-pilled hysteria over the decision, my analysis will be considered controversial, let’s carefully examine the order’s text:
Every single word has meaning. “The deadline in the challenged order has now passed” reinforced that Trump is no longer under any deadline at all. It’s gone. Judge Ali must now issue a new order setting a new deadline, all in the context of the looming March 10th date when his TRO expires four days from now. Ali’s new deadline-resetting order could be appealed again.
More significantly, Judge Ali must soon hold a full preliminary injunction hearing, providing even more opportunities for Trump to appeal— this time on the merits, such as on his argument for sovereign immunity (strongly endorsed in the Dissent), rather than appealing on much weaker procedural grounds.
Second, the Majority said “the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill.” In other words, the Court, in effect, partially granted Trump’s appeal. The phrase suggested that Judge Ali’s original order requiring the government to pay all the contracts by midnight was simply too broad and lacked a good reason.
This places Judge Ali in a diabolical judicial minefield— his next order clarifying the original order has to provide more words, increasing the chances the inexperienced jurist will stumble on a buried appellate landmine.
The third requirement, that Ali’s next order must include “due regard for the feasibility of any compliance deadlines,” means that the Court told Judge Ali, “no more same-day deadlines.” It’s bigger than it look. Ali now must hold a hearing to allow argument over the government’s needs for time, to ensure that payments are feasible. This is all while the clock is ticking on holding the emergency preliminary injunction hearing.
If Judge Ali must have a hearing anyway, why not just go ahead and hold the preliminary injunction hearing, rather than a separate hearing to find out what should be in the next intermediate TRO order?
The bottom line is, it’s probably impossible for Judge Ali to satisfy those three reasonable-sounding conditions in the time remaining before the substantive hearing on the preliminary injunction.
Am I just seeing a glass half-full? Let’s discuss that next.
👨⚖️ Your first question should be, if they wanted to help, why not just grant Trump’s appeal? By issuing a conditional order rather than outright overruling the TRO, the Court wins at least two ways. First, overruling the TRO required changing the law to the Court’s detriment. TRO’s are normally considered unappealable. This rule significantly reduces the work all federal appellate courts have to do, and normally it isn’t a big deal, because TRO’s are intended to be of very limited scope and duration.
If the Court did change the non-appealability rule for President Trump, it would create precedent, it would be much more controversial, and it would create LOTS more future work for itself and for the Circuits.
Second, this way the Supreme Court scored a major political win by ruling against Trump, which shows “independence,” non-king-making, and adherence to the black-letter “rule of law.” But with a single scalpel-sharp sentence, the one-page order stripped Ali of any realistic way to revive his pay-now order—without either violating the Court’s conditions or tripping another appeal.
Here is where the Dissent’s hammer struck the Majority’s nail. We’ll now answer your second question— if the Majority order actually helped Trump without helping him, why was the Dissent so harshly written?
I’d hoped you’d ask that.
👨⚖️ Supreme Court certioari — its agreement to hear a case — needs four Justices. In this case, fully four (4) Justices signed the barn-burning dissent that was seven times longer than the Majority opinion itself. This was a signal to Judge Ali roughly comparable to a baseball bat with the word “stop” painted on the end. The muscular Dissent signaled that, if Judge Ali strays even a little over the line, Trump will be right back in front of the Supremes, tout de suite, courtesy of the furious four.
Furthermore, with the current 5-4 split, and with four already fired up, even inexperienced Judge Ali knows he has zero margin for error— he’s riding a banana peel down a razor’s edge. If he stretches at all, such as by short-shrifting any of the Majority’s three requirements, and loses a single judge — either Roberts or Coney Barrett — he’ll be a dead skunk.
To be perfectly clear: my best guess, reading this order, is that all six conservative Justices were working together, and were not, actually, at odds. If I’m right, there is no daylight between them, and they are executing flawlessly. Remember— these are very smart and very politically savvy people.
Some folks will still remain troubled by the seven pages of dissenting opinion. But there’s no cause for concern.
The almost-over-the-top Dissent was as astonishing a bit of legal dressing down as I’ve ever seen. It was so surreal that it was almost performative. It punched almost cartoonishly hard. But it also laid out a treacherous legal roadmap for Judge Ali, charting a path he’ll fear to take but cannot ignore. It would be entertaining to quote it (“I am stunned”), but this section is already running long. Maybe I’ll do a Twitter thread about the dissent if I have time.
Dissenting opinions are not just hot air. The Court can say things in dissent without risking political blowback that it would never dare to say in a majority opinion. It can say things in dissent that are really advising the lower court judge, for good or ill. We witnessed this dynamic last year, when Justice Thomas penned a scathing dissent about Special Prosecutor Smith’s lack of authority—an issue currently pending before South Florida Judge Cannon, who immediately ran with Justice Thomas’s implicit assurance that the Court had her back, and so she promptly chucked Jack Smith right into the judicial wood chipper.
A dissent might lack direct legal effect, but it wasn’t at all good for Judge Ali or his judicial career to be called out by four Justices in their Dissent (they said he “self-aggrandized” his jurisdiction). While the Dissent appeared to be talking to the Majority, it was actually talking about Judge Ali— and to him. Ali now faces four angry Justices who are ready to drop the hammer.
So, don’t engage with the hot takes. Patience, grasshopper. Don’t start yelling for the other shoe to drop. If anything, the Court just tied Judge Ali’s shoelaces together.
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By now, you’ve probably seen the pathetic parody of a political party that burst onto Twitter before President Trump’s Joint Address to Congress. The National Desk ran the story under its headline, “Democratic senators mocked for using identical anti-Trump script in ‘that ain’t true’ video.”
CLIP: 22 Democrat Senators, out of ideas (1:25).
The tweeted videos, ironically posted to Elon Musk’s X by at least 22 senators, each used identical scripts, TikTok microphone props, and interstitial videos to unpersuasively argue that President Trump is exacerbating Bidenflation. Each video began with the same clip of Trump promising to “bring prices down starting on day one” before cutting to the senators, who childishly, unprofessionally, and obscenely dismissed Trump’s claim as “s— that ain’t true,” before reciting the exact same words.
“Since day one of Trump’s presidency, prices are up, not down,” each senator says in their cookie-cutter videos. “Inflation is getting worse, not better,” they all intoned in dark unison.
You could not ask for a better example of the dearth of independent thought in today’s dissolving Democrat party. The social media response was brutal.
That awful spectacle was then followed by Democrats’ sullen attendance behavior at the Joint Address, where the progressive party refused to stand or applaud even to honor the ordinary citizens invited to the event by the GOP. The sullen strategy, if you can call it a strategy, fell on its face. Even Senator Fetterman (D-Pa.), who did not join the mockingbird social media posts, was disgusted, calling the stunt a “self-own”:
Even the far-left New York Times struggled to find anything to applaud about the Democrats’ childlike petulance during the Joint Address:
“The lasting image of Democratic pushback to Mr. Trump on Tuesday night,” the Times complained, “may have come in the form of a liberal 77-year-old congressman waving his cane as he shouted at the president in a protest that got him ejected from the House chamber.”
The cane-waving clown, Congressman Al Green (D-Tx.), likely now faces censure in the House.
“The result,” the Times admitted, “was a muddled response from Democrats well aware that whatever they did risked looking like too little or too much.”
🔥 For a party that needs to recover, grow, and rebuild by the 2026 midterms to re-take the House, at least, the Democrats are doing a whole lot of shrinking. From the Washington Post, this morning:
Far-left Axios ran a sad story last night with a headline evidencing the Democrats’ growing disarray:
“The party,” Axios soberly reported, “is in a rut.” It warmed to its theme, explaining the Democrats are “stumbling on finding the most effective counterattack to Trump’s full-bore assault on the federal bureaucracy.” One unidentified ‘progressive lawmaker’ quoted for the story tellingly complained, “People are super pissed that we didn’t get more direction from leadership.”
He’s right. Democrat leadership was not thinking, strategizing, or planning. They were busy reading off scripts to make identical TikTok videos complaining about the price of eggs.
Far-left NPR asked the salient question:
Even a blind squirrel can find a nut now and then. But blind squirrels don’t have to deal with advice from progressive activists. The radical, far-left Atlantic answered NPR’s question— emphatically NO.
The Atlantic’s prescription, which will almost certainly be followed given the lack of anything dumber to do, was that Dems are “acting too normal”:
How acting even weirder is any pathway out of the political wilderness is anyone’s guess. And author Tom Nichols agreed with me, almost verbatim— the Democrats just sat there Tuesday night and took it:
🔥 What we are witnessing is no less than the controlled demolition of a major political party. How this is being accomplished remains a mystery. But it is obviously happening. There are clues. Consider this prodigious rats-off-the-sinking-ship story, which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times:
“ActBlue, the online fund-raising organization that powers Democratic candidates, has plunged into turmoil,” the Times grimly reported, “with at least seven senior officials resigning late last month and a remaining lawyer suggesting he faced internal retaliation.”
It will be daunting for Democrats to fund their 2026 midterms with their main fund-raising platform plunged into turmoil, a phrase carrying distinctly toilet-like echoes. (After plunging comes flushing.) Indeed, the Times continued the bad news, reporting that “the group is under investigation by congressional Republicans.”
Uh oh.
If anything happens to ActBlue, the Democrats face a serious fundraising setback:
Wrestling to keep its expression neutral, the Times ironically reported that “what prompted so many longtime ActBlue officials to leave is not clear.” Haha, it’s not clear to Times readers. But we know.
This is not so much an exodus of top officials as it is an evacuation.
The rats who fled this week included the vice president of customer service, the associate general counsel — the highest-ranking legal officer at ActBlue — the assistant research director, a human resources official, the chief revenue officer, and an engineer who spent 16 years building the software handling the flow of donations. Godspeed.
🔥 Over the last two years, the progressive fund-raising behemoth has become increasingly embroiled in a “smurfing” scandal. Diligent independent investigators, beginning with James O’Keefe and his citizen journalists, discovered that ActBlue routinely runs hundreds or thousands of small-dollar donations for the same donors. And those same small donors are often low-income folks or are retired and living on a fixed budget.
More scandalously, O’Keefe and his sleuths interviewed some of these donors who denied not only making the donations but even having the ability to make the many donations.
The timing is telling. For Democrats — staring down a rampaging Trump behemoth — right now is the absolute worst time for the smurfing investigation to get under steam and start popping up in corporate media. If, as the Times suggested, Republicans pass new laws restricting lax loopholes allowing unverified small donations, it could be game over, at least for the foreseeable future.
Some people have speculated that smurfed small-donor support is a fraud that lets foreigners and blue billionaires launder money through the fund-raising platform to skirt campaign finance limits. If that is true (and I happen to believe it is true), then candidates face appalling new needs to fundraise the old-fashioned way, which they have completely forgotten how to do, as evidenced by their bizarre fetishes with promoting vaccine mandates and gender-bending surgeries for children.
It is shaping up to be a perfect storm of disaster for Democrats. Their party lies in disarray. Their leadership is AWOL. They are fighting amongst themselves. Local democrat pols are switching parties. And now, their money pond — the mother’s milk of politics — is drying up. The dreadful question that no one has yet asked is: what if the Republicans gain more seats in the Senate and House in the midterms?
It will be adiós, muchachos. It will be a generation of Democrat wilderness wandering.
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We must also mention the dissolution of Old Europe. The New York Times ran the story under the headline, “Europe Races to Craft a Trump-Era Plan for Ukraine and Defense.” Today, 27 European leaders will meet again in Brussels in the latest in a dizzying series of hastily convened emergency summits. But this time, they mean it.
Although they don’t (or won’t) yet recognize it, the leaders are meeting to discuss fulfilling Trump’s long-time demands that Europe should pay a lot more for its own defense. They used to chortle like hyenas huffing laughing gas at the idea. But this morning, Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, told reporters, “We are ready to put, finally, our money where our mouth is.” Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister of Denmark, said, “Spend, spend, spend on defense and deterrence.”
It’s the Trump effect set on blast. “In less than two months,” the Times admitted, “Mr. Trump has changed the game when it comes to security in Europe.” And guess who finally got it done? Surprisingly, it was funnyman Zelensky. The Times told readers, “the disastrous meeting last week at the White House between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky has forced European leaders to move with new urgency.”
The Times’ article — and all the other related corporate media articles — spent most of their column inches talking not about peace plans but about the European’s frantic panic to “urgently” re-arm themselves. Unstated in any of the articles was the reason why Europe needs to re-arm. The implication was that, as Trump has long complained, Europe has gotten into a bad habit of relying on America’s charge card, since they accidentally left theirs in their other sport coat. Again.
But that is not the real reason, not today. The real reason is much more ironic.
The real reason the European must “urgently” re-arm is because over the last three years they have shipped nearly all their ready military equipment to Ukraine— in exchange for promises of future repayment that remain viable only if Ukraine wins. If Putin wins, Ukraine may never have the ability to pay them back.
But either way, Europe couldn’t field an army against Russia if you threatened to let Putin eat every savory croissant on the continent.
Old Europe laughingly counted on clueless Joe Biden to fight the Russians for them and save Ukraine so it could pay them back. But not only have they shipped off all their working military equipment, but over the last few years they’ve de-industrialized and de-energized their whole silly union.
It’s like the fable of the Little Red Hen. Trump is the little red hen who warned the Europeans since 2016 that they needed to stock up and prepare to defend themselves when winter comes. The EU is the herd of dumb pigs who shrugged and kept grazing the fields of green energy, censorship, and pension expansions while winter’s calendar loomed ever closer.
The pigs are now waking up to the exquisitely painful reality that the Little Red Hen is about to exact a terrible price for sharing any more grain with them. They are completely at the Hen’s — Trump’s — mercy. There is almost nothing he can’t force them to agree to. The Art of the Dealmaker is holding all the farm’s cards.
“America First” wasn’t just a slogan. It was a warning. But like the pigs in the fairy tale, they just wouldn’t listen.
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Finally, and apropos to today’s other news, enjoy and consider this first-time Trump-voting former Democrat explain why she left the donkey party:
CLIP: Former democrat has seen the light (2:08).
That’s a wrap for today!
Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow for another delightful installment of essential news and commentary.
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
