CNN’s Stephen Collinson (“Trump’s frustration hits a boiling point with loss after loss“):
Donald Trump is boiling with frustration after a spate of political blows weakened his presumption of dominance in Washington and abroad.
It’s been one of those tough weeks that presidents sometimes suffer, when multiple priorities seem to unravel all at once.
The Supreme Court’s decision to block Trump’s plan to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterms left him fuming at his first-term appointees on the top bench, whom he slammed as “a shell” of their former selves.
A lower court again frustrated Trump’s bid to renovate the Kennedy Center. The drama over the arts citadel, which Trump now plans to shut down, is most damaging because it’s an unflattering character reveal. Everyone knows this is really about him trying to muscle his own name onto the living memorial to an assassinated president.
The president’s authority took another dent Tuesday when the GOP-led House voted to require him to end his war with Iran, as three more Republicans swelled the list of party heretics to seven.
Trump’s big midterm offer of a $5,000 check for every American if Republicans win in November, meanwhile, looks dead in the water after Capitol Hill GOPers distanced themselves from the idea. And Speaker Mike Johnson, a close Trump ally, chose to send House lawmakers home Wednesday — a day earlier than planned — to avoid a potentially embarrassing vote on whether to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Wednesday brought another implied rebuke to Trump when the Federal Reserve, under Trump’s handpicked new Chair Kevin Warsh, raised interest rates for the first time since July 2023 in a sign of central bank independence. Trump has spent months demanding large cuts to the cost of borrowing, ignoring the specter of rising inflation that his trade and war policies exacerbated.
The president reacted to the Fed’s move with a new outburst of exasperation on Truth Social. He advanced his idiosyncratic economic assessment that the country is booming and therefore US rates should be at 1%, rather than the new benchmark in the range of 3.75% to 4%.
Trump’s vision of unchallenged US power abroad is also being undermined.
In a stunning development, Canada, a third of the mighty North American trading bloc, was just offered associate membership in another group, the European Union, as it seeks new friends following Trump’s sovereignty threats and tariff attacks.
And Trump’s waffling over when the Iran war will end can’t cover up a worsening situation. Tehran-backed Houthi rebels just seized land in and around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, potentially giving them leverage over another critical oil exporting route while the US is still struggling to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
It’s just unfair is what it is. Trump is President and should get whatever he wants. What’s the point of being President otherwise?
Democrats gripe about a Supreme Court that has often shared Trump’s vision of expansive executive authority. But at times, these three justices have also reined in Trump’s power. These are turbulent times, but it shouldn’t be surprising when Supreme Court justices uphold the Constitution, which gives control of elections to the states. Their lifetime tenure also means they’ll be forging their own legacies long after Trump leaves office.
Ungrateful is what they are. Where would they be without Trump?
Trump’s disagreement with the Fed’s rate hike was not a surprise. But it is another sign that his authority is limited. After all, he’d spent months hounding Warsh’s predecessor Jerome Powell over his failure to slash rates. Now the man he picked as a replacement has overseen a rate increase.
It’s like he thinks he’s independent or something. But the Executive is unitary, damn it.
Still, it’s not all bad news.
Trump has perhaps done more than any other president to erode the constraints on executive power imposed by the Constitution and custom.
Damn straight.
He has found particular success, for instance, in his evisceration of parts of the federal government by acting with shock and awe to outpace initial court action.
Hell yes he has.
