The Only “Judicial Coup” in This Country Is by Trump Against Judges

So Donald Trump got a temporary win Thursday when a federal appeals courts stayed the decision from the International Court of Trade, which ruled that his tariffs were illegal. Trump aides went on Fox News to crow about their big victory, but they may be back to eating crow soon: The stay was granted on an administrative basis only. In addition, a second federal court has also issued a ruling blocking the tariffs.

Meanwhile, the administration suffered another huge legal setback this week when a different federal judge ruled that Harvard University can keep admitting foreign students for the time being, overruling the administration’s efforts to derail the university. Naturally, the attack on Harvard is just phase one in Trump’s attempt to Orbánize, if I may put it that way, American higher education. It’s a nakedly ideological and authoritarian attack, for which the administration—while asking to see the coursework of every international student—is presenting to the courts no actual evidence of wrongdoing, and it will lose.

This is the week that TACO—or “Trump always chickens out” —became a thing. The phrase was coined in early May by a Financial Times writer. It has since spread to Wall Street, where traders mock him for always reliably backing down on his most extravagant trade war proposals. A White House reporter asked Trump about his new nickname. Little Donnie got very mad.

It’s funny. But it’s worth noting that he doesn’t always chicken out. Most of the time, he just loses.

The New York Times keeps a running tab of the number of court cases that have gone against the administration. As of May 29, the number of losses clocked in at 181. And in her Substack on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson cited research by the political scientist Adam Bonica of Stanford, who found that the administration suffered a 96 percent loss rate in the courts in May.

The administration is losing these cases for a simple reason: They’re breaking the damn law. They’re invoking old and obscure laws and insisting that they confer upon them the authority to do things they don’t have the authority to do. They’re trying to stretch other laws and regulations to suit their authoritarian purposes.

God knows they’ve done a lot of damage. But it’s also been heartening to see that, thanks to the courage and commitment of a lot of people who care about democracy and the law and are putting themselves on the line to defend them, they’re seeing that limits do exist in this country that should prevent them from imposing full-on fascism.

But all of this assumes that the Trumpies will obey the law. That is not an assumption we can make. This week we have Stephen Miller calling the trade court’s ruling a “judicial coup”—remember, it was delivered by a three-judge panel; two were Republican appointees, and one of those an appointee of Trump himself—and saying: “We are living under a judicial tyranny.” Likewise, we have tariff consigliere Peter Navarro saying, in essence, To hell with the law. “You can assume that even if we lose, we will do it another way,” Navarro told reporters Thursday.

With respect to the Harvard case, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “if these judges want to be secretary of state or the president, they can run for office themselves.” And the Times reported that lawyers at the Department of Homeland Security “hinted that the Trump administration was pursuing other ways to bar international students from enrolling at the Ivy League university.”

In other words: They’re going to continue to break the law. Or maybe they’re going to have young graduates of Ave Maria law school scour the books and find weird 1846 statutes under which they can exercise their authority to deport people for writing newspaper op-eds. The day is going to come, perhaps soon, when Trump just says openly of a major court decision that the decision is illegitimate and he will not obey it. (They’ve flouted court decisions, as in the refusal to comply with the Supreme Court’s order on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but they’ve generally done so without trying to provoke direct confrontation.)

None of this is an accident. Trump and Miller want this fight. As retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told the Times: “This was a planned war that he had been planning since he lost the last election. From Day 1, the president, the vice president, and then eventually his entire Cabinet have been attacking the courts and the judiciary because they knew to a certainty that the courts would strike down his initiatives.”

In other words, these initiatives and the way the Trump administration is going about them—using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as ostensible legal cover for obviously illegal deportations—are part of a larger plan. There’s a particular assault on immigrants, another particular assault on standing trade law and congressional (rather than executive) authority, another particular assault on higher education, and more. They’re all real, and they’re all frightening.

But they’re all just smaller parts of a broader assault on the rule of law itself. They’re pieces of a puzzle, and the puzzle, once filled in, will show a Republican-dominated legislative branch that has willingly conceded most of its authority, a judicial branch that has been stripped of its own, and a unitary executive—King Donald—with all the power in his hands.

Ah, you say, but Trump has always said he’d obey the Supreme Court. True. He has. And that means … what, exactly? Who’s gullible enough to take that seriously? All it means is that he’s at least smart enough to know that he has to say that for now.

So Stephen Miller is right, in a way. There is a judicial coup going on in this country. It’s just that it’s being waged by Trump, Miller, and their gang of rogues against the judges, not the other way around.

If the world still exists a hundred years from now or, even more improbably, a thousand, and people are still writing and reading something that vaguely resembles a “book,” some future Gibbon chronicling the descent into authoritarian corruption of the once-republican United States of America may very well sift through the archives of our era and decide that nothing sums up our decline and fall quite like the events of May 22, 2025.

Dawn broke with the House of Representatives passing the Trump budget bill, which takes from the poor to give to the rich more bluntly and blatantly than any bill in American history. The day ended with Donald Trump hosting the most corrupt dinner a president of the United States has ever held, solely for the purpose of enriching himself, and putting himself in hock to … well, his real employers—the citizens and voters of the United States—have no idea who they are, precisely.

That dinner is way beyond shocking. It’s the American equivalent of the art collection Hermann Goering stole from the homes of Jews during World War II in the way it symbolizes the sick corruption of this regime (and yeah, it’s a “regime,” not an “administration”). But from a small-d democratic perspective, it’s worse, precisely because the people who’ve enriched the president through his $Trump meme coin are mostly unknown to us.

We’ve learned a few names. They are not reassuring. The Wall Street Journal broke the story that one investor and dinner guest was the Chinese-born crypto tycoon Justin Sun, who, before this dinner, avoided even setting foot in the U.S. for fear of being arrested. His blockchain network company, says the Journal, is a “popular channel for crypto’s criminal fraternity to move funds.” (His people deny this.) The Biden Securities and Exchange Commission was suing Sun’s company; in February, the Trump administration dropped the lawsuit.

What sort of favor might Sun one day seek from the U.S. government? At least we know his identity. Otherwise, we have almost no idea who most of the 220 guests were. Were there Saudi potentates? Russian oligarchs? Employers of child laborers in some forlorn destination? Rich Qatari backers of Hamas?

Remember, a meme coin has no tangible value. It’s not an “investment” in any normal sense. Only two kinds of people would be drawn to the purchase of large shares of $Trump: people who simply adore the man—and people who want to have leverage over him.

It boggles the mind that this could be perpetrated by a sitting president of the United States. But it happened, and it will go unpunished, not only because Trump is so grubby and sleazy but because congressional Republicans are such cowards. If Kamala Harris were president and she did something that was fractionally as slimy as this—let’s say she just hosted a thank-you dinner for an undisclosed list of high-rolling donors—they’d be screaming impeachment. What Trump has done here is far worse, and with a few meek exceptions (“This gives me pause,” said the courageous Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis), they have nothing to say.

Lummis and her GOP Senate colleagues vow that they will have plenty to say about the small, ugly bill the House passed Thursday morning. And maybe they will. But what’s being said right now makes no sense.

Missouri’s Josh Hawley claims there will be no Medicaid cuts in the bill. He even said Thursday that Trump agrees with him on that. There are, nevertheless, $800-plus billion worth of Medicaid cuts in the House bill. You know, the one Trump pressured House Republicans to pass? Kentucky’s Rand Paul says adding $5 trillion to the debt isn’t very conservative. In theory, that’s true. But if Republicans want to cut taxes on rich people and take a cleaver to domestic spending—both things they yearn to do—then they’re going to add to the debt, and the deficit.

Republicans have been doing nothing but this for the last 45 years: cut taxes for the rich, punish people who rely on meager government programs like food stamps, and run the deficit and the debt to the sky. But they’ve never done it quite as nakedly as this bill does it. The House bill would add $3.8 trillion to the deficit by 2034. This will require the next Democratic president (assuming the existence of an election) to clean up an unprecedented Republican mess, which every Democratic president since Bill Clinton has had to do.

But even worse is the intentional skewing of benefits to the rich. It’s the usual GOP legerdemain: Yes, everybody gets a tax cut, but the tax cuts for the poor are peanuts, and they’re more than offset by the slashing of government programs on which poor people rely. And the rich are getting not just personal income tax relief. Republicans have thrown all kinds of things into the bill that help those at the top.

As TNR’s Grace Segers reported this week: “The [Congressional Budget Office]’s findings were echoed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business last Friday, whose budget model revealed that those in the lowest income quintile (annual income of $17,000 or less) would see their after-tax income cut by $1,035. Meanwhile, those in the top 0.1 percent of earners would take home an additional $389,280.”

This isn’t just dubious legislation. It’s antidemocratic decadence. These are the governing priorities of a ruling class that faces no democratic accountability.

There are other things in the bill too. The detention budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement jumps from $3.4 billion to $45 billion. Heather Cox Richardson draws out the key historic connection: “This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people. By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement.”

Lots of material for our future Gibbon, for whom May 22 may well symbolize our demise. The only qualifier to add? Something worse is bound to happen soon.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

“Drain the swamp,” Donald Trump said many times—mostly in his first race in 2016, but also in 2020 and 2024. To a certain kind of low-information person who has been conditioned to believe that everybody in Washington is corrupt and in it for themselves, the message resonated well enough that, with the help of the right-wing echo chamber, the man who has spent his entire adult life cheating people and lying about it convinced enough voters that he would be the scimitar-wielding enemy of corruption.

MAGA America still believes this, because Trump has convinced those folks, through further blatant and obvious lies, that he was the victim of the most sinister persecution in American political history. All the work of the swamp.

Back on planet Earth, meanwhile, we saw many instances this week of the Trump swamp in action, and it’s far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before in this country. Of course every week of this presidency so far has been the equivalent of a fetid, mosquito-infested morass, but this week was different because some of his hench people had to go up to Capitol Hill and answer a few questions, and we saw on full wretched display the three ugly faces of MAGA-style swampiness.

But we must start with Trump himself and that Qatari 747, which he intends to use as Air Force One and then transfer it to his presidential library foundation upon leaving office. It’s not possible to overstate how corrupt this is. The $400 million figure you see quoted in the media is the market value of the luxury jumbo jet right now; that is, the size of the bribe. But it will cost a billion, maybe more, to reconfigure.

This was too blatant even for the likes of Ben Shapiro, but other liars reliably leapt to Trump’s defense. Wrote Ann Coulter: “I can’t wait for the press to find out about France’s so-called ‘gift’ of the Statue of Liberty, accepted in 1886 by then-President Grover Cleveland.”

Right. As if Cleveland put the statue in his backyard and started living in it. It was a gift to the United States, not to Cleveland. Coulter isn’t that stupid. She’s a lawyer. She’s just lying and provoking. What else is new, I guess, but it just shows the cynical depths these people will go to in order to keep the MAGA base in a state of rage.

Which brings us to Swamp Creature Pam Bondi, who approved the gift, calling it “legally permissible.” That’s total nonsense, made worse by the fact that the attorney general once lobbied for Qatar. But why should this surprise us? The New York Times reported Friday that Bondi dumped between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares in Trump’s media company on April 2, the day Trump announced his crazy tariffs (though it’s unknown whether she sold them before the announcement, which could indicate she acted on inside knowledge, or afterward).

Corruption is just one face of this swampdom. Tragicomic evasive incompetence is another. Exhibit A this week was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Capitol Hill testimony, in which he dodged questions about his track record on vaccines and ended up saying, “I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” Remember, this is the man who runs the federal agency that is the chief dispenser of policy and advice about public health.

Kennedy also showed he knew next to nothing about the agency he allegedly runs. Maryland Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks asked him about a program of Health and Human Services that is meant to fight sudden infant death syndrome. Where, she wondered, is this program housed?

He took two incorrect stabs at an answer. Finally, Alsobrooks had to tell him that it was part of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics and a philanthropist on intellectual disability issues with few peers in American history, was his aunt.

But the third and worst face of thuggish swampery is plain cruelty, and here, no one can come close to Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary. She traipsed up to Capitol Hill this week, where Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia asked her some questions about Andry Hernández Romero, the gay man from Venezuela whom the Trump administration sent down to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in early April. The administration asserts that Hernández Romero was a member of Tren de Agua but has advanced little evidence to support that charge. He has no criminal record, and the U.S. government determined that he had a credible claim that he needed asylum.

Garcia simply asked Noem to confirm that he hadn’t been killed:

“Would you commit to just letting his mother know, as a mother to mother, if Andry is alive?”

“Our asylum applications are different than the granting of asylum, and I don’t know the specifics of this individual case. This individual is in El Salvador, and the appeal would be best made to the president and to the government of El Salvador.”

Nice. And now she wants to have a reality TV show in which immigrants compete for U.S. citizenship. Not making this up.

These people aren’t draining any swamp. They are the swamp. I could go on. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard this week fired two veteran intelligence professionals because they wrote an assessment that was at odds with Trump’s rationale for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. And now she wants to put James Comey “behind bars” for a stupid Instagram post of a photo of seashells forming the numbers “8647,” which Bondi took to mean he was calling for Trump’s assassination. Comey later deleted the post and apologized, saying he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

Neither did I. I always thought “86” just means to eject or toss someone or thing, as in, “I 86’d that drunk barfly” or “I 86’d that tattered old coat.” Any other administration would have accepted Comey’s apology and let it go. But in Trumpland, Comey’s crime wasn’t a mere Instagram post. It’s that he is the enemy. And because he is the enemy, the regime is completely justified in dangling a prison term over his head. And so things go in authoritarian swamps, when the minions fear that Dear Leader has been offended.

Nicolle Wallace had Scott Galloway on her MSNBC show Thursday. She began by asking him what he makes of this moment in which we find ourselves. Galloway, a business professor and popular podcaster, could have zigged in any number of directions with that open-ended question, so I was interested to see the direction he settled on: “I think we essentially have become a kleptocracy that would make Putin blush. I mean, keep in mind that in the first three months, the Trump family has become $3 billion wealthier, so that’s a billion dollars a month.”

Stop and think about that. A presidency lasts, of course, 48 months (at most, we hope). Trump has been enriching himself at an unprecedented scale since day one of his second term—actually, since just before, given that he announced the $Trump meme coin a few days before swearing to protect and defend the Constitution.

And now, we know that he’s having a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in two weeks for his top $Trump investors, whose identities we may never know. How might these people influence his decisions? This whole arrangement is blatantly corrupt. And The New York Times had a terrific report this week about Don Jr. and Eric going around the world (Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia) making deals from which their father will profit.

I read these stories, as I’m sure you do, and I think to myself: How on earth is he getting away with this? It’s the right question, but we usually concentrate on the wrong answer.

For most people, they think first of the Democrats, because they’re the opposition, and by the traditions of our system they’re the ones who are supposed to stop this, or at least raise hell about it. Second, we might think about congressional Republicans, who, if they were actually upholding their own oaths to the Constitution, would be expressing alarm about this.

They both shoulder some blame, but neither of those is really the answer. Every time I ask myself how he gets away with this, I remember: Oh, right. It’s the right-wing media. Duh.

After the election, I wrote a column that went viral about how the right-wing media made Trump’s election possible. Fox News, most conspicuously, but also Newsmax, One America News Network, Sinclair, and the rest, along with the swarm of right-wing podcasters and TikTokers, created a media environment in which Trump could do no wrong and Kamala Harris no right.

Think back—I know you’ve repressed it—to that horror-clown-show Madison Square Garden rally Trump held the week before the election. It was, as the Times put it, a “carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism.” A generation or two ago, that would have finished off his campaign. Last year? It made no difference. No—it helped. And it helped because a vast propaganda network—armed with press passes and First Amendment protections—spent a week gabbing about how cool and manly it was.

Newsflash: They’re still at it.

First of all, Fox News is basically the megaphone of the Trump administration. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, key administration officials, reports Media Matters for America, appeared on Fox 536 times. That, obviously, is 5.36 times per day; in other words, assuming that a cable news “day” runs from 6 a.m. to midnight, that’s one administration official about every three hours. I’ve seen occasional clips where the odd host challenges them on this point or that, but in essence, this is a propaganda parade.

I tried to do some googling to see how Fox is covering the meme coin scandal. Admitting that Google doesn’t catch everything, the answer seems to be that it’s not. On the network’s website, there was a bland January 18 article reporting that he’d launched it; an actually interesting January 22 piece summarizing a critical column by The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, who charged that it was an invitation to bribery; and finally, an April 24 report that the coin surged in value after Trump announced the upcoming dinner—“critics” were given two paragraphs, deep in the article. (Interesting side note: Predictably, other figures on the far right have aped Trump by launching their own coins, among them former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley.)

But it’s not just Fox, and it’s not just on corruption. It’s all of them, and it’s on everything. You think any of them are mentioning Trump’s campaign promise to bring prices down on day one, or pointing out that all “persons” in the United States have a right to due process? Or criticizing his shambolic tariffs policies? I’m not saying there’s never criticism. There is. But the thrust of the coverage is protective and defensive: “Expert Failure & the Trump Boom” was the theme of one recent Laura Ingraham segment.

So sure, blame Democrats to some extent. A number of them are increasingly trying to bring attention to the corruption story, but there’s always more they could be doing. (By the way, new DNC Chair Ken Martin announced the creation one month ago of a new “People’s Cabinet” to push back hard against Trump. Anybody heard of it since?)

And of course, blame congressional Republicans. Their constitutional, ethical, and moral failures are beyond the pale, and they’re all cowards.

But neither of those groups is the reason Trump can throw a meme coin party and nothing happens; can send legal U.S. residents to brutal El Salvador prisons; can detain students for weeks because they wrote one pro-Palestinian op-ed; can shake down universities and law firms; can roil the markets with his idiotic about-faces on tariffs; can whine that bringing down prices is harder than he thought; can empower his largest donor, the richest man in the world, to take a meat-ax to the bureaucracy in a way that makes no sense to anyone, and so much more.

It’s all because Trump and his team operate within the protective cocoon of a media-disinformation environment that allows just enough criticism to retain “credibility” but essentially functions as a Ministry of Truth for the administration that would have shocked Orwell himself.

And just remember—a billion dollars a month.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.

It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.

Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).

So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.

Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.

So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.

It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)

Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?

This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.

What are the others? Watergate? It was awful in different ways, but of course Trump is worse than Richard Nixon in all those ways too. Teapot Dome? Please—a tiny little rigged contract, and it didn’t even involve Warren Harding directly, just his interior secretary. Credit Mobilier? Run-of-the-mill bribes by a railroad company, again not involving President Grant directly, just his vice president.

And yes, I’ve been thinking this week of the Lincoln Bedroom scandal. In 1995–96, the Clintons invited a lot of people to spend a night in the famous chamber. Many of them made large donations to the Democratic Party. It was unseemly. But it wasn’t illegal. And it certainly didn’t line the Clintons’ personal pockets. But if you were around at the time, you remember as I do the swollen outrage of Republicans about how relentlessly corrupt the Clintons were.

Today? Crickets.

Finally: Before we leave this topic, I want you to go to GetTrumpMemes.com and just look at those illustrations of Trump. There’s a big one in the middle of him with his fist raised, echoing the image from his attempted assassination. Then off to the right, there’s Trump seated at the head of a dining table.

In both, he looks about 50. The artist has airbrushed a good quarter-century off his face, in terms of jowl fat and wrinkles and accumulated orange pancake. And in the dominant, middle image … what do we think Trump’s waist size is, about 46, 48? This Trump is about a 34. Maybe even a svelte 32. It’s hysterically funny. These are probably the most creepily totalitarian images of Trump I’ve ever seen, and yes, I understand, that’s a big statement. But even Stalin’s visual hagiographers didn’t try to make him look skinny.

I digress. Let’s keep our eyes on the real prize here. This May 22 dinner is a high crime and misdemeanor. A president of the United States can’t use the office to enrich himself in this way, from potentially anonymous donors for whom he might do favors. This is as textbook as corruption gets.

New York Times and Washington Post, put your best investigative reporters on this and place their stories on your front pages. MSNBC, hammer on this—you haven’t been. Democrats, talk about this every day, several times a day. Do not let Trump’s sewer standards jade us. Make sure the people know.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.