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tariffs
A New Raft of Trump Awards™, Buildings, and Lifetime Achievements
Trump loves nothing more than hearing his name and seeing it affixed, preferably in gold color, to apartment and office buildings, casinos, and consumer products.
Feb 28, 2026
At his February 2026 State of the Union address, Great Leader Donald Trump was atypically modest about his achievements as president in his second term. He has conquered inflation; ended eight wars; taken $1 off the price of gas; created jobs as never before; conquered unemployment; ridded the cities of criminals and immigrants; secured $18 trillion in investments with highly effective tariff wars; and created a peace board with a modest $1 billion entry fee.
Of course, none of these claims is true. But the president should be honored for his hard work and delusionary beliefs. President Trump loves nothing more than hearing his name and seeing it affixed, preferably in gold color, to apartment and office buildings, casinos, and consumer products. The board of trustees of John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, most of whom Trump appointed and whose chairman is Donald, voted to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. But more work is to be done. The following buildings, objects, and programs are just a first cut of the most important honors.
- The Trump Constitution. Russian President Vladimir Putin promulgated one to make him president for life…
- The Trump and Genesis “I Can’t Dance” Ball Room. For $1 million, you can have a lifetime “I Can’t Dance” membership.
- Trump Archive and Bathroom. At Mar-a-Lago. Where he read classified documents, refused to return them, and washed his hands. Apparently.
- Donald Trump Prisons. Geo Group, with 100 facilities and a total of 80,000 “beds” (or, as they are usually called “cells”), has become the second-largest contractor for Trump’s mass incarceration campaign, with a 700% increase in profits since 2024. Private prisons gave Trump over $1 million toward his reelection. And Trump is a felon. Trump deserves a prison or two.
- The Trump Penn Station, Washington International Airport, and Gateway Tunnel. Trump said he would unfreeze roughly $16 billion in federal funding if Democrats support the name changes.
- Trump Toll Booths. Fifty percent of tunnel tolls go to the Trump Organization through booths emblazoned in gold paint as “Trump Little Towers.”
- The Trump Kennedy-Trump Center Drag Gala. To headline the opening of the 2026-27 season. It will include a reprise of the year 2000 drag performance of Trump with Rudy Guiliani. Special guest JD Vance dressed in drag as he was at Yale Law School. The Gala will be held monthly since schedule permits: Dozens of artists cancelled their performances.
- Trump and Sons Gaza Resort. For $2 million you can name a Gaza skyscraper after yourself.
- The Trump, Kennedy, Oz, and Heath Pharmacy. Medicaire has put a pause on funding medical equipment, orthotics, and prosthetics. For $1 million you can buy a pair of Trump Crutches™ for the needy.
- Qatar Trump Airlines: What to do with a gifted 747? Daily flights between any golf course and Mar-a-Lago.
- Trump Hospitals and Research Centers. No vaccinated or masked patients permitted. No cutting edge research allowed.
- The Trump Center for Human Resources (Trump HR™). His university went bankrupt, and he paid a $25 million fine for it. But Trump is a wonderful judge of quality employees whose main virtue is making their boss look good. A half dozen top administration officials are in the Epstein files.
- Trump Triumphal Arc. Bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but dedicated to heroes with bone spurs who salute North Korean generals. The Arc would resemble the meaning of Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Light” to commemorate the thousand-year Reich in Nuremburg.
- The Jeff Epstein Beauty Pageant. Donald Trump co-owned and operated the Miss Universe Organization from 1996 to 2015. He bragged about going into dressing rooms. He may wish to re-acquire the business for his former friend (we have photos and emails).
- Trump Veterinary Center and Restaurant. Menu includes Cats and Dogs.
- Trump Amusement Park and Tariff Research Center. Highlight is the “TACO” Roller Coaster.
- Trump Rushmore National Monument. Granted, it must overcome significant geological and structural issues, and significant political opposition. But entry valid with “Trump the Beautiful” Park pass. If you deface the pass which has his orange likeness, you are deported.
- Trump Orange Cosmetics. Trump sells a tawdry fragrance whose slogan might be “Because real women love the kind of real man who smells of spray tan.” Also gaudy gold sneakers at only $800.
- Trump Condoms. In gold wrapper with label “Tiny Hands, Big Ego.” (Men whose ring finger is longer than middle finger have slightly bigger penises than average. This apparently explains why Trump flipped off an autoworker on a visit to a Michigan Ford plant. The Trump Footlong wiener, sold in Chicago, is 3” long.
- Trump Cell Phones. Already in the works. None have been delivered as promised six months ago. Phone comes loaded—with one app, “Truth Social,” discounted to annual fee of $100 per year.
- The Trump “Dzhugashvili” Prize. Joe Stalin awarded himself 11 major medals, including three Lenin prizes, but never the Stalin prize.
- The Trump Legislative Award. To be given annually to Trump himself for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law in July 2025 that will impoverish Americans, lead to hunger crises, cut medical care, successfully enrich billionaires, enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain residents without due process, and increase the deficit by $3 trillion in one decade.
- Trump Currency. Name and stunning physiognomy on legal tender. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced the “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act.” In addition to the slang for the $100 bill as the “C-note” and “Benjamin” (Franklin), there will be the “Cheeto” or “Taco” for the $250 bill.
- Trump Collectible Cards. What could be more presidential? Already available including images of the four-time draft dodger wearing American flag boxing gloves that run counter to his own presidential order of August 2025 making it a crime to desecrate the flag.
To ensure these and other possibilities, in February 2026 Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport in a variety of possible names, along “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.” This would enable US citizens to continue to pay Trump through licensing fees. A reasonable patent lawyer might trademark “Grifting President™”.
Trump has already immortalized his legacy in: at least eight Trump towers, and at least 13 others never completed; 10 other Trump buildings, and a dozen more never completed; a handful of Trump hotels, but at least 18 never completed or renamed;15 golf courses, and five abroad, and several under discussion abroad funded by Qataris and Saudis; seven former casinos and four never completed that led to six bankruptcies; and 94 felonies and one case of sexual abuse.
Trump can already be satisfied to learn that scientists have named several creatures after him: a fragile yellow-white moth (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi), a fossil sea urchin (Tetragramma donaldtrumpi), and Dermophis donaldtrumpi, the proposed name for a new species of blind amphibious 10 centimeter-long worm.
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With Its Tariff Ruling, the Supreme Court Shows It's Possible to Take Trump's Toys Away
The decision is a sign that US institutions are attempting to claw back authority from an overreaching executive.
Feb 26, 2026
The Supreme Court’s decision is clear. The president did not have the authority to impose most of his tariffs.
President Donald Trump argued that, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, his actions were justified because of a national emergency caused by a foreign threat. In the 6-3 ruling, the court said that, on the contrary, that act provides Congress with that authority, which hadn’t delegated it to the president. The tariffs left standing are largely by sector: cars, semiconductors, steel.
Trump, like the infamous honey badger, don’t care.
The president immediately insulted the six justices who ruled against him, calling them “disloyal, unpatriotic” and “lapdogs… for the radical left Democrats.” Then he turned around and reimposed a global 15% tariff rate.
The court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach.
For a lot of countries, that new rate is actually an improvement. Mexico and Canada have faced higher tariffs, at least for products not covered under the existing US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. China, Brazil, and India will also benefit from the court decision. But for countries that negotiated lower rates with the Trump team—Japan, Indonesia—it’s a slap in the face. That should teach them to made deals with the devil.
To justify his reassertion of tariffs, Trump is using another law, which establishes a ceiling of 15% and a 150-day limit before Congress can weigh in. No previous president has invoked this law to impose tariffs. For good reason: its provisions reference not a trade deficit but an “international payments problem” connected to fixed exchange rates and the gold standard, a world that no longer exists. As such, Trump is simply graduating from one illegality to another. It may not be long before Trump dispenses altogether with his misinterpretation of esoteric laws to sanctify his lawlessness.
A sensible president might have used the court decision as an opportunity to jettison an unpopular policy and pivot toward “affordability” in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, as his advisers have been urging. But that’s not Trump’s style. He almost always doubles down in the face of resistance.
And resistance there will be. The court ruling opens up the possibility for companies to file suit against the US government to recover costs associated with the tariffs. In his dissenting opinion, Brett “OG Lapdog” Kavanagh warned that this could usher in a “mess.” Perhaps Kavanagh slept through his econ classes at Yale, because the “mess” was already created by Trump’s chaotic approach to trade in the first place.
Trump’s intransigence will naturally interfere with a court-driven effort to restore a measure of predictability to US trade policy. However, perhaps the court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach. Low approval ratings, pushback by some Republicans against Trump’s federal diktats, intimations of rebellion from countries like Canada: These are signs that guardrails are going back up to protect against a presidential monster truck gone amok.
Tariff Impact
The United States continues to run a huge trade deficit—in goods and services—of roughly $901 billion. There was a slight decline last year—of $2 billion—that amounted to a reduction of 0.2%—a far cry from the 78% decline that Trump has claimed. Worse, from Trump’s point of view, the deficit in goods—which his tariffs were supposed to target—went up 2.1%.
Okay, but hasn’t the United States pulled in a lot of revenue from these tariffs? With an effective rate of 11.7%—the average for the previous two years was 2.7%—tariffs brought in $194.8 billion in 2025. That’s not a small figure. It ends up in the same place as domestic taxes: the US treasury. From there, Congress makes decisions regarding spending (which the Trump administration has, on occasion, unconstitionally ignored).
The more important concern is: Who pays?
The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”
A majority of Republicans believes that foreigners pay the cost of these tariffs. They are just following the president, who argued this week in his State of the Union that “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.”
However, since they apply to goods entering the United States from other countries, it’s actually American importers who pay the tax. That includes car manufacturers that are using foreign-made components, big retailers like Walmart that are selling foreign-made products, and service providers like FedEx that deliver goods across borders.
Ordinarily, US companies will pass on the cost of tariffs to the consumer. And there has been an overall increase in inflation over the last year: an uptick of 2.7% in consumer prices in December 2025 from the year before. The rising cost of autos is a case in point. The average cost of a car hit a new record in December at just over $50,000. And that’s with car companies making the decision not to pass on to the consumer many of the additional costs associated with imported components. Companies are not likely to continue swallowing their losses in 2026.
It’s not just consumers who are paying for the tariffs in the form of higher costs. It’s also American farmers who aren’t selling their soybeans to China because of the reciprocal tariffs that Beijing has imposed. This year, crop farmers in the United States lost nearly $35 billion, though not all of that can be connected to tariffs. The $12 billion the Trump administration has pledged in agricultural assistance this year only goes part of the way to limit the damage.
Recouping Costs
The Supreme Court decision opens up the possibility for companies to sue the federal government to recover some of the costs inflated by the tariffs. According to economists at Wharton, the total could reach as high as $175 billion. If companies went after that full amount, that would leave only $20 billion of the tariff revenues in the federal kitty.
To get the issue to the Supreme Court, thousands of companies, including Costco, Revlon, and Goodyear Tires, had already sued the Trump administration. Ford says that it has lost $2 billion because of the tariffs.
Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve.
The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”
FedEx is the first company to take the administration to the US Court of International Trade after the Supreme Court ruling. This federal court, located in New York, already ruled against Trump’s tariffs back in May, with even Trump’s appointee to the court siding against him. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has also sent Washington a bill for $8.6 billion, the proceeds to be distributed to all of the state’s households.
Trump promised to run the country like a business. But he has more experience navigating bankruptcy than posting genuine profits.
Peak Trump?
The US president is still exercising his erratic unilateralism in the global arena. He continues to threaten Iran with military strikes if it doesn’t bend to his will. He has encircled Cuba with a new embargo covering oil shipments. The Pentagon is still bombing alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with six strikes this month alone.
But the Supreme Court decision is a sign that US institutions are attempting to claw back authority from an overreaching executive. Some Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s insane moves to seize Greenland. CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce are starting to test the waters with mild criticisms of Trump’s economically destabilizing policies. Back in December, the Republican-controlled Senate in Idaho rejected the redistricting plan the Trump administration was trying to push down the state’s throat.
It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood.
The president has abysmal approval ratings. But it’s not so much fear of public disapproval as of Trump’s retribution that has kept critics within his party and in the economic elite in line. Politicians prefer to retire—Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House, Thom Tillis from the Senate—rather than face the outpouring of hate and death threats that Trump unleashes when he wants you out of office.
Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve. China played chicken with Trump over tariffs, and the US president swerved out of the way. The power of the street in Minnesota forced the administration to reduce its Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in the state. And some independent-thinking Republicans are standing firm—Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul from Kentucky.
Trump seems to be growing increasingly erratic. He has threatened Iran with not just a targeted attack but a rapid escalation. He has lashed out against his judicial allies (like Neil Gorsuch on the court). Rather than deal with all the backlash against his heavy-handed approach to the Kennedy Center programming, he decided just to close down the center “for repairs.”
The president’s attention-deficit problems are legendary. His unlimited capacity to insult people goes all the way back to his youth. But his most recent tirades seem to be tinged with desperation, like the tantrums of a child who can’t get out of the crib no matter how much it screams and shakes its rattle.
It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood. The only solution is to take away his toys before he hurts himself and everyone else. The Supreme Court has shown the way.
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You Decide: What Is the 'Worst of the Worst' of Trump's Many Outrages?
A strong case can be made for establishing a national competition in which all citizens can participate and advocate for what they consider the absolute “bottom feeding” moment of Trump’s presidency.
Feb 25, 2026
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board recently declared Donald Trump’s public meltdown in the wake of the Supreme Court’s tariff decision “arguably the worst moment of his presidency.”
I beg to differ. There have been countless others for which notable commentators have argued strongly that he surely can’t go any lower than this. They identify a moment, action, or post that they contend is the “worst of the worst,” the nadir of presidential leadership.
For my part, a strong case can be made for establishing a national competition in which all citizens can participate and advocate for what they consider the absolute “bottom feeding” moment of Trump’s presidency. Many benefits would accrue from such a competition.
One of the most consequential benefits is the aggregation in one place of the thousands of “worst moments” that citizens will cite. Amassed together, they would inform our collective consciousness about the quality of leadership that the nation is experiencing.
We have become numb to moral transgressions because we are drowning in them. This is an extremely hazardous place to be. A “worst of the worst” display will help us regain perspective and moral equilibrium.
Perhaps an appropriate national advocacy organization could take on the task of creating a giant display. Viewers would walk through a museum-like presentation, offering a sequenced timeline of these juried “worst moments.” Each one would be set apart and include explanatory text on why it was chosen and who nominated it.
The display would also provide another critical benefit. It would remind us all of the assault on our moral compass that these last years have wreaked.
It is not accidental or incidental that the unfolding saga surrounding the Epstein files has not produced the moral outrage in this country that it has in Great Britain. We have become numb to moral transgressions because we are drowning in them. This is an extremely hazardous place to be. A “worst of the worst” display will help us regain perspective and moral equilibrium. Without something like this, our status as ethical beings will be nullified.
Here are three of the “worst of the worst” that I believe warrant serious consideration for the display. I have chosen ones in particular that involve Trump’s blatant attempts to dominate other persons in a way that diminishes their basic humanity. These speak eloquently of his motivation to harm his fellow human beings and encourage followers to violence.
The president’s recent posting of the Obamas as jungle apes ranks high on my list. Denigrating a predecessor in such a blatantly racist fashion, while also including his wife who is revered by a good proportion of the citizenry, makes this a good fit for the “worst of the worst.” Unlike the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, there was not even a wisp of policy implication here. Rather, it concerned the basic regard we owe other people.
When Rob Reiner and his partner were killed by his drug-addicted son, Trump disparaged him, calling him “deranged.” As with his treatment of Sen. John McCain, he expressed disdain for a highly regarded individual, who through no fault of his own had become a victim.
The most legendary “worst of the worst” is the “grab them by the pussy” assertion. Here Trump objectifies and denigrates over half the world’s population, displaying for all to see how threatened he is by the power of women. He leaves no doubt of his inclination toward sexual abuse and intimidation.
So, my fellow Americans, I urge you to identify the moment you think qualifies for the “worst of the worst.” There is an endless array from which to choose. Our qualification as a caring and right-minded people depends on your thoughtful deliberation.
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