Featured

Trump: Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader, but I said no thanks

Trump’s “Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader” joke at an NRCC fundraiser uses a real, deadly leadership crisis in Iran to normalize assassination-as-policy and blur what’s confirmed about the war and succession.

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Featured

‘Men need to be perp-walked’ after Epstein files release, Massie tells BBC

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Buried.News

The stories buried under the noise

Primary focus

Trump fires Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary

A Cabinet secretary was forced out amid contracting and oversight scrutiny, signaling that executive control—not transparent accountability—can dictate leadership of the agency driving mass detention and deportation.

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Featured

The Trump gold coin is not normal : Consider This from NPR

A federal design panel OK’d a Trump portrait for a commemorative gold coin, but the key question is whether Treasury can legally bypass long-standing limits meant to keep living politicians off U.S. money.

Mar 23, 2026

Featured

White House Confronted Over Huge Bets Made Minutes Before Trump’s Big War Move

A $580 million burst of oil-futures selling minutes before Trump’s Iran “talks” post raises a basic public-interest question: did anyone trade on advance knowledge of a market-moving national security decision?

Mar 24, 2026

Norms Impact

U.S. to Impose 10% Global Tariff Under Different Authority, Trump Says

After the Supreme Court struck down his tariff authority, the president moved to reimpose a global levy under a different statute, testing whether court limits can be functionally bypassed.

Executive

Sources

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-us-gdp-report-02-20-26/card/trump-says-he-will-impose-10-global-tariff-under-different-authority-kYLJL2wuVAz9XRa2H65x

Summary

President Trump announced the U.S. will impose a 10% global tariff to replace duties the Supreme Court ruled illegal the same morning. The administration is shifting tariff authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 while initiating Section 301 investigations for longer-term measures. The practical consequence is an immediate, time-limited tariff regime followed by a pipeline aimed at reconstituting broad tariffs through different statutory mechanisms.

Reality Check

Circumventing a Supreme Court ruling by rapidly repackaging the same sweeping tariffs under a new legal hook weakens judicial constraint and makes our economic rights contingent on executive improvisation. On these facts alone, this is not clearly criminal, but it squarely raises rule-of-law and separation-of-powers alarms about using statutory workarounds to preserve a policy the Court has declared unlawful under its prior asserted authority. The durable precedent is that court defeats become temporary setbacks, not binding limits, as the executive searches for alternate delegations to achieve the same end. If Congress and the courts do not enforce meaningful boundaries on the use of Section 122 and Section 301, executive power becomes the default tariff legislature.

Detail

President Trump announced Friday that the United States will impose a 10% global tariff to replace many duties the Supreme Court ruled illegal earlier that morning. He said the new tariffs will be imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs for up to 150 days.

Trump also said that during the 150-day period the administration will begin new tariff investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act, a process that can lead to more permanent tariffs.

The announcement followed a Supreme Court decision issued Friday morning in a 6-3 vote holding that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose global tariffs was illegal. The move reflects a contingency plan the administration developed in anticipation of the Court’s ruling.

Norms Impact

Trump tariffs based on massive error, conservative think tank says

A tariff regime built on a claimed fourfold math error turns executive trade power into an opaque algorithm, severing accountability for prices Americans are forced to pay.

Executive

Apr 6, 2025

Sources

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/06/trump-tariffs-error-aei

Summary

Economists at the American Enterprise Institute say the Trump administration’s reciprocal-tariff formula contains a math error that overstates impacts by about a factor of four. The administration publicly tied tariff-setting to a Council of Economic Advisers–linked formula while the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative cited outside academic research to justify key assumptions. The practical result is tariff rates that AEI says are massively higher than what would be required to meet the administration’s stated goals.

Reality Check

A tariff-setting formula that AEI says is wrong by a factor of four concentrates coercive economic power behind a technical screen, and when that screen is flawed, our rights and livelihoods absorb the error. On these facts, it does not read as a clean fit for federal criminal statutes without evidence of knowing falsification or corrupt intent, but it squarely implicates governance norms against arbitrary, unreviewable decision-making in the use of delegated trade authority. When the government cites academic research to justify inputs while applying the wrong level of those inputs, it normalizes policy-by-pretext and makes meaningful oversight—by Congress and the public—harder to exercise.

Media

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Detail

Economists Kevin Corinth and Stan Veuger at the American Enterprise Institute said the formula the Trump administration used to set “reciprocal tariffs” includes a math error that inflates the calculated impact by about fourfold.

After announcing the tariffs the prior Wednesday, the administration released a formula it said was developed with the Council of Economic Advisers to determine the tariff rates. Corinth and Veuger said the formula uses two variables that should not cancel each other out because the administration applied the wrong level for one of them.

They focused on a variable described as the “elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs,” meaning how much import prices change when tariffs are imposed. Using what they describe as the correct elasticity measure while keeping the same policy goals, they wrote that the levy on Vietnam would have been 12.2% rather than 46%.

In support of its approach, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative cited research on price elasticity by Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on AEI’s assertion.