A culture of impunity or at least a culture of elite impunity is now so widely discussed that it has become almost a cliché of American political discourse. But clichés and caricatures have power when they contain a strong or recognizable element of truth. And we are in the midst of a kind of performance of impunity which is revealing and bracing to behold. A few days ago, the former Prince Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was arrested and questioned in an investigation of alleged crimes tied to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew is the first prince to be arrested in 400 years. (Technically, he’s the first British prince ever to be arrested. The last example, Charles I, was king of England. This was before the Union Treaty of 1707 which created Great Britain. Charles was tried and executed.) Today, police in the United Kingdom arrested Peter Mandelson, now a Labour party elder (he made his name under Tony Blair) who was until September the British ambassador to the United States. The investigation that led to his arrest was spurred by the release of the Epstein Files. His earlier resignation as ambassador was also tied to his relationship with Epstein.
A funny thing happened today. I made one of my infrequent forays into Facebook and an acquaintance noted in a post her brief mention in the Epstein files. These weren’t incriminating in any way. Something she wrote was briefly mentioned in passing by people who didn’t appear even to know her. Then another friend chimed into the thread noting how he’d similarly been mentioned in an offhand and fortuitous and not incriminating way. So I thought: Am I in the Epstein Files?
Almost every article on today’s tariff decision includes, somewhere two or three paragraphs down, a note which explains that it’s unclear how or whether the federal government will issue refunds for illegally collected tariffs. The Court’s decision doesn’t address this. I’m not sure why it would really need to address this. The tariffs were illegal. The government had no legal authority to collect them. So it should be a simple matter for importers to go to court and compel the government to refund their money. But set all that aside. Is it really so uncertain? I’ll bet the White House is going to find a way to issue those refunds. Why? Because Trump insiders, especially the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have reportedly made huge, huge bets on the tariffs being tossed. They and their clients now, per a July report that prompted a Senate investigation, stand to make tens or even hundreds of billions on those refunds. Given that Lutnick is a primary player in White House tariff policy, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to find a way to issue those refunds.
The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.
We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate. It is, among other things, an example of the central tenet of current conservative jurisprudence: to determine what law or constitution would require if words had no meaning. We could go into the further digression over whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on congressional authority over tariffs or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s made-up doctrines. But doing so would be nothing more than ceding to the Court an authority to compel us to expend time exploring the vaporous logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.
Courtesy of an anonymous TPM Reader, I wanted to share a fascinating, if mundane document with you. This is a report from the city of Social Circle, Georgia (a very conservative area) reporting on their discussions with the Department of Homeland Security about the department’s plans to build an ICE facility in the city. It contains a remarkable degree of transparency about the city’s discussions with DHS, a helpful reminder of the resilience or the promise of local self-government.
But what caught my attention is the slapdash way in which DHS is really trying to run roughshod over local jurisdictions and generating resistance for reasons quite separate from political opposition to ICE’s mass deportation program. I really recommend taking a few moments to read it.
I mentioned the other day that the insider D.C. sheets are helpful guides to when a new idea or bit of news is breaking into the elite D.C. conversation. I saw another example of that today, and it’s a window onto a critical topic, a critical part of the restoring democracy to-do list in the coming years. Semafor’s Liz Hoffman has a piece on the shifting “political pendulum.” What she’s referring to in this context is all those corporations who moved decisively in 2025 to get on the MAGA bandwagon. We think mostly about the tech monopolies. Their leaderships are high profile. In many cases, their structure ensures that the founder maintains total control over the corporations, despite being a public company. So when Mark Zuckerberg starts showing up a UFC matches with Trump or Don Jr. you know where Facebook is placing its bets. But for anyone paying close attention, this corporate shift goes way beyond the highly personalized leadership of the tech monopolies.
“He’s got the MAGA that hates him because he voted to impeach Trump. And he’s got MAHA that’s out to get him because he’s had the temerity to speak out against some of the crazy stuff that RFK Jr. has done.”
