Plus: Is the United States at war with Venezuela?

• A surprising number of liberals turn out to be impatient for President Vance.

• Donald Trump’s worldwide 10 percent tariff and retaliatory “liberation day” tariffs have again been found illegal, this time by a 7–4 decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which gave Trump until mid-October to comply with its ruling. It will likely go next to the Supreme Court. The constitutional principles are straightforward, and governed tariffs for most of American history: Congress has explicit power over taxes, and the president does not. Thus, the court held, “absent a valid delegation by Congress, the President has no authority to impose taxes.” Trump invokes “emergency” powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), which is vaguer and less constrained than other laws that delegate some tariff powers to the executive. No president until now has claimed that the law contains authority to impose tariffs. The court concluded that presidential authority under IEEPA to “investigate” and “regulate” foreign transactions does not include a power to impose tariffs. Under today’s “major questions doctrine,” courts should not assume that large powers are delegated implicitly through vague, general language, and “tariffs are a core Congressional power.” Four members of the majority added that such a “functionally limitless delegation of Congressional taxation authority” would be unconstitutional. There are sound reasons why the Framers kept the taxing power in the legislature. It should stay there.

• During Trump’s first term, there was a concerted effort to confront China and isolate it on the world stage. Trump’s second term has been far less impressive. A military parade celebrating the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in the Pacific featured China’s Xi Jinping, as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean despot Kim Jong-un—the declared and undeclared combatants beating back the West’s influence with force in Ukraine. The parade was a capstone to the concomitant Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China, attended by Xi, Putin, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Throughout, the Indian leader put on a theatrical show of affection for his Chinese hosts and his Russian counterpart—a flamboyant signal of defiance following Washington’s imposition of tariffs for purchasing Russian oil. If Washington’s goal is to convince regional powers to balance against the bullies in their neighborhoods by aligning with the West, it still has a long way to go. It could start by doing as India has done—and as the U.S. Congress has ordered—by banning TikTok.

• On Tuesday afternoon, in response to Chicago’s yearly spate of Labor Day weekend violence, the president reiterated his promise to send the National Guard into the Windy City to patrol the streets. The Constitution and federalism be damned, Trump is riding high on the manifest success of his intervention in the streets of Washington, D.C., and recognizes an obvious target of political opportunity when he sees it. Urban crime is perennially unpopular, and the 2028 presidential ambitions of Illinois governor JB Pritzker are as impossible to conceal as his frame. Meanwhile, with his pathetic response to Trump’s threats, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson proved once again why he is less popular than smallpox in the city he leads. Blaming the lack of gun control in states like Indiana, Johnson moaned that Chicago would never reduce violent crime until the rest of America banned guns from crossing into his state—the proverbial counsel of despair. Johnson’s mewlingly helpless response serves as sufficient explanation for why Trump provoked this fight in the first place: He will never have a better foil than the most unpopular and incompetent mayor in America.

• Trump announced via Truth Social that the United States military attacked and destroyed a boat in the Caribbean “transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.” The strike, he said, resulted in the deaths of eleven “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists” who were “operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro.” Maduro’s regime in Venezuela is malign and illegitimate; the United States has designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization. But neither of those facts automatically suggest that it is appropriate for the U.S. military to target and kill TdA drug smugglers on the high seas, as opposed to apprehending them for law enforcement action. (The designation of TdA as a foreign terrorist organization authorizes the U.S. government to apply sanctions and other measures against it; it is not a declaration of a state of a war.) If the president believes that Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela is attacking the United States via a narcoterrorist proxy, he should ask Congress to authorize the use of military force to put an end to this clear and present danger in accordance with our Constitution. Shooting wars ought not be declared by the president via social media. But if there’s a congressional majority . . .

• This just handed to us: President Donald Trump is still alive. Yes, it’s a little unusual for our current president to go six days without appearing in front of the television cameras. But it should not have set off furious speculation online that the president was hiding some sort of secret health problem that had taken a sudden turn for the worse, with intense dissection of an alleged limp, bruises on his hands, and swollen ankles. (In a perfect irony, the Democrats who were most convinced Trump had some secret serious ailment were also among those convinced that octogenarian Joe Biden could handily serve another four years as president.) Governor Pritzker responded to a Trump Truth Social post by demanding “proof of life.” Lost amid this furious speculation was that Trump gave an Oval Office interview to the Daily Caller on Friday. The interview was not published until Monday. But it would have been unusual for reporters at that news organization—or any—not to notice if the president had died, or suffered a stroke, or become a zombie, or whatever else the rumor mill was claiming. When Trump reappeared Tuesday, he seemed like the same guy he always was. Perhaps the online left felt an intense bout of separation anxiety.

• The supposed justification for Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. atop the Department of Health and Human services was to increase public trust in health agencies after Covid reduced it. That is not what he seems to be doing. Indeed, what he’s doing bears a striking resemblance to what he’s advocated for much of his adult life. Kennedy has purged the CDC’s vaccination advisory committee and staffed it with his fellow vaccine skeptics. He dismissed the CDC’s director one month after her confirmation because, her attorneys claim, she would not endorse “unscientific” orders. That may be legal positioning, or it may foreshadow Kennedy’s forthcoming report on autism in America, which is expected to reflect his personal belief that unnatural environmental factors—not increased diagnoses—are to blame for an uptick in case rates. Republicans who were elected, in part, to depoliticize the CDC are only politicizing it in the other direction. The GOP is likely to find that the public does not believe the cure for the ills of politicized medicine is more, different politicized medicine.

• Author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell reached his tipping point on trans athletes. Appearing on The Real Science of Sport podcast, Gladwell made the remarkable confession that he found the arguments made by advocates of athletes born male participating in women’s sports unconvincing for a long time—but only felt comfortable saying so in public recently. Thinking back to a conference panel he moderated on the subject at MIT a few years ago, Gladwell contended that, while almost no one in the room agreed with the trans activists, they were afraid to say so. “If we did a replay of that exact panel . . . this coming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction. And it would be, I suspect, near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in in the female category.” This is good news, but also a vivid demonstration that on this issue—and likely many others—the cultural left won a temporary victory not through persuasion or reason but through sheer intimidation.

• The Air Force has reversed course and will grant military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt. “After reviewing the circumstances of Ashli’s death, and considering the information that has come forward since then, I am persuaded that the previous determination was incorrect,” Matthew Lohmeier, the undersecretary of the Air Force, wrote. What new information? Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, died on January 6, 2021. She had joined the mob that was trying to force its way into the barricaded Speaker’s lobby inside the Capitol Building. When another rioter broke a window, Babbitt tried to climb through. After being warned to stop, she was shot in the shoulder by a police officer and died. The entire incident was caught on tape. There is no dispute that Babbitt was engaged in a dangerous and violent riot, the purpose of which was to prevent Congress from executing its constitutional duty to count the Electoral Votes after the 2020 election. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.), who was present at the scene, later said the officer who shot Babbitt “didn’t have a choice at that time” and that “his actions, I believe, saved people’s lives even more.” In 2021, the Air Force denied funeral honors to Babbitt’s “due to the circumstances preceding her death.” But now the Trump administration will honor Babbitt, on top of settling a wrongful-death lawsuit with her family this spring for $5 million.

• A federal judge has declined to force Google to sell its Chrome browser. The judge’s message for the tech industry was that, now as 30 years ago, it is simply too chaotic and fast-moving to permit aggressive antitrust action. In his opinion, Judge Amit Mehta noted that the recent rise of artificial intelligence had substantively “changed the course of this case,” before complaining that, because such innovations are so systemically disruptive, his court was being “asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future.” In this, he was right. It is impossible to review the past three decades of American tech development and see anything other than repeated episodes of creative destruction. There is no Standard Oil in this equation—and there never will be.

• At the beginning of January 2024, gold was trading at around $2,050. This past Wednesday, its price reached nearly $3,620. Roughly half that rise has taken place since Donald Trump became president. Over the same period, the dollar has sold off sharply. That’s no coincidence, both mathematically (if the dollar falls, the gold price in dollars will rise) and for more fundamental reasons. The dollar and by extension Treasuries are seen as safe-haven assets as, of course, is gold. Persistent geopolitical tensions have played—and are playing—a significant part in gold’s rise, but, in addition, this year, some of the greenback’s safe-haven appeal has faded. Concerns that the administration would welcome some dollar depreciation have been reinforced by the pressure it has been putting on the Fed to cut rates before Biden-era inflation has finally been tamed, and with any tariff effect still unknown. Those concerns have been bolstered still further by signs that the White House is set, whether through personnel changes or otherwise, on having a more accommodating central bank. The result, ironically, will mean that the U.S. ends up paying more to borrow, not less.

• Governments that crack down on free speech tend to be afraid that too many people will express the wrong sort of opinions, and that too many people will agree with them. This explains why, in Britain, where the ruling establishment, regardless of which party is in charge, has adopted an increasingly authoritarian progressivism, successive governments have been extending the reach of the country’s censors, including online. And that is why a growing number of Brits have found themselves on the wrong side of the law for comments that might sometimes be rough-edged but, in this country of the First Amendment, would not even merit a minute of police scrutiny. The recent case of TV writer and comedian Graham Linehan is illustrative. Linehan was arrested upon returning to the U.K. from the U.S. for social media posts on trans issues. (He is now out on bail.) Aside from transgenderism, one of the topics of online discussion most likely to draw the attention of the U.K.’s speech police is criticism of mass immigration. That, and the recent profusion of Palestinian flags, has provoked many Brits to start putting up Union Jacks or England’s St. George’s flag. This may be a warning of a deeper fracturing to come. The state’s refusal to listen—of which censorship is just one sign—will only make it worse.

• When, enraged by disappointing results in last year’s EU elections, France’s President Macron called snap parliamentary elections, he set in motion a chain of events that has taken his country to the edge of economic and political crisis. The snap election led to a broken parliament. Strong showings by both Marine Le Pen’s RN and the far left meant that the only option acceptable to Macron was a centrist minority government. The first of these fell in December, and the second may be about to follow suit after Prime Minister François Bayrou called a confidence vote for September 8 on his plan to (modestly) cut France’s budget deficit, which is 5.4 percent of GDP (its debt stands at 114 percent of GDP). Both the Socialists and RN have said they will vote against Bayrou, in which case his government will fall, without any obvious successor. Financial markets are beginning to tremble and interest rates on France’s government debt have been going up. Polls suggest that another snap election might well strengthen RN’s position, increasing political tensions and rattling markets still further. In chess, the term “Zugzwang” describes a situation when any move a player makes will make his position worse. Perhaps it should be renamed a “Macron.”