Something I’d not mentioned previously is Trump’s ambition to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense system — a modern-day version of Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which was decades away from technological feasibility. Trump thinks this can be built by the end of his term, for $175 billion. On the other hand, he appears to need Canadian cooperation, not unlike what Canada has historically provided for NORAD, in order to build it. And, as has been on the front of my mind this year, U.S.-Canada relations are in a very delicate state thanks to Trump’s frequent “51st state” comments.

Trump played the “51st state” card again yesterday in a social media post, suggesting that while an independent Canada would need to pony up $61 billion to cover a portion of the Golden Dome costs, Canada would get it for free if annexed by the U.S. Perhaps the best-case scenario is that “Canada will pay for the Golden Dome” becomes to Trump 2.0 what “Mexico will pay for the wall” was to Trump 1.0. Prime Minister Carney’s office responded today with a statement that “the Prime Minister has been clear at every opportunity, including in his conversations with President Trump, that Canada is an independent, sovereign nation, and it will remain one.”

Speaking of Canadians, one of my favorite political writers, David Frum, has a new piece in The Atlantic called “The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist.” After reciting a litany of early Trump 2.0 corruption initiatives, including some I haven’t mentioned, Frum observes that:

“Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.”

After backing that statement up via a walk through past examples of Presidential corruption, Frum concludes his article with the following:

“The emoluments clause depends on congressional enforcement, backed by the ultimate sanction of impeachment and removal. And if Congress does not enforce it? Then public opinion remains the only sanction. Cynics deny that public opinion matters, but Trump is not one of them. His belief in how much popular disgust for corruption matters is precisely why he and his supporters worked so hard to promote dark legends about rivals: the Bushes, the Clintons, the Bidens. Those stories were not based on nothing, but the closer anyone looked, the less there was to see. The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something—something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.”

One of my other favorite chroniclers of our time, appellate lawyer Adam Unikowsky, wrote a comprehensive article today talking about the A.A.R.P. case involving the Alien Enemies Act. I’ve been following this situation somewhat closely, and yet much of this article was new to me.

In an early April case, Trump v. J.G.G., SCOTUS reinforced that the people the administration seeks to remove under the AEA have a right to due process: “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” Here Unikowsky describes how the administration responded to the decision in J.G.G.:

“And so the government quickly devised a new notice protocol to comply with J.G.G. … Much of this post will describe a dramatic series of events and filings on April 18 that culminated in a Supreme Court injunction. But the government didn’t tell the courts or the detainees’ lawyers about this new protocol until after the events of April 18. The government wrote the new protocol and immediately started implementing it without telling anyone what it was. As far as I can tell, the government first disclosed the new protocol in a federal court filing on April 23—well after the government attempted to start deporting people pursuant to the new protocol. Moreover, even on April 23, the government attempted to file this new protocol under seal, opposing its public disclosure…”

This new protocol involves giving a detainee a form advising them that they have been determined to be a TdA member and will be deported, and allowing them to make one phone call. The protocol also says that if the detainee doesn’t express a desire within 12 hours of receiving the form to submit a habeas petition then the detainee can be immediately deported, and that even if that desire is expressed then the detainee only has 24 hours to actually submit the habeas petition before being deported. But, the form doesn’t tell the detainee that they have the right to file a habeas petition! Nor does the detainee know that they only have 24 hours to get the petition filed. Nor was the form also provided to the lawyers of those detainees who already had immigration lawyers. Nor was the ACLU, who actively wants to provide legal representation to these detainees, given a list of the detainees’ names or allowed to visit the facility without a specific name of the detainee they wanted to meet with. An illusion of due process, rather than actual due process.

Unikowsky ends his lengthy article with the following passage:

“I usually wince when people say that a Supreme Court decision delivered “justice.” In almost all Supreme Court cases, both parties have a claim to the mantle of justice, and the Supreme Court’s decision reflects nothing more than the fact that the winning party had stronger legal arguments. Almost all, but not all. From time to time, the Supreme Court finds a way to deliver justice. In A.A.R.P., the Supreme Court delivered justice.”

My last topic for today is something I talked about on multiple occasions last year: TMTG, the Trump-owned company that owns Truth Social and trades under the ticker DJT. As a company, it remains unprofitable, having reported $31.7 million of losses for 1st quarter 2025 on $0.8 million of revenue. As a stock, it has continued to support a market capitalization in the mid single billions, with its stock price having briefly gone above $40 in the days before the inauguration and below $20 during the April bear market.

But TMTG has other ambitions. Last month, TMTG and Crypto.com signed an agreement to bring thematic exchange-traded funds to market, under the Truth.fi brand. And this week, TMTG announced that it would raise $2.5 billion of new financing and use the proceeds to buy and hold bitcoin, making TMTG the latest in a series of what financial columnist Matt Levine refers to a “crypto treasury companies”.

Levine has noted repeatedly in his newsletter that crypto treasury companies as a group — the most famous of which is the former software company MicroStrategy Inc., now known simply as Strategy Inc. — have seemingly found a way to print money: When they raise $X to buy a crypto asset, their market cap increases by a multiple of $X. This happened earlier this week to a moribund public company called SharpLink, who announced it would receive $425 million of new financing and buy Ethereum with it, and saw its market cap increase by $2.5 billion.

So, what happened when TMTG did the same thing? Its stock went down by 10%. Levine has a theory:

“[T]he obvious appeal of the crypto treasury strategy for most small US public companies is probably along the lines of “nobody is paying attention to our tiny company, but if we announce we’re buying a big pot of crypto, retail traders will get excited and overpay for our stock.” And then that doesn’t work for Trump Media because, you know, retail traders already got excited and overpaid for its stock. There is only so much attention that anyone can pay to Trump Media, and just doing more stuff — even otherwise pretty reliable stuff like announcing a Bitcoin treasury strategy — is not really additive. The pool of retail investors who could get excited about Trump Media stock, but were not already excited about Trump Media stock, is small, and the Bitcoin treasury pivot doesn’t seem to have found any more of them.”