Bulwark Takes - Morning Shots Live: Trump Is Coming for Lake Ontario

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol went live to cover Trump's dumbest idea yet: renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America." Plus, Andrew and Bill give their takes on the Supreme Court's decision Monday regarding Trump's executive order on mail-in voting and ICE deports the wife of an active-duty Army sergeant.Sleep cooler this summer with Boll & Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at https://BollandBranch.com/bulwarktakes with code bulwarktakes.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Morning Shots Live. I am Andrew Eger with the Bullwork. joined as always on Tuesdays by My Morning Shots. Co-writer and colleague Bill Crystal, our editor at large. We are here to talk about the latest in the trade war with Canada, about last night's alarming, but perhaps not yet that alarming. Supreme Court decision. We're going to break all of it down. Bill, good to see you. How are you doing this morning? I'm doing fine. And you? I'm doing pretty well. Before we get into the meat and potatoes of all of this, I should tell everybody, if you're not subscribed to the channel, go subscribe to the channel. They're putting the screws on us. They're saying, go perform.

Go make people subscribe to the channel. Please come through for Bill and me. Come through and help us prove our worth to our corporate masters at Bullwark HQ by getting us some subs for this morning shots live. Okay. We've been talking a lot about this new trade war. Nobody seems to really know what this trade war is about except for punishing Canada, for not liking Donald Trump very much. Donald Trump's rationale continues to change over it. We've gotten a couple more remarkably juvenile tweets out of the president bleats out of the president this morning. Let's just hit a

couple of them real quick. First of all, this is his latest threat in the trade war. The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don't expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump. The name of the lake actually predates the name of the Canadian province. I believe it's an indigenous word for Big Lake, Great Lake. And so that part does not make a whole lot of sense. I also sort of wonder about, are we ever going to rename anything,

anybody of water to anything other than America? Presumably we're going to run out. You can only name one Lake, Lake America. You can only name one Gulf, the Gulf of America. What do you think about this one, Bill? Do you think that our Canadian counterparts have their knees knocking over this latest American threat to do violence to maps? I mean, in a way, that shows how silly and performative of the whole trade war is. I mean, it could, instead of the trade war could have serious consequences,

Canada is our second largest trading partner, our largest source of purchaser of exports. And so it's not ludicrous, though Trump makes everything ludicrous, right? So, yes. No, Ontario is a Native American word. It goes way back in American history. I think they discussed it right after the founding was to have the negotiating with the British about actually who gets control of the forts near Lake Ontario and so forth.

That's the J Treaty, I think, in 1794. And so it's like a, it's an actual American thing. Ontario province and Canada is named after Lake Ontario. This is not like a Canadian victory to name it Ontario, you know. But nonetheless, Trump doesn't like it, and he wants to call it like America. And I can't believe in this one. He'll get away with it to the degree he did

with even the Gulf of Mexico in terms of like, you know, news organizations going along and stuff? Do you think? I don't think so. Well, I mean, it depends. First of all, I don't think he has really gotten away with the Gulf of America thing. They made a big deal at the very beginning about sort of defenestrating news organizations that wouldn't go along with it. But they've continued not to go along with it. You know, the AP, New York Times, a lot of these places, they don't just call it the Gulf of America now. Other countries haven't gone along with it. You know, we just have this weird bubble in time where the United States government calls this body of water. the Gulf of America. I guess maybe now we're going to see the same thing with Lake Ontario is going to be Lake America now. I don't know. I mean, I totally take your point about the seriousness that undergirds all of this stuff. And we should not lose sight of that at all because this is just a giant calamity economically and geopolitically for the United States, for Canada. Nobody's winning here. Nobody is set up to do better because of any of this. Donald Trump hopes to see Canada cave and on the back end of all of these trade fighting to get some little concessions

here and there. But it's not even clear that he really, I guess he tweeted this out. All right. Cool. Lake America. Great. I'm glad you're having fun, Mr. President. But, but, you know, on the, on the far side of this, after all of the destruction of this trade war, he's hoping to get like some little concessions for U.S. dairy farmers and some slightly better terms for U.S. automakers as we integrate with Canada's auto industry. around the Great Lakes. And the other insane thing is that the asks just keep changing. Like, it's not even clear to Canada's negotiators exactly what the president and his negotiators want at any given time. It's been widely reported that one of the major sticking points was the was U.S.

negotiators wanting Canada to relax some requirements for French language things in, I don't know, streaming services or labeling requirements for U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. goods going into Canada. But now Trump gets on truth social this morning and denies that that's the case. Here's another tweet from him. I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French. In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing. This lie was made up by a week and an effective prime minister and an attempt to gain

political support, which he has totally lost from the people of Quebec. I love French Canadians. President Donald J. Trump. Well, it's just not true. These negotiators have been negotiating over this sort of stuff. It's been, I mean, there's a, this one's so crazy because, you know, you know, you can see why it would be useful for U.S. companies not to have to comply with some of these, you know, export requirements for for looping in French language, things like this. So this is a real ask that our negotiators have really been asking for. But apparently it's not something the president cares about. What the president cares about changes every day. Here's one more tweet from him. Again, just today. Canada has been ripping off the USA for decades. They have been charging our farmers 400 percent tariffs and more. They have driven many wonderful U.S. companies out of business. For 10 years, they wouldn't certify Gulfstream jets until I got involved. They wanted 100% of the market for Gulfstream's Canadian competitor.

I deal with many countries in Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable. They feel entitled, but they are not a state and will be entitled no longer President DJT. I mean, again, this Gulf Stream Jets thing, that's not been part of the coverage of this. That seems to kind of come out of nowhere. It's just another grievance the president piles up. You can't make deals with this guy, which is supposedly his whole deal. No, absolutely. Just a couple of points.

I think on the Quebec point, you're absolutely right. But it is, if you're Canadian, I mean, this is a real, he's trying to, he's trying to muck around in Canadian politics. I mean, he's not being entirely just childish in the sense that there's an election coming up, I think, in Quebec. It's always a dicey issue about the French language stuff and the central government and so forth. I think for Carney's party, it's delicate. And so he's trying to just cause trouble for Carney, which we've done this in other countries. We tend to like to cause trouble for democratically elected centrists who are actually responsible when trying to run responsible governments. We don't cause trouble, of course, for the dictators or for

Urdawan or anything like that. So that's, that's, but, but you can see how if, and incidentally, it's not weakening carnage, it's strengthening carnion and Canada, but you can see how, I mean, we take it as like what a childish bully he's being, but, you know, if you're an actual Canadian citizen or politician or something, it's, it's bad. I mean, it's really, and it's offensive. And that gets, I guess my main point, which is just a whole, yeah, I mean, it's both so childish, but also, I mean, if you had to invent a neighbor, I mean, just from the big geopolitical

and economic point of view. It would, right, that you wanted to have. You'd want to have a neighbor that was sort of smaller than you and that you could probably get your, mostly followed your lead in things, but also was a serious country, a democratically governed country, a country that's not a source of terrorism,

it's not a source for that matter of illegal immigration, if that's something you're very concerned about. Vast natural resources. Yeah, speaks the same language, a very profitable trading relationship, pretty balanced one, actually, with them, stability. I mean, you would, you would,

then every most 95% of the nations of the world would give their eye teeth to have a neighbor like Canada, right? He's like, no problems. And, you know, people like going there. They like coming here, whatever, you know. And Trump is screwing it up. I mean, it really is, you have to almost go out of your way to mess up the Canadian relationship. And, of course, you can tinker with NAFTA and tinker with the trade deals. And there's always negotiations among friends.

But as I say, the big picture of things, this is one of the least problematic relationships we have had for over for 150 years. right? I mean, when I was in government, I remember it was just a cliche of diplomacy. I went with Vice President Quail to Canada, I think a couple of times maybe. It's the longest undefended border in the world. And everyone says that and it's a nice thing. And we're proud of that. But it is not nothing. You know what I mean? As one can see when drug cartels take over states in Mexico and we do have to get very worried about the export of terrorism and in this case of violence and criminality, it's kind of good to have a government that is competently running a stable and friendly country. country on this huge border we have with them.

So it's really, for Trump's just sort of a danger at all and mess it up, and ultimately, I assume US-Canada relations will remain okay and will continue to have trade and discourse with them and they'll work with us in NATO. But the insulting, I mean, I wrote about this yesterday in warning shots, our idiot transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, they don't have an army, you know, a country that obviously that fought side by side with us

on D-Day famously at Juneau Beach, took more cash that we did per capita in World War II, part of them was they were in it for two years before we were, obviously, with Britain, fought with us in Afghanistan and took considerable casualties there. I mean, just the kind of insulting that we're doing, the bullying, I think we, it's hard for us to appreciate, and we don't like it, most of us,

most Americans don't like it, we the bulwark really don't like it, so it's not like we're not aware of how vulgar and stupid and kind of productive it is, but it's a little hard, probably to put oneself in the shoes of another country and realized how insulting and gratuitous this is to be coming from the president of the United States. Yeah, yeah.

And to no end. I mean, this is the thing that that just continues to boggle my mind is that there is no, like, golden goose payoff that Trump is confident he's going to get out of this. Like, like, yeah, you know, I'm hurting the Canadian economy and I'm hurting this relationship. And I'm hurting the American economy, by the way, especially in a few states where I really want Republicans to do well if I'm Donald Trump, like Maine and Michigan. But not only all of that, but it's not like it's for this purpose. It's not like he's thinking to himself, well, if I just squeeze them here, I think they'll crack and then I'll be able to deliver this prize to the American people.

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and that he's going to punish him for it because they're not going to get away with it anymore and punish us for it as well, even Americans in the American economy. And I just made this point on a live stream with Catherine Rampel the other day. It really does feel to me psychologically like the president has been so bottled up and frustrated this year. I mean, his attempts to sort of wield American power with machismo all over the world have gone so badly, especially in Iran, very, very notably. And it's like he is, he's like a domestic abuser who had a bad day at work. And now he's coming home and looking for some smaller fish to fry, somebody else that he can push around and bully. And I guess in some ways, Canada fits the bill.

But we had a really interesting piece on our homepage this morning by a Canadian writer who, was really laying out the reasons why there might be good reason to believe that even though Canada is going to suffer worse than us economically from this trade war, Carney might be in a better position to withstand this in terms of his political capital and his mandate, having been essentially elected to stand up to the United States on this stuff. Let me just read a couple of little points from this article. Carney's greatest advantage in this contest is that he's very popular with Canadians. There are certainly many Canadians who do not like the prime minister or his liberal party, but his opinion poll after opinion poll keeps showing, Carney still commands major enduring support across the

Canadian electorate, and that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon. You can contrast that with Donald Trump, whose personal approval ratings are continuing to slowly slide toward oblivion as the midterms loom. And more to the point, the reckoning is coming much faster on those numbers for Trump than for Carney. Carney does not have to call a parliamentary election for a number of years. Trump has these midterms coming up in just a couple of months. We're going to be feeling the pain now. And again, for some prize that is who the heck knows what it would be and that would come far later in any event. So even though this seems like an attempt to pivot from a fight that we are not able to push Iran around in to a regional fight where it's easier to push around somebody who's smaller and weaker, it's just not even that clear that Trump is going to succeed here either.

Oh, I think it's unlikely to succeed just as in Iran, but this is even less likely. I mean, Cardi's not getting any political pressure from within Canada. to cave on this, you know, was quite the opposite. And he was elected on this. I do think one only point out is I do think Trump has a particular grudge against Carney. So it's not just lashing out randomly. Carney gave that major speech in Davos, which was the day before Trump arrived. Trump was going to be going there and being a star here, you know, or at least being a central figure. Carnegie gave that very well received, very important speech, really, I'd say, of just sort declaring a kind of independence from the U.S. and saying that the U.S. had caused a rupture in the

alliance structure, both not just in trade, in terms of trade, but in terms of NATO. And this is the countries like Canada and everyone else was going to have to adjust to it. I think he was ahead of the curve on that. I think everyone was seeing it at that time. But Iran has brought that home, obviously, in so many other ways. And so Trump, to the degree, thought about it, knows that Carney stole the spotlight from him. But Davos had also told the truth, which is Trump is weakening the U.S. And Carney said that basically on Saturday, too, in his speech.

So, I mean, it is, again, unbelievable this is happening. Carney, again, if you had to invent a prime minister, you would like to have as an ally who's not very problematic. Let's have a centrist, central banker who believes in NATO, who believes in free trade. I mean, you know, we've had Trudeau in Canada, two Trudeau's. They were a little more problematic. The first one was kind of pro Castro. Second one, it wasn't terrible, but a little lefty for U.S. tastes in various ways. And it's kind of a, you know, not aligned in all this.

Carney has none of that. Carney is like your dream of a foreign leader. And Trump, of course, for that reason, in a way, since the dream of a normal American president of who you would have as an interlocutor, for Trump, it's the worst kind to have, I suppose. But it is, yeah. No, it's ridiculous and silly and laughable. But it's of a piece, of course, with a foreign policy where we are just, we had a good piece on this by Jill Lawrence today too. I mean, you know, just abandoning, not just abandoning our allies, but going after, attacking our allies.

And you know what? At some point, they're just not going to be allies. They're not going to be our allies. You and I still talk about it, understandably. I think as well, these are allies and this is, you know, an interruption in the alliance. I think that's still true, mostly sort of. But at some point, they're not going to just say, oh, fine, we're just going to be American allies. And that's where the real danger obviously comes.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, never you fret because for every. For every sensible liberal regime with a, you know, longstanding fruitful trading relationship that we lose in Canada, we add one sort of mercurial nebulous, not super clear what we're getting out of it, a corrupt Gulf state. We had one Muhammad bin Salman. We had one bromance with Kim Jong-un. So, you know, who's to say really? Which structures better? Time will tell. Let's wait and see, Bill. It could be. It could be that this new world order that we're getting actually, contains prosperity, human rights, you know, the likes of which we've never seen. So, you know,

who are we to say? Who are we to say, which is better? I don't know. It's insane. It's crazy. It's, there's nothing else really to say about it.

Now, I guess one other thing I will add, I happen to go back and reread from the morning that Carney gave that speech. And the headline was, the American age is over. And this was,

you know, 15 months ago or something like that. now. It was a provocative headline at the time. This year, six months ago. Oh, was it? Okay. I remember, maybe I'm thinking of a different Carney speech then. Yeah, there are. Well, there are several. This is from like Liberation Day or sometime around then. Whatever. I, I, we're going to have to check that one. Anyway. No, no, but you're right. You'll look it up. You could well have happened on Liberation.

Yeah. And obviously, people have made this point over the last, correctly, over the last 18 months, not just over the last six or seven. Yeah, anyways. But it's pay, it was pegged to a Carney speech. And Carney was basically saying, look, we didn't choose this world. We loved the old system where the United States was sort of a benevolent hegemon among a bunch of countries that were organized, not around that hegemony of the United States, but organized around the fact that we all shared these values and that we were all sort of working together peaceably. And obviously, the United States was the biggest and the most important, the most militarily powerful. They certainly had a primacy in all of those things, but it was not like that was why this structure developed, just because the United

States was strong and brought on all these vassals. It was developed around cooperation. And it worked really well for a lot of people for a really long time. We're not choosing the end of that, but the end of that is here. Donald Trump has brought the end of that. And people are going to have to act accordingly. And that's exactly what's played out, not just in this trade war, but around the world all the time. I mean, the rest of the world has been moving forward as though the United States can no longer be seen as a reliable economic and security partner. And that's just the world that we're living in. And we will see whether it can be put back together at any level for, you know, in any semblance. At least, at least it will be nice at some point here not to have

to continue to endure these continual reaggravations of that, re-provocations, playing the greatest hits of, you know, I guess we're back at trade war with Canada over and over again until Trump leaves office, I guess. Anything else on Canada before we turn the page here? All right. We got some Supreme Court stuff to talk about. Let's throw a quick, first though to an ad and we'll see you on the other side. This message is sponsored by bowl and branch. There is nothing worse than getting into bed on a hot summer night and realizing you're not actually going to cool down. You toss the covers off, flip the pillow over, looking for the cool side, somehow five minutes later, you're sweaty again. At that point you start wondering if you need to crank up the AC even more to get a good night's sleep.

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with every wash. I've been sleeping in Bowen Branch and I genuinely don't want to want to go back to regular betting. It's not going to happen, people. I'm hanging on to it. Sleep cooler this summer with Bull and Branch. Get 15% off your first order, plus free shipping at bull and branch.com slash bulwark takes with code, bullwork takes. That's bull and branch, B-O-L-L-L-A-N-D, B-R-A-N-C-H.com slash bulwark takes. Code B-R-W-W-W-W-W-T-E. Exclusions apply. And I meant every word. Okay. this Supreme Court case. This came last night. This is a story we have been tracking for months now. It is a weird story in some respects because I think everybody still expects the smart money is still that this executive order of the presidents attempting to crack down on mail in voting in a number of blue states in order that if it were allowed to go into effect would genuinely provoke a constitutional crisis, maybe not a gigantic constitutional crisis, but a real constitutional.

crisis right around the midterm elections. The expectation is still that the Supreme Court probably will not let this go into effect based on a lot of smart people we've talked to, certainly not just conservative commentators on all this stuff. We had a whole video about this last night with Steve Vladick talking to Sam Stein. But the Supreme Court yesterday did kind of inch one toe in that direction. There were a couple of injunctions against this order. Supreme Court basically throughout one of those injunctions, basically saying that states did not yet have standing to sue over this order. Because even though this is a naked attempt of the presidents to bully blue states into either handing over their voter rolls or not using mail-in ballots at all in their elections

as early again as this midterms, because the language of the order repeatedly said, you know, we're only going to do this insofar as it is in keeping with all applicable law. The Supreme Court basically said, well, until we have these rules from the U.S. Postal Service on how they're going to implement this, who's to say whether or not these things are going to violate the law? And so you've got to wait for those rules. You don't have standing to sue until they're out. So that's where we're at right now. This case is going to be back before the Supreme Court probably quite soon.

And then it will really be put up or shut up time and we will find out whether they're going to allow this thing to go forward. Bill, what was your, how do you read this? I mean, where do you see the tea leaves of this? Is this an ominous sign? Is this just sort of a procedural step and we don't really know yet? Or where do you fall? I mean, I think it's, I guess, likely that the court ultimately doesn't overturn the lower courts, the other stay from the other lower court or in this case maybe goes to the merits. So they'll have to do that pretty fast on the states. Now that they can decide the state's cases does have standing. I mean, standing law is extremely complicated and it's not really law, but it's just, you know, customary law of the courts, basically. I wrote a lot about it. I can't believe I did in my PhD thesis, but that was a heck of a long time ago, and I don't remember any of it.

It's probably not applicable anymore. I would say, though, I'm a little more perturbed by it, I think, than I take Steve Lattick's point. I think he's been excellent on this and all the law professors and your piece this morning is very good. But you kind of, I think, weigh it judiciously. it's foolish to be hair on fire about it, but it's foolish to be complacent about it. The court went out of its way. Let's look at this way. The court went out of its way to overturn a lower court decision that had stayed the executive order that had said, no, for now, so close to the elections until this can be decided on the merits, you're prevented from going

ahead. Implicit in that was an assumption that may not win on the merits, right? The court could have just said nothing. They didn't have to do anything. They didn't have to say, yea or nay. They chose to say in this case, no, no, you can't stay it yet because we have this very complicated view of this was a preliminary or it wasn't quite the final order. As you said, and we have to see about it. And so now we're going to go back to the court. We're going to have uncertainty about the elections for what, a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, with these elections coming, mail and balloting supposed to be beginning in September. I mean, I think it's irresponsible of the court. I'm going to put it that way. I think you can

say it's fastidious proceduralism, but in this case, the fastidious proceduralism is, you missing the forest for the trees and again when they had they went out of their way to overturn the lower court now maybe they want to tell the lower courts send a little message to the lower courts don't muck around quite as much with all these temporary restraining orders and stays and and you got to be a little more deferential to the executive branch but this is just a naked attempt by trump to interfere in the state's management of the elections and so uh i'm i'm a little more spooked by what it says not that they're necessarily going to let trump go ahead and produce a real crisis this no this october november but it shows

they're still not thinking in a serious way, in my opinion, all the time, at least, about the moment they're in. And they're looking for procedural ways to avoid confronting the administration. And again, maybe that's prudent, maybe given the way the world works, that's kind of what people will look back 10 years now and say the Supreme Court navigated this cleverly and well. And some of that legalism was useful. But I think a little more stepping up to the moment would have been, I would have preferred that. Yeah, yeah. So I genuinely am of two minds about this one. I am interested to see which direction they ultimately fall.

I think it will be an extraordinarily crucial case when they actually do rule on the merits for this in terms of assessing what kind of a court we have on our hands. And I do see a couple points on the other side of the ledger. The one thing that I would say is that there were previously two different stays on this executive order from this same lower court judge. The Supreme Court repealed one of those stays. but the administration had asked them and had hoped that they would actually reach out and

repeal both. And they didn't do that. They only repealed the one. So you can make an argument that by not giving the administration what they wanted on this, ultimately, the thing that matters is the Supreme Court left the order not yet able to go into effect, you know, pending for the rulings. So I guess people can take some degree of comfort from that. On the other hand, there is a bit of a nightmare scenario here that is plausible that I've seen sketched out. I talked about this a little bit in morning shots today. It is not completely out of the question that what we will now see from the court is this, that they have gotten rid of this standing question and explicitly said in this ruling, we're not ruling on the merits of this. We're not saying, you know, whether or not we believe

this to be constitutional, this order from the president. We just think that states were too early to challenge it before. But now we're just really close to the election. And this court has, from time to time, leaned on a doctrine called the Purcell principle in order to say, we're not going to touch, we're not going to weigh in on matters that concern elections once they get so close to the elections that for us to weigh in would cause chaos. Now, up until now, it has seemed like a pretty strong Purcell principle argument that they should not overturn the lower court's ruling, allow this thing to go into effect. But now I have seen some people, you know, say that they are alarmed because the shoe is kind of on the other foot now, right? I mean, they've, they've,

they've, they've, they've, they've, they've, they've, they've, they've, they've, the state, the state, the states did not have standing yet to sue. Maybe now there will be a new ruling, a new lawsuit, you know, the new lawsuit based on these new postal rules or a new ruling from that lower court judge and the existing lawsuit based on these new postal service rules that are coming out. And now you, you know, the new lawsuit, uh, you know, could see a world where this conservative Supreme Court cuts the Purcell principle the other way and basically says, well, you know, we have these new rules now. They've come out from the government. We are not going to now get in their way because that would be what causes chaos. And you could just

have them sort of sidestep the entire thing altogether while never really ruling on the merits of this. If that were to happen, it would. I mean, I have I have been a little bit more bullish than a lot of people around here about this court. It's a very conservative court, but I do not think, that they have shown that they're just kind of carrying water for Trump or in the tank for Trump, like a lot of people seem to believe. That would be a remarkable abdication. That would be genuinely them just getting out of the way and letting Trump run roughshod over our elections. I hope we don't see it.

I still don't think we're likely necessarily to see it. But that would be a real break glass moment, at least in my view, for how we should assess this court going forward. No, I think that's fair. And I mean, I do think the states can have to do a lot over the next two years. you said the next two months, I think, to stand up to the Trump administration's efforts to monkey with the elections more than 2028, certainly than in 2026. And therefore, I sort of don't like the idea. The court is awfully fastidious about the states can't quite get involved yet. This isn't quite a, actually was a final rule, I believe, as a Friday night, but it wasn't issued maybe

until today or tomorrow or something. I don't know. So they're super fastidious, but that's quite so fastidious when the Trump administration wants to do a whole lot of stuff in immigration and other areas I've noticed. So, I mean, I do feel like it's not great. I want the states. And I think, again, to do a lot. And I think the courts, if they were thinking in a slightly broader, unless legalistic way, it's maybe stupid to ask courts not to be too legalistic. But this Supreme Court shouldn't just be legalistic, you know. And we want states to step up and defend their prerogatives, I think, in the current world we're living in. And so I'm a little unhappy about that. But I know, I think let's see what happens, obviously, over the next week. So it's not,

It's not good that everyone has to talk. I mean, they could have just put this thing to bed. You made that point, I think, in the, this morning. And they at least haven't, they kept it alive for a while. Now maybe two days from now, the district court judge may decide, nope, putting the stay back on now that we have a final order, Supreme Court quickly hears it, don't, doesn't review it. And that's that.

That would probably be the best outcome. I don't think they can actually have a Supreme Court. I'd be pretty surprised if they can have a Supreme Court decision on the merits in the next two months. It hasn't been argued before the Supreme Court. I mean, that would be very, very unusual. So I think the best case is that they, in effect, put back on a stay that they sort of half took off, you know, two weeks from now and let the district judge and I guess the appellate court or maybe they'll skip the appellate court do this. So anyway, we'll see what happens. The one point I would make is it shows how serious the Trump administration is, though, about mucking with the elections, right?

I mean, they're not giving up. They've been told, oh, that's unconstitutional. They've got very adverse district court rulings for more than one judge, I think appellate court rulings, too. and they're just chugging right ahead, go to the Supreme Court. We want this overturned. You know, they are not shrinking away from their attempt to do everything they can to monkey with the 2026 elections. But I'd say especially, again, looking forward, what they might try to do in 2028.

Yeah, yeah. And not hiding the ball on it either. I mean, they've been very explicit even in their own filings that they want the Supreme Court to overturn this so that they can put it in place now ahead of November. And again, like I maybe haven't put quite a fine enough point. about this. It's an alarming intrusion. I mean, we've talked about this order before, but maybe not so much in detail on this show. I mean, it's essentially weaponizing the U.S. Postal Service to prevent blue states and really only blue states from administering their elections primarily

through mail-in ballots unless they are willing to give the federal government huge new insight into their voter rolls, basically hand over their voter rolls to the federal government, let the federal government monkey around in those voter rolls and hand them back a list of approved people who are allowed to receive a federal or who are allowed to receive a ballot. The state has no say over this. The state has no insight into how the federal government would be making these decisions. And that those would be the only people that the Postal Service is allowed to deliver mail-in ballots to. So, I mean, just a gigantic federal takeover of mail-in ballot administration at a time when the president openly, nakedly, just wants to do away with the process altogether. So it's, it's,

pretty high stakes. And wants to kick a lot of alleged illegal voters, immigrants really off, who allegedly are voting and aren't, but, you know, off the rolls. So you're going to have DHS is now going to be involved in this scrubbing of the roles. As I understand it, the DOJ would engage in. Do we think their data is perfect? Do we trust them to do this? I mean, that's where I do think it gets, as you say, very alarming.

Yeah, yeah. And this is, of course, the contention that these blue states have made in bringing this suit in the first place. So we're going to keep following it. Hopefully we'll have a quick resolution to all this stuff, but who knows? We're still holding our breath for now. Last story we'll talk about real quick. I just wanted to get into this ABC News story that you wrote about in Morning Shots

today. Wife of active duty Army Sergeant deported amid Trump's immigration campaign. Can you just kind of talk us through what was happening in this story, what you had to say about it this morning? I really summarized the ABC News report just because I'm so appalled by it. But this isn't, because case isn't unique, other family members of active duty. the American military had been deported. In this case, the wife came over 10 years ago, has lived here peacefully and broken no laws at all, apparently.

Her husband has joined the military and has served honorably, served in the Middle East for nine months, came back. He became a naturalized citizen after having served in the military. He's tried to help now his wife go ahead and get herself citizenship. I targeted her.

That's really striking to me. wasn't that she was kind of swept up by mistake and they didn't realize she was married to a military person and whatever previous administration just to be clear have been very exercised lawfully their discretion in not deporting otherwise law-abiding relatives especially spouses of people in the military i mean they didn't deport a lot of other people do incidentally who were behaving themselves here and we've seen the trump administration that's what mass deportation means right it means going after all these people who've been living here peacefully in her case 10 years but they targeted her So they don't care that she's married to someone in the military.

There's no, it's not, it doesn't fit with their attempt to cleanse America of all these undocumented immigrants. And so, and they're defending it. They're not even like, oh, gee, we didn't quite realize, yes, we can go back to the previous policies here. We know, they're defending and she was deported yesterday to Honduras. So, I, you know, Congress does write these laws. Congress oversees the implementation of these court laws, the execution of these laws. And Congress can, of course, say this is not permissible. That is not what we meant in this law.

It's not how this law was ever interpreted, even I think in the first term of Trump, incidentally. And we wanted to go back to the previous understanding of who could be deported and who couldn't. They could do this in other areas. Obviously, TPS is congressional legislation, temporary protected status, the Haitians, and Ohio and elsewhere. Congress has done nothing,

which is to say the Republican Party in Congress has done nothing. But I will say that the Democrats have not pushed very hard, in my opinion. nearly as hard as they could for reminding people, the Congress wrote these laws. Congress can rewrite these laws, can amend them, can interpret them. And they've sort of complained. I mean, to be fair, Mark Kelly, particularly,

they've been letters complaining about this case or some other cases. But they haven't sort of really submitted a huge issue of why is the Republican Congress doing nothing? I think they should in this case. Why is the Republican Congress doing nothing when this kind of thing happens? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's just another one of these stories. I don't know. It really is astonishing the degree to which they are putting, even after everything, even after Minneapolis and the supposed kind of soft peddling of some of this stuff. I mean, it's mass deportations by hook or by crook for these guys. And it doesn't seem to matter who they scoop up with all that. All right, we will leave that one there. We can leave the show there as well. Thanks, Bill, for covering that story, spotlighting that story this morning. Thanks to you guys all for watching. I gave you a pretty strong hard sell at the beginning. But I'll just give you one more for anybody else.

who didn't get caught up in the dragnet. Subscribe to the channel. Subscribe to us on YouTube. If you're watching us on YouTube, we hope you subscribe to us on Substack. If you're watching us on Substack, if you're on Substack, by the way, very easy to get Bill in my morning newsletter

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