Trumpism takes an L up north

Canada dumps Trump

Donald Trump was handed a stunning defeat this week—in Canada—when the Conservative Party he endorsed lost in the country's parliamentary elections, largely because he endorsed it.

It's almost impossible to overstate how stunning this reversal is for Canada's Conservative Party. The party led by "huge" margins throughout 2024. Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who held the post for a decade, stepped down in January. The liberals had about as much time to reorganize as Democrats did after Joe Biden stepped aside in our election. For the Conservative Party to go from that kind of lead to losing the election—a defeat that also swept up the party's candidate for prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, who lost the seat in parliament he'd held for 20 years—is shocking.

Canadians did have one thing going for them that Americans did not: They got to see Donald Trump's second coming in action. They got to see the intense racism and economic destruction that MAGA-inspired movements cause, and they got to see Trump mock Canada and lightly threaten to colonize it for four months. Apparently, that was enough to sink Conservative prospects up north.

As an American, I can't help but look at the Canadian victory with a tinge of jealousy. Everybody else can seem to figure out how to vote against this guy except us. Canada has many advantages our democracy does not, including a functional press and no Electoral College—but still. I am reminded of the fact that the Underground Railroad did not stop in New York or Chicago; it stopped in Montreal and Toronto. It feels like I still have a lot to learn from Harriet Tubman.

The Bad and The Ugly

Amazon was reportedly considering letting people know how much Trump's tariffs were raising the price of goods, but Trump didn't like that, so he called his lapdog Jeff Bezos and squashed the proposal.
By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court decided to deprive rural and underfunded hospitals of some Medicare payments. Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the case was "highly technical," but its effects will not be. Underserved communities will get worse health coverage now, and it doesn't take an advanced math degree to understand that.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken the first step toward making sure that nobody can get a Covid vaccine booster this fall. Here's a question for which I've yet to be given a satisfactory answer: At what point does RFK Jr.'s destruction of public health make a reasonable person hesitant to take a vaccine approved by the government? And if we get to that point, does that mean that the anti-vaxxers have fundamentally won?
Usually, the Trump administration is on the receiving end of lawsuits, but this week it filed one against the states of Michigan and Hawaii. Apparently, those states are trying too hard to keep the air clean, and Trump doesn't like it.
There will be more pollutants in the air thanks to the Trump administration, but not birds. A new study says that 75 percent of North American bird populations are in decline. This comes as Trump is taking steps to weaken one of the oldest environmental laws we have on the books, one that protects migratory bird species.

Inspired Takes

Adam Serwer explains how the arrest of Milwaukee judge Hannah Dugan marks a new phase of Trump's attack on the judiciary and the rule of law.
I do not have the mental distance to assess Trump's "first 100 days," any more than I'd be able to write about my first 100 seconds of drowning in the ocean. I'm more focused on anything I can do to get back to the surface and, you know, breathe again. But my colleague Sasha Abramsky has taken an admirable stab at it, calling Trump's administration a "self-dealing thugocracy."

Worst Argument of the Week

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. It's a case engineered in a lab by conservative activists to force states to fund religious schools. The court's theocrats will almost certainly agree with the Bible-thumpers, and vote to funnel public taxpayer dollars toward parochial education.

All the Republican justices sitting in on the hearing (Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from this one) made their best cases for ending the separation of church and state as we know it, but alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh displayed a truly special level of Christian supremacy. Mark Joseph Stern reports: "Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed indignant that anyone would even question whether St. Isidore [the Oklahoma religious school demanding public support] has a right to taxpayer dollars. 'All the religious school is saying is, Don't exclude us on account of our religion,' he told Gregory Garre, who defended the attorney general's effort to block the school. 'I mean, if you go and apply to be a charter school and you're an environmental studies school, or you're a science-based school, or you're a Chinese immersion school, or you're an English grammar–focused school, you can get in. And then you come in and you say, Oh, we're a religious school. It's like Oh, no, can't do that, that's too much. That's scary. We're not going to do that.'"

This kind of shrill indignation has become commonplace on the right, but no one should miss the intellectual dishonesty of Kavanaugh's arguments. "Science-based" schools are secular. So are Chinese-immersion schools and freaking grammar schools. THE UNVERIFIED ADVENTURES OF JESUS H. CHRIST is a religious subject, not a secular one. In a country that prohibits the establishment of one religion over any others, my tax dollars simply should not go toward teaching children that you can be dead for three days and then get up and haunt your old friends. If a school decided to teach The Mummy as a historical fact about ancient Egyptian military power, I'd have the same objection.

Kavanaugh is arguing for no less than a return to the Dark Ages of medieval Europe, a time when science and religion could not be distinguished from each other. That is, in fact, "scary." It is, indeed, something we should not do.

But Republican theocrats control the Supreme Court, so that's exactly what we're about to do.

What I Wrote

Have you heard about Donald Trump's attempts to establish martial law in these United States? Because that's the upshot of one of this week's executive orders. But while we await our new military overlords, he's also going to make sure that nobody can hold a police officer accountable for committing crimes.

In News Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos

I do not enjoy playing what appears to be the most popular video game on Earth right now, Fortnite. But I love their lawyers. Epic Games, makers of Fortnite, have been involved in an epic legal battle (pun very much intended) against Apple, Google, and their popular "App stores" where we all buy stuff to load onto our smartphones. Apple and Google charge companies like Epic Games up to 30 percent of the app purchase price to have their products show up on the stores, a fee that gives Apple and Google a constant revenue stream from other people's creative content. Think about it, when was the last time you downloaded an app that was not on the Apple or Android store? Since Apple and Google have a functional monopoly on online app purchases, most creators give the giant corporations their vig.

But not Epic. Epic created its own store, so people could buy games like Fortnite directly from it. Such an alternative storefront would have been able to bypass the 30 percent fee Apple and Google charge through their own stores. But Apple and Google refused to make the Epic store available on smartphones. Epic sued to force the giants to make their Epic storefront available on iPhone and Android devices.

In the initial phase of the case, Epic kind of lost. In 2021, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued an injunction against Apple and Google for their anticompetitive practices and ruled that Epic could indeed offer its products through an alternative store that Apple and Google had to carry, but she also ruled that the companies could charge Epic something for making the storefront available. It was a moral victory for Epic, but one that fundamentally protected Apple's and Google's right to a revenue stream from app purchases.

Google, more or less, played ball. But Apple massively overplayed its hand. It turned around and charged (wait for it) 30 percent for making the Epic store available. Epic appealed.

The case went back before Judge Rogers who issued a ruling this week and, holy hell, was she unimpressed with Apple's maneuvers. She wrote: "Apple's continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated.… Apple's response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction's goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up."

And wait, there's more: "This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers' ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases."

Then, she referred Apple's vice president of finance, Alex Roman, to federal prosecutors so they can look into bringing criminal contempt charges against him.

Folks, I cannot think of a time when Apple lost a case this hard. In fact, the only other time I can think of a major monopoly losing any kind of litigation this completely would be the tobacco companies, and they were literally killing people.

Apple released a statement saying it would "comply with the order" (you think!?) and appeal. I have no idea how that appeal will go in front of the Ninth Circuit. But, we could literally be witnessing the end of Apple's and Google's stranglehold on the app market.

I can now only hope that Donald Trump does something to anger Fortnite. It may be that federal judges are more committed to defending the ability of their kids to play their favorite games than they are to defending democracy.