Trumpiana: Tughlaq troubles — tariff tiffs to Tianjin troika 

The Don was hopping mad. A federal judge had rejected his $2.2 billion cuts in research funding to Harvard. Another judge had held deployment of troops in Los Angeles as illegal. Yet another court had blocked the use of a wartime law to speed deportations.

And most annoyingly a “Radical Left Court” had decreed as unlawful most of his sweeping tariffs on more than 90 countries — with India and Brazil hit hardest with a whopping 50% duties — upending a decades old world trade order.

Yet they call him ‘King’ with a ‘failing New York Times’ critic decrying “The Un-Checked, Un-Balanced Reign of King Donald” branding him “the monster the founders dreaded, rehomed from their nightmares to the Resolute Desk,” when these uncontrolled judges in their little fiefdoms are the ones running amok.

It’s a good thing, mused Donald Trump, there’s that dependable friendly neighbourhood Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority with three of his own first term appointees, which had granted 17 of his 22 emergency requests to date, according to an NBC count.

Trumpiana: The great Don and his magnificent Goldberg machine! (August 30, 2025)

So he headed again to the apex court calling tariffs  “a crucial aspect of our push for peace” in Ukraine singling out “India for purchasing Russian energy products.”

“Can’t stop, won’t stop: August tariff revenue breaks record AGAIN, bringing in $31 BILLION! 💸” echoed the White House on Truth Social.

Calling ties with India, which only till the other day the U.S. had courted as a counterweight to China, “a totally one sided disaster!” Trump suggested, with little basis in fact,  “They have now offered to cut their Tariffs to nothing, but it’s getting late. They should have done so years ago.”

And on the other side of Earth, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi had ganged up to collectively thumb their noses at him in the company of a score of Eurasian leaders gathered for a security summit in Tianjin.

POTUS 45&47, as he loves to sport on his hat, thought he had all but persuaded pal Putin at their August 15 summit in Alaska to meet Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to strike a peace deal. But it seems the slippery Russian had taken him for a ride on the ‘Beast,’ his own presidential armored limousine.

And Putin had followed it up by taking a ride with Modi in his Russian-made luxury Aurus limo in Tianjin discussing god knows what for 50 minutes!

Trumpiana: Putin POTUS pow wow — who played whom? (August 16, 2025)

As Putin used the global stage to publicly blame the West for the war in Ukraine, he gleefully held hands with Modi and erupted in laughs as the pair joined in a huddle with Xi, sending a chill through Washington.

Even as the Times suggested that “The elephant in the room was President Trump, who has helped end Putin’s isolation,” he lamented, “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” with a picture of the three leaders.

Hours later, calling ties with India a “very special relationship,” Trump insisted  “I’ll always be friends with Modi. He’s a great Prime Minister. I’ll always be friends, but I just don’t like what he is doing at this particular moment.”

“There is nothing to worry about. We just have moments on occasion,” he said, but made no tangible moves to either win back Modi or punish Putin with severe direct sanctions despite ignoring several two-week deadlines.

Instead,  he asked Europe’s leaders to “do more” by stopping purchase of Russian oil and putting economic pressure on China. As for Putin, he said cryptically, “Whatever his decision is, we’ll either be happy about it, or unhappy. And if we’re unhappy about it, you’ll see things happen.”

READ: Trumpiana: Who stole my Nobel Peace Prize! (August 2, 2025)

Meanwhile, the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein came back with the return of Congress from vacation with a group of disgraced financier’s accusers telling emotional, gut-wrenching stories of sexual abuse at the hands of the late convicted sex offender and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Raising pressure on lawmakers to back the release of all of the files in the Justice Department’s years long investigation, the accusers warned that if Congress isn’t willing to back them, they would compile their own list of names to hold those in Epstein’s orbit accountable.

Exposing fault lines in the Republican base, the White House framed a  move to force a House vote to compel the DOJ to release its Epstein files as a “hostile act” toward the Trump administration.

Trump himself dismissed the move as “merely another Democrat HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, and all of the others, in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President, and the record setting failure of the previous Administration, and the Democrat Party.”

Then in a Tughlaqian move, he was “thrilled” to order “the U.S. Space Command headquarters to move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama — forever to be known, from this point forward, as ROCKET CITY. WE LOVE ALABAMA!” — and it does not have mail-in voting!

And on another whim, Trump Friday signed his 200th executive order in 228 days to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War —as Washington called it, as “it’s a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.”

He also lost no time to reopen “Alligator Alcatraz,” a controversial immigration detention site in the Everglades, South Florida, as a federal appeals court halted a lower court ruling to close it on environmental grounds.

READ: Trumpiana: Who dun it — The crime of the century! (July 27, 2025)

“Back open for business,” the White House proclaimed with a picture of Trump with three alligators wearing “ICE” caps and captioned “ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ   MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” —  perhaps signalling an underlying message that it was business as usual in Trumpiana with no (crocodile) tears shed for friends lost!