Trump Ramps up Lawlessness With Plan to Ignore Supreme Court Ruling (2025)

Americans are starting to see through Donald Trump’s economic promises as he continues to tank the economy with his volatile approach to global trade.

A new poll from The Economist/YouGov, conducted April 13–15, shows that Trump’s economic approval is at an all-time low. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the economy is getting worse, up 5 percent from “Liberation Day,” when Trump implemented reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent or more on about 90 countries, sending stock markets plummeting to a generational low. He then rescinded the majority of those tariffs days later (but increased the ones on China), causing confusion and chaos for consumers and small-business owners.

Three-quarters of voters said they thought tariffs “will increase the price of goods they buy,” and about two-thirds of Americans think the state of the stock market is Trump’s fault, according to the YouGov poll.

As data journalist G. Elliott Morris pointed out Friday in a Substack post, Trump’s average net economic approval in YouGov polls over the last month is -6 percent, the worst he’s ever polled as president. While handling the outbreak of Covid-19 during his first term, Trump’s net economic approval rating was 3 percent, Morris noted.

Trump ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the promise of economic prosperity and change for millions of Americans fed up with inflation and the high cost of living. He pledged an “end to the devastating inflation crisis,” lower prices, tax cuts, and a tariff scheme that would bolster American manufacturing. But as the likelihood of a recession inches closer, just three months into Trump’s term, people are clearly starting to lose faith in the president’s disastrous economic plan. Forty-two percent of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat oppose” Trump’s budget, and the percentage of Americans who say the economy is their top concern has increased since Trump took office, the poll found.

The president’s performance isn’t flailing in just the Economist/YouGov poll, either. Investor sentiment has only been lower a handful of times since this data started being recorded, including post-9/11 and during the 2008 global financial crisis, according to a review of economic polls from The Independent.

In a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents conducted April 4–9, nearly two-thirds of people said they don’t think Trump is handling inflation well and 58 percent think he is mishandling trade policy.

“Three months into his second administration, the honeymoon might be over for President Donald Trump,” Tatishe Nteta, the poll’s director, said in a statement. Hopefully he’s right.

Donald Trump may be trying to shield his old buddy Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, from being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

David Eisner, a senior presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Treasury, wrote to senior staff at the IRS that Lindell, a “friend of the president,” was “concerned he may have been inappropriately targeted” after receiving his second audit in as many years, according to two people familiar with the request and records reviewed by the Post.

Eisner’s inquiry was then referred to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019, told the Post the request from the Trump official was “so inappropriate.”

“In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case,” she said.

Lindell claimed that the Treasury had “misconstrued” his request and claimed he had been trying to ask about an employee retention credit he’d received from the IRS. He said he’d already emailed the agency weeks ago and been referred to the Treasury.

Lindell, a former millionaire, spent months after the 2020 presidential election pushing theories about a grand conspiracy between electronic voting companies to keep Trump out of the White House. Lindell is facing a series of expensive lawsuits for not only allegedly defaming these companies but attempting to profit from his conspiracies.

During a hearing in U.S. District Court Wednesday, Lindell refused to pay the more than $50,000 he owes to Smartmatic, after filing a frivolous counterclaim against the electronic voting company he smeared. The MyPillow CEO insisted that he couldn’t pay because his company was already $70 million in debt and was already paying garnishments to the IRS.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement took violent steps earlier this week to arrest a Guatemalan man who not only has no criminal record but wasn’t even the target authorities were looking for, according to his lawyer.

Juan Francisco Méndez, a 29-year old Guatemalan immigrant, was arrested without a warrant Monday in New Bedford, Massachusetts—but that’s not the only shady thing about this arrest.

Méndez and his wife, Marilú Domingo Ortiz, were in their car when a pair of armed officers stopped them. In a video shared by The New Bedford Light, the couple told the officers that they were waiting for his lawyer to arrive before speaking with the agents. When Ortiz asked whether they had a warrant for her husband’s arrest, the officers did not respond. When asked if she could leave, they said, “No.”

In a statement, ICE told The New Republic that Méndez “refused to comply with officers’ instructions and resisted apprehension.”

The officers continued to ask Ortiz to roll down her window to speak. After some time, one of the officers, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, violently smashed the back window of Méndez’s car with what appeared to be a pickax.

“They forcibly removed me and my husband,” Ortiz said in Spanish in the video. “They pulled me out of the car violently. They treated me badly too.”

ICE said in its statement that it “concurs with the actions deemed appropriate by the officers on the scene who are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation in a manner that ensures the success of the operation and prioritizes the safety of our officers.”

By the time Méndez’s immigration lawyer, Ondine Galvez Sniffin, arrived at the scene, it was too late for her to tell the officers they had taken the wrong man.

“They said they were looking for a certain individual, by a different name. And I said that’s not my client,” Sniffin told WBZ-TV CBS Boston. “They said, um, ‘He has prior entries to this country,’ and I said that’s not true. I know my client’s history, and that’s not him.”

Méndez, who has been in the country for two years with no criminal record, is undocumented and awaiting documentation that would solidify his asylum status, according to Sniffin.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said that in detaining Méndez, ICE broke its long-standing practice of alerting city officials before conducting an arrest. The New Bedford Police Department spokesperson confirmed Mitchell’s statement, adding that ICE officers gave the wrong address when they finally did report to the police during the incident.

Mitchell said that communication with ICE has been “inconsistent” since the beginning of Donald Trump’s administration.

“We hear the Trump administration say that they’re prioritizing convicted criminals. I’ll be the first to say I want criminals removed from the streets of New Bedford,” Mitchell told the Light. “But it should matter to everybody if these people are not criminals and they’re being detained because their identity is mistaken, that they are still adjudicating their immigration status and are waiting for a hearing.”

The Light spoke with Méndez Wednesday. “We are not criminals. We are hardworking people who came here to fight for our families and for a better future,” Méndez said from a facility in Dover, New Hampshire. He added that he was being held with 30 or 40 other individuals detained for immigration issues.