The Court Gave Trump His Biggest Win Yet
Plus: the Trump family's tungsten payday, hunger by design in Arizona, and the war that's back.
The Supreme Court Gave Trump His Biggest Win Yet.
This morning was the clearest picture yet of what this Supreme Court actually is: an institution willing to hand Trump a sweeping, structural expansion of presidential power — while still drawing lines on the smaller fights.
In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court’s six conservatives voted to overturn Humphrey’s Executor — the 90-year-old precedent that let Congress shield the leaders of independent agencies from being fired at will. Chief Justice Roberts wrote it. The holding: the FTC’s for-cause removal protection is unconstitutional. The practical effect: FTC commissioners, and the leaders of more than two dozen other multimember independent agencies, are now at-will employees who serve at the president’s pleasure. It also effectively ends the law requiring the FTC to be bipartisan.
Think about what that means heading into a presidential administration that has spent eighteen months testing every limit. The agencies that police monopolies, protect consumers, enforce labor law, regulate elections-adjacent speech, and oversee markets can now be staffed entirely by presidential loyalists, removable the moment they cross him. Justice Kagan, writing for the three dissenters, pointed out that the Court was discarding a unanimous 1935 precedent that emerged from a firing at the very same agency. The conservative majority decided ninety years of settled law was wrong. This is the project Robert Reich has been describing for weeks: not narrow legal calls, but a deliberate effort to concentrate power in the executive and remove the checks around it.
However, it wasn’t a clean sweep for the Trump administration today.
In Watson v. RNC, the Court ruled 5-4 that states can count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked on time. Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by Roberts and the three liberals. The RNC brought the case, backed by the Trump administration, seeking to overturn Mississippi’s five-day grace period. They lost. The ruling protects grace periods in 14 states and D.C. heading into the midterms. Washington’s Secretary of State noted that more than 250,000 ballots postmarked on time arrived late in 2024 — under the rule the RNC wanted, all of those voters would have been silenced, many in rural areas where the mail runs slowly.
The Court also declined to let Trump remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, leaving her in place. That one matters in light of Slaughter: the Court gutted independent-agency protections in one ruling while refusing to let Trump purge the Fed in another — a signal it’s carving out the Federal Reserve as a special case even as it demolishes the shield for everything else. The justices also refused to hear Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict, leaving the $5 million judgment for sexual abuse and defamation intact and ending his last avenue of appeal. And in Chatrie v. United States, the Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they pull your phone’s location data from Google.
So which is it? A Court that checks Trump, or one that empowers him? The honest answer is both. And the significance of each case is what matters here.
On the structural questions that shift permanent power to the presidency, this Court delivers for Trump. On the discrete fights where the law is clear and the politics cut both ways — mail ballots that millions of Republicans also use, a Fed that the markets need to be stable — it holds the line. Don’t mistake the second category for reform. The Slaughter ruling gives Trump the power he wants.
One more thing: the term isn’t over. The birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, is still pending, along with the transgender sports cases. At least one more opinion day is coming this week. The biggest immigration ruling of the year could land within days.
Read more: CBS News, NPR, The Parnas Perspective, Robert Hubbell
Tungsten and the Family Business
The New York Times reported Sunday that the Trump administration approved up to $1.6 billion in federal financing for an American company, Kaz Resources, to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan — a metal the U.S. needs for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. The mines hold an estimated 1.4 million tonnes of tungsten trioxide, roughly 15% of global production. China was also bidding for access. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakh President Tokayev at the St. Regis Hotel in New York on September 23, and Trump joined the meeting by phone to seal it.
Now here’s the part that matters. Reporters Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton found that Dominari Securities — an investment firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, housed in Trump Tower — took a 20% stake in the project. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm controlled by Lutnick’s family and run by his sons Brandon and Kyle, helped a lead investor raise $210 million in new capital, the kind of deal that nets Cantor millions in fees. The Kazakh deal was signed on November 6, six days after the Trump sons’ investment, which was not disclosed at the time.
This isn’t a one-off. The Times found that one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, which are backed by roughly $8.9 billion in federal support. The fathers negotiate the deals. The sons take the stakes.
Sen. Jon Ossoff put the stakes in plain terms, promising accountability if Democrats retake Congress: “Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.” I’ve written before that Trump’s presidency is fundamentally a vehicle for personal enrichment — that he’ll leave office richer than any human being alive. The tungsten deal is what that looks like in practice. The same families running the war machine are now running the supply chain that arms it.
Read more: The New Republic, Zeteo, The New York Times
Hunger by Design
Judd Legum at Popular Information reports that hundreds of thousands of people have been pushed off SNAP nutrition assistance in Arizona as the first wave of cuts from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” takes hold. The numbers are staggering: Arizona’s SNAP enrollment fell from roughly 925,000 in January 2025 to 435,196 by April 2026. A drop of nearly 490,000 people, including 213,000 children. No state has cut deeper.
The bill, which Trump signed on July 4 last year, cuts roughly $187 billion from SNAP over the next decade. But the deepest cuts haven’t even hit yet. What’s happening in Arizona is the bureaucratic machinery grinding people out early. The law ties a state’s costs to its payment-error rate; Arizona’s 2024 error rate was 8.84%, and if it can’t get under 6%, the state owes between $100 and $300 million. So Arizona cut staff, added documentation requirements, and started enforcing a 30-day processing deadline. As one analysis explained, even if an eligible person submits everything on time, if the understaffed state fails to process it within 30 days, that person is automatically dropped and has to start over.
The law also expanded work requirements from ages 18-54 to 18-64, stripped exemptions for veterans, unhoused people, and foster youth, and ended eligibility for refugees and people granted asylum.
Lauren Bauer at the Brookings Institution called the new work requirements what they are: “a cruel policy to try to use hunger as leverage over people.” That’s the whole design. Every Republican in Arizona’s congressional delegation voted for this. Every Democrat voted against it. And the bill passed so narrowly that if two Republicans had flipped, it would have died. This was a choice, and Arizona’s hungry kids are the result. The cruelty is the point.
Read more: Popular Information, NBC News, PBS NewsHour
The Forever War Trump Promised Was Over
A weekend of renewed strikes has the supposed ceasefire in tatters. Iran hit an oil tanker — its second such attack since Thursday — after objecting to efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz without its oversight. The U.S. struck Iranian missile and drone sites. Iran retaliated against Bahrain and Kuwait, near the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters. Trump escalated on Truth Social, warning “there may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable” and that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”
Sunday’s planned talks were canceled. Trump claimed Iran requested a Tuesday meeting in Doha; an Iranian official denied any formal negotiations were scheduled. Zeteo quotes a U.S. official describing, simply, a “forever war.” Rep. Ro Khanna says Congress should take Trump to court to compel an end to the strikes.
The fact is that the US negotiated a bad deal with Iran. Iran reads the MOU to mean it has full sovereign control of the Strait of Hormuz, working with its Gulf neighbors on transit, not with the United States. The U.S. believes it retains a role in keeping the Strait open. So when the Navy escorts a tanker through, Washington calls it freedom of navigation and Tehran calls it a violation.
The MOU allows Iran to charge a toll on Strait traffic after 60 days, effectively legalizing the chokehold Trump went to war to break. And Iran, having watched the U.S. bomb its facilities and then negotiate, has concluded the obvious lesson — that the only thing that would have deterred the attack was a weapon it didn't have. Its president now says enrichment is non-negotiable.
This is what Trump’s war accomplished: an Iran that controls the Strait, can tax the world's oil through it, and is more convinced than ever that it needs a bomb.
Read more: Robert Hubbell, Zeteo, The Parnas Perspective, Semafor
That's your Monday. The Court gutted ninety years of independent-agency protection. Trump’s sons cashed in on a tungsten deal his administration financed. Arizona pushed half a million people off food assistance, a third of them kids. And the war he said was over is back.