The courts, the donor class, and foreign interests lined up to kill his tariff program. By the time the ruling hit the wire, Trump had already outmaneuvered all of them.

WASHINGTON — No president in modern memory has fought harder for working Americans than Donald Trump, and no ruling from any court is going to change that.

The Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump this morning, striking down his IEEPA tariff authority and delivering the legal victory foreign interests spent a year buying lawyers to get. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the law’s text “cannot bear such weight.” Trump walked to the White House podium, called the decision “ridiculously incorrect,” told reporters he was “deeply disappointed” and “ashamed” of the justices who lacked the courage to rule correctly, and signed a new executive order before the press finished writing their ledes.

Any other president holds a somber press conference, promises to respect the court’s decision, and moves on. Trump absorbed the ruling, exposed its absurdity for the record, and signed a 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 while launching Section 301 investigations that carry decades of legal precedent.

The court took away one tool. He picked up three others before lunch.

The people who funded the lawsuits that produced today’s ruling are not ordinary American businesses worried about import costs. Trump identified them plainly: “Sleaze bags. Major sleaze bags. Foreign country centric.”

These are the same interests that spent thirty years telling factory workers in Georgia, Michigan, and Ohio that losing their jobs to China and Mexico was just the price of progress. Trump was the first president to tell them they were wrong, charge their foreign competitors for access to American markets, and mean it.

The results are documented. The Dow crossed 50,000. The S&P broke 7,000. Fentanyl crossing the border is down more than 30 percent.

The steel plant owner Trump visited in Georgia Thursday told him factories all up and down the highway were weeks from bankruptcy before tariffs hit. Now they run double shifts. “Sir, I want to kiss you,” the man told him. That is not a talking point. That is a business owner who thought he was finished telling the president who saved him exactly what he thinks.

The institutional resistance to Trump has been relentless and it has failed every time, and today was no different. The court’s ruling produced a legal absurdity so glaring Trump pointed it out from the podium without notes: a president can embargo a foreign nation entirely and destroy its trade access to the United States, but cannot charge that same nation a dollar in tariffs. “I’m allowed to destroy the [a] country,” he said, “but I can’t charge them a little fee.” Six justices signed their names to that logic.

Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh refused to go along. Kavanaugh’s dissent did something beyond registering disagreement.

He told Trump exactly where to go next, writing that the decision “might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward” because Congress authorized that authority through multiple other statutes. Trump quoted it at the podium. He was already using it.

As a combat veteran who took fire at Khobar Towers, I have been around people who perform under pressure my entire life.

The man who walked in had just taken a serious blow from a court that included two of his own appointees. He came in angry, specific, and completely undeterred. He praised the justices who stood with him, eviscerated the ones who didn’t, laid out the legal path forward in enough detail to make clear he had studied it, and signed the order. “We were ripped off by almost every country in the world,” he said. “Our people were stupid, and I blame presidents for it.” No president before him said it. None of them fixed it either.

The foreign interests who funded today’s lawsuit thought they were killing the tariff program. Instead they handed it a stronger legal foundation with better judicial precedent and forced Trump onto authorities that have survived court challenges for decades.

They will figure that out soon enough.

The Supreme Court, the donor class, and every foreign government that wrote a check to stop this man wanted him finished today. The factories in Georgia running double shifts say otherwise.

By Rarchar Tortorello – https://www.citynewsokc.com/opinion/they-threw-everything-they-had-at-donald-trump-he-s-still-standing-america-is-better/article_cbfc787a-f638-4d77-938b-b33e59958043.html

The SAVE America Act is a bright lantern in a long dark tunnel.

The American Republic stands today at a civilizational crossroads, suspended between ordered liberty and administrative anarchy, between a constitutional architecture painstakingly erected by geniuses and a creeping entropy imposed by ideological opportunists who prefer procedural murkiness to transparent law. The SAVE America Act emerges in this moment not as a partisan bauble but as a civilizational instrument, a keystone placed beneath a sagging arch to prevent the entire structure from collapsing into historical oblivion.

What is the SAVE America Act if not a reaffirmation of first principles? What is citizenship if not the sacred threshold that separates participant from spectator in the grand drama of self government? What is a vote if not a sacrament of sovereignty, a solemn attestation that the individual casting it is a lawful member of the political body?

The SAVE America Act, formally titled the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, was introduced in early February 2026 during the 119th Congress by Congressman Chip Roy of Texas, with corresponding efforts led in the Senate by Senator Mike Lee of Utah. It builds upon earlier incarnations of the SAVE Act, which successfully passed the House in prior sessions but stalled in the Senate labyrinth, a familiar graveyard where common sense reforms often go to languish.

Which bodies of Congress have previously acted on similar SAVE legislation? The United States House of Representatives has already demonstrated its willingness to advance this reform in earlier versions. Which bodies must still act for the SAVE America Act to become law? The Senate must pass it, and the relevant committees in both chambers, including those overseeing election administration and constitutional affairs, must complete their review and reporting process.

At its core, the SAVE America Act amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require documentary proof of United States citizenship when an individual registers or updates registration for federal elections. This is not radical. This is not exotic. This is not draconian. It is the equivalent of requiring a ticket before boarding a train.

Acceptable documentation includes a REAL ID compliant identification indicating citizenship, a valid United States passport, a military identification paired with service records showing United States birth, and other government issued photo identifications confirming citizenship. States would be required to verify citizenship before accepting registrations and to maintain ongoing programs ensuring that only citizens remain on voter rolls.

Recent versions also emphasize a nationwide photo identification requirement for federal elections, stricter standards for mail in voting, and the creation of pre election citizenship confirmation systems. These provisions are not instruments of exclusion. They are instruments of clarification.

The Republic is not a house of mirrors. This populace is not conducting a séance where invisible hands shuffle ballots behind closed curtains. It is a courthouse, not a carnival.

President Donald Trump has publicly endorsed the SAVE America Act, framing it as an essential pillar in a broader effort to nationalize baseline election standards, require voter identification, and curtail the industrialization of mail in voting except in narrow and legitimate circumstances such as military service or serious illness. Why would a nation that requires identification to board an airplane, rent a car, open a bank account, or purchase certain medications refuse to require identification to choose its leaders?

Opponents argue that noncitizen voting is rare. Even if one accepts that claim at face value, what is rare still becomes catastrophic when multiplied across a nation of more than three hundred million souls. A hairline fracture in a dam is still a fracture. A single spark in a dry forest is still a fire.

They claim that documentation requirements burden eligible voters. Yet millions of Americans already possess the very documents contemplated by the Act. For those who do not, the solution is not to abolish standards, but to facilitate access to documentation. The answer to a missing lock is not to leave the door open.

The SAVE America Act would improve life for all Americans by restoring confidence in elections, the lifeblood of any functioning Republic. Without confidence, participation withers. Without participation, legitimacy decays. Without legitimacy, power devolves into raw coercion.

When citizens believe the system is honest, they reengage. When they reengage, communities stabilize. When communities stabilize, economies grow. When economies grow, families thrive. Election integrity is not an abstraction. It is the soil from which prosperity grows.

The Act also reduces administrative chaos. Clean voter rolls mean fewer provisional ballots, fewer legal disputes, fewer recounts, fewer courtroom melodramas that stretch for months like constitutional purgatories. Clarity is cheaper than confusion. Order is cheaper than litigation. Truth is cheaper than theater.

The SAVE America Act is a bright lantern in a long dark tunnel. It is a compass in a bureaucratic blizzard. It is a constitutional tuning fork restoring harmony to an orchestra that has drifted into discordant noise.

Do Americans deserve elections that are transparent, verifiable, and grounded in law? Do citizens have the right to know that their votes are not being diluted by ineligible participants? Do we wish to remain a Republic of laws rather than a marketplace of manipulated outcomes? The SAVE America Act answers yes to every one of these questions.

The passage of time teaches that Republics rarely fall in a single dramatic collapse. They erode. They corrode. They soften at the edges until one day they awaken to discover they are no longer what they once were. The SAVE America Act is a conscious act of national self preservation. It does not silence voices. It sanctifies them. It does not shrink democracy. It fortifies the Republic. And for a nation drifting amid fog and faction, that is not merely legislation. That is salvation.

Who was St. Valentine, and how did a Christian martyr’s feast day become transformed into a carnival of candy hearts, greeting cards, and commercialized sentimentality?

Who was Saint Valentine, and how did a Christian martyr’s feast day become transformed into a carnival of candy hearts, greeting cards, and commercialized sentimentality? How did a solemn commemoration of sacrificial faith become repackaged as a secular spectacle divorced from its sacred origin?

Saint Valentine, known in Latin as Valentinus, refers to one or more early Christian martyrs of the third century living under the shadow of the Roman Empire. The Roman Catholic Church has long recognized at least two Valentines who were martyred on February 14, one a priest in Rome and another a bishop in Terni, ancient Interamna, Italy. A third Valentine is mentioned as a martyr in Roman Africa, though little is known about him. The most widely accepted account centers on a Roman priest and physician who lived during the reign of Emperor Claudius II Gothicus, a brutal persecutor of Christians.

Valentine lived in an age when professing Christianity was not a lifestyle choice but a potential death sentence. Christians were hunted, imprisoned, tortured, and executed for refusing to worship pagan gods or offer incense to the emperor. To be Christian in that era meant to live in open defiance of state power.

Born in the mid third century, possibly in Rome or Terni, Valentine was known for his piety, learning, and charity. He ministered to Christians in hiding. He comforted prisoners. He offered spiritual counsel to those awaiting execution. Ancient tradition also credits him with miraculous healings, including restoring sight to the blind.

One legend that endured through the centuries claims Claudius II outlawed marriages for young men, believing single soldiers fought more fiercely without familial attachments. Valentine, recognizing marriage as a sacrament instituted by God, secretly performed Christian weddings for couples who wished to consecrate their unions before Christ. If true, this alone would have been sufficient cause for his arrest.

Another story recounts that while imprisoned, Valentine befriended his jailer and healed the jailer’s blind daughter. Before his execution, he reportedly wrote her a farewell message signed, “from your Valentine.” These stories were later popularized in medieval literature and helped associate Valentine’s feast day with courtly love.

But even if portions of these legends are embellished, they reflect a deeper truth. Valentine stood for fidelity. He stood for the sanctity of marriage. He stood for Christian love rooted in sacrifice rather than sentiment.

What is a martyr? A martyr is someone who willingly suffers death rather than renounce the faith. Not all saints are martyrs. Many saints lived long lives of holiness. But every martyr is a saint, and Saint Valentine is honored precisely because he chose Christ over survival.

Valentine was arrested for aiding Christians, possibly for performing forbidden marriages, and certainly for refusing to abandon his faith. Accounts vary, but tradition holds that he was beaten with clubs and then beheaded on February 14 around the year 269 AD along the Via Flaminia in Rome. His body was buried there, and later a basilica was built over his grave by Pope Julius I.

For centuries, February 14 was observed as a feast day marking Valentine’s martyrdom. What is a Catholic feast day? It is a liturgical day set aside to honor a saint or a sacred mystery, offering Mass, prayers, and remembrance of the individual’s witness to Christ. It is not a party. It is not a marketing opportunity. It is a religious observance rooted in worship.

Over time, medieval poets blended Valentine’s feast day with romantic imagery. Later centuries layered pagan customs, commercial interests, and sentimental clichés on top of a sacred foundation. By the twentieth century, the holy martyr had been buried beneath chocolate wrappers and advertising slogans.

Yet Saint Valentine was never about disposable romance. He was about covenant. He was about vows. He was about a love willing to suffer and die rather than betray truth.

The Catholic Church continues to recognize Saint Valentine as a saint and martyr, even though his feast was removed from the universal calendar in 1969 due to limited historical documentation. Local veneration persists. Relics attributed to him exist in churches across Europe.

Do other Christian denominations accept Saint Valentine as a saint and martyr? Eastern Orthodox Christians also venerate Valentine. Many Anglicans and Lutherans commemorate him historically. While Protestant traditions may not emphasize saintly intercession in the Catholic sense, most acknowledge Valentine as an early Christian who died for his faith.

Saint Valentine’s true legacy is inseparable from the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Marriage is not a contract between two consumers. It is a covenant before God. It is the union of one man and one woman ordered toward mutual sanctification and the raising of children. It is a living icon of Christ’s love for His Church.

Real love is not a feeling that flickers and fades. Real love is sacrifice. Real love is perseverance. Real love is fidelity when it is difficult.

Saint Valentine did not die for flowers and candy. He died because he believed Christ is King. He died because he believed marriage is holy. He died because he believed truth is worth more than life itself.

February 14 is not a secular holiday. It is a Catholic feast day. It is a reminder that authentic love flows from God, is anchored in truth, and is proven through sacrifice.

That is the Valentine worth remembering.