It challenged his self-conception as an all-powerful ruler

Alysa Liu won the gold medal in women’s figure skating at the Olympics. This is the first Olympic medal for women of the US in 20 years. The talk isn’t so much that she did it, more on how she did it. Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Chris Schleichter, a former figure skater, who wrote about it. Schleichter said that much of competitive figure skating is about fear. The stakes are high. The judges are there to record every mistake. The skater has invested years of training a lots of money (coaches and ice time are expensive). One misstep can end one’s dreams, as happened to Amber Glenn in the short program. The result is skating not to lose rather than skating to win. But Liu says she has no nerves. She is joyful. She just wants to skate to show people her art. This level of mental health is rare and refreshing. This allows her to be more relaxed and her jumps are bigger and landings more beautiful. She portrayed a party on ice and the crowd was with her. Liu had retired from skating. But she missed it and came back just for the fun. She had done a quadruple jump, but on her return she decided that was too hard on her body. She was not there to earn a medal (though she got the big one). She was there for the fun. Kelly figured out what the lesson is:

Stop worrying about all these achievement yardsticks that we are constantly always measuring ourselves by. Just go out and have some fun.

Schleichter agreed:

I think, yeah. And it's healthy for so many skaters in the sport. Like, every four years, we're only going to send three women to the Olympics. Does that mean that every other girl skating out there is somehow a failure? Shoot for that Olympic goal, but have other measures of success that are healthier and achievable, and you might actually end up getting those along the way. It's really so refreshing to see someone reframe what success in the sport looks like.

I watched Liu’s performance. It was indeed joyful – she had a broad smile the whole time – and wonderful. This is quite the contrast to Ilia Malinin, the “Quad God” who tumbled in his long program. The one who was expected to win gold placed 8th. There were signs the pressure got to him. I’ve mentioned this before. What if athletes did it for the fun and not for the judging, scores, and ranking? I’m not sure how that would affect hockey. For figure skating that would definitely lessen the stress and heighten the beauty. Which will be the case in the Olympic figure skating gala tonight (I keep waiting for that to appear as I stream both NBC and Canada’s CBC – 75 minutes of prime time left). Would people come if there wasn’t a winner? For several years (perhaps 30 years ago) the prominent figure skaters from the World and Olympic competitions would go on tour as a group and put on well attended (as in filling ice arenas) displays. No pressure, fun encouraged. I attended as many as I could and enjoyed them very much. I had written that I thought the first meeting of the nasty guy’s Board of Peace might have been secret. But it wasn’t. Now that I think about it, of course it wasn’t. The nasty guy wanted as much press coverage as possible to demonstrate how wonderful he is. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos wrote about the meeting. The nasty guy’s pals were there, including a few autocrats. France and Britain were not. Cardinal Pietro Parolin of the Vatican said the topic of the meeting – Gaza – should be discussed at the United Nations. Beyond that Willis had little to say, though he concluded:

The “Board of Peace” is a vehicle for Trump to avoid the United Nations, where he has consistently given poorly received speeches that failed to rally international support to his positions. Trump’s most notable U.N.-related moments have had more to do with ranting about malfunctioning escalators than achieving international cooperation. Trump cannot even work alongside regional partners like Canada and Mexico—but he thinks his joke of a “Board of Peace” can supplant the U.N.

The nasty guy’s tariffs – well, one category of tariffs – were struck down by the Supreme Court. I don’t have a full news article about it, though I do have excerpts and some commentary from today’s pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos. From the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s far-reaching global tariffs on Friday, handing him a significant loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda. The 6-3 decision centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs he levied on nearly every other country. The high court ruled his use of an emergency powers law to set import duties without Congress was illegal. It’s the first major piece of Trump’s broad agenda to come squarely before the nation’s highest court, which he helped shape with the appointments of three conservative jurists in his first term.

From the Wall Street Journal editorial board:

This is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards. He’s accusing them of betraying the U.S. at the behest of nefarious interests he didn’t identify, no doubt because they don’t exist. Asked about Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, whom he appointed, Mr. Trump called them “an embarrassment to their families.” This is rhetoric that could cause some deranged Trump acolyte to turn to violence against a Justice.

A tweet by Jonathan Karl:

Wow. President Trump just accused the Supreme Court majority in the tariffs case as "fools and lapdogs" to "RINOs" and the "radical left" and calls the Justices "very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution." He suggests "foreign" influences drove the decision

A tweet by Dan Pfeiffer:

I keep seeing people say that the SCOTUS ruling on tariffs will help Trump by taking economic matches from the baby. That's wrong. It's almost certainly going to make his political problems worse, because the ruling shines a light on the tariffs, and he is going to use other authorities to raise people's prices.

A tweet by Kyle Cheney highlighted a section of Gorsuch’s concurrence:

...our system of separate powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.

And Cheney added:

It's hard to imagine a ruling that cuts more deeply to the heart of Trump's identity in public life — he has linked his presidency to the ability to use tariffs as a deal-making cudgel and bend other global powers to his will.

In the comments a tweet from David Frum:

Trump could have written and submitted a tariff bill for enactment by Congress. It happened often in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He didn't do that, because the point of the exercise was arbitrary presidential power - and the corruption possibilities that flow from arbitrary power. I suspect the above point is the reason Trump erupted so ferociously today. The Supreme Court did not merely strike down Trump's lawless tariffs. It challenged Trump's self-conception as an all-powerful ruler, who can do as he pleases, answerable to no one.

A tweet by Tim Miller:

It brings me no joy to say this but given the presidents shocking announcement that the Supreme Court is compromised by foreign interests, the next president will have no choice but to replace all 9 members with new justices who have no foreign entanglements.

The news today is the nasty guy imposed a 10% tariff for every country using a different law, which means they can last only five months. Then, because he was still angry, he bumped it to 15%. A cartoon posted by Wolfpack and created by MacKinnon shows Andrew sitting in prison writing a note that says, “Dear Donald, Wish you were here. – Andrew” A cartoon by John Auchter shows a conversation between an elephant and a woman:

Elephant: Good news! As part of $38.3 billion in new federal spending, your government is going to develop a detention center in Romulus, Michigan! Woman: Wait, wait, wait, wait. You’ve been telling me for years there’s no money for heealthcare, education, transportation, energy infrastructure, food – but now there’s plenty for a concentration camp?! Elephant: Look, you gotta understand – government spending is good! It creates jobs! It stimulates the economy! Deficit spending helps pick winners in the marketplace of ... of the ... Woman: Who are you anymore?! Elephant: I ... I don’t know...”

The New York Post tweeted a video of dancers at the Lincoln Memorial protesting by enacting the shootings by ICE of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The video is less than 2 minutes.