The Situation: Happy Liberation Day to All Who Celebrate
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
The Situation on Monday looked at the dark subject of those students who keep disappearing off of American streets and ending up in immigration detention in Louisiana.
Today, however, it’s time to celebrate: It’s Liberation Day, and I want to wish a particularly happy one to all who celebrate.
What, you ask, is Liberation Day? Let me Google that for you.
President Donald Trump declared Wednesday will serve as the nation's "Liberation Day," as he is anticipated to enact trade policies emphasizing his "America First" mission, which his administration says will help end the U.S.' reliance on goods made overseas.
Trump is expected to roll out his reciprocal tariff plans Wednesday, which will levy additional taxes on nations that export goods to the U.S.
'April 2nd, 2025, will go down as one of the most important days in modern American history," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during Tuesday's White House press briefing. "Our country has been one of the most open economies in the world, and we have the consumer base, hands down — the best consumer base. But too many foreign countries have their markets closed to our exports. This is fundamentally unfair.'
In fact, even as I write these words, President Trump is rolling out those new reciprocal tariffs. The plan includes 10 percent additional tariffs on all imports, with added tariffs on goods from 60 countries. By the time you read this, the press will be full of the details of the new plan. I’m not fussed about the details. I’m just here for the liberation.
As a starting matter, Liberation Day is the day Americans have all been freed from lower prices. It’s a day when their 401(k) plans have been freed from needless value—and that is just in anticipation of the announcement. And it’s a day when jittery investors around the world are busily anticipating how much of their money will liberate itself from existence over the coming few days and weeks.
If you close your eyes and suspend your critical faculties for a moment, you can interpret it all, as Trump said today, “as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”
It certainly is a day when the United States of America takes a giant step forward to liberate itself from all of its friends and allies. This has been in the works for the past couple of months, but the administration has been doing it kind of piecemeal. It pisses off Canada one day. Ukraine another day. Denmark and Greenland another day. And then it goes to Munich to go after Europe. But not until today—Liberation Day—has the administration done the whole declare-trade-war-on-everyone-all-at-once thing.
But if you close your eyes, just for a minute, you can say that we are freeing ourselves. “For decades our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far both friend and foe alike,” according to the president.
Trade is just the beginning.
But today, a federal judge said no, the Justice Department can’t do that and leave the possibility of renewed charges dangling over the poor mayor’s head.
In a scholarly and careful opinion, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho ruled that he couldn’t force the department to prosecute the mayor and that he also couldn’t let the department dangle future charges over Adams’s head. The only option, therefore, was to dismiss the case with prejudice—meaning that the case now goes away completely and forever. Judge Ho couldn’t have picked a better day to issue such a ruling.
Just close your eyes for a minute, and it even makes sense.
There are also tens of thousands of Washington area residents who have been liberated from their jobs in observance of this year’s Liberation Day. Many of these people were federal workers. Some were probationary employees. Some were long-serving civil servants suspected of being operatives of the Deep State. Some didn’t even work for the government at all. Some worked at U.S. Agency for International Development contractors. Some worked at nongovernmental organizations of all sorts. What they all have in common is that the shackles of employment no longer bind them. They are free this Liberation Day.
Then there’s TikTok, which has a lot to be thankful for this Liberation Day. The law says it should be banned now from app stores. But he who saves TikTok violates no law, as Napoleon would have said had he thought of it, and Trump has already sailed past one deadline for the app’s divestiture from its Chinese owner—and nobody is making him enforce the law. So now Saturday looms as the new deadline, and the president is busily trying to come up with a divestiture plan. But if Saturday comes and goes with no deal, worry not. It’s Liberation Day, and Trump has already freed TikTok from that pesky law.
And finally, a very happy Liberation Day to all the law firms that have liberated themselves from their dignity. A tip of the cap to those that are still fighting. But folks, Liberation Day means you don’t have to fight it any more. You can just accept the new reality. All you have to do is close your eyes:
The Situation continues tomorrow.
