Sparkle Motion In DC

With leftwing judges continuing to stymie President Trump's attempts to do what he was elected to do, The Federalist Society noted something interesting about the makeup of the DC district courts: a third of the judges there are foreign born, including the latest, a Caribbean immigrant named Sparkle Sooknanan. 

It gets worse. The newest addition to the DC District Court is a Biden-appointee named Sparkle Sooknanan. She was born in Trinidad and Tobago.

Yes, Sparkle is her real name.

Clown country. https://t.co/sy812FdTYR pic.twitter.com/zgSWrdmbB4

— Josiah Lippincott (@jlippincott_) March 25, 2025

Of course, as Josiah Lippincott points out, this didn't happen by accident. It was the result of a deliberate Biden Administration policy to appoint nearly all women and nonwhite judges. 

Joe Biden worked to systematically cleanse White men from the federal judiciary. 86% of his judicial nominees were women or BIPOC.

Democrats are anti-White. pic.twitter.com/uFRTGRf8OX

— Josiah Lippincott (@jlippincott_) March 25, 2025

The Democrats being anti-white is one reason for this policy, as Lippincott writes. Another reason is that the Democrats know how someone named Sparkle Sooknanan is going to rule on every issue ahead of time. In contrast, Republicans can appoint an ostensibly conservative white man named John Roberts and never be sure if he will rule in their favor on an issue. 

This Has Become An Existential Issue 

As Charles Haywood writes below, this judicial rebellion against Trump has become an existential issue for America. Haywood, as an attorney who clerked for a federal appeals court judge, broke down what's at stake in the X post below. Before we get to Haywood's post, a brief market note. 

Markets At An Inflection Point 

The markets seem to be at inflection point now. On the one hand, Tesla's huge rally over the last week is bullish, but we still have "liberation day" ahead of us next week, when the new Trump tariffs kick in. With that in mind, a couple of suggestions: 

For Conservative Investors

Consider taking advantage of the next up day to hedge. You can download the Portfolio Armor optimal hedging app by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below (or by tapping here, if you're reading this on your phone). Our app can help you find the least expensive hedges given your risk tolerance and time frame.

For Aggressive Investors 

Look for short squeeze candidates, in the event we're on our way out of the correction. We placed a bullish options trade on a short squeeze candidate in our trading Substack a couple of weeks ago, 

And we have another one teed up for later today. If you'd like a heads up when we place it, feel free to subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list below. 

Now on to Mr. Haywood's sobering post. 

Authored by Charles Haywood On X

Renewal Or War

I think it helpful to break down, for the layman, what’s happening strategically with the attempts by judges to illegitimately thwart Trump’s executive branch actions. The success of Trump’s recent executive actions is an existential question, which will determine whether the future of America is renewal or war.

As with all analysis that touches on essential structural questions of a society’s legal system, Trump’s decision is an ambiguous, twilight one. (Carl Schmitt made his career analyzing a similar set of questions in 1920s Germany, which, despite his efforts, did not succeed in threading the needle.) In today’s America, the twilight nature of Trump’s decision is because the forms of constitutional government appear to remain, while their substance has been gutted over the past century by the Left. Thus, the uninformed “normies,” who still constitute the majority of Americans, can easily be convinced that any dramatic Trumpian action is illegitimate, because they don’t understand that nearly all legitimacy left our legal system long ago.

In particular, the rule of law, meaning here clearly legible law applied without regard to the parties or to the political effect of a ruling, has been nearly completely eroded by the Left. Judges who lean Right always refuse to do anything but apply the law, constitutional or statutory, while Left judges, always and everywhere, feel free to ignore any law to achieve their political ends. This is why, for example, nobody ever asks how Left members of the Supreme Court will rule on any matter important to Left ends.

Thus, by attempting to restore the Republic, Trump risks destroying it. There is no avoiding this danger.

1) The Trump administration has been ordered to do, or not do, numerous actions very clearly exclusively within the executive branch purview. These orders have come from the lowest level of federal court, the district court, where one judge rules on matters related to a case.

It is important to understand that none of these judges’ decisions are even remotely possible to cast as legitimate. All of them attempt to constrain action that is on its face, within any legitimate reading of either the relevant statutes or the Constitution, within Trump’s power. In particular, immigration and national defense have always been agreed to be subject to almost zero judicial review. All precedent is very clear on this. (The exception is Trump’s orders on so-called birthright citizenship, for which his reading of the Constitution is plausible, but not indisputably correct. He might try other less-clearly-legitimate actions in the future, but he has not done so yet.)

2) The federal judiciary, while it appears to not be wholly captured by the Left, is in practice a major, and today the major, tool for the Left. This is because their other powers have largely been neutralized by Trump’s victory, the “vibe shift,” and because of elite movement toward Trump. At this moment, control of the judiciary is all they have remaining.

One might respond that the Left controls Congress, which is largely true—or, more precisely, the Uniparty, which never defies what the Left wants, controls Congress. But the actions we are talking about are either actions inherent to the executive under the Constitution, or actions in which Congress has already passed legislation granting clear power to the President. Trump might be unable to do some other things he wants to do if he can’t get new legislation passed by Congress. But nothing he is doing now requires new legislation; therefore the Uniparty in Congress cannot stymie what he is doing by passing fresh legislation to remove those powers, because of Trump’s veto power.

3) Trump faces a choice how to react to these early judicial decisions. Certainly, failure to defeat Left control of the judiciary will doom his entire project, because the Left knows this is the last reliable tool left in their arsenal (other than violence). On the other hand, Trump also needs to maximize the sense that his actions are legitimate, for the uninformed normies, or he faces a coordinated backlash that may destroy his ability to accomplish anything. Thus, overreaction to early challenges is potentially self-defeating.

4) The key question for Trump is whether these illegitimate acts of federal district judges are merely slightly slowing down, or instead preventing/stopping, his agenda.

5) In general, there are two levels of review above district court judges. First, the thirteen courts of appeal, the “circuits.” (I clerked for a judge on the Seventh Circuit.) Second, the Supreme Court.

6) Appeals can be made fairly quickly to the Circuit Courts. In the coming weeks, we will see if any of the Circuits will reign in rogue district court judges. Therefore, it makes sense for Trump to delay action that can be cast as “unprecedented” (meaning an action not taken by the Right in living memory; the Left continuously engages in unprecedented legal action, and has for a hundred years, which is a large part of how they have maintained their power).

7) If the Circuits fail in their duty, and uphold illegitimate district judge decisions, appeals can be made to the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court does not have to hear any given appeal, and even if it does, can effectively delay any decision indefinitely.

8) Thus, unless all or nearly all of Trump’s indisputable power is quickly restored by the Circuits, Trump has to decide whether to wait for a Supreme Court decision that broadly suppresses district judge power to frustrate his actions. A handful of Supreme Court decisions that narrowly uphold only a portion of his actions is inadequate and constitutes a defeat for Trump, and America.

9) Whether the Supreme Court backs Trump’s power, given that both Roberts and Barrett, and maybe Kavanaugh, by temperament and social position obligation very clearly want to vote with the Left, is dependent on how those three Justices vote.

10) Roberts, in particular, is obsessed with maintaining the legitimacy (or rather, the power) of the Supreme Court. (This is why he would never have allowed Trump to be actually jailed when the Left threatened to do so.) If Trump makes clear that the Court’s power will be destroyed, by any means necessary, if the Court destroys the rule of law by allowing district judges to continue to ignore the law, it is more likely he can obtain a favorable Supreme Court decision (or decisions), in an adequately timely fashion.

11) Therefore, Trump should, right now, threaten the Court, publicly (by channeling Andrew Jackson’s famous reiteration that the Court is not superior to the executive, even over Constitutional interpretation, and Lincoln’s similar rejection of Court authority in times of national emergency) and privately (by threatening personal destruction by various means). The Right needs to understand that the days of only the Left threatening, and only the right cowering, are over.

12) If this does not succeed, Trump should simply reject the Court’s decisions, sooner rather than later, beginning with district court decisions and, as necessary, higher court decisions. The danger here is that his actions, in that case, can be cast as illegitimate, frightening the normies. However, given that Left control over the Narrative has frayed very badly, this is a risk worth taking. He should, however, be prepared to go so far as to arrest Supreme Court justices for treason.

13) As a philosophical matter, allowing district court judges to keep issuing lawless decisions directed purely to advance their political ideology is the very definition of destruction of the rule of law. Thus, Trump can and should cast anything he does as restoration of the rule of law. To be sure, this is the argument of all Caesars. But it is not (necessarily) untrue.

14) This ignores macro arguments, such as the Constitutional illegitimacy of judicial supremacy as created out of whole cloth in Marbury v. Madison, and that the lower federal courts indisputably wholly within the discretion of Congress to eliminate or constrain. These arguments might come into play if Trump decided to completely neuter judicial supremacy, however.

15) For once, I don’t actually have a prediction what Trump will do. My general feeling is that he will do what is necessary. But he may be trapped within the delusional frame the in which the Left has trapped America for decades.