elusiveat

Posted by Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-21-2026

On February 22, 1889, outgoing Democratic president Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill that divided the Territory of Dakota in half and enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older Territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted to the Union in nine months.

Republicans and Democrats had fought for years over admitting new western states, with members of each party blocking the admission of states thought to favor the other. Republicans counted on Dakota and Washington Territories, while the Democrats felt pretty confident about Montana and New Mexico Territories.

In early 1888, Congress had considered a compromise by which all four states would come into the Union together. But in the 1888 election, voters had put the Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, and while the popular vote had gone to Cleveland, the Electoral College had put Republican Benjamin Harrison into the White House.

Democrats had to cut a deal quickly or the Republicans would simply admit their own states and no others. The plan they ended up with cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood but admitted Montana, split the Republican Territory of Dakota into two new Republican states, and admitted Republican-leaning Washington.

Harrison’s men were eager to admit new western states to the Union. In the eastern cities, the Democrats had been garnering more and more votes as popular opinion was swinging against the industrialists who increasingly seemed to control politics as well as the economy.

Democrats promised to lower the tariffs that drove up prices for consumers, while Republican leaders agreed with industrialists that they needed the tariffs that protected their products from foreign competition. Republicans assumed that the upcoming 1890 census would prove that the West was becoming the driving force in American politics, and admitting new states full of Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. The one new representative each new state would send to the House would be nice, but two new Republican senators per state would guarantee the Republicans would hold the Senate for the foreseeable future.

Then, too, the new states would change the number of electors in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of the state’s U.S. senators and representatives. Harrison’s men were only too aware that Harrison had lost the popular vote and won only in the Electoral College, and they were keen to skew the Electoral College more heavily toward the Republicans before the 1892 election.

In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the administration’s mouthpiece, Harrison’s people boasted that Republicans could take Montana, and gleefully anticipated that the new western states would send eight new Republican senators to Washington, D.C., making the count in the Senate forty-seven Republicans to thirty-seven Democrats. The newspaper also pointed out that changing the balance of the Electoral College would stop the Democratic-leaning state of New York from determining the next president.

In May 1889, elections for members of the constitutional conventions in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington Territory went Republican. Montana went Democratic, but Republicans blamed the result on Democratic gerrymandering. In October 1889, congressional elections in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington confirmed that those territories would come into the Union as Republican states. Frank Leslie’s counted the numbers: Republicans had garnered 169 seats to the Democrats’ 161. Republican legislatures would also give six new Republicans to the Senate, putting the count in that body at forty-five Republicans and thirty-nine Democrats. Frank Leslie’s reported the numbers, then explained what they meant: Republican control of Congress was pretty much guaranteed.

As for Montana, when it appeared the legislature would be dominated by Democrats, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud. They did have to admit that a Democrat had won the governorship, but they insisted he had done so by fewer than three hundred votes. The governor, Joseph K. Toole, was so popular that he was reelected twice, but the Republicans tried to weaken him by harping on what Frank Leslie’s called his “arbitrary, partisan, we might almost say indecent official conduct.”

In a little over a week in November 1889, four new states entered the Union. On Saturday, November 2, President Harrison signed the documents admitting North Dakota and South Dakota. On Friday, November 8, he welcomed Montana to the Union. The following Monday, November 11, he declared Washington a state.

Just as they had planned in February, Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union and had come close to capturing a fourth. The West seemed to be the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as if Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves. Republican dominance in the new western states, Frank Leslie’s wrote, would tip the scale that had balanced the parties for more than a decade. The votes of the new states would virtually assure the Republicans the presidency in 1892, and the tariffs would be safe.

But by summer 1890 it was no longer clear that the Republicans would keep their majority. The economy was faltering, and Americans blamed the tariffs. They were looking favorably on former president Cleveland, who, after all, had won the popular vote in 1888. The Harrison administration seemed out of touch with the American people. Mrs. Harrison had drawn up plans for a $700,000 addition to the White House with conservatories, winter gardens, and a statuary hall, “so as to make it a fit home for a Presidential family.” The Harrisons’ ne’er-do-well son Russell insisted it was “shameful” for the head of the nation to be forced to live in cramped quarters, although observers noted that the cramping came from the fact that Russell Harrison and his wife and child had moved into the White House with the president and the first lady. And then President Harrison accepted a handsome plate of solid gold from supporters from California on his birthday in August.

Republicans turned again to the idea of protecting their majority by adding more states. They looked toward Wyoming and Idaho. Since Wyoming had boasted a non-Indigenous population of fewer than 21,000 people in 1880 and the Northwest Ordinance had established 60,000 as the necessary population for admission to statehood, it was a stretch to argue that it was ready, but the Republicans were adamant that it should join the Union.

They also wanted to add Idaho, which had a population of fewer than 33,000 in 1880. They were in such a hurry to admit Idaho that they bypassed the usual procedures of state admission, permitting the territorial governor to call for volunteers to write a state constitution, which voters approved only months later.

Democrats pointed out that there was no argument for Wyoming and Idaho statehood that did not apply to Democratic New Mexico and Arizona. “The picking out of the two Territories and plucking them into the Union by the ears looked like an operation that was not to be justified by any sound principle of statesmanship or of public necessity, and that only found justification in the minds of its promoters by the fact that they were thus increasing their political influence in the next presidential election,” a Democratic representative charged.

Republicans countered that Democrats were opposing the admission of new states out of partisanship, saying they would not add a new state unless it pledged allegiance to the Democratic Party.

On July 3, 1890, after a vote that fell along party lines, Wyoming and Idaho were admitted to the Union. The Republicans had added six new states to the Union in less than a year. Administration loyalists were elated, but Democrats and moderate Republicans were not enthusiastic. The Democratic Boston Globe pointed out that the two new states together had a population of “a fair sized congressional district in Massachusetts” but would be represented in Congress by four senators and two representatives.

The moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly was also concerned. It pointed out that the admission of the new states badly skewed congressional representation. The estimated 105,000 people of Wyoming and Idaho, it complained, would have four senators and two representatives. The 200,000 people in the First Congressional District of New York, in contrast, had only one representative. Harper’s Weekly pointed out there were fifteen wards in New York City that each had a population as large as the population of Wyoming and Idaho put together. To get their additional Republican senators, the magazine noted, the Harrison administration had badly undercut the political power of voters from much more populous regions, a maneuver that did not seem to serve the fundamental principle of equal representation in the republic.

Administration men did not stop at redrawing the map to ensure the success of their party. They manipulated the 1890 census to favor Republican districts, projecting their count would give fifteen more Republican congressmen while only seven for the Democrats. They erected statues of Civil War heroes and passed the Dependent Pension Act, which put money in the pockets of disabled veterans, their wives, and their children. And all the while, they blamed their opponents for partisanship. Frank Leslie’s lectured: “It behooves the citizen, regardless of party affiliations to think of the calamities that must in the end result from the intensifying of party feeling and the subordination of right and justice to the desire to advance party success.”

And yet the public mood continued to swing away from the Republicans, who continued to insist that the workers and farmers suffering under the Republicans’ policies were ungrateful and were themselves to blame for their own worsening conditions. In turn, opponents accused Republicans of stealing the 1888 election and believing they didn’t have to answer to voters so long as they had moneyed men behind them so they could buy elections.

In the 1890 midterms, voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed their opponents a majority of more than two to one. A new “Alliance” movement of farmers and workers had swept through the West “like a wave of fire,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, calling for business regulations and income taxes and working quietly through new, local newspapers that old party operatives had largely ignored. Republicans held power in the Senate only thanks to the admission of the new states, but even those did not deliver as expected: Republicans held a majority of only four senators, but three of them opposed tariffs.

In the presidential election of 1892, Harrison won four electoral votes from South Dakota, three from Montana, four from Washington, and three from Wyoming. Idaho’s three electoral votes went to the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver. North Dakota split its three votes among the three candidates. It was not enough. Grover Cleveland returned to the White House for a second term, and Democrats took charge of Congress for the first time since before the Civil War.

—

Notes:

The material here is mostly from my Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre but the specific references are below:

New York Times, February 13, 1888, p. 1; February 24, 1888, p. 3; February 15, 1889, p. 5; February 17, 1889, p. 4; February 25, 1889, p. 1.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 5, 1889, p. 346; March 2, 1889, p. 39; March 16, 1889, p. 91, from New York World.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 1, 1889, p. 287; October 19, 1889, p. 191. Hubert Howe Bancroft and Frances Fuller Victor, History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1845–1889 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), pp. 781–806.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 2, 1889, pp. 223, 230; November 16, 1889, p. 259; December 14, 1889, p. 331.

Benjamin Harrison, Message to Congress, December 3, 1889, at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 8, 1890, p. 1; March 22, 1890, p. 163; March 29, 1890, p. 171; May 10, 1890, p. 294; May 3, 1890, p. 279; April 26, 1890, p. 259.

Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier President (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), pp. 52–53.

New York Times, November 7, 1900.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 22, 1890, p. 147. Merle Wells, “Idaho’s Season of Political Distress: An Unusual Path to Statehood,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 37 (Autumn 1987): 58–67.

Harper’s Weekly, January 11, 1890, p. 31; July 19, 1890, p. 551. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 12, 1890, p. 211; May 3, 1890, p. 275; July 12, 1890, p. 487.

Boston Globe, June 28, 1890, p. 10; July 2, 1890, p. 6; July 3, 1890, p. 4. New York Times, June 28, 1890, p. 1.

New York Times, April 30, 1890, p. 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 1, 1890, p. 79; April 26, 1890, p. 257 and 259; May 17, 1890, p. 311; May 31, 1890, p. 355. July 12, 1890, p. 487; September 27, 1890, p. 113.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census

New York Times, August 16, 1890, p. 4.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 22, 1890, p. 278. Harper’s Weekly, November 29, 1890, pp. 934–935.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/1892

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-21-2026

Posted by Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-20-2026

Today, in a 6–3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that President Donald J. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were unconstitutional.

Shortly after he took office, Trump declared that two things—the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China, and the country’s “large and persistent” trade deficits—constituted national emergencies. Under these emergency declarations, he claimed the authority to raise tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

The U.S. Constitution is clear that Congress, and Congress alone, has the authority to tax the American people, and tariffs are taxes. But with the IEEPA, Congress gave the president the power to respond quickly to an “unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” The law specifies that any authority granted to the president “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.”

Although the law does not mention tariffs, Trump claimed the authority under IEEPA to impose a sweeping new tariff system that upended the free trade principles that have underpinned the economy of the United States and its allies and partners since World War II.

Trump promised his supporters that foreign countries would pay the tariffs, but in fact, studies have reinforced what economists always maintained: the cost of tariffs falls on businesses and consumers in the U.S. Similarly, Trump promised his tariffs would make the economy boom and bring back manufacturing jobs, but the latest report on U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter of last year, released just this morning, shows that tariffs and the government shutdown slowed growth to 1.4%, bringing overall growth down from 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% in 2025.

While the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, it added only 181,000 in 2025. Manufacturing lost about 108,000 jobs in 2025.

Trump also used tariffs to justify his extension of the 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, insisting that fees on foreign countries would fund the U.S. government and cut the deficit.

It was always clear, though, that Trump’s reliance on tariffs was mostly about seizing power. Trump’s advisors appear to be using the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies.

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26, 2025: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Instead, he has operated under emergency powers. Since he took office thirteen months ago, Trump has declared at least nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. Since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term.

Having declared his power to do whatever he wished with tariffs, Trump used them for his own ends in both foreign policy and economics, punishing countries for enforcing the law against his allies—like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, jailed after trying to overthrow the elected government—or strong-arming countries like Vietnam into giving real estate deals to his family.

Trump changed tariff rates apparently on his own whim. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, a month after imposing a 10% additional tariff on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20%. A month later, he removed the legal exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing reciprocal tariffs, he increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34% to 84%. The very next day, he jacked them up to 125%. That meant the total tariff rate on Chinese goods was 145%.

Trump’s tariffs destabilized the global economy, while the wild instability made it impossible for U.S. companies to plan. Increasingly, other countries have simply cut the U.S. out of their trade deals, while U.S. growth has slowed. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household about $1,000 in 2025. They projected that cost to be $1,300 in 2026. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee–Minority, made up of Democrats, estimates that number to be low. They say the actual cost has been $1,700 per household.

It was a huge tax increase on the American people, imposed without reference at all to Congress, which is the only government body with the power to raise taxes. Now the Supreme Court has said that the chaos and cost of Trump’s tariffs was for nothing. Trump’s claim of authority to levy tariffs under IEEPA was unconstitutional all along.

Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles wrote of the decision: “[A]ll this reinforces that the tariffs were arguably both the most reckless act and the greatest abuse of power by a President in American history.” He added: “In most democracies Trump’s reckless and wild abuse of power through his tariffs would cause the government to fall or the leader to be removed. The imposition of these tariffs against the will of Congress, the courts, our allies, and the American people. It’s clear grounds for removal.”

As Ryan Goodman of Just Security pointed out, the justices in the majority expressed “deep skepticism of claims to open-ended emergency powers,” although it is not clear that they will recognize the same problem in other contexts.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that “today’s decision is…an indictment of the Court…. [T]hese tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.” Marshall said there is no future for the American republic without thoroughly reforming the court of its current corruption.*

Trump did not take news of the court’s decision calmly. Trump was at a private breakfast with governors at the White House when an aide handed him a note about the decision. A source told Reuters White House reporter Jarrett Renshaw that Trump was “visibly frustrated” and said he “had to do something about the courts.” Then he left the room.

Three hours later, Trump delivered a public response in which he lambasted the justices in the majority, including two of the three on the court he nominated. He said the justices appointed by Democrats are “against anything that makes America, strong, healthy and great again. They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.” The Republicans in the majority are “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats and, not that this should have anything at all to do with it, they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” As a whole, he claimed, “the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” He asserted that “obnoxious, ignorant and loud” people were frightening the justices to keep them from doing what was right.

Trump heaped praise on his appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas in the minority.

Trump continued in this vein for forty-five minutes, ranting that he had created a booming economy that “all of the Nobel Prize winners in economics” had said was impossible. He returned to his fantasy identity as peacemaker, reiterating that he had “settled eight wars, whether you like it or not,” saving 35 million lives, and claimed tariffs had made that possible. He claimed that he “was very modest in my ask of other countries and businesses” because he didn’t want to sway the court. He said: “I want to be a good boy.”

He told reporters that there were other ways to impose tariffs and that he intended to do so. Indeed, he said, “the Supreme Court’s decision today made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear, rather than less. I don’t think they meant that. I’m sure they didn’t. It’s terrible…. There will no longer be any doubt, and the income coming in and the protection of our companies and country will actually increase because of this decision. I don’t think the court meant that, but it’s the way it is.”

Trump’s tariffs are unpopular enough that he could have interpreted the Supreme Court decision outlawing them as providential, but instead he vowed to sign an order imposing 10% global tariffs under a law that permits him to do so for 150 days. When a reporter asked him why he couldn’t “just work with Congress to come up with a plan to push tariffs,” Trump answered: “I don’t have to. I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs. And it’s all been approved by Congress, so there’s no reason to do it.”

Tonight Trump posted on social media that he had signed an order to impose “a Global 10% Tariff on all Countries, which will be effective almost immediately.” Economist Justin Wolfers asked: “What problem is Trump’s new global 10% tariff meant to solve? If it’s about leverage, ask: How much leverage do you get from a tariff that disappears in 150 days? If it’s onshoring: Who builds new factories based on tariff[s] that disappear before the factory is built? It’s a tax. That’s all it is.”

The court did not say anything about how the government should remedy the economic dislocation the tariffs caused or, for that matter, return the billions of dollars it took illegally. Simon Rosenberg wrote that “Democrats can now credibly call for the repeal of the Trump tax cuts and the clawing back of the additional ICE funding as a way of offsetting the revenue loss from the ending of the illegal tariffs.”

But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an interviewer: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see” refunds. Nonetheless, Representatives Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Janelle Bynum (D-OR) immediately introduced a bill to require the Trump administration to refund tariff revenue to U.S. businesses within 90 days.

This afternoon, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker sent an invoice to Trump, charging him $8,679,261,600, or $1,700 for every family in Illinois, as “reimbursement owed to the Illinois families for illegally imposed tariffs.” It said: “Illinois families paid the price for illegal tariffs—at the grocery store, at the hardware store, and around the kitchen table. Tariffs are taxes and working families were the ones who paid them. Illinois families paid the bill. Time for Trump to pay us back.”

In a cover letter, Pritzker said: “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof. This morning, your hand-picked Supreme Court Justices notified you that they are unconstitutional…. This letter and the attached invoice stand as an official notice that compensation is owed to the people of Illinois, and if you do not comply we will pursue further action.”

—

*Edited at 12:00 on February 21. I wrote last night that "In August 2025, almost six months ago, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision striking down the tariffs as illegal." That is incorrect. In fact, the lower courts stayed their own injunctions to allow Trump to appeal to the Supreme Court. I apologize for the error.

—

Notes:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/chapter-35

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-midsized-companies-costs-consumers-2a25158ff1d06bd7f72d909a8ec64f25

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/20/gdp-2025-economy-tariffs-trade/

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/january-jobs-revisions-trump-rcna258398

https://www.kcra.com/article/manufacturing-jobs-us-tariffs/70304916

Paul Krugman

Who Is Paying the Trump Tariffs?

WARNING: TODAY’S POST WILL BE EVEN WONKIER THAN USUAL…

Read more

7 days ago · 1346 likes · 293 comments · Paul Krugman

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-emergency-immigration-tariffs-crime.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78x9256pn7o

Law Dork

Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote, blocks Trump's IEEPA tariffs

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday struck a blow to one of President Donald Trump’s key economic policies, holding on a 6-3 vote that Trump’s the challenged set of Trump’s mass-tariffs are not authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA…

Read more

2 days ago · 227 likes · 34 comments · Chris Geidner

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/press-releases

https://thehill.com/homenews/5747651-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-disgrace/

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-press-conference/#post-update-d01baad5

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-moment-trump-found-out-the-supreme-court-killed-his-tariffs-ad40b45f?mod=e2fb

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/20/gdp-2025-economy-tariffs-trade/

https://www.editorialboard.com/supreme-court-says-the-biggest-tax-increase-in-more-than-three-decades-was-illegal-from-th/

https://globalnews.ca/news/11676133/donald-trump-tariffs-supreme-court-reaction-transcript/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/live-blog/-trump-tariffs-ruling-supreme-court-live-updates-rcna252655/rcrd101323

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/trump-national-guard-chicago-dictator.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-be-fooled-by-the-corrupt-courts-tariff-decision

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-20-2026

Posted by Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-19-2026-ba4

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-19-2026-ba4

Posted by Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-19-2026

In the United Kingdom this morning, Thames Valley Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, on suspicion that he committed misconduct in public office. Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last October because of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice suggest that when Mountbatten-Windsor represented the United Kingdom as a trade envoy, he gave confidential government documents to Epstein.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest is the first arrest of a senior royal since 1647, when supporters of Parliament arrested King Charles I during the English Civil War. Today is Mountbatten-Windsor’s 66th birthday.

King Charles III said the investigations into his brother have his “wholehearted” support and that Buckingham Palace will cooperate. He said that “the law must take its course.”

In South Korea, Seoul Central District Court Judge Jee Kui-youn sentenced former president of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison after he was found guilty of leading an insurrection against the government. With his approval rating plummeting as his administration was engulfed by scandals, on December 3, 2024, Yoon declared martial law and tried to paralyze the parliament by using troops to blockade the National Assembly building and arrest opposition politicians. As Lim Hui Jie reported for CNBC, five other conspirators have also received prison sentences of up to 30 years.

During the trial, prosecutors told the court that Yoon had declared martial law “with the purpose of remaining in power for a long time by seizing the judiciary and legislature.” Yoon claimed that he was within his constitutional authority to declare martial law and that he did so to “safeguard freedom and sovereignty.”

After Yoon declared martial law, 190 of the 300 lawmakers in the National Assembly fought their way into the chamber and overturned his edict, forcing Yoon to back down about six hours after his martial law announcement. Lawmakers impeached him 11 days later and removed him from office. Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty for Yoon. The judge said that in sentencing Yoon, he had taken into consideration that Yoon is 65 and that he did not order his troops to use lethal force during the period in which he declared martial law.

In Washington, D.C., today, President Donald J. Trump held the first meeting of his so-called Board of Peace at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), newly renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace,” a change being legally challenged. Last year, officials from the Trump administration seized the USIP building, which housed an independent entity created by Congress in 1984, and fired nearly all the employees.

Trump has made it clear he wants his new board to replace the United Nations. Twenty-seven countries have said they will participate, but so far none appear to have tossed in the $1 billion that would give them permanent status. The countries participating include Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Trump extended invitations to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Trump withdrew an invitation to the board from Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced Trump’s foreign policy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, so Canada is out. Rejecting Trump’s invitation are Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the Vatican. They cite their continuing support for the United Nations, concerns about Russian influence in Trump’s board, and concerns about the board’s organization, which gives Trump final say in all decisions, including how to spend the board’s money.

Today, Trump announced that the U.S. will put $10 billion into the Board of Peace, although since Congress is the only body that can legally appropriate money in our system, it’s unclear how he intends to do this.

The event at the board appeared to be the Trump Show. Representatives from the countries who had accepted Trump’s invitation stood awkwardly on stage waiting for him while his favorite songs blared. Once he arrived, he rambled for an hour and then appeared to fall asleep at points in the meeting as dignitaries spoke.

Lena Sun and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported today that having pulled out of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Trump administration has called for creating an alternative run by the U.S. that would recreate WHO systems. The cost would be $2 billion a year funded through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), up from the $680 million the U.S. provided to the WHO. The secretary of HHS is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Public health experts told the journalists it was unlikely that any new U.S.-based system could match the reach of the WHO. Director Tom Inglesby of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said: “Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship. We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere [near] the influence we had.”

Only sovereign nations can join the WHO, but California, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, as well as New York City, have joined the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.

Today Trump’s Commission of Fine Arts swore in two new members, including Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience in the arts. Then the commission, now entirely made up of Trump appointees, approved Trump’s plans for a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand, although the chair did note that public comments about the project were over 99% negative.

According to CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty, Harris said the White House is the “greatest house in [the] world. We want this to be the greatest ballroom in the world.” Trump says the ballroom is being funded by private donations through the Trust for the National Mall, which is not required to disclose its donors.

Today workers hung a banner with a giant portrait of Trump on the Department of Justice building.

On Air Force One as Trump traveled to Georgia this afternoon for a speech on the economy, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor. “Do you think people in this country at some point, associates of Jeffrey Epstein, will wind up in handcuffs, too?”

Trump answered: “Well, you know I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated. It’s very nice, I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. To see it, and to see what’s going on with his brother, who’s obviously coming to our country very soon and he’s a fantastic man. King. So I think it’s a very sad thing. It’s really interesting ‘cause nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive, but now they speak. But I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing. In fact, the opposite—he was against me. He was fighting me in the election, which I just found out from the last three million pages of documents.”

In fact, Trump has not been exonerated.

When he got to Georgia, Trump’s economic message was that “I’ve won affordability.” More to the point was his focus on his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to secure elections. In fact, in solving a nonexistent problem, the law dramatically restricts voting. Republicans in the House have already passed it. If the Senate passes it, Trump told an audience in Rome, Georgia, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/02/19/uk-police-arrest-ex-royal-prince-andrew/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/uk/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-arrest-what-we-know-intl

https://www.the-independent.com/bulletin/news/andrew-arrest-charles-i-english-civil-war-b2923559.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/14/south-koreas-president-yoon-impeached-after-failed-attempt-to-impose-martial-law.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/south-korea-ex-president-yoon-suk-yeol-life-sentence-guilty-insurrection-death-sentence-martial-law-verdict.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/19/world/yoon-korea-martial-law-president

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-mixes-diplomacy-flattery-peace-board-meeting-2026-02-19/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-says-nobody-occupied-u-s-institute-of-peace-he-had-nothing-to-do-with-renaming-the-building-after-him

https://time.com/7379643/trump-board-peace-countries-joining-rejected-invitations-membership/

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5745297-trump-funding-board-of-peace/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/02/19/alternative-world-health-organization-proposal/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/politics/trump-white-house-ballroom-commission

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/white-house-ballroom-donations-should-be-disclosed-on-lobbying-disclosure-reports/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/04/illinois-world-health-organization-global-outbreak-alert-and-response-network

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/10/new-york-who-global-outbreak-alert-response-network

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2026/02/18/evers-joins-who-disease-alert-network-tiffany-vows-to-reverse-move/88737562007/

https://www.aol.com/articles/trump-says-hes-totally-exonerated-001041657.html

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-republicans-will-never-lose-save-america-act/

https://newrepublic.com/post/206784/donald-trump-sleep-board-peace-launch

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/19/trump-sotu-georgia-rally-00790155

X:

atrupar/status/2024576037477027958?s=20

Bluesky:

governor.ca.gov/post/3mfahp6e7s22w

atrupar.com/post/3mfadaghzzk2k

onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3mfa34ad6js2m

atrupar.com/post/3mf7rmmjvzw2i

democracydocket.com/post/3mfamqr27kk2a

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-19-2026