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Karoline Leavitt Says American Businesses Should Have No Recourse When Trump Mood Swings Destroy Their Businesses

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Karoline Leavitt went on a rant today, attacking the three judges (one Reagan appointee, one Obama appointee, and a Trump appointee) who ruled that Donald Trump cannot usurp Congress’ authority to levy tariffs. (The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency en banc stay of the order.)

The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the Presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump — or any other president, for that matter — has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges. President Trump is in the process of rebalancing America’s trade agreements with the entire world, bringing tens of billions of dollars in tariff revenues to our country and finally ending the United States of America from being ripped off. These judges are threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, Leavitt’s typically inflammatory rhetoric.

Let’s consider her premise.

Leavitt is saying that America’s small businesses should have no recourse if Trump unlawfully destroys their business.

One of the five plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Terry Cycling’s Nikolaus Holm, which sells women’s cycling clothing, described in a filing submitted on April 10 that;

  • His company had already paid $25,000 in unplanned tariffs
  • Tariffs may cost the company $250,000 by the end of 2025
  • If the tariffs in effect on April 10 stayed in place, they would have to pay $1.2 million in tariffs in 2026
  • It had already raised prices by up to 30% to pay for the tariffs

“Tariffs will become the single largest line item operating expense on Terry Cycling’s Profit & Loss Statement,” Holm described. “It would be larger than payroll.”

In Karoline Leavitt’s world, small business owners like Holm should have absolutely no recourse if Trump’s mood swings  and unlawful usurpation of Congress’ power destroys their business.

Update: DC Judge Rudolph Contreras also threw out Trump’s tariffs (but stayed the injunction for 14 days).

How he found he had jurisdiction — after the Court of International Trade had already ruled; Contreras basically said they did not have jurisdiction, and how he used their prior ruling to dismiss Trump’s inflammatory claims of harm — are matters of some interest.

But for the purposes of this post, here’s how Contreras described the harm that Trump’s usurpation of Congress’ duties had done to the two family-owned toy companies that sued.

They cannot offset the highest IEEPA tariffs without raising prices 70 percent or more “as a matter of pure survival,” Woldenberg Decl. ¶ 9; their customers have already canceled over $1 million in orders, id. ¶ 10; and they face an immediate 40 or 50 percent decline in sales, year-over-year, id. ¶ 11. The companies “cannot possibly absorb the costs of the increased tariffs” without “changing [their] pricing radically.” Id. ¶¶ 6, 14. But they cannot pass price increases onto their customers without selling substantially fewer products. Id. ¶¶ 16, 18. Plaintiffs are not “massive entities that can withstand such losses in their core business[es].” See Everglades Harvesting & Hauling, Inc. v. Scalia, 427 F. Supp. 3d 101, 116 (D.D.C. 2019). Nor can they reduce the quality of their products to support lower prices: reducing quality is “unthinkable” for “premium brands” like Plaintiffs, and is practically unworkable because it would require them to “change the design and/or production of more than 2,000 products at once.” Id. ¶ 15.

Without an injunction, Plaintiffs may have to refinance loans on unfavorable terms; significantly scale back operations and product offerings; close facilities; lay off employees; or possibly sell their businesses. Mot. Prelim. Inj. at 41. Granted, financial losses typically do not constitute irreparable harm. E.g., Wisc. Gas Co. v. FERC, 758 F.2d 669, 674 (D.C. Cir. 1985). But that is not the case when “the loss threatens the very existence of the movant’s business.” Id.

The government argues that Plaintiffs’ harms are speculative and conclusory. See Defs.’ PI Opp’n at 37–39. The Court disagrees. See Pls.’ PI Reply at 20–21 (detailing, to the extent possible, the specific costs that Plaintiffs have incurred because of the Challenged Orders). How could Plaintiffs possibly describe the exact costs they will face from paying tariffs that the President imposes, pauses, adjusts, and reimposes at will?

Note that Contreras used Trump’s moodiness and unreliability against him in this ruling.

Stephen Miller’s shrill attacks on judges Karoline Leavitt parroted today have, heretofore, been directed at people Miller has spent years demonizing, primarily migrants (about whom he lies shamelessly). Miller has trained Trump’s rubes to believe that migrants should have no due process.

But this time around, Miller’s puppet Leavitt is saying that small business owners are not entitled to due process.

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Some of the Ways Trump’s Immigrant Invader Damaged America in Just Two Weeks

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I think one effect of Trump’s attempt to wow journalists with the appearance of action is to hide how many major fuck-ups and failed promises Trump has had in his first two weeks (like the serial confession that Trump and Stephen Miller lied to voters about how many criminal aliens there are and Trump’s equivocations about multiple of the tariffs he will set).

But one locus of many of the worst failures comes from this unelected immigrant.

Among the things that African immigrant Elon Musk has done in the last few weeks was:

Forced FAA’s head, Michael Whitaker, out days before a fatal crash. As the Verge explained, Elon took Whitaker out because he deigned to regulate Musk’s companies.

But Musk’s efforts to get Whitaker were well known even before Trump’s victory in November. He has complained many times about the FAA, lashing out in September after the agency levied a $633,000 fine for launching missions with unapproved changes. (Musk is worth over $400 billion, making him the richest man in the world.)

The FAA has also fined Starlink, after the SpaceX subsidiary failed to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022. In a House hearing, Whitaker explained that the FAA’s civil penalties were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

On X, Musk complained that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” He also claimed that humans would never land on Mars without “radical reform at the FAA.” In September, he wrote “he needs to resign” about Whitaker.

Elon also pushed out the guy who manages America’s checkbook, David Lebryk, in whom a lot of the confidence of investors and businessmen is invested.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.

[snip]

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Musk’s flunkies, including one 18-year old with only a high school diploma, have also been installed in the Office of Personnel Management [corrected] — the government’s HR department.

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government.

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages.

One thing they’ve done is set up a government-wide email function.

Last week, many federal workers received test emails from the email address [email protected]. In a lawsuit filed last night, plaintiffs allege that a new email list started by the Trump administration may be compromising the data of federal employees.

In their attempts to set up agency- and government-wide emails, Elon’s unelected bureaucrats seem to have taken security filters off at least NOAA’s email system, resulting in noxious spam being sent.

After setting up the government-wide email, someone sent out an email similar to the one Elon sent out when he gutted Xitter, attempting to fool government workers into accepting something misleadingly labeled a buy-out, one not authorized by statute or appropriation.

In a separate email sent on Tuesday entitled “Fork in the Road,” most federal workers were effectively offered an eight-month severance package to leave their jobs, simply by sending [email protected] a message with the word “Resign” in the subject line between now and February 6. Military personnel, postal workers, and national-security and immigration officials are not eligible.

The executive branch has no authority from Congress to offer a mass buyout to federal workers. In fact, the OPM website clearly states that the limit for incentive packages for voluntary resignations is $25,000, far less than eight months’ pay for the average federal worker. Some employees can’t even be offered that.

The way OPM purports to get around this is by defining this as “deferred resignation.” The resignation of the federal worker would be set at September 30, and they will retain full pay and benefits until then and be exempt from return-to-office requirements that are part of one of the Trump executive orders. (This is also a way to not unlawfully reduce salary outlays in federal appropriations for the current fiscal year.) “I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date,” reads the sample resignation letter. In this sense it is just a future setting of an end date of employment, though the strong implication is that those employees will have nothing to do for the next eight months.

[snip]

This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.

All this access — and almost certainly, some shitty AI — is where the big lie Karoline Leavitt told in her first presser came from.

MS. LEAVITT: There was notice. It was the executive order that the president signed.

There’s also a freeze on hiring, as you know; a regulatory freeze; and there’s also a freeze on foreign aid. And this is a — again, incredibly important to ensure that this administration is taking into consideration how hard the American people are working. And their tax dollars actually matter to this administration.

You know, just during this pause, DOGE and OMB have actually found that there was $37 million that was about to go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump, with the swipe of his pen in that executive order, is — no longer wants the United States to be a part of. So, that wouldn’t be in line with the president’s agenda.

DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.

Jesse Watters picked up Leavitt’s lie, which in turn led Trump to parrott Watters’ expanded version of it.

It’s possible flunkies installed by African immigrant Elon Musk mistook Africa for the Middle East (of which only Jordan gets contraceptives), because Africa receives condoms from the US (as part of the important PEPFAR anti-AIDS program that even Republican Senators were demanding be resumed when it got shut down).

And this is just what we already know! While it hasn’t been confirmed, I’d bet a good deal of money that Elon’s flunkies were behind shutting down the Medicaid portals early in the week, something that affected health care for people throughout the country.

It has been spectacular failure after failure.

And many of them were directly caused by the immigrant demanding that we get rid of unelected bureaucrats taking democracy away.

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