Susan Kokinda argues Trump’s response to the Supreme Court tariff ruling points beyond China to “foreign interests” tied to the British Empire's Adam Smith free-trade ideology, defended by the US Chamber of Commerce and Cato Institute.
Next, Susuan cites Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ambassador Jamieson Greer framing the administration’s approach as Hamiltonian economic sovereignty, and says tariffs will continue under other laws, including a new 10% global tariff.
She also contrasts this with Thursday’s Board of Peace meeting, where 60 nations backed “peace through construction,” funding housing, security, and development, rejecting Kissinger-style managed conflict.
Finally, Susan warns that midterm demoralization risks ending Trump’s agenda
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:01 The Foreign Interests Behind the Court Decision
07:13 The End of the Kissinger System
12:06 The 2026 Battle for the American System
Snapshots and Notes
Yesterday (Fri, 20 Feb 2026), President Trump responded to the Supreme Court’s tariff decision with a statement that cut through all the legal noise…
“It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.
“Foreign interests behind the Supreme Court.”
Foreign interests behind SCOTUS - that’s a serious charge, and most of the coverage will stop there.
Instead, they’ll obsess over who the president was angry at, Gorsuch, Roberts, or they will only focus on China, an obvious target.
If that is as far as the narrative goes, then the point has been missed entirely.
Take a step back and hold the president’s statement up against the other major event this week.
Thursday’s historic Board of Peace meeting (19 Feb 2026), where 60 nations answered President Trump’s call to build something new, and where the president made a not-so-offhand remark about Henry Kissinger.
“We had some conflicts, to put it mildly, in the world.
“And I said, Steve, how would you like to be Henry Kissinger Jr. that doesn’t leak?”
When you put those two things together a very specific picture emerges not a president venting about a court ruling but of a president who understands exactly what he’s fighting and he’s naming it out loud.
Those foreign interests have been tracked by Susan Kokinda for decades - they are the same forces we fought the American Revolution against, and for most of those decades, they’ve stayed hidden.
The Foreign Interests Behind the Court Decision (02:01)
So who are these foreign interests?
The president was careful - he said China-centric forces were behind the lawsuits.
That is, people who, quote, have business in China and want to keep ripping us off.
Look who actually filed the friend-of-the-court briefs challenging the president’s tariff authority...
These are not Chinese communist front groups.
These are the most venerable bastions of Adam Smith’s free trade ideology, an ideology that opened the floodgates for cheap Chinese goods to wipe out our manufacturing and to hollow out our middle class for decades.
So it’s not really China …
Now listen to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaking to the Dallas Economic Club shortly after the court released its tariff decision.
And Bessent went out of his way to say that he had not changed one word of his speech in reaction to the decision.
Why?
Because this administration did not need a flawed court decision to tell them who the enemy is.
“Economic security is the foundation that allows a country to fulfill its most basic obligation of safeguarding its people, safeguarding its people.
“Unfortunately, past administrations lost sight of this fundamental truth, allowing for efficiency gains and short-sighted profit obsession to eclipse security resilience and long-term value.”
Fake efficiency gains …
Short-sighted profit obsession …
That’s not a description of Chinese policy - that’s a description of the British liberal free trade system, the system that measures everything by how much money can be extracted from a nation and its people, leaving an economic wasteland and shattered lives behind.
But what fundamental truth had past administrations abandoned?
Here’s what Secretary Bessent said...
“From the earliest days of the republic, our founding fathers understood that independence required economic security.
“The ability to produce essential goods, sustain public credit, and foster domestic industry was seen as the foundation of sovereignty by Alexander Hamilton, and still is.”
Did you catch that?
Our Treasury Secretary now joins Trade Ambassador Jameson Greer in declaring that this administration’s policy is a HAMILTONIAN POLICY, and it is the foundation of our economic sovereignty.
Remember who Alexander Hamilton and the infant American Republic were fighting.
Not Chinese communists.
They were fighting King George, the Bank of England, and the British East India Company, the same imperial free trade system that is now, in its 21st-century globalist form, that the Chamber of Commerce and the Cato Institute are defending.
Now, as far as the Supreme Court’s decision nullifying IEEPA as a vehicle for imposing tariffs, the president and Bessent made clear that the authority exists through many other provisions, and there will be no let-up in the administration’s defense of American industry and workers.
Yesterday, the president moved quickly to sign a new 10% global tariff using other laws, and Bessent said that the tariff revenue in 2026 will be virtually unchanged.
Here’s what really matters most...
The day before the court ruled, President Trump was in Georgia, making the human case for what this fight is actually about and inviting the American people to see it with their own eyes.
Here’s how the owner of the factory that Trump spoke at put it …
Andrew Saville, President, Coosa Steel Corp: “It’s been a game-changer.
“We were competing with China.
“They had taken all of it.
“They were producing racks at $90 a piece.
“Our cost alone is $150.
“You’ve leveled it.
“Playing fields back.
President Trump: “So when I came in, and we did what we had to do to save all these businesses, you went through the road, right?
Saville: “We did.
“Our quotes, our orders.
“We’re so busy now, we don’t know what to do.
“My lead time now on an order is 36 weeks.
“We were at a point in time in our racks division when we were laying off workers.
“We were working one shift, three days a week. begging for work, now we’re... It’s the exact opposite.”
From one shift three days a week to now having to turn away business…
And in his speech, the president said that his policies have created 5,000 manufacturing jobs in Georgia alone, and 70,000 construction jobs building more factories that will employ more people as soon as they’re opened up.
These aren’t economic statistics - it’s the difference between a dying country and a growing one.
And the foreign interests behind Friday’s court decision want to take that away.
They failed, BUT they will try again…
And that’s exactly why you need to understand what happened Thursday at the Board of Peace meeting, because it shows you not just what Trump is defending, but what he’s building in the place of this dying system.
The End of the Kissinger System (07:13)
When President Trump introduced his special envoy, Steve Whitcoff, to the Board of Peace, he used a line that deserves far more attention than it got.
“And I said, Steve, how would you like to be Henry Kissinger Jr. that doesn’t leak?
“I said, are you a leaker, Steve?
“No, he didn’t even know what the word meant.
“And it’s true.
“I always say Henry Kissinger, who was one of the great leakers of all time, by the way, Richard Nixon said to him, ‘Henry, Henry, who’s leaking all this stuff?’
“’I don’t know, Mr. President.’
“’It was Henry.’”
That’s not a joke.
That is a very precisely directed statement.
And you can bet that many of the people sitting in that room understood the role that Kissinger had played in the last century in the empire’s policy of perpetual war.
Henry Kissinger was one of the architects of the post-war order that Trump is now dismantling.
And if you want to know who Kissinger was leaking to, just look at his infamous speech to London’s Chatham House in 1982, when he said ...
On the empire’s behalf, Kissinger didn’t manage peace; he managed conflict, keeping nations locked in permanent tensions and permanent negotiation.
That was the system.
That was the point.
Trump didn’t just pick Steve Whitcoff because he isn’t a leaker; he picked him because this administration’s policy is the polar opposite of Kissinger’s and the Empire’s.
And Marco Rubio made clear that President Trump has thrown out the old rulebook.
“President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has both an ability and a willingness to use the power of his office to think outside the box.
“This Gaza situation was impossible to solve under orthodoxy, under existing structures.”
Impossible under orthodoxy.
That’s the key phrase: the imperial system doesn’t just tolerate perpetual conflict; it requires it.
It was designed to keep the imperial or globalist system in place, which is why it never took up the challenge of real economic development for the region.
It was always happy to let everyone fight forever and just extract the oil.
The president of Kazakhstan put the alternative in the simplest possible terms.
“It’s about making durable peace through practical, target-oriented measures, but not through endless conferences with wishful resolutions.
“The world has never seen a move like this.
“It is absolutely unprecedented because, in essence, Peace through construction is a very innovative concept.”
Peace through construction.
Not peace through managed negotiation that never resolves anything, but construction and economic growth, which is the only durable basis for peace.
And here’s what it looks like in practice.
This is what was announced on Thursday…
$7 billion already committed from Gulf and Central Asian nations
The United States pledged $10 billion, which is only two weeks of what a war costs, as the president put it
100,000 homes in Rafah as a starting point
A Palestinian police force had 2,000 applicants on its first day of recruiting
This isn’t some hollow framework; this is an up-and-running operation.
But perhaps the most powerful voice in that room came from the youngest head of state present, the president of Paraguay.
“I think that of the many things that you have achieved in the last 12 months as President of the U.S., I think the greatest thing, and I’m probably the youngest head of state here, is hope, (Mr.) President.
“We have lost hope about solving problems for many, many decades.
“A system that was broken, a system that was not able to bring solutions, now we’re seeing that, thanks to your leadership, we are solving the issues.”
A broken system that couldn’t produce solutions.
He’s describing exactly what Kissinger built and what the Chamber of Commerce and the Cato Institute went to court to protect.
A globalist system that manages the world through war and free trade.
The Board of Peace is built on the opposite premise, that human beings, given security and economic opportunity, will recognize each other as creators and builders rather than enemies.
60 nations answered that call on Thursday, because for the first time in decades, someone offered them something the empire never would:
an exit from the system that was destroying them.
Now, what transpired in that room on Thursday is something that every American needs to understand: the enemy is not another person or a religion or a country; it is a system.
But if you think that system is gonna sit back and let the president dismantle their economic and strategic power without a fight, you don’t understand how evil they are.
And here’s where the midterms come in.
The 2026 Battle for the American System (12:06)
The Cook Political Report just dropped an important analysis about the mood of many voters.
They reported that voters aren’t just angry about the cost of living, but feel that, quote,
They’re not wrong.
And Marco Rubio told you at Munich that it was a deliberate decision.
And we’ve shown you that it was announced 50 years ago by the Council on Foreign Relations.
But if you don’t understand who did it, the empire will use that anger and misdirect it, just like they’ve used the real anger in the Mideast to keep people fighting each other while they maintain control.
Here at home, you’re supposed to get angry at Trump’s billionaires - that’s the new Democratic Party playbook, or whatever the latest social media outrage is.
The intended outcome is simple.
Enough people who voted for Trump in 2024, especially the younger ones, get demoralized, stay home in November, and the American system revolution ends in January of 2027.
Don’t let them do that.
CALL TO ACTION
Think about the factory owner in Georgia who went from a few days of work a week in 2010 to turning away business today and all the workers he’s brought back to work.
Think about the president of Paraguay saying that for decades there was no hope and that Trump is changing that.
Think about a treasury secretary who declared that Alexander Hamilton’s system is the foundation of American sovereignty.
That is why Promethean Action exists.
That is why Decisive Liberty News exists.
We know the playbook and how to defeat it.
We are going to pull back the curtain.
So last week, an imperial system that has run the world for centuries used the American judiciary to try to disarm the president’s economic revolution.
But in the same week, the president marshaled 60 nations to join in his mission.
The question now comes down to whether enough Americans will understand that and defend that economic revolution in this fateful year.
Join us as a supporting member or a contributor,
because the fight before us is bigger than they want you to know.
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