“Germany’s Army Is Rebuilding. What Could Go Wrong?” That’s the striking title of a lengthy essay from Politico. It makes an important point: Germany’s expansion in military spending “marks a huge shift not just from how Germany manages its finances but how it perceives both itself and its place in the world.” Germans are once again becoming proud of the military, despite its links to Hitler’s Wehrmacht and a series of disturbing far-right scandals.

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Our feature story this morning makes a similar point: Germans are being prepared to sacrifice their welfare budget to fund armaments. “As the nation’s leadership is thinking increasingly militaristic, the people will have to follow suit,” writes Josué Michels.

Lilliputian courts vs. Trump: As Donald Trump works to use the power of the presidency to enact bold reform on multiple fronts, anti-Trump lawyers and judges work to reverse virtually every action he takes.

The latest example happened yesterday, when a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze $2 billion in federal funding to Harvard University.

• Trump aims to combat the anti-Semitism rife on campus. The judge admitted Harvard is “plagued” with anti-Semitism.
• However, she divined Trump’s true motives for the action: Anti-Semitism was just “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
• So apparently Harvard’s constitutional right to free speech means American taxpayers must pony up $2 billion.

Another day, another lawsuit.

On June 27, a Supreme Court ruling limited nationwide injunctions. But Trump’s enemies keep finding innovative legalistic fetters to tie him down: class-action lawsuits, narrower injunctions, emergency motions for temporary restraining orders, and multiple lawsuits in different jurisdictions, to name a few. Recent high-profile examples:

• A temporary restraining order is keeping Trump from firing Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board.
• The Ninth Circuit upheld a district court ruling that Trump was not allowed to end the temporary protected status Biden gave to 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants—effectively treating that temporary status as permanent.
• A federal appeals court ruled that many of the president’s tariffs are illegal—he can’t impose tariffs by executive order.

In an article on Tuesday, the left-wing Atlantic celebrated “lawsuits, lawsuits and more lawsuits” as “The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working.” Citing one former attorney for the Obama administration who “has pursued more than 100 legal matters against Trump since his second inauguration,” the article describes how lawsuits are slowing the president down.

Hundreds of attorneys and plaintiffs have stood up to him, feeding a steady assembly line of setbacks and judicial reprimands …. Of the 384 cases filed through August 28 against the Trump administration, 130 have led to orders blocking at least part of the president’s efforts, and 148 cases await a ruling ….

Since Inauguration Day, executive orders have been defanged or blocked, agency closures delayed, government-employee firings reversed. Deportation flights have been delayed, law firms have freed themselves from Trump’s retaliation, and foreign students have won the ability to continue studying at U.S. universities. Courts have forced the president to restore cut services and spending to AmeriCorps, the U.S. African Development Foundation, the cdc, and other agencies. They have upended an effort by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to make it more difficult to release unaccompanied minors from government custody and forced Trump to pay for foreign-aid bills he had hoped to stiff-arm.

Hooray for lawfare!

Meanwhile, a voice of sanity: Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a Free Press article articulating the long-forgotten fact that judges should judge not by personal preferences but by … the law.

We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process. … The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice.

[Judges] are referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.

Judges who forget this fundamental principle are wreaking havoc. Prophecy suggests that the Supreme Court will play a role in helping President Trump. Still, the damage that lesser courts could continue to inflict is more broadly reflected in several biblical prophecies about the lack of justice in this end time. God repeatedly singles out unjust judges as one of the gravest problems of our day.

mercosur took a big step forward yesterday. Last year, after decades of negotiation, the EU and the Latin American trade bloc mercosur signed a trade deal. It would be the world’s largest free trade deal—but the EU still has to sign off on it. Yesterday it made a move in that direction.

Trouble is, France hates the deal. To get at least part of it through, the EU has split it into two “pillars.”

• The trade-only pillar requires only a “qualified majority” of EU nations. It passed that milestone yesterday. It now needs the European Parliament to consent.
• The political and cooperation pillar requires the unanimous consent of all the EU, and France can block it. For this, we wait.

The EU and Latin America trading closely together was a long-standing forecast of Herbert W. Armstrong. Our publisher, Gerald Flurry, has pointed out that, to complete this controversial deal, the EU will probably have to shift toward the 10-nation, undemocratic union we read about in Bible prophecy. To learn more, read “Why the World’s Largest Trade Deal Will Shake the World.”

IN OTHER NEWS

How Iran evades oil sanctions: Iran has built a sanctions-busting oil trade network that disguises its shipments as coming from Iraq. Get this: For the past two years, China has imported more “Iraqi” oil than Iraq sends to China—about 100,000 barrels per day more, worth more than $2.5 billion annually, Iran International reports. Various tanker-tracking organizations confirmed Iran uses a variety of techniques, including forging documents and manipulating identification data. Iraq’s oil minister confirmed earlier this year Iran was doing this. This is powerful evidence of a prophetic fulfillment we have pointed to for years: Iraq has fallen to Iran.