“I’ve always believed,” William F. Buckley said in an interview with — of all publications — Playboy back in 1970, “that conservatism… is the politics of reality and that reality ultimately asserts itself, in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position.”

That quote has not attained the level of axiomatic cachet of the likes of “give me liberty or give me death,” or “it’s the economy, stupid!” but is nevertheless one of my favorites for both its succinctness and accuracy; it packages conservative philosophy — obdurately resistant as it is to clear definition — in a simple tight few words, and aptly explains the phenomenon of recurring, if frustratingly incomplete, political course corrections in this country, a phenomenon that persuaded even former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to occasionally do the right thing when the weight of reality overwhelmed ideological intransigence. With President Donald Trump, reality is again starting to impose itself on some his more wayward excursions.

The 2024 election was, as much as anything, an expression of yearning for a return to reality after four years of cultural and economic fantasy. And indeed, a great deal of the first few months of Trump’s presidency has represented something of a welcome return to reason. But President Trump, ever the rootless populist, has engaged in some fantasizing of his own.

First, of course, is what he seems to want to be the economic hallmark of his second term, the broad imposition of tariffs by executive fiat. Even before the U.S. Court of International Trade stood athwart the rails of protectionism yelling “STOP!” earlier this week, the economic realities of the nefarious effects of the tariffs jolted President Trump into periodic rescissions. The practical argument against tariffs has been well established throughout the classical economic canon, from Adam Smith to Thomas Sowell, with several stops in between. Now the U.S. Trade Court has aptly made the legal argument against them. The court’s three justices — appointed respectively by former President Ronald Reagan, Obama and Trump, in case anyone was keeping score — unanimously rejected President Trump’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs arbitrarily on the whole world. Essentially, they reiterated what the Constitution says in plain text: Congress alone has the authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.”

Congress, of course, bears some culpability here. The legislative branch has been quite keen during the last hundred years or so to hemorrhage its authority and hand it to the judiciary or the executive. It is long overdue for Congress to begin to reclaim some of that authority and start doing the job the framers assigned to them rather than pawning it off on the presidency, the courts, or the administrative state. Colorado U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd had the right idea when he co-sponsored a bill to require congressional approval of new tariffs, a bill which is nothing more than a rebuke of executive usurpation.

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A similar rebuke has now been issued by three separate federal courts against President Trump’s executive orders directed against partisan law firms, described cohesively in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. I happen to find many of the actions of firms like Perkins Coie, which shamelessly promoted the patently ridiculous Russia collusion dossier, as deplorable as the president does, which does not, in any case, justify abuse of executive power. Legislating via executive order has become a regrettable habit in recent decades; populists and progressives may be impatient for “CHANGE!” but if you need a refresher on why the process exists as it does, go back and re-read “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke.

Perhaps the most poignant example of reality forcing a correction is in foreign policy. A few days ago, in the wake of Russia’s largest aerial assault on Ukrainian civilian centers since the start of the invasion, President Trump exclaimed in utter astonishment “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Well, no, that’s actually kind of who Putin is. And it’s not crazy, it’s cold, calculated ruthlessness befitting a colonel of the Soviet KGB.

This revelation may, one hopes, be the beginning of the full realization by President Trump Putin has been expertly playing him. There is still time for President Trump to do what Biden refused to, which is to finally equip the Ukrainians with the long-range weaponry they need to not just hold on for a little while longer, but to actually win, and without the moralistic strings attached. He could also cripple Russia’s economy with punitive secondary sanctions targeting Russia’s oil-and-gas exports.

And, if President Trump fails to follow through, then Republicans in Congress should act, simultaneously reclaiming their authority, their honor and the supremacy of reality.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.