In a startling display of pettiness and vengeance, Trump lashed out at two law firms that dared to represent his critics. This is not normal. Law firms don’t get punished because of whom they represent. But to Trump, everything is personal. Anyone who is not on his side is an enemy. Anyone who represents his enemy is his enemy and should expect vengeance to rain down on them.
President Trump signed an executive orderon Thursday seeking to severely punish the law firm Perkins Coie by stripping its lawyers of security clearances and access to government buildings and officials — a form of payback for its legal work for Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign.
With the order, Perkins Coie becomes the second such firm to be targeted by the president. Late last month, he signed a similar memorandum attacking Covington & Burling, which has done pro bono legal work for Jack Smith, who as special counsel pursued two separate indictments of Mr. Trump.
While the Covington memorandum sought to strip clearances and contracts from that firm, the Perkins Coie order goes much further, seeking to also limit its lawyers’ access to federal buildings, officials and jobs in a way that could cast a chilling effect over the entire legal profession.
The president’s animosity toward Perkins Coie dates back eight years, to when two lawyers at the firm, Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann, played roles in what eventually became an F.B.I. investigation to determine if anyone on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign conspired with Russian agents to influence the outcome of that election. Both lawyers left that firm years ago.
If Trump had his way, any newspaper or network or cable station that criticized him would lose its license, any TV journalist or writer would lose their job. Any criticism of him would be banned. Anyone who abetted a critic would be punished.
There are words for such behavior: censorship. Fascist. Dictator. Thin-skinned. Authoritarian.
Trump often complained that the Biden administration had “weaponized” the Justice Department to persecute him. He has terminated everyone who had a role in the prosecution of federal charges against him. The boxes of classified documents that he took to Mar-a-Lago were returned to him.
So now he is actively politicizing the HR departments across the government. Most of those jobs were held by nonpartisan civil servants. They will be ousted and replaced with people loyal to Trump. The current occupants of these jobs are being punished for implementing the Biden administration’s DEI policies.
The Trump administration continued its efforts to politicize the upper echelons of the federal civil service Thursday, instructing agencies to reclassify chief human capital officer positions to allow political appointees to fill those roles.
The Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agency heads Thursday recommending that all agencies where CHCOs are career-reserved positions—meaning only a career member of the Senior Executive Service can fill the post—request to change that designation to “SES general,” which allows either career executives or political appointees to assume the job. The federal government’s HR agency set a deadline of March 24 for agencies to comply.
In the memo, Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell argued that CHCO jobs have “become intensely politicized in recent years,” referring to the Biden administration’s efforts to boost diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
“It is hard to imagine a more vivid example of advocacy of the ‘major controversial policies of the administration’ than an HR leader and policymaker implementing and embedding DEIA policies throughout their agency and the government more broadly,” Ezell wrote. “By contrast, President Trump campaigned vehemently against government DEI programs.”
Although only a portion of CHCO positions are actually career-reserved, federal agencies have moved toward employing nonpartisan civil servants in those roles over the last two decades because of the technical expertise required. The move to re-politicize the CHCO corps comes just weeks after the Trump administration took similar action regarding chief information officers across government.
The memo’s publication comes just days after Traci DiMartini, human capital officer for the Internal Revenue Service, was put on leave Monday for alleged “ineffective management” of the administration’s implementation of the deferred resignation program and purge of recently hired, transferred or promoted employees, as well as “insubordination” toward DOGE operatives.
“That they’re accusing human capital officers of being partisan because we implemented DEIA under the Biden administration is so counterproductive to their own argument,” DiMartini said. “Our job is to follow the law and help implement the policies and programs of whoever is in charge.”
To DiMartini and other CHCOs, the memo reads as a pretext to getting rid of officials who refuse to circumvent laws governing the civil service.
“They’re trying to politicize human capital,” DiMartini said. “They want to be able to hire only loyalists, ignore Title 5 [of the U.S. Code] and commit flagrant prohibited personnel practices. When you look at the Merit Systems Protections Board and what the civil protections are, we’re supposed to have a nonpartisan civil service, and we have been completely whipsawed.”
“I think I just got a reverse two-week notice,” one currently serving CHCO told Government Executive.
DiMartini said that she believes her impending termination—the agency has indicated that it will not allow her to retire—stems from two incidents. The first was a refusal to call employees, who she said were already putting in “60-70 hour” work weeks—into the office over the weekend to onboard a DOGE operative.
And the second was mentioning that OPM had directed the probationary purge across government in a meeting intended to calm IRS workers. Unbeknownst to her, an employee had recorded the conversation, and her comments appeared in filings of a lawsuit seeking to overturn the probationary firings.
DiMartini said that although she doesn’t plan to return to government, she will challenge her firing. She said she has never been disciplined in her 21 years of service, and wants to preserve her professional reputation.
“As an SES-er, it’s my job to stand up and be the buffer between politicals and career employees, and I’m just trying to do my goddamn job,” she said. “They have no idea who they picked a f***ing fight with.”
Peter Green explores one of the strangest paradoxes of our time: how can people be “pro-life” and also oppose any gun control? Guns kill people. Guns kill thousands of people every year. Consistency would demand that a person who is pro-life would also want to regulate the sale of guns.
But no. Among the most zealous pro-life governors is Ron DeSantis of Florida. He doesn’t want any woman to get an abortion, regardless of the peril to her life or the fetus. But when it comes to guns, DeSantis wants everyone to have at least one.
Green writes:
This week in his State of the State speech, Ron DeSantis announced that it was time to get over the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting–that would be the one in Parkland in which a 19-year-old killed 17 and injured 17 others in the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in US history.
After that shooting, the state put in place a piddly excuse for an attempt to make such horrors less likely, but even that is too much for DeSantis, who specifically wants to get rid of language raising the age to purchase a shotgun or rifle from 18 to 21 and also the red flag law that lets family members or law enforcement petition the court to remove someone’s firearms id they are risk to themselves of others. You know– like maybe a 19 year old with a long history of racism and fascination with mass shootings. “We need to be a strong Second Amendment state. I know many of you agree, so let’s get some positive reform done for the people in this state of Florida,” DeSantis was quoted by the Florida Phoenix.
Also, he’d like to have open carry in the state.
Because nothing is more important than an American’s God-given right to shoot other people. Because we should go to any length to “protect” a fetus, but once it’s a live child, its life is less important than someone’s right to fire off a couple of rounds at anyone that bugs them. Because this is one more way politicians can show that for all their talk, they don’t particular care about young humans.
On the right column of the blogspot version of this blog, I have had one image parked for years. It’s not complicated
I would say that it’s the least we could do, but of course the least we can do is nothing, and Ron DeSantis would like us to get back to doing that.
The only bright spot here is that the legislature doesn’t seem to have his back on this. Good. DeSantis should be ashamed that he can’t even produce a bad argument for his favored policies other than complaining that Florida has “lagged on this issue.” What a bummer– imagine all the people who are going to some other state because it’s easier to shoot people there.
In this post, historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of the struggle to secure voting rights for Black Americans, as she commemorates the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” For most people, these stories are history. For me, because I am old, they are memories. in my lifetime, Black voters across the South were disenfranchised. People who advocated for civil rights, the right to vote, and racial equality put their lives at risk in the South. The KKK was active. Black churches were bombed. Civil rights leader Medger Evers was murdered while standing in his driveway.
The struggle for equal rights was violent and bloody. Yet today, we are told by our President and his allies that we shouldn’t talk about these parts of the past. It’s not patriotic. It’s “woke.” It’s DEI. It’s divisive. Let’s not talk about race anymore. Let’s all be colorblind. That’s what Dr. King wanted, wasn’t it? Cue the quote about being judged by “the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” No, that’s not what he wanted. He spoke hopefully about a future where no one was disadvantaged by the color of their skin. Where everyone had the same and equal rights. Where racism and prejudice no longer existed.
But that’s not the society we live in today. We live in a society where people of color and women are openly disparaged by the President as “DEI hires.” When race and gender are no longer reasons to belittle and demean people, then we can judge everyone by the content of their character. But that day has not arrived.
Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”
The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.
Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.
The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.
Reporters at The New York Timespored through 5,000 pages from various federal agencies and found that the following words had been removed from government websites and publications. As the article points out, Trump and Musk frequently claim to be champions of “free speech,” but they have no problem censoring words and ideas that offend them.
As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.
accessible
activism
activists
advocacy
advocate
advocates
affirming care
all-inclusive
allyship
anti-racism
antiracist
assigned at birth
assigned female at birth
assigned male at birth
at risk
barrier
barriers
belong
bias
biased
biased toward
biases
biases towards
biologically female
biologically male
BIPOC
Black
breastfeed + people
breastfeed + person
chestfeed + people
chestfeed + person
clean energy
climate crisis
climate science
commercial sex worker
community diversity
community equity
confirmation bias
cultural competence
cultural differences
cultural heritage
cultural sensitivity
culturally appropriate
culturally responsive
DEI
DEIA
DEIAB
DEIJ
disabilities
disability
discriminated
discrimination
discriminatory
disparity
diverse
diverse backgrounds
diverse communities
diverse community
diverse group
diverse groups
diversified
diversify
diversifying
diversity
enhance the diversity
enhancing diversity
environmental quality
equal opportunity
equality
equitable
equitableness
equity
ethnicity
excluded
exclusion
expression
female
females
feminism
fostering inclusivity
GBV
gender
gender based
gender based violence
gender diversity
gender identity
gender ideology
gender-affirming care
genders
Gulf of Mexico
hate speech
health disparity
health equity
hispanic minority
historically
identity
immigrants
implicit bias
implicit biases
inclusion
inclusive
inclusive leadership
inclusiveness
inclusivity
increase diversity
increase the diversity
indigenous community
inequalities
inequality
inequitable
inequities
inequity
injustice
institutional
intersectional
intersectionality
key groups
key people
key populations
Latinx
LGBT
LGBTQ
marginalize
marginalized
men who have sex with men
mental health
minorities
minority
most risk
MSM
multicultural
Mx
Native American
non-binary
nonbinary
oppression
oppression
oppressive
orientation
people + uterus
people-centered care
person-centered
person-centered care
polarization
political
pollution
pregnant people
pregnant person
pregnant persons
prejudice
privilege
privileges
promote diversity
promoting diversity
pronoun
pronouns
prostitute
race
race and ethnicity
racial
racial diversity
racial identity
racial inequality
racial justice
racially
racism
segregation
sense of belonging
sex
sexual preferences
sexuality
social justice
sociocultural
socioeconomic
status
stereotype
stereotypes
systemic
systemically
they/them
trans
transgender
transsexual
trauma
traumatic
tribal
unconscious bias
underappreciated
underprivileged
underrepresentation
underrepresented
underserved
undervalued
victim
victims
vulnerable populations
women
women and underrepresented
Notes: Some terms listed with a plus sign represent combinations of words that, when used together, acknowledge transgender people, which is not in keeping with the current federal government’s position that there are only two, immutable sexes. Any term collected above was included on at least one agency’s list, which does not necessarily imply that other agencies are also discouraged from using it.
The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.
In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
The list is most likely incomplete. More agency memos may exist than those seen by New York Times reporters, and some directives are vague or suggest what language might be impermissible without flatly stating it.
All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies. It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration.
Still, the words and phrases listed here represent a marked — and remarkable — shift in the corpus of language being used both in the federal government’s corridors of power and among its rank and file. They are an unmistakable reflection of this administration’s priorities.
For example, the Trump administration has frequently framed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as being inherently at odds with what it has identified as “merit,” and it has argued that these initiatives have resulted in the elevation of unqualified or undeserving people. That rhetorical strategy — with its baked-in assumption of a lack of capacity in people of color, women, the disabled and other marginalized groups — has been criticized as discriminatory.
Haha. That “rhetorical strategy,” assuming that those groups are incompetent has not only been “criticized as discriminatory.” IT IS DISCRIMINATORY!
Heather Cox Richardson sums up the dizzying events of the past few days. It’s hard to keep track of the array of court orders, overturned, affirmed, or Elon Musk emails, warning government employees to answer or resign, or tariffs, announced, then paused, then announced, then paused again. Is Trump’s intent to dazzle us with nonstop dung?
Trump has disrupted the Western alliance, having made common cause with Putin in his unprovoked and brutal war on Ukraine. Trump is destabilizing not only our alliances with other nations but our government as well. He has approved of draconian cuts to every department, ordered by Elon Musk or his team of kids. The determination to cut 80,000 jobs at the Veterans Administration, most held by veterans, may be a wake-up call for Republicans.
This country is in desperate trouble. When will Republicans in Congress stand up for the Constitutionand stop the madness?
She writes:
This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”
“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”
The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.
In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politicothat President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.
As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.
Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.
As predicted, Trump’s turn of the U.S. toward Russia also means that allies are concerned he or members of his administration will share classified intelligence with Russia, thus exposing the identities of their operatives. They are considering new protocols for sharing information with the United States. The Five Eyes alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. has been formidable since World War II and has been key to countering first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Allied governments are now considering withholding information about sources or analyses from the U.S.
Their concern is likely heightened by the return to Trump’s personal possession of the boxes of documents containing classified information the FBI recovered in August 2022 from Mar-a-Lago. Trump took those boxes back from the Department of Justice and flew them back to Mar-a-Lago on February 28.
A CBS News/YouGov poll from February 26–28 showed that only 4% of the American people sided with Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine.
The unpopularity of the new administration’s policies is starting to show. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) told House Republicans on Tuesday to stop holding town halls after several such events have turned raucous as attendees complained about the course of the Trump administration. Trump has blamed paid “troublemakers” for the agitation, and claimed the disruptions are part of the Democrats’ “game.” “[B]ut just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION,” he posted on social media, “it’s not going to work for them!”
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.
Even aside from the angry protests, DOGE is running into trouble. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump referred to DOGE and said it “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” In a filing in a lawsuit against DOGE and Musk, the White House declared that Musk is neither in charge of DOGE nor an employee of it. When pressed, the White House claimed on February 26 that the acting administrator of DOGE is staffer Amy Gleason. Immediately after Trump’s statement, the plaintiffs in that case asked permission to add Trump’s statement to their lawsuit.
Musk has claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste or fraud in the government, and Trump and the White House have touted those statements. But their claims to have found massive savings have been full of errors, and most of their claims have been disproved. DOGE has already had to retract five of its seven biggest claims. As for “savings,” the government spent about $710 billion in the first month of Trump’s term, compared with about $630 billion during the same timeframe last year.
Instead of showing great savings, DOGE’s claims reveal just how poorly Musk and his team understand the work of the federal government. After forcing employees out of their positions, they have had to hire back individuals who are, in fact, crucial to the nation, including the people guarding the U.S. nuclear stockpile. In his Tuesday speech, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.”
Except it’s not. The mice in question were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health. For comparison, S.V. Date noted in HuffPost that in just his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today that people reporting on the individual cuts to U.S. scientific and health-related grants are missing the larger picture: “DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States…. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening.”
Republicans are starting to express some concern about Musk and DOGE. As soon as Trump took office, Musk and his DOGE team took over the Office of Personnel Management, and by February 14 they had begun a massive purge of federal workers. As protests of the cuts began, Trump urged Musk on February 22 to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, prompting Musk to demand that all federal employees explain what they had accomplished in the past week under threat of firing. That request sparked a struggle in the executive branch as cabinet officers told the employees in their departments to ignore Musk. Then, on February 27, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the firings were likely illegal and temporarily halted them.
On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) weighed in on the conflict when he told CNN that the power to hire and fire employees properly belongs to Cabinet secretaries.
Yesterday, Musk met with Republican— but no Democratic— members of Congress. Senators reportedly asked Musk—an unelected bureaucrat whose actions are likely illegal—to tell them more about what’s going on. According to Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor, and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post, Musk gave some of the senators his phone number and said he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that Musk told the senators he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get cuts they dislike reversed.
This whole exchange is bonkers. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: “How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?”
Later, Musk met with House Republicans and offered to set up a similar way for the members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee to reach him. When representatives complained about the random cuts that were so upsetting constituents. Musk defended DOGE’s mistakes by saying that he “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”
This morning, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of a group of state attorneys general from 22 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, saying that Trump does not have the authority to freeze funding appropriated by Congress. McConnell wrote that the spending freeze “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, McConnell issued a preliminary injunction that will stay in place until the case, called New York v. Trump, works its way through the courts. The injunction applies only in the states that sued, though, leaving Republican-dominated states out in the cold.
Today, Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries that they, and not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Dasha Burns and Kyle Cheney of Politicoreported that Trump told the secretaries that Musk only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.
Trump is also apparently feeling pressure over his tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on imports from China that went into effect on Tuesday, which economists warned would create inflation and cut economic growth. Today, Trump first said he would exempt car and truck parts from the tariffs, then expanded exemptions to include goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) Trump signed in his first term. Administration officials say other tariffs will go into effect at different times in the future.
The stock market has dropped dramatically over the past three days owing to both the tariffs and the uncertainty over their implementation. But Trump denied his abrupt change had anything to do with the stock market.
“I’m not even looking at the market,” Trump said, “because long term, the United States will be very strong with what’s happening.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University and a specialist in autocracy.
She wrote recently on her blog Lucid about some of the ways that Trump is helping Putin achieved his goal of reassembling the whole USSR. Many years ago, Putin said that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.” some might have said it was World War I or Wotkd War II. Not Putin, veteran KGB agent.
Ben-Ghiat wrote:
To understand the nature and scope of this momentous shift, it helps to think like an autocrat. For this kind of leader, democratic America, with its robust economy, far-reaching infrastructure of foreign aid, immensely powerful military, and checks on foreign malign influence and corruption initiatives, is a huge problem.
Trump’s path back to power so he could take care of this distressing situation was eased by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian disinformation campaigns, which, together with U.S. Republican propaganda, helped to discredit and weaken American democracy in the eyes of the American public. Trump’s ceaseless efforts to praise foreign strongmen and his delegitimization of democratic institutions, from elections to the free press to the judiciary, also had this aim.
Trump had long ago internalized a view of geopolitics that sees democracies, and American democracy in particular, as hostile actors who deny the rights of autocracies to expand their influence in the world. When Trump suggests that President Joe Biden’s support of Ukraine’s bid to join NATO provoked Russia’s invasion, he justifies the Kremlin’s aggressions as a legitimate response to democratic meddling.
Now that Trump is back in the White House, focused on the destruction of American democracy, we can expect public collaboration with Russia to take several forms. Trump and his enablers in and outside of the GOP will produce a steady stream of performances and propaganda meant for two audiences: autocrats, especially Putin, and the millions of Americans who still need to be indoctrinated to see the world in ways that benefit Trump and his Kremlin ally.
The novel co-presidency of Trump and Elon Musk has provided a one-two punch approach to quickly launch the other two ways the U.S. will collaborate with Russia. First, by erasing or dialing back America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world. This could mean reducing military spaces abroad that are now deterrents to autocratic aggression, or using such spaces as launching pads for pro-autocratic military engagements that the US may one day participate in.
It also means ending or scaling back humanitarian assistance programs that have created goodwill for America among global populations. Musk has jump-started this latter action by destroying USAID. The goal is to create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.
The second form of collaboration entails the removal of barriers to the free flow of Russian influence inside America. This was supposed to be a priority of Trump’s first administration. Just months after his inauguration, Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office, with only a Russian state photographer from TASS present. This told the world that the White House would be a Russian-friendly space with Trump in power, with Kremlin views of politics and the world amplified by Washington.
President Trump with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office, May 10, 2017. Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/via Getty Images.
Then came the Russia investigation —a supreme annoyance made possible by the existence of democracy in America. During the recent meeting with Zelensky, Trump evoked the difficulties this investigation created for Russian capture of the United States, tellingly mentioning the toll it took on Putin–and just as tellingly, alluding to the pressures this obstruction of Putin’s plans placed on him as an ally with responsibilities to fulfill. His statement resembles the “self-criticism” Communist operatives were required to engage in when they displeased the regime.
“Let me tell you. Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He had to suffer through the Russia hoax…He went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt…It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”
This false start, and the heightened expectations for Trump to perform this time, are likely why Trump & Co. have acted so aggressively. In his first weeks in power, Trump signed orders to disband TaskForce KleptoCapture, which targeted Russian oligarchs, disband the FBI’s Foreign Influence Taskforce, and relax enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including digital actions.
The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who has a history of taking positions that defend Russian interests, as Director of National Intelligence, is another indication of the will to dismantle obstructions to Russian influence inside America. The walls of the national security fortress are coming down.
In 2018, before the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, Trump said that he saw Russia as more of a “competitor” than an “enemy.” Seven years later, that competitor has become an ally. Whatever forms Russia-U.S. collaboration will take, more Americans will come to understand that the man they elected to “save the country” is far more interested in solving Putin’s problems than in governing America. That means wrecking American democracy at home and dismantling American power abroad.
ProPublica estimated the number of children who will die–of starvation or lack of medical care–because DOGE closed down USAID. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, in addition to their families, are the direct result of the shuttering foreign aid. These lives don’t matter to Trump and Musk; they are not white. Musk is a well-known pro-catalyst; he thinks women must have more babies. He himself now has 14 children, by different mothers. But he seems to care only about white babies.
Here is a portion of their report:
For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.
In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.
Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.
President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.
During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.
The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.
Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.
The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.
The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.
Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.
Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.
How do you sleep at night, when you know that your actions were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? And their parents?
The New York Times story that was linked in the story gave more details:
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them:
up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.
Those stark projections were laid out in a series of memos by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., which were obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday.
This was the opening of Enrich’s bold memo, as reprinted in the New York Times:
Takeaway: The temporary pause on foreign aid and delays in approving lifesaving humanitarian assistance (LHA) for global health will lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks-directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health. If the pause leads to permanent contract terminations, the $7.7B in resources appropriated by Congress are no longer be used to support these lifesaving global health programs, which could potentially result in wasted resources. The impacts on mortality and morbidity are summarized in the tables below. While the Foreign Assistance Review is set to take place in the coming weeks, it is important to recognize that a mechanism-by-mechanism approach may overlook the broader impact of these programs across global health program areas. This includes missed opportunities to enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness within LHA program areas.
Marco Rubio, how do you feel about the deaths of so many people? Does it trouble you? Can you look in the mirror in the morning without seeing a murderer reflected back to you?
We know that Trump and Musk don’t care. What about you, Mr. Rubio?
I didn’t watch Trump last night. The combination of his face, his voice, and his lies is intolerable. I get nausea and a headache. And my soul hurts. I have always loved this country. I am a patriot. And he is destroying it.
With a modesty we have come to expect of him, President Donald Trump informed Congress on Tuesday night that he had already ushered in “the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.” He told the assembled lawmakers that he “accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four or eight years.”
Armed with a portfolio of fabricated statistics, Trump judged that “the first month of our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation — and what makes it even more impressive is that you know who No. 2 is? George Washington.”
Republican lawmakers laughed, whooped and cheered.
Usually, such talk from Trump is just bravado. But let us give credit where it is due: Trump has made history. In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that, over the course of the last five days, he has set the United States back 100 years.
Trump on Monday implemented the largest tariff increase since 1930, abruptly reversing an era of liberalized trade that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War. He launched this trade war just three days after dealing an equally severe blow to the postwar security order that has maintained prosperity and freedom for 80 years. Trump’s ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, followed by the cessation of U.S. military aid to the outgunned ally, has left allies reeling and Moscow exulting. The Kremlin’s spokesman proclaimed that Trump is “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations” in a way that “largely aligns with our vision.”
And our erstwhile friends? “The United States launched a trade war against Canada, its closest partner and ally, their closest friend,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin: a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”
It only makes sense if, against all evidence, you believe, as Trump apparently does, that Americans were better off 95 years ago than they are today.
We’re apparently going to have to re-learn that lesson the hard way. The blizzard of executive orders that Trump has issued, though constitutionally alarming, can be rescinded by a future president. Elon Musk’s wanton sabotage of federal agencies and the federal workforce, though hugely damaging, can be repaired over time. But there is no easy fix for Trump’s smashing of the security and trade arrangements that have kept us safe and free for generations. “We’re certainly not in the postwar world anymore,” Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economist and fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, tells me. He calculates that Trump’s hike in tariffs is the largest since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 accelerated the nation’s slide into the Great Depression. And Trump’s current tariffs, which in Irwin’s calculation affect imports worth about 4.8 percent of gross domestic product, will have an even greater impact on the economy than did Smoot-Hawley, which affected imports worth 1.4 percent of GDP, and the McKinley administration’s tariffs during the 1890s, which affected imports worth 2.7 percent of GDP (and which also were followed by a prolonged depression).
Irwin figures the current tariffs “are likely to be much more disruptive” than those historical cases because the U.S. economy is much more dependent now on “intermediate goods” — meaning materials such as auto parts, needed by American businesses to make finished goods. Trump has brought the average tariff on total imports to 10 percent, a level not seen since 1943, in Irwin’s analysis.
Late Tuesday, after stocks plunged for a second day, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appeared to signal a retreat, saying the administration would “probably” announce Wednesday that it was meeting Canada and Mexico “in the middle some way.” Yet even if Trump were quickly to abandon the trade war he just launched, the effects will probably be long-lasting, because he has upended the gradual liberalization of trade that has been underway since 1932.
Trump, in imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, has violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement he negotiated during his first term. “So, going forward, what country would ever sign a trade agreement with the United States knowing that we can find some sort of excuse that’s outside the agreement to raise the tariffs?” Irwin asks. Instead, he expects a return of the “corrupt process” that existed before the 1930s in which tariffs remain on the books and businesses try to curry favor (in this case, with Trump) to win exemptions.
Inevitably, the retaliation has already begun. Canada is imposing 25 percent tariffs on $155 billion of American goods — and the premier of Ontario, vowing to “go back twice as hard” at the United States, is slapping a 25 percent tariff on electricity going to the United States, while threatening to cut the lights off entirely. China is imposing tariffs of up to 15 percent on U.S. imports and banning some exports. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, calling Trump’s justification for the tariffs “offensive, defamatory and groundless,” has said she would announce her country’s retaliation plans this weekend.
And Trump keeps escalating. After Trudeau said on Tuesday that Trump wants “a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that will make it easier to annex us,” Trump mocked “Governor Trudeau” on social media and vowed that “when he puts on a Retaliatory Tariff on the U.S., our Reciprocal Tariff will immediately increase by a like amount!”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 1,300 points. Inflation forecasts are increasing (the free-trading Peterson Institute says Trump’s tariffs will cost the typical American household $1,200 per year). Retailers such as Target and Best Buy are warning about higher prices. The Atlanta Fed’s model of real GDP growth, which a month ago saw 2.3 percent growth in the first quarter, now sees a contraction in the first quarter of 2.8 percent. And Trump is threatening to hit more countries with more tariffs, on metals, cars, farm products and more, in the coming weeks.
During his first term, Trump tweeted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” — but he had the good sense not to test this in a major way. Now, we all get to experience what actually happens when we launch one.
Trump’s moves to dismantle the trade architecture of the last century is all the more destabilizing because he is simultaneously moving to knock down the alliances that maintained security for most of that same period. As The Post’s Francesca Ebel reported from Moscow, Putin’s government sees Trump’s humiliation of Zelensky as a “huge gift” that furthered Russia’s ambitions of dividing the West. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called it a “proper slap down” of “the insolent pig” Zelensky. Hungary’s repressive leader, Viktor Orban, also celebrated: “Thank you, Mr. President!”
And while Trump blames the victim for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China is growing bolder in its desire to take Taiwan. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post quoted analysts calling the Trump-Zelensky rift part of a “systemic reordering” of geopolitics in which “Beijing was positioned to capitalize on the ‘rapid disintegration of the West’ that legitimizes ‘Beijing’s vision for a post-American world order.’”
As the authoritarians celebrate, freedom’s defenders weep. Lech Walesa, the celebrated champion of Polish democracy, joined other former political prisoners in a letter to Trump expressing “horror and disgust” at the American president’s treatment of Zelensky, saying they were “terrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service and from courtrooms in communist courts.”
Democratic leaders across Europe, and across the world, spoke up in defense of Ukraine. “We must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war,” wrote incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz. Now, these democratic leaders must contemplate rebuilding what Trump has destroyed. “Today,” European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas wrote on the day of Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine, “it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.” In the House chamber on Tuesday night, there was little sign of the United States that until now has led the free world.
Republicans, once the party of free trade, applauded Trump’s vows to impose tariffs — or additional tariffs — on Canada, Mexico, the European Union, China, India, Brazil and South Korea. “We’ve been ripped off by nearly every country on Earth, and we will not let that happen any longer,” he said. As for the pain his trade policies are already causing, he said: “There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re okay with that. It won’t be much.” Trump spoke — repeatedly — about his election victory, about the “radical left lunatics” who prosecuted him, and about his culture-war battles against transgender Americans and against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” With taunts and nonsense claims (more than 1 million people over age 150 receiving Social Security!), he goaded the Democrats, who answered him with messages (“False,” “No Kings Live Here”) on signs and on T-shirts. When Al Green, a 77-year-old Democratic lawmaker from Texas, waved his walking cane and shouted at Trump that he had “no mandate to cut Medicaid,” Republican leaders, who allowed members of their party to shout “bulls—” at President Joe Biden from the House floor, called in the sergeant at arms to evict him. It took nearly an hour for Trump to talk about trade. He didn’t get to Ukraine until nearly an hour and 20 minutes into his speech, and then it was to level the false claim that Ukraine had taken $350 billion from the United States, “like taking candy from a baby,” while Europe spent only $100 billion on Ukraine — dramatically overstating the U.S. contribution and understating Europe’s. “Do you want to keep it going for another five years?” he said, looking at the Democrats. “Pocahontas says yes,” Trump added, referring contemptuously to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). At this, Vice President JD Vance chortled — and the Republican side, once the home of proud internationalists, responded with derision, cheers and applause. And so collapses the architecture of freedom and prosperity: with a lie, a taunt and a guffaw.
Tonight, at 9 pm Eastern Time—which is to say, 5 am Wednesday Moscow Time—Co-President Trump will deliver the first State of the Union Address of the Redux. Congressional Democrats must protest this speech like the fate of the nation depends on it—because it does.
The time for traditional party politics has passed. No more “norms.” No more butter knives to gunfights. No more tone-deaf tweets. No more pathetic capitulation. No more infuriating appeals for donations from what’s left of Kamala Harris’s team. We cannot allow Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, the anonymous new DNC chair, and the husk of Joe Biden to Merrick Garland our democracy into oblivion.
The Dems must become a true opposition party. Now. Today. A true opposition party recognizes that the real enemy of the people is sitting in the Oval Office, watching a little kid wipe boogers on the Resolute Desk. Since January 20th, Trump and Co-President Elon Musk have quickly consolidated power, causing all sorts of chaos and pain. This will continue until they have transformed this country into the Russian-style oligarchy of their despotic dreams.
They. Want. To. Hurt. Us. And we must stop them. All of us.
The nation is in urgent need of Washington generals—and not the kind who get beat up every night by the Harlem Globetrotters. Kamala Harris must snap out of her post-election funk and reboot the Joyous Warrior. Barack Obama must step away from his Hollywood party circuit and get his manicured hands dirty; Michelle Obama hates this crap, and I don’t blame her, but we need her help now. George W. Bush needs to put down the paintbrush and take up the mantle. Bill and Hillary need to come to the front. Mitt Romney? This ain’t the moment for dressage. Step away from your Dutch warmblood, mount the Warhorse, and ride in with the cavalry.
Since Election Day, the Democrats as a party have been rudderless, weak, and frustratingly out of touch. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the party leadership have been slow to recognize the threat. Hint: look at what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett have been doing, and do that! Or better yet, step down and put them in charge! If the Dems can’t sort this out, and fast, to hell with them. If we have to galvanize behind Liz Cheney, fine, great, let’s do it. We can bicker about policy positions and party planks after the dragon is slain. Right now, we need a leader who isn’t a pusillanimous piece of shit.
On Monday, AOC asked:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social
If you were in Congress, what would you do for the State of the Union? What do you think Dems should do?
All members of Congress who oppose Trump—Democrats, Independents, and whatever Republicans haven’t capitulated—should come to the Capitol at the appointed time. They should have with them a laminated print of that infamous photo from Helsinki, where Trump follows behind Putin subserviently. They should tape the photo to the back of the chair. And as soon as Trump begins to speak, they should all walk noisily out, so that the cameras pan to empty chairs and scores of copies of that embarrassing photo. I wouldn’t object to a crisp “Pu-tin sucks!” chant.
Then, every member of Congress who opposes Trump should repair to his or her office and do a livestream, giving the same speech: a real State of the Union (or State of the Oblast, as it were). This way, every single opposition leader is doing must-see counter-programming simultaneously, to drown out Donald’s hateful lies.
This is what I think they should say:
My fellow Americans, good evening.
What is the state of the Union? Co-President Donald Trump will tell you the state of the Union is strong, but he’s lying, as usual.
Unlike Trump, I’m not going to lie to you. The state of the Union is precarious. It’s precarious and it’s perilous. We are hanging on by a thread. Our democracy is on life support—and Co-President Elon Musk wants to pull the plug and call it “efficiency.”
The Trump/Musk agenda represents a clear and present danger to the people of this country. This threat transcends party politics—like 9/11, like the JFK assassination, like Pearl Harbor. I am speaking to you now not as a Democrat, but as a member of the opposition.
I oppose cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
I oppose the suicidal tariff war Donald has begun with our neighbors, Canada and Mexico.
I oppose the country descending into dictatorship.
I oppose an unelected, unconfirmed South African weirdo—who can’t be bothered to take off his baseball cap while presiding at their first Cabinet meeting—being granted godlike powers to cut funding, kill programs, and fire hardworking Americans—all at the whim of some half-ass algorithm slapped together by the teenage boys who comprise the workforce at the illegal shadow operation he calls DOGE.
I oppose rudeness, cruelty, and lack of respect.
Above all, I oppose the new world order Donald and Elon have created, where they do whatever they can to help that butcher and war criminal, Vladimir Putin.
My fellow Americans, this is the greatest country on earth—the greatest country that ever existed. And I refuse to allow the United States of America to turn into a vassal state of the Russian Empire. The occupant of the White House should be the Leader of the Free World, not some third-rate tyrant’s sidekick.
Donald has consistently denied his long ties to the Kremlin. “Russia Russia Russia,” he says mockingly, whenever some new revelation comes out about something involving him and Moscow. He has ridiculed anyone who suggests he is Putin’s puppet—as Hillary Clinton did, you may recall, in that debate back in 2016, right around the time the U.S. Intelligence Community warned that the Kremlin was attempting to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf. Later, in Helsinki, Trump would side with Putin over our intelligence professionals!
He claims the Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt.” Same with Volume 5 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. Even Marco Rubio, Trump’s groveling Secretary of State, signed off on that, admitting the Trump/Russia relationship. It wasn’t a witch hunt, you see. Donald doeshave lots of ties to the Kremlin. And, as he made abundantly clear in Friday’s Oval Office debacle, he is indeed Putin’s puppet.
Putin’s puppet: That sounds like the sort of insult Donald likes to hurl as his opponents, but I don’t mean it as an insult. I mean it as a statement of fact. Trump has thrown in with Putin. He has taken up Moscow’s position regarding the invasion of Ukraine. He has parroted Kremlin talking points about President Zelenskyy.
You don’t have to believe me; you can look it up yourself. This is why so many people were so upset about the abhorrent way Donald and JD behaved at that meeting. People know: that’s not how American leaders are supposed to act!
On Friday, Donald told President Zelenskyy that he didn’t have the cards to play. When he said that, he put his own cards on the table. And now, incredibly, the United States of America is overtly, eagerly sucking up to Moscow. Why? So Co-President Elon Musk and the other new American oligarchs can make even more money—by stealing it from you and me.
Putin regards the United States as an enemy of Russia—as he should. Because he’s certainly our enemy—even if a lot of Americans haven’t quite realized it.
We are now finding out what it means when the President and Co-President are Putin’s puppets. Donald and Elon are charting the course the Kremlin wants for America. They want us broke. They want us sick. They want us stupid. They want us fighting each other. And they want us to leave the rest of the world alone.
Over the first two months of his second term, Donald and Co-President Musk have worked hard to give their whoremaster Vladimir Putin what he wants. So has Speaker Johnson, most of the Republicans in Congress, and the entire Trump Cabinet.
Let me explain what that means, in real terms.
They want us broke. That means they want a recession, a depression, economic tumult. They want mass unemployment. They want the stock market to collapse. They want us to go broke struggling to pay our bills. Have you read the contents of the austerity budget Speaker Johnson wants to pass? Trump and Musk will cut $2 trillion from things like Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and other social welfare programs that Americans of allpolitical persuasions depend on. This will be to pay for tax cuts—which aren’t really tax cuts, because the American oligarch class doesn’t pay taxes like you and me. This is going to be mass theft on the grandest possible scale. This is stealing. You’ve heard of robbing Peter to pay Paul? This is robbing Grandma to pay Elon. The result of this will be financial hardship for most Americans—just what Putin wants.
They want us sick. There is a measles epidemic now in Texas. It’s spreading. This is the result of a massive, decades-old Kremlin disinformation campaign around vaccines. RFK, Jr., who has done more to push this Kremlin lie than any other person on earth, is now in charge of our national health systems. He’s antivax. You know who isn’t antivax? Putin. Putin and Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News and the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, love their vaccines. Rupert was one of the first people on earth to get the covid vaccine. They know vaccines work—but they want you to think they don’t. RFK also wants to cut funding for cancer research and pandemic preparedness. He wants to get rid of SSRIs, which are incredible drugs that help millions of Americans who struggle with their mental health. Why? Because RFK’s job is to make us all sick—which is what Putin wants.
They want us stupid. Donald put the Department of Education in the hands of the head of a professional wrestling organization. Let me say that again: Donald put the Department of Education in the hands of the head of a professional wrestling organization. And she’s going to cut funding, if not kill the department entirely. They say they want to empower the states to decide how our children are being educated, but that’s just the cover story. All this will do is make our schools exponentially worse. Which is what Putin wants—it doesn’t help Russia if Americans are inventing things, and bringing new technology to the world.
They want us fighting each other, and they want us isolated from the rest of the world. Pete Hegseth, the drunken Fox News host who is somehow our Secretary of Defense, ordered Cyber Command to stand down its defenses against Russia. Why would he do that, if not to please Putin? Tulsi Gabbard ordered mass firings at the NSA, our largest and most important intelligence gathering agency. Why would she do that, if not to please Putin? JD Vance, the pompous imbecile who is a heartbeat away from the presidency, is on an anti-diplomacy tour, insulting all of our longtime allies—the leaders of Western democracies. Why would he do that, if not to please Putin?
This is what it looks like when a Kremlin puppet dictator is in the White House. This is why Hillary Clinton, and James Comey, and James Clapper, and Christopher Steele, and Pete Strzok, and Adam Schiff, and Nancy Pelosi, and Bob Mueller, and Jack Smith worked so hard to expose Donald Trump for what he is.
The message failed. The warning was ignored. And what is happening now, right now, is the result. The chaos, the cruelty, the ignorance, the rudeness, the lack of fundamental human decency, the fear and dread—that is the result.
We have Putin puppets in charge of our country. We are being led by full-on traitors: Donald Trump and Elon Musk, JD Vance and Mike Johnson.
None of those people care about you or your family; if they did, they would occasionally do something to help you. None of them care about what’s good for the United States; if they did, they wouldn’t be trying to burn it down. And none of them care about democracy; if they did, they would not be establishing a Trump/Musk dictatorship, modeled on the philosophy of the Unabomber. I’m not kidding—read the Unabomber Manifesto!
Maybe you think I’m crazy. Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think I’m just trying to score cheap political points. Sooner or later—sooner, probably—it will become obvious to even the most zealous Trump supporter: Change is coming, my friends, and unless you’re one of the new oligarchs, you’re not going to like it.
Ignore me at your peril. Peril. Peril.
The state of the Union is perilous. And we must recognize the threat, and oppose it with every fiber of our beings, and with every means at our disposal. If we don’t, we will dishonor the memory of Abraham Lincoln. If we don’t, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall indeed perish from the earth.
God bless you, and God save America.
…or something to that effect. These motherfuckers have all but announced their plans to steal our Social Security. If you can’t message on that, hang up the spikes.
Or, if the Dems can’t manage something so sophisticated, offer an alternate broadcast—Manning Cam, but for the State of the Union. Have AOC and Jasmine live-stream themselves watching the SOTU, so they can fact-check and mock Donald while he’s speaking. I would certainly watch that.
And as for the rest of us? The course is clear: DON’T WATCH THE SOTU. Deny Donald the ratings he desperately craves.
If the Dems don’t offer suitable counter-programming, I’ve set my State of the Oblast speech to run tonight at 9 pm ET:
Or, if you prefer to ignore the whole shit-show—I don’t blame you!—turn on the telly and flip to TNT, where there’s an NBA doubleheader beginning at 7:30: First, Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors are at Madison Square Garden to take on Jalen Brunson and the New York Knicks. (Go, New York, go, New York, go!) And then, the L.A. Clippers are in Phoenix to play Kevin Durant and the Suns. Remember: keeping the television tuned to a different station hurts Donald’s precious ratings.
There it is. Those are my proposals.
And if we see clips of Jeffries and Schumer and the others just sitting there as Trump rants and raves, looking solemn, clapping softly, normalizing the fascist takeover, we know damned well what that means: craven, cowardly, poltroonish surrender, of the most shameful kind, before the fight has even really begun.
Then we’ll know for sure the Democrats, like the Republicans, are dead as a political party.
