Joyce Vance was US Attorney for Northern Alabama and a steady voice of reason. She wonders in this post what it will take to awaken Republicans to Trump’s erosion of the Constitution and our rights.
She writes:
Why doesn’t any of this break through? Why do Republicans still support Trump?
The reporting in The Atlantic on the Signal chain? The voter suppression executive order Trump issued…? The foul-ups in deporting supposed gang members who turn out not to be? Why aren’t Americans out on the streets protesting in massive numbers like we have seen people in other countries doing—Israel, Georgia, Turkey, South Korea, and others? In part, it’s because a large number of people who are Trump supporters just don’t care. Their guy can do anything, and they don’t care. They’ll believe any lie, and they’ll ignore any horrible; they’re all in for Trump for reasons the rest of us still struggle to understand.
The question is, how many of the rest of us are there? By that I mean Americans who, regardless of party affiliation, still care about truth and democracy. Those words are no longer just philosophical notions to be bandied about, an elite construct. They are the reality of what we are fighting a rearguard action to try and save.
Statistics from the last election provide reason for some optimism. Donald Trump won with 49.9% of the popular vote. Although he has claimed he has a mandate for a radical transformation of government, the numbers just don’t back that up. And they don’t suggest there’s a mandate for putting out military information on a Signal chain being used on personal phones, rather than on secured government systems. If there ever truly was a mandate for Trump, the reality is, it’s evaporating day by day as egg prices stay high and people lose their jobs. And now, there’s this, a cavalier disregard for the safety of our troops, lax security with one member of the Signal group apparently in Russia while communications were ongoing, what looks like an effort to do an end run around government records retention procedures.
Will the Atlantic story break through? It should. Trump’s Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, his CIA director, his DNI, all put American pilots in harm’s way. If that’s not enough for Senate Republicans to break ranks with Trump, especially those on subcommittees that have oversight into military and intelligence community operations, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…)
The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong.
As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.
It’s hard to imagine that the Signal chain for the Houthi attack was just a one-off, that they only went to Signal for this moment. Is this how this new government is operating routinely—off the books, in a hidden fashion designed to avoid scrutiny and accountability?
It may seem like a minor point with everything else that’s going on, but this is how autocrats work, not how a democracy operates. That’s the danger we are now facing, and this is another marker on the path to tyranny.
Calls are mounting for Hegseth and others to resign. Anyone who would engage in this kind of behavior and then argue that it was not improper rather than apologizing and promising to do better should leave government, whether voluntarily or not. But they should never have been confirmed in the first place. There is a cancer on the heart of the presidency, to quote from the Watergate era, and it’s infecting all of us.
Michael C. Bender reports in The New York Times that the Trump administration is threatening to cancel funding from schools that refuse to eliminate programs or courses that teach DEI. The administration has turned civil rights enforcement upside down and inside out. For decades, civil rights law meant protection of racial minorities and women, who were often targets of discrimination, exclusion, or unfair treatment. This administration worries most about the rights of white students.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon clearly doesn’t know that federal law prohibits any federal official from interfering with or trying to influence curriculum.
“20 USC 1232a: Prohibition against Federal control of education. Text contains those laws in effect on April 2, 2025
§1232a. Prohibition against Federal control of education
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.
What Secretary McMahon proposes is illegal.
Bender writes:
The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.
The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. The move is the latest in a series of Education Department directives aimed at carrying out President Trump’s political agenda in the nation’s schools.
At her confirmation hearing in February, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools should be allowed to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But she was more circumspect when asked whether classes that focused on Black history ran afoul of Mr. Trump’s agenda and should be banned.
“I’m not quite certain,” Ms. McMahon said, “and I’d like to look into it further.”
More recently, the Education Department said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”
Programs aimed at recognizing historical events and contributions and promoting awareness would not violate the law “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote.
“However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate,” the Education Department said.
It also noted that the Justice Department could sue for breach of contract if it found that federal funds were spent while violating civil rights laws.
The federal government accounts for about 8 percent of local school funding, but the amounts vary widely. In Mississippi, for example, about 23 percent of school funding comes from federal sources, while just 7 percent of school funding in New York comes from Washington, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.”
Government Executivehas gathered data on the number of layoffs, RIFs, and firings in various federal agencies. These cuts of employees are supposed to make government more efficient, but they are so haphazard that government is likely to be less efficient. The data are current as of March 28.
The cuts are expected to help fund massive tax cuts for the richest Americans.
A President Trump executive order and subsequent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management has to plan for the “maximum elimination” of federal agency functions not required by law. As a starting point for the cuts, OMB and OPM said, agencies should focus on employees whose jobs are not required in statute and who face furloughs in government shutdowns—typically around one-third of the federal workforce, or 700,000 employees.
Agencies are expected to eliminate some offices wholesale and slash their regional offices across the country.
Here are the departments and agencies where Government Executive has confirmed RIFs have taken place or about to occur. We will update as we learn more. More in-depth reporting is linked where available:
Commerce Department: Commerce is seeking to cut its workforce by 20%, or nearly 10,000 employees, but plans to use attrition, incentives and other measures to get to that level without RIFs.
Defense Department: Defense plans to issue RIFs in the coming weeks for 5% to 8% of its civilian workforce, or as many as 61,000 employees. It will fire 5,400 probationary employees as part of those cuts.
Education Department: Education has laid off one-third of its workforce, or about 1,300 employees. The notices went out on March 11 and the department closed its offices on March 12 for the day. Education previously offered buyouts of up to $25,000 to most of its employees, who had until March 3 at 11:59 p.m. to accept the offer. About 300 employees accepted those and combined with other voluntary separations, Education’s total workforce is set to be about half the size it was before Trump took office.
Environmental Protection Agency: RIFs began to take shape at EPA on March 11 when agency Administrator Lee Zeldin eliminated offices related to environmental justice and diversity. Those were expected to impact around 170 employees. President Trump said during a cabinet meeting that he expected 65% of the workforce, or nearly 11,000 employees, to be let go. An EPA spokesperson declined to verify that number, saying only that Trump and Zeldin are “in lock step” to find efficiencies in government and those efforts would include “organizational improvements to the personnel structure.” A White House spokesperson subsequently told Politico Trump meant to say EPA would slash 65% of its “wasteful spending.”
Federal Trade Commission:FTC dismissed around a dozen employees on Feb. 28, impacting its Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Office of Public Affairs and Office of Technology.
Open the link to see reports on the cuts in more departments and agencies.
President Trump and Vice President Vance berate President Zelensky at the White House, February 28, 2025 (OSV News photo/Brian Snyder, Reuters)
John Connelly is a historian of East Central Europe at the University of California at Berkeley. This essay appeared in Conmonweal. I urge you to subscribe. How I wish someone would read this essay out loud to Donald Trump. Among other things, it demonstrates the importance of learning history and the dangers of historical ignorance.
Connelly writes:
For decades pundits have been urging us to do something about this or that dictator because he was “Hitler.” A quarter century ago, David Brooks was equating Saddam Hussein with the Nazi leader, and a quarter century before that, newspapers portrayed Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro as their day’s equivalent of the Führer. The historical episode these writers had in mind was the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Chamberlain and Daladier surrendered Czechoslovakia’s fortified border areas in return for “peace.” Half a year later, Hitler helped himself to the rest of that undefended country, until then the last surviving democracy east of the Rhine. The lesson was that we must not appease dictators: it only encourages them.
In 2022, history finally produced an actual parallel to the attack on Czechoslovakia when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, a functioning East European democracy. Yet, in contrast to 1938, this time the democracy fought back, and the West stood in united support—that is, until the pusillanimous and unprincipled acts of the Trump administration. The U.S. president has already gone far beyond anything Chamberlain might have dreamed of. Trump has not only appeased a dictator but adopted the dictator’s own language and reasoning, and he seems willing to award Putin vast Ukrainian territories before peace negotiations have even begun. As if all this weren’t strange enough, he also sent Vice President J. D. Vance to a conference in Munich to berate our allies for their allegedly undemocratic behavior. He then met with the leader of a party that has downplayed the importance of Hitler to German and world history and who opposes support of Ukraine.
The explosive exchange between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office prompted commentators to look for other historical parallels. Bartosz T. Wieliński, who writes for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, recalled that the evening before Hitler sent his armies to seize Prague in March 1939, he summoned Czech president Emil Hácha to Berlin and threatened to lay waste to the Czech capital if Hácha did not accept “peace” on German terms. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring stood by nodding, nearly causing old Hácha to collapse. By contrast, writes Wieliński, president Zelensky has stood firm.
But an even more apt parallel occurred a few months later, in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin decided to divide Poland and treat themselves to the spoils, including the country’s grain and oil. Careful historians could list many differences between now and then, but the underlying intention to expropriate a small country’s resources has a familiar ring, as does the imperial attitude behind it. Stalin’s transactional mentality continued after World War II, when he insisted that Poles repay the USSR for having cleared their lands of German troops by awarding it Polish oil and coal.
The United States of that period, led by men committed to defending freedom, behaved very differently. With much of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army, it invested huge sums (most in outright aid) to get Western Europe back on its feet and to sustain its democratic governments. The investments served the interests of peace because democratic states seldom go to war with each other.
The current administration relegates such thinking to the past, with Trump likening international affairs to a card game, with some holding stronger “hands” than others. Yet card games at least have rules, while what imperial powers do is help themselves to new cards as they see fit and knock over the card table whenever fair play displeases them. The best-known advocate of such behavior is the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote that different rules apply to great powers; he might be the only serious thinker who would justify Trump’s ambitions to seize Greenland or the Panama Canal.
The Trump team’s imperial attitude was on full display in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky. Vice President Vance badgered Ukraine’s president to express more gratitude to the United States, even though he has done so profusely for years. What Vance seemed to expect was the sort of self-abasement that vassals once rendered to their lords. As long as humans can think and write freely, that fiasco will go down as a special disgrace for the United States, a low point in meanness and absence of compassion. It is we who should be grateful to Ukrainians—the same way we’re grateful to the men who landed in Normandy in June 1944 or to the soldiers of George Washington’s army. Like those heroes of yesteryear, today’s Ukrainians are putting their lives on the line for the sake of freedom.
That sort of argument may mystify the American right, but it also surprises some people on the left. I’ve heard colleagues in Berkeley denigrate the Ukrainian struggle as one driven by “nationalism” fueled by ancient ethnic chauvinism. In the midst of the Bosnian war, even the well-read and well-meaning Bill Clinton expressed frustration with such “Old World” nationalism, saying, “until those people over there get tired of killing one another, bad things will continue to happen.” Trump himself shows some of this impatience, portraying Zelensky as yet another Eastern European closed to reason.
But what’s happening in Ukraine is not difficult to understand. What we have been witnessing, in the years since 2014, is an East European democratic revolution much like our own, if not more dramatic. The colonists who took up arms in the 1770s were responding to everyday colonialism, of living under an empire that left them little voice in their own affairs and blithely exploited their lives and treasures. At some point, those Americans decided freedom was a cause worth dying for.
This was the sentiment an audience in Berkeley heard last September from Taras Dobko, the rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University. A missile had recently struck an apartment house in Lviv, wiping out a whole family, including Daria Bazylevych, a second-year cultural-studies major. For years, students and professors have been going off to fight and sometimes die, and now the hundreds of mourners at Daria’s funeral Mass recognized a consensus that has strengthened over time: human life is precious, but some things are more important than simple survival.
The Trump team’s imperial attitude was on full display in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky.
The comparisons I have been invoking are approximate. The imperial aggressors Ukrainians face are endlessly more sinister than George III’s forces. But the similarities are nevertheless striking. Recall the early images from three years ago, just after Russian troops had crossed Ukraine’s borders. All kinds of people sought to repel the invaders—the young, the old, the tough, the nerdy, workers, students. The real issue was not territory on a map but how human beings on any territory are allowed to live their lives. These human beings were desperate not to fall under a regime of lawlessness, where human life is for sale and dignity is trampled by tyranny. Today’s Ukrainian patriotism is not about ethnicity. Many of the troops defending Ukraine are Russian-speaking; the religious communities represented among these troops range from Greek Catholic (Uniate) to atheist.
In the summer of 2022, President Zelensky, who is Jewish, demonstrated his acute historical vision by calling his country a “new nation.” Technically, the claim is wrong. Sources referred to a Ukrainian nation back in the seventeenth century. But the nation Zelensky means transcends that past. He is placing Ukraine in the small company of nations that define their identities by looking forward and not backward. The new Ukraine is a place and a people that seeks to create a future free from tyranny.
Here, Ukraine’s democratic revolution has precedents in European history, but they are few. There was 1789, when the French people walked onto the historical stage with the novel insistence that they had a right to self-rule. There was 1848, when peoples across Europe tried to follow the French example, but that movement soon came apart in ethnic bickering. And then there were the revolutions of 1989, when Europeans between France and Russia rose up against the Soviet empire. In world history, the closest parallel is indeed 1776, when North American colonists rebelled regardless of language and creed and dated their nation from the moment they determined to live freely.
But our day’s Americans can have short memories, a fact that frustrated Zelensky when he visited the Oval Office. For Trump and Vance, the indiscriminate torture and killing of hundreds of civilians committed by Putin’s soldiers just three years ago at Bucha are irrelevant to the challenges of “peace making.” Accusing Zelensky of “hating” Putin, as Trump did, is a bit like criticizing the Czechs or Poles for their animosity toward Hitler. Putin belongs to a small group of strongmen—including Pol Pot and Slobodan Milošević—who have presided over genocidal acts. Of course, sometimes one has to engage in diplomacy with such men, but the reports of U.S. diplomats becoming chummy over shared meals with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, evoke disgust. Neville Chamberlain at least had the decency to appear uncomfortable in the presence of cynical despots.
American ignorance of the past can extend beyond facts to a misunderstanding of what America is about. Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is, deep down, a betrayal of the United States. Last summer, Vance said that his ancestors are buried in Kentucky, and he hoped that seven generations of his family would find their final resting places there as well: even if they “would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.” In fact, where our ancestors lie is irrelevant for our identities as Americans; their graves may be anywhere in the world. We are not a community of soil and blood.
But the sentiment Vance expressed is not unknown elsewhere. In 1984, I went on a field trip to eastern Poland with historians from Jagiellonian University in Krakow. My roommate on the trip, a young instructor, explained to me why Poles could not forget the territories that had once belonged to Poland yet now lay in Ukraine: “Remember, our graves are there.” Fortunately, when their country became free in 1989, the better angels in Polish society prevailed. As Timothy Snyder explained in The Reconstruction of Nations, émigré intellectuals determined that Poland needed peace and not more land. Eastern Europeans have suffered from territorial disputes for centuries, and that moment was a time to look forward and consign destructive bickering to history.
Hence the extraordinary incomprehension with which Poles and other Europeans view the Trump regime, which seems more intent on expanding America’s borders than on protecting existing ones in Europe. Washington now joins Moscow in calling Zelensky a “dictator.” That is why Europeans insist upon security guarantees for Ukrainians: as long as pernicious and demonstrably false ideas about Ukraine are taught as dogma to tens of millions of Russians, there can be no return to normal. An expansionist state backed by an aggressive ideology cannot be appeased; it can only be stopped.
Ukraine’s democratic revolution has precedents in European history, but they are few.
Today’s Ukrainian fighters live in trenches. They spend weeks in puddles of cold water, unable to rest properly, subsisting on terrible food. Like the men of D-Day or those who accompanied Washington to fight in wintry Princeton, they face not only death but discomforts that are difficult to imagine and usually forgotten in history books. Soldiers then and now have suffered these things so that their fellow citizens can say what they want in public, so that journalists can report without fear of retribution from civil authorities, so that teachers can speak freely in their classrooms without having to worry about being reported for indoctrinating their students with “Western ideology.” Growing threats to civil liberties under the Trump regime are of a piece with his admiration for Putin and with Vance’s meeting with neo-fascists in Munich. We are letting our freedoms slip away, and it’s not clear why.
Our founders, despite the checks and balances they built into the new republic, had gloomy forebodings. No matter how brilliantly conceived, they knew a constitution alone could not guarantee civic virtue. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin was right that the demos would one day succumb to corruption, but what would he say about voters who abandoned their God-given critical faculties and supported a man who, just four years earlier, had whipped up a mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power? Video images show the attackers beating police with flagpoles.
For decades, I have been teaching students about interwar Germany’s last free elections in 1932, and when class is over we leave the lecture hall with pained incomprehension at those strange people back then. No longer. Germans of that time faced unemployment, destitution, street violence; they had suffered more in a war than we can imagine. Still, that July, far fewer than half of them voted for the radical right (37.2 percent). The numbers went down to 32 percent in November. His party in decline, Hitler was considering suicide when a coterie of conservatives schemed to bring him to power.
In November 2024, the United States was enjoying high employment, steady growth, and decreasing inflation, yet more than half of us voted for our own brand of right-wing populism. Yes, I am aware there are deep problems with housing, health care, and education, but that is no justification for casting a ballot that jeopardizes democracy. There was no reason to think that a second Trump administration would address those basic problems.
Is it not a kind of civic corruption for a nation to be blessed with abundant resources and fortuitous geography and not appreciate it? (Zelensky, ever the keen student of history, gently tried to remind Vance and Trump that Americans were protected by an ocean—a lesson that did not go over well.) Our conspicuously pious vice president might consider thanking the Almighty that we have peace-loving, democratic Canada on our northern border and not, like the Ukrainians, a rapacious, occasionally genocidal empire three times our size.
We are not in the 1930s. Our European allies have drawn lessons that make a return to Munich unlikely if not impossible. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Ukraine is not isolated, but an object of genuine neighborly concern. In Poland, France, and Austria, centrist forces have rallied to keep the far right out of power. The German elections suggest that when Elon Musk and J. D. Vance promote right-wing extremists abroad, it only drives Europe’s democrats closer together. Europeans display a wariness of neo-fascism that we, who have been spared direct experience of totalitarian rule, evidently lack.
Against the background of an Eastern Europe where nationhood has usually been about ethnicity, Ukraine’s brand of civic nationhood is a world-historical miracle. We don’t know what mysterious pool of ingredients permits democracies to arise and thrive, we know only that, unlike so many places where the United States has involved itself militarily, democracy has taken root in Ukraine. Unlike in 1938, when Czechs hoped that the West would sacrifice blood for their democracy, all that Ukrainians ask of other democracies is military aid, which in our case amounts to about four percent of the defense budget.
But even more important than our material support is their own faith: that some things, like freedom, are worth dying for, as Dobko reminded us in Berkeley. That belief can fade, and when it does, the effect can be contagious. In 1938, Czechs witnessed allies unwilling to stand for shared principles, and after World War II, Czechoslovakia—once the lone democracy east of the Rhine—became the sole European country to submit willingly to totalitarianism. Soviet troops left Czechoslovakian territory in December 1945, yet Czechs streamed into the Communist Party and the final seizure of power in 1948 was generated from below. It took democracy decades to recover.
Who would have thought an American president would make Neville Chamberlain look good? In 1938, the British PM sought peace to avert millions of deaths, while Trump seeks peace to advance “U.S. interests,” which he understands in purely material terms. Peace not for the sake of people, but of mineral rights. All talk of values like freedom or solidarity is anathema, and if “democracy” is invoked, it is only to aid its enemies. History writers of the future will pay close attention to what the United States does now. Far less is asked of us than was asked of the Western powers in 1938, and unless we change course, those historians will judge us far more severely than the men who once tried to appease Hitler.
John Connellyteaches the history of East Central Europe at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe(Princeton, 2020).
As I read this frightening post by Thom Hartmann, I was reminded of the many times in first term that he longed for protestors or suspects to be roughed up. He spoke to police officers in New York and urged them not to be so gentle when they apprehended suspects. He encouraged his audience to beat up troublemakers and send him their legal bills. He has a strange love of violence, though he himself dodged the draft five times.
Hartmann describes the freedom of ICE to arrest and detain anyone without a warrant, without any due process. Where is this going?
Imagine stepping off a plane in the United States, fully expecting to enter the country without issue, only to be surrounded by armed agents, handcuffed, and thrown into a freezing detention center. No trial. No lawyer. No contact with the outside world.
In Trump’s America, you are no longer guaranteed your rights or freedom—because now, it takes nothing more than an ICE agent’s “suspicion” to make you disappear.
This isn’t a mistake. It’s part of an expanding system of cruelty, where ICE—once an agency tasked with immigration enforcement—is now operating like an unchecked police force, targeting legal residents, visitors, and even US citizens with impunity.
People who follow every rule, complete all the required paperwork, and obey every regulation are still finding themselves locked away, held in horrific conditions, and stripped of their rights—all based on the whims of an agent who doesn’t even need evidence to justify an arrest.
A U.S. citizen from Chicago was among 22 people recently subjected to unlawful arrests and detention by ICE. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that during Trump’s first term, immigration authorities asked to hold approximately 600 likely citizens and actually deported about 70 likely citizens.
But now, in part because of the Laken Riley Act, it’s getting worse. Forty-two Democrats in the House and fourteen in the Senate voted to pass this execrable GOP bill last month; it was named after a young woman murdered by an undocumented alien whose story was relentlessly promoted by Fox “News” and other rightwing hate media.
That law, recently signed by Trump, says that ICE now has the authority to detain anybody — anybody — for an indefinite period of time — no time limit whatsoever — if an ICE agent simply says that he or she “suspects” the person is in the country illegally or without documentation.
Fabian Schmidt, a German-born engineer, has lived in the United States for nearly two decades, legally working, paying taxes, and contributing to his community. None of that mattered when he returned home from a trip abroad. As soon as he landed at Logan Airport in Boston, ICE agents pulled him aside. His green card renewal was “flagged” for some unknown reason—no explanation, no opportunity to clarify, just a red mark in a government system.
That was all it took. ICE stripped him of his clothes, subjected him to hours of aggressive questioning, and locked him in a detention center. They threw him into an ice-cold shower and left him shivering on the concrete floor, humiliated and terrified.
For days, his mother, Astrid, desperately tried to find him. She called ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and any agency that might give her an answer. They either ignored her or outright lied, claiming they had no record of her son. When she finally learned where he was, Fabian was barely holding himself together. “They treat us like animals,” he told her.
And why was he there? Because of a supposed “bureaucratic error.” ICE used a minor paperwork issue as an excuse to detain a legal resident of the United States without due process, a tactic that’s becoming frighteningly common.
For Jessica Brösche, a German tattoo artist, her visit to the United States was supposed to be brief—just a trip to see friends and enjoy the country. She had a valid passport, a return ticket, and legal permission to enter under the Visa Waiver Program. Yet, ICE decided that she might try to work while visiting, a baseless assumption that required no proof and no justification.
Just “suspicion.” That was enough to detain her indefinitely.
Once inside, the nightmare deepened. They threw her into a cell with no bed and no access to legal assistance. For eight straight days, they kept her in solitary confinement. The lights never dimmed, and the sounds of other detainees screaming in despair echoed through the walls. She started hallucinating, her grip on reality slipping. Desperate to feel something, anything real, she punched the walls until her knuckles bled.
Meanwhile, her best friend, Amelia, searched frantically for her. ICE refused to confirm her location or even acknowledge that they had detained her. No charges, no trial, no legal recourse—just silence.
Jessica’s case isn’t unique. People who follow all immigration rules are being detained under vague suspicions, often disappearing into a bureaucratic black hole. And once they’re inside the system, their rights mean nothing.
Consider Jasmine Mooney, the actor who starred in the American Pie franchise anda Canadian businesswoman who played by the rules. She secured a job offer, completed all visa paperwork, and followed every U.S. immigration law to the letter. But that didn’t stop ICE from shackling her, chaining her wrists, ankles, and waist as if she were a violent offender.
For days, she was trapped in a brutal private, for-profit detention facility, laying on the bare floor with nothing but a crinkled foil sheet for warmth. Then, in the dead of night, ICE dragged her from her cell, bound her in chains again, and forced her onto a bus with dozens of other women. They drove for hours, denying them food, water, or bathroom breaks. By the time she arrived at another facility, she had been awake for 24 hours and was too weak to stand.
To this day, ICE refuses to explain why she was detained. And why would they? They don’t have to. The agency operates with absolute power, detaining people for as long as they want, answering to no one.
Moody tells her horrifying story to The Guardian, writing:
“I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet. …
“There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.”
These aren’t isolated cases. ICE has transformed itself into an authoritarian force that detains people indefinitely on suspicion alone. No evidence? No trial? No problem.
And the for-profit prison industry that’s holding many if not most of them has no incentive to help these people; the more they detail and the longer they stay, the more money the prison companies make (which they then share as campaign donations with Republican politicians).
ICE agents don’t need proof. They only need the power to act—and Trump has given it to them.
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Please open the link to continue reading this important post.
Olga Lautman is a fearless defender of democracy. She keeps close tabs on authoritarian regimes and has had many reasons to should the alarm since the return of Trump. Now that Trump controls the executive branch, Congress, and usually the Supreme Court (where he occasionally loses when Barrett and Roberts dissent), he is on a path to tyranny.
She warns that his crackdown on dissent is a decisive step towards full-fledged authoritarianism. Let me add as a personal that not all forms of dissent are legal, even by the most liberal definition. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. While I support student protests, there are reasonable limits defined by time, place, and manner. If students prevent others from learning by disrupting their classrooms or closing the library, that’s out of line, in my view. You are free to disagree. That’s your right, as it is mine.
Lautman writes:
Trump’s Crackdown: Silencing Dissent and Censoring the Press
While Trump floods the zone with chaos, I am watching a deeply disturbing pattern emerge. Recently, he has targeted universities under the guise of combating antisemitism, threatening to cut funding, open investigations, and deport foreign students involved in what he deems “illegal protests.” This move to silence student voices is part of a broader strategy—Trump is systematically laying the groundwork to criminalize dissent. Concurrently, he has continued to invoke emergency powers over immigration, granting himself sweeping authority with minimal oversight.
Adding to this concerning trend, Trump is weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission to suppress media freedom. Under his regime, the FCC has initiated investigations into major news organizations like NPR and PBS, scrutinizing their content and funding. The White House has also barred Associated Press reporters from covering presidential events, citing disagreements over “terminology.” Furthermore, the regime has taken control of the White House press pool, deciding which journalists can cover presidential activities, effectively beginning the process of sidelining independent media voices.
Today, the targets are “antisemitism” and “immigration.” Tomorrow, it could be any form of resistance to the regime. This pattern mirrors tactics employed by autocratic governments, where laws and regulations are manipulated to suppress opposition and control public discourse. It is imperative to recognize and challenge these encroachments on our democratic freedoms before dissent becomes a criminal act, and that is why I felt it was important to bring it to everyone’s attention.
The Playbook of Repression
Trump’s attacks on universities have nothing to do with stopping antisemitism. If they did, there would be a serious, balanced approach to addressing hate across the board. Instead, he’s selectively using it as a pretext to punish colleges, strip funding, launch investigations, and lay the groundwork for broader crackdowns on protests. These moves, along with the threat to deport foreign students who participate in protests, are a classic authoritarian tactic—silencing youth movements before they become a real threat.
In Russia, we have seen this exact strategy play out. Putin started by using the language of “public order” to justify suppressing protests. Then, he expanded it to clamp down on journalists, opposition figures, and universities. Today, any form of public dissent in Russia is met with immediate arrests, long prison sentences, or exile.
Trump is following the same playbook. First, redefine what qualifies as a legal protest. Then, frame all opposition as a national security threat. Finally, implement policies that criminalize resistance. Let’s not forget—during his first term, Trump wanted the military to shoot protesters, but guardrails stopped him. Now, with those guardrails gone and loyalists installed in key positions, he is laying the groundwork to justify an all-out assault on free speech and assembly, using the rhetoric of “law and order” to disguise repression as a “necessary” security measure.
The Danger of Emergency Powers
Trump’s continuing invocation of emergency powers on immigration is another red flag. Emergency powers are not inherently undemocratic, but in the wrong hands, they are a tool for consolidating unchecked authority. In Russia, Putin used emergencies—terrorist attacks, economic crises, and foreign threats—to justify expanding his power. Each crisis became an excuse to centralize control and dismantle any resistance to the regime.
Trump is testing the limits of emergency powers to override legal norms. He has already deployed the military on U.S. soil for immigration enforcement—what stops him from escalating further? With the Insurrection Act looming in the background, he is laying the groundwork to use military force against civilians under the pretense of a “national emergency.”
This is Just the Beginning
We are witnessing the early stages of a full-blown authoritarian shift. The selective targeting of student protesters, the abuse of emergency powers, and the push to redefine “illegal protests” are all interconnected. Today, it’s about silencing students. Tomorrow, it will be about crushing unions, blacklisting journalists, or jailing political opponents.
This is not alarmism—it’s a pattern seen time and again in authoritarian regimes. And it’s why we must sound the alarm now.
What Can We Do?
Expose and Document – Share information, track developments, and call out every attempt to silence dissent. Authoritarians thrive on people looking the other way.
Support Targeted Groups – Defend students, journalists, unions, and activists under attack. Legal funds, advocacy groups, and independent media need resources to fight back.
Pressure Lawmakers – Demand that Congress and state governments put up real resistance. Emergency powers must be challenged, and unconstitutional crackdowns must be met with legal action.
Mobilize and Protest – Peaceful mass protests and civil resistance are essential. Authoritarianism collapses when people refuse to comply.
Prepare for Escalation – The time to organize networks and alternative platforms is now and will be critical to keeping resistance alive.
The question is not whether Trump will attempt to consolidate power—it’s whether Americans will resist before it’s too late.
Jeff Nesbit, who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, wrote this article for The Contrarian. The question is one that I keep asking about many federal government programs that are being eliminated by Trump and Musk, like USAID.
Why? It makes no sense.
The fact that Trump chose Robert F.Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been an alarm bell; Kennedy is not only unqualified, he is stridently hostile to science.
The only beneficiary of this insane and reckless slashing of our most successful programs would be our international enemies, Russia and China. They want us to fail. Trump and Musk are making their dreams come true.
Nesbit wrote:
A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?
There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.
The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.
An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.
The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?
There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.
Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.
One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions…
Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.
The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.
Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state’s economies.
But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.
But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.
And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.
Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.
More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
Hopkins’ medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university’s health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.
“This is a difficult day for our entire community. The termination of more than $800 million in USAID funding is now forcing us to wind down critical work here in Baltimore and internationally,” Hopkins’ spokesperson said in a statement.
The Trump administration, through advisor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, is slashing federal spending across agencies in an effort to end wasteful spending. Such cuts have an outsized effect on Hopkins, which comes in first of all universities in federally funded research. By extension, those cuts affect Baltimore and Maryland, where Hopkins is the city and state’s largest largest private employer. Hopkins says it accounts for more than $15 billion in economic output in the state.
The funding cuts for research institutions are hurting universities in multiple states.
Who determines that basic research in science and medicine are unimportant?
Trump’s flunkies have eliminated the Inspectors General in every Department; they are the nonpartisan watchdogs who scrutinize contracts and official actions to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. They were all summarily fired, without even the 30-day notice to Congress required by law and without cause.
Kurtz writes about the purge at the Justice Department, which will never again investigate Trump or any of his allies.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has eviscerated the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, NBC News reports, in another sign that rampant unrestrained public corruption will be a defining feature of the Trump era.
We didn’t get here overnight. A social, political, and legal transformation over the past decade has removed many of the most important guardrails to contain public corruption. The 2016 Supreme Court decision in McDonnell v. United States was the most overt early sign that democracy’s endemic but manageable corruption was going to be allowed to run free.
The implications of that and similar subsequent decisions are hard to isolate from the wholesale corruption that Donald Trump brought to the table beginning that same year. But the rank corruption of his first term pales next to the structural changes he’s already wrought less than two months into his second term.
The Trump White House’s takeover of the Justice Department writ large is the greatest boon to public corruption, but there have been a series of particularly egregious actions – like Trump’s executive order crapping all over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – that have cleared the way for more wrongdoing and less accountability for wrongdoers.
Bondi’s decision to strip the Public Integrity Section bare leaves Main Justice’s experienced career prosecutors on the sidelines in public corruption cases, shifts the onus to bring (and not to bring) such cases to more politically malleable U.S. attorneys, and weakens the mechanism for ensuring nationwide consistency across investigations and cases.
Unrestrained public corruption creates its own perverse political culture. It feeds into cynicism and nihilism about government that in turn is exploited by figures like Trump to justify further weakening and undermining the rule of law. It’s a death spiral and we’re now firmly in the grips of it.
Robert Hubbell is a blogger with a huge following. He has that following because he is well-informed, reasonable and optimistic about the power of democracy. In the absence of any coordinated response from the Democratic Party, protests are occurring spontaneously and locally. At Tesla showrooms, where people are picketing. At town hall meetings, which Republicans have suspended. And in other public settings, where people are expressing their anger and frustration about the dismantling of their government.
It is a tough time to be an ordinary American who believes in democracy, the rule of law, and the value of good government. From the cheap seats, it appears that all three are under a brutal assault from Trump and Musk designed to weaken America as a global force for good. In a bizarre twist worthy of The Twilight Zone, Trump and Musk’s campaign of destruction seems carefully crafted to benefit the world’s worst dictator and sworn enemy of American democracy, Vladimir Putin, a goal that is warmly embraced by a party that only a decade ago wrapped itself in patriotism and pro-democracy foreign policy.
But America’s political and media classes seem oddly unconcerned and detached from reality. True, Democrats in Congress express concern—but in the same way, they express concern about policy fights over revisions to the tax code. (To be fair, a handful of notable exceptions are out on a limb without the support of their party.) Our Democratic leaders use their minority status in Congress to justify their strange quiescence—an explanation that accepts defeat as the status quo.
The media is a husk of its former self. Firebrands and self-styled crusaders who took Biden to task for every inconsequential verbal slip now report on grotesque lies and unprecedented betrayals by Trump with the ennui of a weatherman predicting increasing darkness in the late afternoon and early evening.
What is wrong with these people?…
Is the failure of Democratic leaders a lack of ability? Of desire? Or the triumph of personal ambition regarding 2028 presidential politics over their willingness to serve as a leader of the loyal opposition in our nation’s hour of need?
The silence is deafening. There is a grand disconnect. I had no answer for Americans abroad wondering why the deep pool of talented politicians in the Democratic Party was missing in action at a moment of crisis for their beloved country. But I was able to assure them that the grassroots movement is responding to the call without waiting for politicians to lead the way.
Organic protests are spreading across the US, including protests targeting Tesla dealerships. See News24, ‘We are taking action’: 9 people arrested at Tesla dealership as anti-Musk protests break out in US. (“Throngs of protesters also descended on the electric vehicle maker’s showrooms in Jacksonville, Florida; Tucson, Arizona, and other cities, blocking traffic, chanting and waving signs . . . .”)
Like the Civil Rights Era in the 20th Century and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, we are experiencing a moment in our history where the people drag their leaders kicking and screaming into the future—at which point those reluctant leaders will take credit for victory. So be it. We must stop asking, “Where are our leaders?” and start doing the work until they show up to join us on the front lines.
The pattern behind Trump’s embrace of Putin in Friday’s Oval Office meeting
On Friday, Trump ended 80 years of alliance between Western nations by attacking and dishonoring the leader of the European nation on the frontlines of the effort to halt Russian expansionism. As Trump berated President Zelensky, Trump characterized himself and Vladimir Putin as “co-victims” of the US investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
The next day, Elon Musk agreed with a tweet asserting that the US should leave NATO and the UN.
When European leaders met on Sunday in a pre-planned security conference in London, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev condemned the meeting as an “anti-Trump Russophobic coven [of witches].” Medvedev speaks for Putin.
On Sunday, the NYTimes reported that the US Department of Defense has unilaterally ceased cyber operations against Russia, hobbling the US’s ability to understand Russia’s true intentions at a critical juncture in world politics.
Late last week, The Guardian reported that the US no longer views Russian cyberattacks against the US as a priority. See The Guardian, Trump administration retreats in fight against Russian cyber threats. There is no indication that Russia has stopped cyberattacks against the US or that it has “de-prioritized” American cyberattacks on Russia.
In the span of 72-hours, Trump effectively surrendered to Russia in a cyberwar that has been waged continuously for decades. Trump’s disgraceful actions in the Oval Office on Friday must be viewed in the broader context of Trump’s embrace of Russia.
The media is failing to tell that broader story by trivializing a foreign relations debacle into a “Will he, or won’t he?” story about Trump’s ludicrous demand for Zelensky to “apologize.” See BBCr eport, Laura Kuenssberg, asking Zelensky if he would “express[] some regret to President Trump after your heated confrontation at the White House on Friday.”
The unit that was disbanded was known as “18F.” Its job was to make public-facing websites of the federal government more user-friendly and functional—things like making it easier to complete and file your tax returns for free on the IRS website.
[The terminations were] a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.
All 18F’s support on that work has now abruptly come to a halt. Since the entire staff was also placed on administrative leave, we have been locked out of our computers, and have no chance to assist in an orderly transition in our work. . . .
Before today’s RIF, DOGE members and GSA political appointees demanded and took access to IT systems that hold sensitive information. They ignored security precautions. Some who pushed back on this questionable behavior resigned rather than grant access.
The chaos-termination of the 18F computer group is being repeated across the federal government. Doge has apparently targeted 50% of the Social Security Administration staff—a move that will hurt service levels for seniors who depend on SSA payments to meet basic living expenses.
These cuts are painful and will cause chaos. That chaos and pain will spur a backlash against Republicans that should allow Democrats to take back the House (and possibly the Senate) in 2026 if only the Democratic Party can get its act together—PRONTO! We need a daily news conference with effective messaging by dynamic, charismatic leaders who are not Chuck Schumer!…
Concluding Thoughts
Apologies that this newsletter is more like a rant and less like my usual call to action. But I am reflecting the frustration and anger that I am hearing from readers (both in person and in the Comment section). There seems to be a disconnect that is exacerbating an already mind-boggling situation.
The good news is that everyone seems to “get it”—other than politicians and the media. As I noted, they will be dragged along with the tide of history—a tide whose course we will determine by our actions.
It is up to us to save democracy—a situation that does not distinguish this moment from the thousands of perilous moments that have brought us to this point.
I acknowledge that we are living through an extraordinarily difficult moment. Our most important task is to not quit. If all we do is endure and keep hope alive, that will be enough. That is what Winston Churchill did during the darkest hours of WWII. If we can do the same, we will see victory in 2026 and 2028.
But we can do more—much more. The tide is turning. Republicans are retreating from their constituents. Spontaneous protests are spreading across America. It is happening. Be part of the movement in whatever way you can. No effort is wasted. No gesture is meaningless. No voice is unheard. Everything matters—now more than ever.
Paul Cobaugh is a military veteran who spent many years in intelligence operations, decoding propaganda. This post is straight talk from a patriot and a vet. His blog is “Truth Against Threats.”
TAT readers,
This is a quick update. For the next week or so, I have an erratic schedule that will keep me from the longer essays, but will intermittently bring you shorter, very succinct thoughts regarding our ongoing coup by a now, fully fascist Republican Party. There is simply no longer a Conservative Party. Today’s GOP has an exclusively MAGA agenda and has either stood by and cowardly watched the ongoing coup, or offered tacit support.
Trump’s statements claiming that, “nothing is illegal when saving your country,” which he began claiming, when our court system started throwing legitimate legal roadblocks into his and DOGE’s coup machinery. My friends and fellow citizens, Trump’s chaos is intentional and is a diversion from his intended goal, to place all relevant power under the auspices of the Oval Office. Yes, for those that have been reading TAT for a while now, know that this is exactly the 180-day Transition Playbook from Project 2025.Why won’t the media call it a coup?
As indicated in my ongoing explanations about the coup, time is critical now, if we are to stop or slow this coup’s steamrolling of our constitutional republic. This is Trump’s second attempt, with January 6th, 2021 being his first try. Apparently, our hand-picked SCOTUS decided to forgive and forget that attempt and gave him a second opportunity. Now, we have no Congress, no SCOTUS and an Executive Branch, bursting at the seams with the tyrannical power that our founding fathers decided to limit with a system of “checks and balances.” Today’s GOP, has devolved that system incrementally now for years. 2025, is the year that it came all together for them and resulting in the only major challenge to our republic, other than the Civil War.
Deep inside all Americans that respect and honor our constitution and true American values, lies a gene of resistance. It appears whenever tyranny raises its ugly head and threatens democracy, ours or the world’s. Trump, Putin and Musk, don’t understand patriotic Americans dedication to our actual values and guaranteed constitutional rights. They will find out soon enough if they persist. As I always say, this is not about party, this is quite plainly, about being a true patriot. Real Americans do not worship God, guns and Trump as American values. Real Americans don’t respect or tolerate what I call the Four Horsemen of the MAGA Apocalypse, Autocracy, Oligarchy, White Christian Nationalism and Political Violence.
True principled conservatives have now already left the party or vote against it. Those who voted for Trump, have been brainwashed and no longer have the ability to see truth. Stop trying to convince them. When I write, I write for honest citizens, never a party. This is America for heaven’s sake, not Russia, China, Iran or otherwise. We all get a say and freedom to think as we wish, worship or not, and we all have a citizen’s obligation, to defend our nation and its real values.
I aim to continue writing the truth about this coup and its leaders and followers. All of you that are exploding my follower statistics are doing the same. It is what we do as Americans. I’m beyond proud of all of you and am humbly honored, to be among such patriots.
Diane Ravitch's blog 