Morning all. Before we get into it a reminder that we are going Live today at 1215pm with influential journalist Ron Brownstein. Click on this link at 1215pm to join us and learn more about how to access Substack Live events here. I’ve asked Ron to come on today to reflect on his seminal essay, The Gray and The Brown. This essay, one of the most important of the past generation IMHO, raised the question then about whether aging white Americans would fund an America made up of kids that increasingly did not look like theirs. It’s a question at the very heart of our current moment as Trump attempts to radically reduce the tax burden of the wealthy, cut government programs for “those people” and “remigrate” millions of non-white immigrants out of the country. Hope you can join today at 1215pm - going to be a good one!
On Trump’s Plunder, Sabotage and Betrayal - My Latest Video on American Politics - Got together with our paid subscribers last night, and let loose a bit on Trump’s escalating sabotage and rancid self-enrichment. In my talk last night (recording and transcript above) I explored three main topics:
1 - Trump increasingly looks more like a foreign saboteur than an American President. I discuss the 4 main pillars of his comprehensive sabotage of the American project - the tariffs and his attacks on our allies, the reconciliation bill, his mass deportations and rejection of foreign students and his escalating and dangerous attack on science, knowledge and our public health.
This sabotage, and the ongoing damage it is causing, is why we have to keep working with great urgency. In my talk I explain why we should be so heartened by the success Dem AGs had this week in undermining the unconstitutional and destructive tariffs, and how damaging this ruling is to Trump’s entire global and domestic project.
A powerful new op-ed in The Guardian by leading American scientists, Trump’s ‘gold standard’ will destroy American science as we know it, reminds us, powerfully, of the stakes of our fight:
Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct, and then penalize the researchers involved accordingly. This administration has already appropriated the language of open science to assert control over and deal heavy blows to the scientific ecosystem of the United States – including cancelling thousands of active research grants in climate science, misinformation and disinformation, vaccines, mental health, women’s health, LGBTQ+ health and stem education. Calls to “revisit” decades of work that establish vaccine safety beyond a shadow of a doubt “because the only way you can get good science is through replication”, and demands for unethical vaccine clinical trial practices and additional data, further echo the bad-faith adoption of open science language.
Trump has also advanced a congressional budget calling for massive cuts to federal spending on research and development and levied significant retaliation against universities that have not fallen in line with his demands. He has gone so far as to propose a rule change by the office of personnel management that would install policy police at all levels of federal agencies, converting thousands of employees into presidential appointees who can be summarily fired without due process for any arbitrary political reason. This new executive order raises the concern that many of our best scientists would be targeted in Lysenkoist purges. Meanwhile, the threat of such actions is already having a chilling effect on all scientists.
Science is the most important long-term investment for humanity. Interference in the scientific process by political arbiters stifles scientists’ freedom of speech and thought. Science depends on unfettered speech – free and continuous discussion of data and ideas. We, like the rest of the scientific community, aspire to achieve greater openness, integrity and reproducibility of research to accelerate discovery, advance treatments and foster solutions to meet society’s greatest challenges. Meeting that objective will not occur by centralizing power over science and scientists according to the whims of any political administration. We see this executive order for what it is: an attempt to sell the US’s future for pyrite.
2 - It is time for our discourse to move from “laws were broken” to name those who broke laws - Trump, Musk, DOGE etc. We have to learn from the failure to hold Trump to account in the Garland era and start developing a clear narrative about the crime wave Trump and Musk have been on. There can be no restoration of our Constitutional order in the years to come without true accountability for the crimes, abuses of power, wanton destruction we are seeing daily. We cannot let another whitewashing this dark era as “locker room talk” or those things crazy rich boys do succeed, again.
As part of this effort I think we need to start raising questions about the legitimacy of the Trump regime. He was elected to be President, a job that he has rejected for some form of imagined dictatorship that does not and has never existed in the United States of America. His actions are not just illegal and unconstitutional, they are all also illegitimate, based solely on their argument that because he won the election he can literally do anything he wants (an expansion of the “grab them by the p—y” narrative). They believe the legitimacy of his regime comes from his winning the election, not from the authority granted to him by our Constitution and law. Which is why I think we simply must be more aggressive about attacking the legitimacy of the regime itself and describing him and his actions as illegitimate.
A test of our resolve and courage in confronting the darkness and not letting it all get flushed down a Garlandy memory hole will be how we talk about Musk’s time in Washington. Here’s Michelle Goldberg today in a column called Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death (gift link):
There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.
Now, Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.
There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nick Kristof’s reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who’ve been in the field say he’s either lying or misinformed.
Atul Gawande, an assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. in Joe Biden’s administration, told me that during a trip to Kenya last week, he visited the national referral hospital. There’s been a major increase in the number of patients with advanced H.I.V. symptoms, a result of losing access to antiretroviral medication. At refugee camps on the border of South Sudan, food aid has been cut so severely that people are getting less than 30 percent of the calories they need. “It is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,” said Gawande.
Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children. The Post reported that he hadn’t foreseen “the intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.” He’s been doing a series of interviews that Axios called an “image rehab tour.”
This morning the NYT is running a remarkable story, On The Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drug Use And Family Drama (gift link):
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
Everyday we are being asked to accept the unacceptable, and we all simply must learn how to say no to it all or we become complicit in the erosion of our democracy and rule of law:
3 - Coming back from my day at the Spring meeting of the Association Of Democratic State Committees (ASDC) I come away more convinced than ever that the national donor community simply must make funding of the State Parties far more central in the years to come. I am proud of our more than $2m of investment in the DNC, and three state parties - NC, NE, WI. In my talk I review the wins our investments in these states brought in 2024, some of the most important wins Democrats had anywhere in a tough year.
The new DNC under Ken Martin is making unprecedented investments in the 50 state parties but more must be done. Part of the story of our first two years together is that investing in state parties can produce big wins and big dividends - that it is money well spent. It’s why I hope this community continues to do its part in supporting our state and local parties, and help them become the vital, powerful force we need them to become in all 50 states.
In my talk to the State Chairs on Wednesday I made a few key points, ones that I will be expanding on and exploring with you in the days ahead:
Democrats are stronger than we look, and our democracy more resilient
We need to build a new coalition, win in more red places and make partisan voter reg great again
We have to get on the right side of opportunity with voters
We have to learn how to listen better and have a big conversation about how we do research
Amen to the DNC/State Parties’ “organize everywhere, win anywhere” 50 state strategy.
We have to become patriots, they the betrayers
So, that’s a summary of my talk last night. Get to it when you can. Lots in here to chew on, but the bottom line remains 1) they are breaking things that will be difficult if not impossible to repair and we must act now with great urgency 2) the circle of defiance is growing, we are making progress, Dem AGs are kicking ass, Trump’s standing with the public has taken a big hit, his economic strategy isn’t working, we keep winning and overperforming in elections.
We are making progress, getting stronger, everyday but we cannot let up for one moment and need to keep summoning the resolve, the courage, the love of country to fight them as hard as we can - for we cannot, not for one moment, begin to accept the unacceptable.
Now, Let’s Get To Work - In my post last Saturday I offered up some initial ideas of what our summer was going to look like. Please check it out if you haven’t gotten to it yet.
Job One for us this summer is fighting Trump’s ruinous economic agenda. We need to keep calling every day and demand our leaders vote down the reconciliation bill and roll back Trump’s terrible tariffs. This is the big, definitional battle of the summer and we need keep working it every day.
I know many of you are involved in the June 14th No Kings events, town halls, Telsa take downs and all the other in person activities that have taken off of late. Thank you, and do keep working it everyone. I still encourage our community to keep exploring ideas for how we can Own The Fourth and make our Independence Day an ugly day for our mad wannabe king. Merch is coming soon, and be sure to check our robust Events schedule as new events are being added daily.
We have three additional efforts we are working on now:
1 - Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Simply, the Virginia elections are the most important elections we have this year, and we must win them. We have narrow majorities in both legislative chambers and while our candidate Abigail Spanberger has a modest lead in current polling, this is going to be a close election where our money and volunteer time can make a real difference. If you are to give to only one candidate or election this year it should be this one. Here’s a link to do so today……
To learn more about Abigail check out my new discussion with her, watch her new TV ad, or head over to her campaign website We have now raised over $114,000 towards our June 30th goal of $200,000 - thank you all! We need to keep working it everyone!
2 - Support The Hopium House 7 - We’ve begun our work to help flip the House next year by supporting and shoring up the 7 newly-elected battleground House Dems we helped elect last year. Catch our interviews with Reps Derek Tran, Janelle Bynum, Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen and give to all 7 through a single donation on our ActBlue page. Learn more about this important effort here.
We’ve already raised over $109,000 towards our $200,000 June 30th goal - great work everyone!
We also have ongoing campaigns to raise money for the new DNC, support the North Carolina Democratic Party and thank Senator Cory Booker for his spirited leadership in a time of enormous challenge.
3- Growing Hopium - We’ve set a goal of trying to grow the Hopium community from the 150,000 we are now to 175,000 by Labor Day. Do what you can to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to become a summer subscriber to Hopium, free or paid. To encourage the growth of our community annual paid subscriptions are 10% off through Labor Day too!
Keep working hard all. We are making progress but oh boy do we have a lot of work to do - Simon
Share this post