Good morning all. The next DNC candidate forum is today at 2pm ET. You can watch it on the DNC’s YouTube channel live or catch a recording when have the time. The vote for all the DNC officers, including Chair, is next Saturday, February 1st. Check out our interviews with the 3 leading candidates for Chair - Ken Martin, Martin O’Malley and Ben Wikler - and my current 7 recommendations on the path forward.
Last night I got together with Hopium paid subscribers for one of our 2-3 times a month political briefing and discussion. It was a well-attended and lively affair. The video is above. Know I’m throwing a lot at you right now (the moment demands it) but hope you get to it when you have the time. A transcript is available for those who would rather read than watch or listen.
So, Simon, where are we? In these early days Trump has made it clear he and his allies are going to be a gigantic wrecking ball on our government and on things that matter to all of us. In her post today Heather Cox Richardson does a great job summarizing their initial assaults:
For the past two days, the new Trump administration has been demonstrating that it is far easier to break things than it is to build them.
In his determination to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures, Trump has shut down all federal government DEI offices and has put all federal employees working in such programs on leave, telling agencies to plan for layoffs. He reached back to the American past to root out all possible traces of DEI, calling it “illegal discrimination in the federal government.” Trump revoked a series of executive orders from various presidents designed to address inequities among American populations.
Dramatically, he reached all the way back to Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in September 1965 to stop discriminatory practices in hiring in the federal government and in the businesses of those who were awarded federal contracts. Johnson put forward Executive Order 11246 shortly after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to protect minority voting and a year after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, both designed to level the playing field in the United States between white Americans, Black Americans and Americans of color.
In an even more dramatic reworking of American history, though, the Trump administration has frozen all civil rights cases currently being handled by the Department of Justice and has ordered Trump’s new supervisor of the civil rights division, Kathleen Wolfe, to make sure that none of the civil rights attorneys file any new complaints or other legal documents.
Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870…to prosecute civil rights cases.
Today, Erica L. Green reported for the New York Times that Trump’s team has threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they refuse to turn in colleagues who “defy orders to purge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from their agencies.” Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill commented: “Can’t wait until these guys have to define in court a ‘DEI hire’ and ‘DEI employees.’”
Trump’s team has told the staff at Department of Health and Human Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop issuing health advisories, scientific reports, and updates to their websites and social media posts. Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Roubein of the Washington Post report that the CDC was expected this week to publish reports on the avian influenza virus, which has shut down Georgia’s poultry industry.
Trump has also set out to make his mark on the Department of Homeland Security. Trump yesterday removed the U.S. Coast Guard commandant, Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, and ordered the Coast Guard to surge cutters, aircrafts, boats and personnel to waters around Florida and borders with Mexico and to “the maritime border around Alaska, Hawai’i, the U.S. territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,” to stop migrants. The service is already covering these areas as well as it can: last August, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday, told the Brookings Institution that the service was short of personnel and ships.
As we discussed last night the majority of the American people did not vote for this radical agenda. They didn’t vote for higher prices and tax increases (tariffs, mass deportation, House R budget drafts), the dismantling of our public health system and 60 year old civil rights laws, the release of dangerous criminals and domestic terrorists back into our communities, the termination of funding for infrastructure projects across the country already under construction, the deployment of marines on American soil, open conflict with our closest allies and neighbors, and a gutting of the US government itself.
We know that Trump has dictatorial fantasies, and believes despite winning a very narrow election and not having ideological control of the House that he has some FDR like mandate, a corrupt judiciary and compliant broligarchy behind him and that he can just do whatever he wants. As I’ve written to you, I think Trump’s arrogance, impulsivity and megalomania/madness has led him this week to be reckless and sloppy. They are making mistakes, political and governing mistakes, that make it far more likely they fail and far more likely the public turns against them.
Trump 2.0 is a profound, ongoing betrayal of America, and everything that has made this remarkable nation the most powerful and prosperous in the world. It is why we must fight. As dark as all this is, we cannot for one moment forget that what Trump is doing is wrong; he and his project remain deeply unstable and his coalition narrow and fractious; he is embracing deeply unpopular actions; he is old, impulsive, reckless and clearly in decline; and extremists and ideologues are often far better at bread and circuses than governing.
But now the public has to turn against him. They’ve let us know who they are and what they are going to do. Now it is up to us to work with the tools and assets we have to create permission structures for people and institutions to challenge Trump. We have to fight now. We have to work together to turn ourselves and new allies into an effective and ferocious opposition movement, something I discussed with Rep. Swalwell yesterday.
Bishop Budde joined the fight this week. So did leading police unions, The Pope and the US Council of Catholic Bishops. 20 states sued to block Trump’s unconstitutional effort to end birthright citizenship. Elon trashed Trump’s big AI rollout yesterday. I expect in the next few days we are going to see very loud and aggressive protests from the nation’s medical community, leading medical research institutions, governors and other electeds in red states and blue states wanting to ensure promised infrastructure dollars keep flowing and FEMA run by professionals.
What is important now is that we must acknowledge people and institutions who stand up, cheer them on and amplify their words and actions. Each one of these acts of bravery can inspire others to follow. Each action you take can inspire others to follow you. Think of yourself now as a leader whose actions can inspire others. Step up, do, and encourage others to follow. It is how movements happen.
Here is the lead story in the right-leaning The Hill this morning, Trump’s blizzard of orders get pushback, questions from GOP lawmakers:
President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders during the first few days of his presidency has sent Republican lawmakers scrambling to make sense of what impact they’ll have on the country, and some GOP senators are already raising questions and concerns.
Republicans were surprised by Trump’s order to immediately pause the disbursement of funds under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which they feared would stop funding to key projects in their home states.
“Some of it is not helpful,” said a senior Republican aide, who said Trump’s team would have been wise to provide more detail about the scope of the orders or could have waited until some of his nominees cleared Senate committees before taking actions that were likely to prompt legislative pushback.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said her staff reached out to the Trump administration immediately to find out whether the order would affect funding formulas for her home state, which Trump carried with 70 percent of the vote in November.
“We’ve been seeking clarification,” she told The Hill.
As someone who has been in Washington for more than 30 years I can tell you that Republicans on the Hill are nervous about how wild Trump has been these first few days. I believe Trump has stumbled out of the box. He and his team have been reckless, sloppy and arrogant. They have made big mistakes, and it can - if we work our asses off - cost him, dearly. We now have to fight as hard as we can so that the narrative becomes about his early reckless overreach, and retreat. In the short term the single most important thing we can do is defeat his Unacceptable 4 - Hegseth, Gabbard, Kennedy and Patel. Everyone reading this should call their Senators and House members today and insist they work against these outrageous nominees and Trump’s other, early destructive acts.
I also hope that all the leaders of our muscular Democratic grassroots groups across the country begin to move beyond their traditional electoral work into fighting the info and political battle against Trump’s 100 day MAGA blitzkrieg that began this week. We are not without power. There are 6 million Democratic supporters/donors/volunteers now, twice as many as 10 years ago. We have our growing Democratic grassroots, and increasingly muscular pro-democracy media ecosystem. We have compelling, articulate, charismatic leaders of the next Democratic Party in Congress and across the country who have an historic opportunity to lead. We also have something they do not have - love of country and the extraordinary power that comes from defending the great American project. What are they fighting for? Oligarchy, the odious orange one, chaos, white supremacy and flying our flag upside down.
They have this:
We have this:




I will take our odds.
Enjoy our discussion from last night, let’s keep pulling that curtain back from the Wizard and let’s keep working hard all - Simon
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