The Historic Cowardice of John Thune and Mike Johnson Threatens Our Republic
Mourning Pope Francis this morning.....
Morning everyone. Yesterday I woke up hopeful. Senator Van Hollen has been inspiring us with his courageous leadership. Hundreds of thousands of you peacefully, joyfully, rallied and protested on Saturday. Bernie and AOC keep drawing big crowds. More People’s Town Halls are scheduled for this week. Trump’s poll numbers continue to plummet and Democrats are now trusted more on the economy for the first time in 4 years. 7 Senate Rs have backed a bill that could roll back Trump’s destructive tariffs, 12 House Rs have come out against Trump’s proposed cuts to the health care of almost 100m people. Fed Chair Jerome Powell called BS on Trump’s reckless economic plans. Governor Newsom and the State of California filed a very important lawsuit against Trump’s terrible tariffs. Harvard stood strong and inspired us all. The Supreme Court ruled against Trump for a second time, this time with a 1:00 am emergency order. Little cracks are becoming bigger cracks. We are getting stronger and Trump weaker.
While I woke up yesterday hopeful, today I’ve woken up angry. Angry at what Trump is doing to the country. Really angry at how Mike Johnson and John Thune are letting him get away with it.
Here is what our deranged leader posted yesterday:
Here is the White House Twitter feed from Friday morning:
Here is a long time Trump staffer, John Ullyot, writing in Politico today about the ridiculous person Trump and Thune put in charge of the most important military in the world. The article is called Former Top Pentagon Spokesperson Details ‘Month From Hell’ Inside The Agency:
It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.
President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.
The latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks. On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his most loyal senior staffers — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense. In the aftermath, Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month.
Yet none of this is true. While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test. In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.
On Friday, POLITICO reported that Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, was leaving his role. Kasper had requested the investigation into the Pentagon leaks, which reportedly included military operational plans for the Panama Canal and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.
Hegseth is now presiding over a strange and baffling purge that will leave him without his two closest advisers of over a decade — Caldwell and Selnick — and without chiefs of staff for him and his deputy. More firings may be coming, according to rumors in the building.
In short, the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.
This morning we are learning that The US will have no formal representation at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings in DC this week, embarrassing this great country as the world descends upon Washington:
The Trump administration has made little effort to formally establish itself at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, but expect President Donald Trump’s presence to be ubiquitous at the institutions’ spring meetings this week.
Since Trump took office, the U.S. has abstained from internal votes at both organizations by default, as his administration has yet to name a permanent U.S. executive director to the board of either the IMF or the World Bank. And the Treasury Department’s office of international affairs remains without a nominated leader, leaving the U.S. with diminished ranks to interact with the rest of the world this week.
Trump continues to drive the US economy off a cliff:
The possibility of Trump completely abandoning Ukraine - and Europe - has grown in recent days:
I’ve woken up angry today. But my anger - today - is less at Trump, Rubio, Musk and the other MAGA quislings and more at Mike Johnson and John Thune who violate their oath of office daily by ceding the powers of Congress to our mad leader. Consider that much of the damage Trump is doing now is 1) coming from seizing and exercising powers not granted to him under the Constitution - the dismantling of the US government, the tariffs - 2) through the breaking of laws and treaties passed by Congress itself 3) from the incompetence of unqualified idiots willingly advanced by the Senate. We are here now as a nation due in large part to the extraordinary cowardice of Johnson and Thune and their unprecedented betrayal of our Constitutional order.
A new essay in the Atlantic magazine explains how the Roman Senate’s voluntary ceding of its power played a central role in the fall of the Roman Republic:
In about 80 years, roughly the same length of time between the end of World War II and now, the Roman Republic was transformed into a dictatorship. If you had told a Roman senator at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. that his grandchildren would willingly hand over governance to a monarch, he would not have believed you. Like the American one, the Roman Republic was founded on the rejection of a king. Rome had a representative government that, though flawed, was based on the rule of law, with freedom of speech and rights to legal recourse for its citizens.
The Roman Republic lasted nearly 500 years, about twice as long as Americans have had theirs. As was surely true for the Romans, most Americans can hardly imagine that their system of self-government might break and be replaced by an imperial dynasty. That is why considering what undid the Roman Republic is useful today—if we can learn from the Romans’ mistakes.
Augustus was Rome’s first emperor. In so becoming, he dismantled the republic and founded a monarchy that would last for more than a millennium. In Rome, most aristocratic men were also senators and usually held that position for life. In the later republic, some of those men—notably, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus—grew so extraordinarily rich and influential that they began to ignore the constraints of the Senate and the law. In the first century B.C.E., decades of aristocratic overreach and the authoritarian violence of Augustus’s predecessors Sulla and Caesar brought Rome to the brink more than once, but Augustus pushed it over the edge.
He took control of the government gradually but completely, with the support of those wealthy aristocrats who valued fortune above principle and with the complaisance of a population exhausted by conflict and disillusioned by a system that favored the rich and connected. Perhaps most salient for us today, Augustus consolidated his power with the institutional blessing of the Senate.
At first, the Senate let Augustus bend rules and push boundaries. It allowed him to accumulate domestic powers and bring unqualified members of his family into government. The Senate stood by while Augustus removed enemies from his path, and supported him when he put a self-serving spin on recent actions. Even when elections were held under Augustus, he often handpicked state officials.
The senators never called him emperor in his own day, but as primus inter pares, or first among equals, Augustus was allowed to pretend he was part of the republican system even as he destroyed it. Those who praised Augustus and those who failed to fight back, despite their misgivings, created a king by another name. They may have believed they were securing their own positions by doing so, but their acquiescence to Augustus meant the practical end of their power, forever. In their defense, Rome’s senators legitimately feared death if they broke with him; Augustus certainly had a lot of people killed. Our American senators apparently have only primaries to fear—yet they and their congressional colleagues have shown little inclination to rein in their leader or assert their own constitutional powers.
The advice we receive from this terrific essay is very similar to the advice Gary Kasparov provided us on Friday:
The American opposition should spend less time criticizing the content of the administration’s executive actions—eliciting sympathy for a deported individual, say, or decrying the impact of Trump’s tariffs on 401(k) plans—than focusing on its suspect methods. The real crisis is the lack of due process in the deportations, to take the first example, and the president’s assumption of Congress’s power to levy taxes, to take the second. Sure, Trump loves tariffs, in other words—but he mostly loves exercising power, and his slate of arbitrary levies, unilaterally imposed by the executive, is a power grab.
Which is why I still believe job one for all of us to keep the pressure on the Republicans in Congress to return to our Constitutional order, reassert its powers, and follow the Supreme Court in forcefully challenging Trump and his dangerous clown show before our Republic, like the Roman one it was modeled on, also falls. Far more pressure needs to be brought to bear on them to honor their oath, due their job and protect this great country from its gravest threat in our history.
Recommended Hopium Actions and Campaigns - Let’s focus on four current actions to channel our love of country and our frustrations into even more progress today:
1 - Demand Congress Take Back Their Tariff Authority From Trump - Call/contact your Senators and House Members today and demand they override and roll back these incredibly dangerous and destructive tariffs. Insist they sign on to the new resolution introduced by Senator Tim Kaine and others. Watch my new interview with Senator Kaine to learn more.
2 - Fight The Trump-Musk Attack On Our Government, Our Privacy And Our Constitutional Order - Encourage your Senators and Representatives to follow Senator Booker’s lead and let Facts be be submitted to a candid world in a joint Senate-House Letter to America; to hold their own hearings; to file criminal referrals for Musk and his malicious posse to DOJ/FBI and amicus briefs in the court cases regarding the usurpation of their Constitutional authorities or file suits of their own (House Dems began doing this several weeks ago). Encourage them to hold a daily morning press conference to more aggressively challenge Musk’s wild ransacking of the US government that is making America less prosperous, less healthy, less safe and far less respected in the world. Call to demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Watch my new discussion with Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson of Lincoln Square and/or my new video, We Are Stronger, He Is Weaker, to learn more about why Congress must craft A Letter To America.
3 - Loudly Protest Trump’s Embrace of Russia and Abandonment of NATO and Europe - Let your electeds know you are outraged by traitorous Trump’s selling out of Zelenskyy, abandonment of Europe and embrace of Putin; and that we cannot accept this level of appeasement of someone who is a clear enemy of America and the West, and certainly not an ally. Demand that Trump not let his Saudi meeting w/Putin become our Munich; demand that he not become our Neville Chamberlain; demand that we rejoin our European and NATO allies in support of Zelenskyy and democracy here and everywhere. The country is not with Trump’s embrace of Putin and we must be very loud, very, very loud now. See my new essay on the need to support our allies and not surrender to Putin, and my new interview with Rep. Adam Smith, the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, one of the most important foreign policy voices in our party.
4 - Rallying The States, The Spring Offensive - I am going to rework this section as so much has happened since we called on our community members to organize in the 17 most vulnerable Republican House seats a few months ago. Rallies and protests have exploded across the country and the “Hands Off” events and Bernie/AOC tour have drawn extraordinary crowds. The DNC/House Dems/State Parties have kicked off People’s Town Halls in all 50 states. I have come to believe that we should be leaning on our state and local electeds to pursue these organized “condemnations” of the Trump regime and their betrayal of America. Let’s start talking now about what we are going to do on July 4th, a day with all of a sudden much more importance.
Here are the current list of People’s Town Halls folks can attend and support during the coming Easter recess:
Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District “Good Trouble Festival” on April 22nd, represented by Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan
Colorado’s 8th Congressional District on April 24th, represented by Republican Rep. Gabe Evans
North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District on April 24th represented by Republican Rep. and NRCC Chair Richard Hudson
Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District on April 25th, represented by Republican Rep. Ann Wagner
Paid subscribers should self-report their actions today in our daily chat. So inspired by how hard so many of you are working. I want to make a special plea to all Hopium readers in states with Republican Senators - please make your calls, every day. Even 50 to 100 people calling every day in every red state can make a difference. We have hundreds of Hopium subscribers in every state in the country and it’s critical that we all do our part now.
For those wanting to do more traditional political/campaign work, we have the following Hopium-backed efforts we're rallying behind:
Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Virginia will be one of the big battlegrounds of the November, 2025 elections and we have a great candidate for Governor, Abigail Spanberger. Watch my interview with Abigail, donate, volunteer, and learn more here. Given how many federal employees live in Virginia, this race is also now on the front linesof the Trump/Musk assault on the federal government.
We’ve raised more than $82,000 so far towards our June 30th goal of $250,000 - thank you all. Let’s keep working it for Abigail!
Help Allison Riggs, Anderson Clayton And The NC Dems Stop The GOP’s From Stealing A Supreme Court Seat - A few weeks ago we began a campaign to raise $50,000 for Justice Allison Riggs, Anderson Clayton and the NC Dems. These funds will help the NC Dems get off to a great start in 2025 and help cover the costs of their fight to prevent the Republicans from stealing a Supreme Court seat we won together in 2024.
If you want to go deeper into the GOP’s rancid effort to steal a Supreme Court seat watch my new interviews with Justice Riggs and Anderson Clayton, the inspiring Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party.
We’ve raised $42,000 so far towards our June 30th goal of $50,000 - thank you everyone!
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 Derek Tran and Janelle Bynum and give to all 7 through a single donation on our new ActBlue page. Learn more about this important effort here.
We’ve already raised over $65,000 towards our $250,000 June 30th goal - thank you all!
Thank Senator Booker For Standing Up For America - Senator Booker is up for re-election next year and many of you asked if they could channel their support and appreciation for him through Hopium. So I’ve set up an ActBlue fundraising page for him with a goal of raising $100,000 by June 30th. We’ve already raised $25,000 - thank you all. Let’s be there for Senator Booker as he been there for us at this critical time.
Keep working hard all. So proud to be in this fight with all of you. While we are making progress, real progress, we have a lot of work to do - Simon
Good morning all. Over the weekend I wrote and mailed four letters requesting a Letter to America. It’s a request I had a hard time articulating via my daily phone calls to my electeds’ offices, so I decided to write letters instead. Sent them to my rep Jason Crow, Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, and AG Phil Weiser:
“I just re-read the Declaration of Independence for the first time in many years, and it struck me as timely and pertinent to our current situation.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’
I’ve been out in the streets for the past couple of months, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens. We the People are the fourth branch of government, and we are demonstrating that we do NOT consent to this current government.
The Declaration of Independence listed grievances against Mad King George, and served as a foundational document for the colonists to rally around.
I urge you to join with your fellow legislators to create a new document, maybe called a Letter to America, that will serve the same purpose. Have it list the illegal, unconstitutional, and destructive acts being committed by this lawless regime. Have it signed by every single Democratic Senator and Representative.
The Letter to America will serve as a rallying point for We the People, who refuse to submit to this criminal government. It can be a focus for Congressional Days of Action. It can be used by those fighting Trump in the courts. It can be a battle cry for all of us proud patriots who are fighting this corrupt and unconstitutional regime.
Thank you sincerely for your consideration and your patriotism,”
In response to the Atlantic article, american senators have to fear for their lives, too - witness Mitt Romney’s statements after Jan 6 and Lisa Murkowski’s hints in her latest statements . I wish this aspect of Trumpism - violence and death threats, including families - were brought to the fore, and forcefully condemned. The stochastic terrorism is NOT ACCEPTABLE in a democratic system, and people in power need to explicitly say so.