Morning all. We fight because Trump is making us poorer, less safe and less free, by design, on purpose; and he is breaking things that will be very hard, if not impossible, to repair. That’s why we fight, and do so with the urgency this perilous moment requires.
First up today - another pitch for Susan Crawford. Musk has now poured $18m into this race and we have to keep up. Our community has responded, mightily, and has now raised almost $200,000, and I know many of you have been working hard on this race for weeks/months. Our new mega-stretch goal is $225,000 by this Sunday, 31st. Donate and volunteer for our great candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court race today!
To dive deeper watch my recent interview with Judge Crawford and WI Dem Chair Ben Wikler. We’ve all been given a powerful reminder in recent weeks of how important the Courts are for our democracy and freedoms. It’s why we need to leave it all on the playing field this week and help Susan Crawford and the WisDems close strong!
Yes, People Are Disappearing in America - Our good friend David Leopold returned yesterday for a live briefing and primer on Trump’s escalating assault on immigrants and visitors to the US, the 1st Amendment and our Constitutional order. We had a good turnout for the live event using Substack’s new live feature yesterday and a recording is above. Our discussion provides a comprehensive overview of what is happening now, and how our immigration system works more broadly. As we discuss there is a racial rage driving Trump’s actions that is both breathtaking and dangerous for tens of millions of immigrants right now; and perhaps many more of us if we and the courts do not reign in this terrible regime.
Please consider sharing this interview through your networks as it is a great primer for those wanting to better understand how our immigration system works, and why what Trump is doing now is such a threat to all of us.
Trump Continues To Decline In The Polls - We got the new Morning Consult weekly track yesterday and Trump’s job approval came in at 47% approve, 51% disapprove, another 2 point weekly drop. This is down from 52%-44% in Trump’s first week, a 12 point drop. In the poll he is now deeply underwater with independent voters, 39%-56%. This data is consistent with the other weekly trackerwe follow, Economist/YouGov, which came in at 45%-50% last week, 11 points off Trump’s first week. That poll included this additional remarkable data showing Trump’s 2024 coalition unraveling in real time, leaving him a far weaker political figure than he was just two months ago:
Trump Job Approval - Change Since Jan 20th
Overall 49%-43% to 45%-50% (11 pt swing against Trump)
Hispanics 42%-47% to 31%-61% (25 pt swing against Trump)
18-29 y/os 48%-43% to 44%-48% (9 pt swing against Trump)
Independents 41%-45% to 37%-54% (13 pt swing against Trump)
Trump Job Approval For Jobs and The Economy - Change Since Jan 20th
Overall 49%-37% to 45%-49% (16 pt swing against Trump)
Hispanics 41%-36% to 34%-61% (32 pt swing against Trump)
18-29 y/os 51%-33% to 42%-51% - (27 pt swing against Trump)
Independents 43%-35% to 36%-52% - (24 pt swing against Trump)
A Government Of Crooks, Liars And Fools - On Saturday I shared with you a riveting conversation I had with author/journalist Casey Michel about the historic and unprecedented corruption of the Trump era. One of the things we discussed was how Trump’s team were manicly dismantling the US government’s global anti-corruption regime. Yesterday we learned this:
The Trump administration is exempting tens of millions of companies from an anti-money-laundering law that was passed during President Donald Trump’s first term to crack down on anonymous shell companies that facilitate financial crimes.
The move, which the Treasury Department formalized in a new rule on Friday night, effectively dismantles a key part of the law, the Corporate Transparency Act, which requires businesses to reveal their true owners to the government. And it’s poised to open a new front in the long-running battle over the future of the law.
Small business groups are cheering what they see as a long-overdue rollback of onerous regulations. But some law enforcement groups are preparing to lobby the administration to change course, warning that the move will cripple efforts to track illicit finance.
The new rule slashes the number of businesses required to report beneficial ownership information. Treasury had previously estimated that 32 million entities would be subject to the requirement. Under the revised policy, the department says only about 11,600 foreign firms operating in the U.S. would have to disclose their ownership on average each year….
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But proponents of the law say the Trump administration is erasing years of progress toward combating illicit finance.
The administration’s exemption of all U.S. companies “is tantamount to nullifying the statute,” said Ian Gary, executive director of the FACT Coalition, adding that the decision is “very unlikely to be upheld in court.”
Who might challenge it remains unclear. But state attorneys general and local law enforcement agencies, which were set to gain access to the Treasury’s database of business ownership records, could argue they have suffered harm.
“Access to beneficial ownership information is a necessity for prosecuting crimes,” Nelson Bunn, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said in a statement. The new rule, he said, “threatens to deny law enforcement the vital information they need to pursue illegitimate business fronts that jeopardize U.S. national security and public safety.”
Law enforcement groups have already begun discussions with Treasury and White House officials and plan to escalate their efforts, said Frank Russo, who lobbies on behalf of several law enforcement organizations as vice president at Modern Fortis.
Law enforcement officials are open to “appropriate exemptions” and efforts to reduce compliance burdens on small businesses, Russo said. But they want to ensure that federal, state and local investigators retain access to critical ownership data.
On Friday we learned that due to the downsizing and weakening of the IRS, the US government expects to bring in hundreds of billions less in revenue than it would have otherwise every year (WaPo, gift link). This staggering loss of revenue, something Treasury warned the Trump team about during the transition, will make DOGE one of the most expensive government programs in US history costing the US trillions and trillions of dollars:
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.
The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.
To be very clear DOGE has found no waste, fraud or abuse; is breaking things not making them more efficient; is in the process of corruptly giving Musk tens of billions of dollars of new contracts; has stolen the private data of many millions of Americans; has broken hundreds of laws in its wrecking of the US government; and now we learn that it will not save money at all but will be among the costliest government programs in history. On top of this, the Trump budget plan will also cost the government trillions over ten years, meaning that all this “fiscal responsibility, cleaning up Washington” stuff coming from Trump may be the biggest scam the American government has ever attempted to pull on its people. Trump and Musk are leaving our government broken and broke, not clean and efficient while making us poorer and them richer.
In related news here’s the jawdropping lead story in the Washington Post this morning, Social Security is breaking down:
And then there is the unbelievable fiasco we learned about yesterday - the Signal chat.
First, noted author and frequent TV commentator David Rothkopf is joining me live at 215pm ET today to discuss this extraordinary national security disaster. Look for an email right at 215pm ET and click through to join us. A recording of our talk will be shared here in the late afternoon for those who cannot make it live. To prep read David’s new Daily Beast essay, Why Signal Leak Shambles Isn’t Even Trump’s F—wits’ Worst Foreign Policy Move So Far.
To read the story that generated this unbelievable scandal - which everyone here should - you will need to create an account in the Atlantic. It is worth it. Trust me, read this story. No second hand account can do it justice. Here’s a link.
Washington wakes today flabbergasted at what will become known as an act of historic stupidity, buffoonery, recklessness and betrayal. Three main takeaways for me this morning: 1) the American people can never trust this team again to look out for their interests on the global stage; 2) Hegseth and Nat Security Advisor Waltz must go, immediately; 3) Everyone on the Signal chat committed a serious crime, including the Vice President, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. An excerpt from the Atlantic story:
Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.
All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.
Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.
There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.
“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.
“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.
Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)
Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.
For further confirmation of how dangerously unprepared, naive and over their heads Trump’s foreign policy team is watch this clip of Trump “super-negotiator” Steve Witkoff unconsciously admitting how badly Putin played him, and then shockingly claiming that the genocidal maniac “is not a bad guy.” Every day our adversaries cannot believe their good fortune that such a bunch of fucking idiots ended up running our once great nation……
All of this together - the corruption, the Muskian wrecking ball, the trampling of the Constitution, the inhumane treatment of our fellow Americans, the selling out of America to Russia, a government of crooks, liars and fools is why it is long past time for our leaders to open up that Second Front we’ve been talking about here and take it to Trump with everything we got.
Join me and David Rothkopf at 215pm this afternoon to discuss it all via Substack’s new live feature (look for an email at 215pm). Paid subscribers should sign up for our 8pm ET get together tomorrow. And for those wanting to support Hopium a reminder that an annual paid subscription here is 10% off through the end of March, and there you can find info on how to give group or gift subscriptions too.
Now, let’s get to work.
Recommended Hopium Actions and Campaigns - While we have made many recommendations to Democrats in recent months for how to raise our game and fight harder and smarter, let’s focus on our current four recommended sets of actions for how we can best channel our love of country and our frustrations into concrete action today:
1 - Fight The Trump-Musk Attack On Our Government, Our Privacy And Our Constitutional Order - Encourage your Senators and Representatives to 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 two weeks ago). Encourage them to hold a daily morning press conference to more aggressively challenge Musk’s ransacking of the USG that is making America less prosperous, less healthy, less safe and far less respected in the world.
2 - 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.
3 - Our Work In The States, The Spring Offensive - I am going to rework this section in the next few days as so much has happened since we called on our community members to organize in the 17 most vulnerable Republican House seats. Rallies and protests have exploded across the country. 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.
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.
Next, for those wanting to do more traditional political/campaign work we have four Hopium-backed efforts we're rallying behind in addition to our new House Hopium 7:
Help Susan Crawford and Ben Wikler in Wisconsin - As a way of honoring our good friend Ben Wikler and supporting this critical April Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, I’m asking our community to donate to the Wisconsin Democratic Party today. The money raised here will make sure Ben has the resources he needs to keep his team in place so they can support this critical statewide race. I know many of you are already deeply involved here - thank you all.
Watch our new discussion with Susan and Ben. Thanks to a huge surge of support in recent days we have already raised $197,000 from over 2,400 of you, blowing past our original $50,000 goal and now our stretch goals of $100,000, $125,000 and $150,000. We are now upping this to a new superduper-stretch goal of $225,000 by March 31st. Amazing work 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. You can give to all 7 through a single donation to our new ActBlue page and learn more about this important effort here. We’ve already raised over $31,000 towards our $50,000 March 31st goal - thank you all!
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 lines of the Trump/Musk assault on the federal government. We’ve raised more than $68,000 so far towards our March 31st goal of $100,000 - thank you all. Let’s keep working it for Abigail!
Get Anderson Clayton And The NC Dems Fight The GOP’s Attempt To Steal A Supreme Court Seat - Last week we began a campaign to raise $50,000 for 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. Watch my new interview with Chair Clayton from last week to get an update on the fight over the Supreme Court seat and her plans to win elections and counter Trump this year. We’ve raised $26,000 so far - thank you all!
Help Get Ken Martin Off To A Strong Start - In this time of extraordinary challenge we need a strong DNC. Two weeks ago we set a goal of raising $100,000 by March 31st for our new Chair. Incredibly, over 1,400 of you have donated over $102,000 so far. Watch my interview with Ken about what he wants to do with the DNC, and chip in whatever you can to help Ken and the new exciting team at the DNC get off to a strong start!
Keep working hard all. Incredibly proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon
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