Democracy

“I run the country and the world”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 4, 2025

YIn an interview aired today on NBC News’s Meet the Press, reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In his decision in the 1993 case Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.

Welker tried again. “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”

Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ari Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “[t]he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”

Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post reported today that federal judges are becoming increasingly impatient with the incompetence of the Department of Justice lawyers who are defending more than 200 cases against the administration in court. Judges have accused DOJ lawyers of providing inadequate answers and flimsy evidence, defying court orders, and even behaving like toddlers.

Trump has said the justice system is a “rigged system” run by “radical left lunatics,” but former federal judge John E. Jones III, whom President George W. Bush appointed to the bench, agreed that DOJ lawyers have “lost a fair measure of their credibility.”

Authoritarian governments are based on the idea that some people are better than others. This translates into the idea that some people have special insight based only upon their superiority. They don’t have to listen to experts, who just muddle the clear picture the leader can see. When reality intrudes on that vision, the problem is not the ideology of the leader, it is obstruction by political opponents.

As Trump told Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about his presidencies: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

Trump himself illustrated this ideology again in the interview with Kristen Welker when he explained his trade war. “Look,” he said. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”

It is not, in fact, that simple.

This impulse to downplay expertise and concentrate power in a strongman shows in Trump’s tapping of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting national security advisor, as well as acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, Trump doesn’t think he needs experts in at least three of those four senior posts. Perhaps it also shows there are few experts still willing to work in a Trump White House.

The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.

“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.

Rosenbluth noted that “[p]ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.

Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.

Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”

At the end of March, Kennedy also vowed to study possible links between vaccines and autism, although repeated scholarly studies have shown no link. Kennedy has tapped David Geier, who does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license, to perform the study.

On Thursday, former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that both Geier and Kennedy have made significant money thanks to their anti-vax stands as they monetize alleged treatments and sue pharmaceutical companies.

In Ars Technica on April 30, microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole explored another angle to understand Kennedy’s policies. She noted that Kennedy, who is neither a doctor nor a public health expert, does not believe in the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory.

In a 2021 book, Kennedy argued the idea that microscopic viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi cause disease serves the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry that grew around it by “emphasiz[ing] targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those supporting this system, including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a proponent of the Covid vaccine, of misleading the American public.

While Kennedy appears to believe germs exist, he also claims to believe in the older theory of disease called “miasma theory,” although as Mole points out, he misunderstands that theory—the idea that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors—and really appears to believe in another old idea: “terrain theory.” Terrain theory maintains that diseases are signs that the internal “terrain” of the body is out of whack.

This would explain Kennedy’s assertion—refuted by doctors—that the children who died of measles were malnourished. As medical blogger Kristen Panthagani, MD/PhD, explains: Kennedy’s way of thinking is “the belief that infections don’t pose a risk to healthy people who have optimized their immune system.”

While underlying medical conditions certainly affect people’s health, Mole notes that “the evidence against terrain theory is obvious and all around us.” But if you think germs are less important than overall health, things like the pasteurization of milk to kill E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria bacteria—which Kennedy opposes—are unnecessary.

In 1876, German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the cause of anthrax was a bacterium. Germ theory challenged established practices In the U.S., where doctors in the 1860s during the Civil War believed the best demonstration of their skill was their bloody aprons and instruments, instruments they kept in a velvet-lined case.

In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.”

But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it.

And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago.

A cure for Trumpism: Radical empathy and radical change

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Some reflections on Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s playbook for a post-Trump America

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Anand Giridharadas 
Anand Giridharadas 

Here is a strange thing about politics. It’s a competitive arena in which people win by distinguishing themselves from others. And it’s an arena so lacking in originality. How often do you hear a political leader say something truly inspired, or even just slightly fresh? How often do you notice them actually thinking out loud, the mind still active, still with questions, not answers given to them on Post-It notes by an aide?

It is rare enough that, when it happens, it sometimes takes me a second to realize it. But that’s what happened when I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is a doctor and public health professional in Michigan who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What took me time to register was that El-Sayed was doing something more interesting than explaining why he should win his primary. He was laying out a vision for how America can finally be done with Trumpism. Like, actually done.

I don’t think I’ve heard these ideas put together like this in a package before. Each one will have its share of critics. But I think the whole package is worth a look.

The bottom line is this. A lot of what Democrats have ended up offering is contempt for Trump voters and moderate policy ideas. Dr El-Sayed is suggesting a reversal on both counts: radical empathy for Trump voters (which will rankle progressives) and radical change to eradicate the social conditions that enabled Trump (which will rankle moderates). Let them be rankled.

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1. The bully and the posse

Growing up with the name Abdul, the son of immigrants from Egypt, El-Sayed knew a thing or two about bullying.

What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.

El-Sayed argues, therefore, that the pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.

That means not lapsing into the condescension toward lay voters that feels so satisfying and, oftentimes, so justified. It means not calling them Magats and brainwashed and irredeemable racists all. It means strategically biting your tongue and opening your arms. For winning’s sake.

Confront the bully. But woo the posse.

2. Don’t prove them wrong. Get them to right

Winning movements don’t humiliate potential followers. They fix them a drink.

Trump’s chaotic and economy-quaking opening months are already causing lots of pain for his own supporters, let alone all the other people in his policy crosshairs.

Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.

Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.

Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”

What’s the difference? It’s about creating, he says, “a space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”

So next time you hear a veteran who voted for Trump complaining about benefit cuts, or a shopkeeper complaining about tariffs, or a CEO complaining about the stock market, resist the temptation to gloat. If you want to save your country from hell, invite these potential newcomers to the pro-democracy cause in. Pour them a drink.

3. America is good, actually

In some of the progressive circles Dr. El-Sayed travels in, well-earned critiques of American policy and history can sometimes devolve into contempt for America.

Progressives have a patriotism problem, often conceding the flag to those who would break the country rather than share it. They become so consumed with what is wrong with the country that they forget to say whether there is anything they love about it, and they leave the impression, sometimes true, sometimes not, that they think it irredeemably flawed, rotten at the root.

This is fine for your academic seminar. But please keep this pose out of politics. Because it’s risking the republic itself and plays right into Donald Trump’s hands.

Dr. El-Sayed, as a child of Egyptian immigrants, has a way into this issue that is compelling and worth listening to. He knows all the critiques leveled at America; he levels many of them himself. But his dualness — being from here and being from there — gives him another way of seeing.

He spoke in our conversation about going back to Egypt in his youth. He would sit with his grandmother who, he said, half-jokingly (or maybe not?), would sit with him and tell him that this cousin of his was better looking than Abdul, and this one more athletic, and this one smarter. But you know what Abdul had, his greatest gift that would matter more than any of these others? He would soon be leaving Egypt.

It’s a bittersweet truth that many of us with similar experiences of dualness know from childhood. And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself. That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe. Enjoy autocracy, guys!

What El-Sayed reminds us is that to be a progressive who comes partly from somewhere else can be to hold two competing ideas in tension: that America is flawed, and is built on ideals and ways rare in history and worth defending.

“America sucks” is a lazy shrug too often heard in progressive organizing spaces, and it is weirdly provincial in its obliviousness to how life is in other places around the world, and what El-Sayed is pointing toward instead is a progressive patriotism.

“I love America because I know exactly what my life would have ended up as if I didn’t, but for the accident of history, get to grow up here,” he told me. And: “My critiques about America are about the difference between what she gave me…and what she has not given too many kids.”

His advice to Democrats and progressives: “Wrap yourself in the flag as you demand the flag represent the things that you believe are best about this country.”

4. Fighting Trump isn’t enough. Win the peace

Since Inauguration Day, I, like so many of you and so many across the country, have argued that Democrats need to show fight.

Boneless and skinless is fine for chicken thighs. It’s not adequate for a party that purports to be interested in beating back an attempted authoritarian breakthrough.

But El-Sayed challenged my thinking on the fight point. A former team captain in school sports before he became a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor, he pointed to scars on his face and spoke obliquely about not being afraid to fight when needed.

But he argued Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”

What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.

The mantra to fight more and fight harder, which I have touted as much as anyone, risks fetishizing fight for its own sake. The real goal, El-Sayed says, must be creating conditions where the fighting is unnecessary.

And how do you win the peace?

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5. The age of insecurity

There are a lot of ways to frame the times we live in. But El-Sayed offered one that stuck with me: this is an age of insecurity.

What’s powerful about insecurity as a grand unified theory is that it encompasses all manner of sentiments, from all sections of the political spectrum, some based in reality, others more in fantasy, but all with emotive, often explosive political effect.

Brutal hyper-capitalism creates insecurity. Not being able to afford things creates insecurity. Feeling vulnerable to crime creates insecurity. Feeling deluged across a poorly managed border creates insecurity. Racial and gender progress, when you are not well prepared for your own new role and standing, creates insecurity. New and unfamiliar ideas about history and the meaning of your country create insecurity. New technology and the threat of obsolescence create insecurity. The loss of control over one’s children and their vulnerability to outside influences creates insecurity.

You will no doubt identify with some forms of insecurity listed above, and not with others. El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.

“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it.”

So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.

And how bold should Democrats be in doing that?

6. Abolish vanilla

Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate. Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.

A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.

“You can’t beat something with nothing,” he told me. “And, love him or hate him, when it comes to Donald Trump, he’s always saying something. And the problem that folks have with Democrats is that we say nothing, but we say it with a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like somebody screaming ‘Vanilla!’ at you. You’re like, Well, I don’t know, what if I like cookie dough? What if I like cookies and cream? What if I like Rocky Road? The folks are like, ‘Vanilla! vanilla!’”

El-Sayed has advocated aggressive policy responses to America’s overlapping crises — including Medicare for All, which he wrote an entire book about. Whatever you think about individual policy questions, the larger point is worth grappling with: that the proper place for moderation is in the stance one shows to potentially politically adrift Americans. The place for unbending passion is on substantive policy ideas that would drastically change the country, drain some of the insecurity, and therefore heal the conditions that enabled Trump, so that we don’t keep returning to square one.

7. Reclaim common sense

Listening to El-Sayed, it struck me that he was pushing against both his fellow progressives and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, in distinct ways.

His message to progressives is to ditch the label. I am referring to him as a progressive, but he didn’t call himself that, although his policy vision lines up with any conventional definition. But he seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making similar arguments on her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stops.)

But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” he told me.

America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.

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Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 2, 2025

Yesterday I identified incorrectly the messaging app newly fired national security advisor Michael Waltz was using at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday as the unsecure Signal app. Joseph Cox of 404 Media identified the app as “an obscure and unofficial version of Signal” from “a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them.” As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, this third-party app introduces even more insecurity into those White House communications.

Today I spent time organizing the many tabs I had opened over the past six weeks. When they were grouped by topics, what emerged was the story of an administration that decided from the start to portray President Donald Trump as a king, creating an alternative social media ecosystem designed, as Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”

The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines. “We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

They are engaged in a marketing campaign to establish Trump’s false version of reality as truth. The White House has also brought into the press pool right-wing influencers, who are asking questions that tee up opportunities for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to push administration talking points, which the influencers then amplify on social media.

Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism are showing today in the announcement that there will be a military parade on Trump’s 79th birthday, June 14, which coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Second Continental Congress’s establishment of the Continental Army in 1775. About 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters will proceed from near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, to the National Mall at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

Trump’s attempt to empower loyalists showed today in the news that the Trump administration has reached a settlement in principle with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Trump loyalist who was shot by Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd as she tried to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby on January 6, 2021. The right-wing Judicial Watch organization had filed a $30 million civil suit on behalf of Babbitt’s estate. A 2021 internal review determined that Byrd saved lives.

The administration’s hunkering down in right-wing ideology showed as well in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s public attack on U.S. ally Germany for declaring the German right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist party that goes against Germany’s “free democratic order.” That designation is the result of a three-year investigation. It allows the government more leeway in monitoring the AfD.

Both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire White House advisor Elon Musk supported the AfD and backed it in a recent election. Rubio took AfD’s side today, writing on social media that that new designation was “tyranny in disguise.” He attacked the current government and urged Germany to “reverse course.”

The German Foreign Office responded publicly. “This is democracy. The decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”

It says something about the Trump administration that the German government is lecturing the U.S. government about the dangers of right-wing extremism.

Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan spoke to reporters yesterday, threatening Wisconsin governor Tony Evers with arrest after the governor issued a memo to state workers directing them to check with a lawyer before turning over documents or other items to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Evers said Republicans were mischaracterizing his memo, which did not direct anyone to break the law.

“We now have a federal government that will threaten or arrest an elected official, or even everyday American citizens who have broken no laws, committed no crimes and done nothing wrong,” Evers said. “And as disgusted as I am about the continued actions of the Trump administration, I’m not afraid.”

Yesterday, at an event for judges, jurists, and lawyers, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke out against the attacks on judges currently plaguing the country. Judge Esther Salas, whose son Daniel was murdered by a man who came to their house looking for her, has been calling out the recent tactic of sending pizzas to the homes of judges or their children, making the point that right-wing opponents know where they live. Furthering their attempt at intimidation, the perpetrators have been using the name of Judge Salas’s son.

Judge Jackson began her remarks yesterday by saying she wanted to address “the elephant in the room”: the attacks on our legal system. Such attacks are not just on individuals, she said, but undermine the system itself. “Attacks on judicial independence is how countries that are not free, not fair, and not rule of law oriented, operate,” she said, and she told her colleagues: “I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.” According to Laura N. Pérez Sánchez of the New York Times, the audience gave her a standing ovation.

At least some of the administration’s intimidation is an attempt to cow opponents. It does not appear to be working.

Yesterday, about 1,500 lawyers and their allies packed the plaza outside Manhattan’s federal courthouse to defend the rule of law. According to Santul Nerkar of the New York Times, they held up pocket Constitutions, reaffirmed their oath to support and defend the Constitution, and chanted: “The rule of law protects us all. Without it we will surely fall.”

Speaking in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., constitutional law scholar and U.S. representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The whole country needs a constitutional refresher.” He recited the Preamble of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

On March 6, Trump issued an executive order attacking the law firm Perkins Coie, which has represented high-profile Democratic individuals and causes, by barring the federal government from hiring the firm, suspending the security clearances of individuals working for it, barring its lawyers from entering federal office buildings, and preparing to end government contracts with any of its clients.

Rather than back down, as several other firms did, Perkins Coie sued the next day. Today, Judge Beryl Howell permanently barred any enforcement of Trump’s executive order, saying it “violates the Constitution and is thus null and void.” In her opinion, Howell noted that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.” Trump’s executive order violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to free speech, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, and the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of right to counsel.

She pointed out that the fair and impartial administration of justice has been part of the U.S. since John Adams “made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre.” “I had no hesitation,” Adams wrote in his diary, because “the Bar ought…to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.”

Today, Riley Board and Dylan Tusinski of the Portland Press Herald reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Maine reached a settlement in the state’s lawsuit against the Trump administration after it froze funding to Maine education. The administration claimed the state violates the law because it allows transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams. Governor Janet Mills said she was following state and federal law and that Trump could not change the law by fiat. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said the state had no choice but to sue in order to force the USDA to follow the law. The settlement restores the funding and establishes that the administration will go through the legally required process to pursue its policy.

When Trump tried to bully Governor Mills over the issue at a White House meeting in February, she told him, “See you in court.” Today she commented: “It’s good to feel a victory like this. I stood in the White House and when confronted by the president of the United States, I told him I’d see him in court. Well, we did see him in court, and we won.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched a different lawsuit against the Maine Department of Education that would pull funding primarily from poorer students and students with disabilities. “That’s a separate complaint they filed a few weeks ago, it’s only a one-page complaint that cites no authority, no case, no law,” Mills said. “We’ll see them in court on that one as well.”

Finally, tonight, Trump’s apparent determination to dominate the news and to project an image of leadership is overlapping with his increasingly erratic behavior. After suggesting on Tuesday that he’d like to be Pope, tonight the president of the United States posted on his social media site an AI-generated image of himself wearing papal robes and a miter.

Illinois governor: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 29, 2025

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”

In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR was speaking on July 24 to urge Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about,” he said. “If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of this depression, I answer, ‘They will if they want to.’”

Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”

In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.

But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in HIS first hundred days. Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people.

Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies.

As is typical with autocratic governments, corruption appears to be running deep in this White House. The president and his family are openly profiting from his office. And it would be hard to find a better example of a government letting cronies profit off public resources than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s relinquishing of control over the department to a DOGE operative, or of a government permitting businesses to profit from ordinary Americans than billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent creation of a master database of Americans’ information.

Trump’s dismantling of the modern American state has been a disaster. Trump spoke tonight in Michigan to tout his hope that his new tariffs will center auto manufacturing back in the U.S., but the economic chaos his tariff policies have unleashed has turned what was a booming economy 100 days ago sharply downward. That economic slump, along with Trump’s illegal renditions of men to El Salvador and the gutting of services Americans depend on, has given Trump the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years.

And that suggests another way to look at the first 100 days of a presidential term. For all that the 100-days trope focuses on presidents, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have shown Americans, sometimes encouraged by their allies abroad, pushing back against Trump to restore American democracy.

Democratic attorneys general began to plan for a possible Trump second term in February 2024, preparing for cases they might have to file if Trump followed through with his campaign promises or implemented Project 2025. California, with 5,600 staffers in its department of justice, and New York, with 2,400, carried much of the weight. They were able to file their first challenges to Trump’s January 20 executive orders on January 21. Their lawsuits, and those of others, have been so successful that they have sparked both Trump and MAGA Republicans to attack judges and even the judiciary.

Early observers of the movement to stop Trump’s destruction of the modern state argued that the opposition was too burned out to mount any meaningful pushback against a newly emboldened Trump. But, in fact, people were not in the streets because they were organizing over computer apps and at the local level, a reality that burst into the open at Republican town halls in late February as angry voters protested government cuts at the hands of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, told Republicans to stop holding town halls to stop the protests from gaining attention. So Democrats began holding their own packed town halls in the absent Republicans’ districts.

On March 20, 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Las Vegas. Unexpectedly huge crowds flocked to their rallies across the West, revealing a deep well of unhappiness at the current government even in areas that had voted for Trump.

At 7:00 on the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched a marathon speech attacking the Trump administration and imploring Republicans to defend democracy because, he said, he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.” Before he finished twenty-five hours later on April 1, his speech—the longest in congressional history—had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

The quiet organizing of the early months of the administration showed when the first call for a public “Hands Off!” protest on April 5 produced more than 1,400 rallies in all 50 states and turned out millions of people. Organizers called for “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”

On April 11, Harvard University rejected the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract.

Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

Last Sunday, April 27, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire, telling them to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” he said.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact— because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”’

And so, even as Trump tries to erase the government FDR pioneered, Americans are demonstrating their support for a government that defends ordinary people, and proving the truth of FDR’s words from 1933, that when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”