Wisconsin

Stock Market losses wipe out nearly $2 trillion

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 3, 2025

Trump’s announcement last night that he was placing high tariffs on countries around the world came after the stock market closed, but it drove stock futures dramatically downward. Overseas, global markets also plunged. Today, before the stock market opened, Trump posted on his social media site: “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Fittingly, it was former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who rang the bell opening the stock market today. Giuliani represented Newsmax, the right-wing media channel with ties to Trump. As soon as the market opened, stocks fell straight down. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1,679 points, falling about 4%, its biggest fall since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020. The S&P 500 fell 274 points, or 4.8%. The Nasdaq Composite fell more than 1,050 points, or almost 6%. The losses wiped out about $2 trillion.

Trump justified the tariffs by declaring that the U.S. is in the midst of a national emergency, but this afternoon he left the White House for a long weekend in Florida, where his private Doral resort outside of Miami is holding the first domestic golf tournament of the season of LIV Golf, which is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.

Trump’s tariffs are not an economic policy. Tariffs are generally imposed on products, not on nations. By placing them on countries, the White House was able to arrive at its numbers with a nonsensical formula that appears to have been reached by asking AI how to impose tariffs—a suggestion so outlandish that I dismissed when I saw it last night, but economist Paul Krugman today identified it as being a likely possibility. CNBC’s Steve Liesman said: “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along….”

Today, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted: “It’s now clear that the [Trump] Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”

Editor of The American Prospect David Dayen notes that there is no apparent policy behind the tariffs, no thought, for example, as to whether it is even possible for the U.S. to ramp up the kind of domestic manufacturing Trump claims to want. While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS, “You’re going to see employment leaping starting today,” in fact, both automaker Stellantis and appliance manufacturer Whirlpool announced layoffs because of the tariffs.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that building and establishing a new plant in the U.S. will take a minimum of three to five years even if investors are inclined to support one, but Victoria Guida reported in Politico that corporate executives are saying they cannot invest in manufacturing until they can project costs, and Trump is far too unpredictable to enable them to do that with any confidence.

Dayen writes that Trump’s tariffs are essentially sanctions on the rest of the world. His behavior is, Dayen says, “no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.” Dayen notes that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued last year for using the extraordinary power of the U.S. economy to force other countries to do as the U.S. wants, creating a U.S. sphere of influence through economic pressure.

Extending the comparison to a mob boss, Dayen notes that “protection money” could take many forms: “curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants.”

Trump’s son Eric appeared to confirm that the tariffs are a shakedown when he posted: “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with [Trump]. The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.…” Foreign affairs journalist David Rothkopf was more graphic: “These aren’t tariffs,” he wrote. “They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.” Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman suggested that if a government refused to negotiate with Trump, that country’s major companies should deal directly with Trump, exempting that company’s products from tariffs in exchange for a new factory or some other investment Trump wants.

Trump is overturning the past 80 years of global trade cooperation in order to concentrate power in his own hands. Congress began to take down the tariff walls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it passed the 1934 Reciprocal Tariff Act enabling the president to lower the high tariff rates Republicans had established with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. That tariff had worsened the Great Depression. With the turn away from tariff walls and toward international cooperation, global trade has fostered international cooperation and created the rising prosperity of the twentieth century.

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said today. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States…is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”

Ending systems of global free trade dovetails with the idea of getting rid of the international rules-based order created after World War II. After that horrific war, world leaders decided to create a system of international institutions, like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide ways in which countries could protect their sovereignty and work out their differences without going to war.

Trump’s threats against other countries, including Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, are a direct rejection of those principles. That rejection reinforces the Trump regime’s embrace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which invaded Ukraine first in 2014 and again in 2022 and is trying to justify grabbing Ukrainian territory. Under Trump, the U.S. is siding with Russia rather than Ukraine in this war in a stunning rejection of the institutions and principles that have stabilized the globe since World War II.

Putin is now threatening NATO countries, prompting them to prepare for defense. “We are not at war,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said recently, “but we are certainly not at peace either.”

Some of those advocating tariff walls and forcing our allies to maintain their own defense suggest that creating a U.S. sphere of influence is the best way to counter a rising China, but there is no doubt that the concept of such spheres caters to the worldview of Russian and Chinese leaders. As scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder points out, weakening the U.S. and its allies also benefits Russia by increasing Russia’s power relative to other countries, making it easier to establish the multipolar world Russia wants.

The Trump administration is also undermining post–World War II democracy at home. Last night, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) identified Trump’s tariffs as “a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.” Murphy pointed to Trump’s shakedown of prominent law firms, four of which he has attacked with executive orders. He also pointed to Trump’s attacks on universities, withholding government funding until their administrators bow to MAGA’s ideological demands.

Sarah D. Wire of USA Today reported that earlier this week the Institute for Museum and Library Studies was effectively closed, and over the past two days the administration told libraries across the country that grants awarded last year have been terminated. Today the administration cut federal grants for arts and humanities across the country: museums, archives, historic sites, educational projects, and so on—all defunded. It also cut this year’s funding for National History Day, a popular history program in schools that is already underway.

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services slashed jobs and programs in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even as measles continues to spread and two Louisiana infants have died of whooping cough. Today, news broke that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is implementing a hiring freeze even as flash floods and tornadoes just today have killed at least seven people in the Midwest to the mid-South.

The plan, as Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, is to destroy the current government, business, educational, cultural, and scientific pillars of the United States in order to replace them with a new system, although there is tension between the Project 2025 wing of MAGA and the technocrats’ wing over whether that new system will be a theocracy or a technocracy. In either case, it will be an authoritarian government in which power and money concentrate in a very few hands.

The administration’s crusade against the state of Maine shows what this looks like. After Maine governor Janet Mills told Trump the state would follow state and federal law rather than bow to his demands, acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek canceled contracts permitting Maine parents to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborns from the hospital and for Maine families to report deaths from funeral homes. Told such a change would risk identity theft and wasteful spending, Dudek told the agency to do it anyway in order to punish Mills.

After an outcry, Dudek backtracked, but yesterday the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced she was freezing federal funds for Maine educational programs. The Trump administration would stand against “a leftist social agenda,” Rollins wrote.

The problem for Republicans is that while the sort of inflammatory language Rollins used has been a staple of the party for decades, the MAGA agenda itself is not popular. Only about 4% of voters who knew about Project 2025 wanted to see it enacted, and billionaire Elon Musk, who runs the “Department of Government Efficiency” that is slashing through government programs, is so unpopular that his support for a candidate in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election actually appeared to have hurt, rather than helped, that candidate.

Now party members have to deal with the fact their president has tanked the economy by enacting what the National Review says is likely the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history. Now countries around the globe are imposing reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. while also negotiating their own trade agreements that cut out the U.S. Those agreements are not only for products like soybeans, but also for weapons, a development the administration is protesting.

Republican members of Congress could stop Trump at any time. In the case of tariffs, they could simply reassert their constitutional power to manage tariffs. If they choose not to and the economy doesn’t recover and thrive as Trump keeps promising, voters can be expected to hold them, as well as him, to account.

Right now Republican leaders appear to be hoping that Trump’s attempt to extort other countries will work and the tariffs will be short lived. But their enthusiasm for that strategy seems to be well under control.

Today, Bill Ackman resorted to defending the tariffs by posting: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side you are crazy.”

“Golden age of America?” Markets plummet after Trump announces tariffs

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 2, 2025

Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy. That economy was, the magazine said, “the envy of the world.” Today, stock market futures plummeted after President Donald J. Trump announced that he will impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with higher rates on about 60 countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices, including China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea, as well as the European Union.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost more than 1,000 points upon the news, falling by 2.5%; the S&P 500 dropped 3.6%.

Trump’s erratic approach to the economy had already rattled markets, which dropped significantly in the first quarter of this year, and consumer confidence, which recently hit a twelve-year low. Trump waited until the stock market had closed today before he announced the new tariffs. Then, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, he said: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. But it is not going to happen anymore.” Instead, he said, tariffs would create “the golden age of America.”

“Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted. “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.” “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” posted former vice president Mike Pence.

Trump claims he is imposing “reciprocal tariffs” and says they are about half of what other countries levy on U.S. goods. In fact, the numbers he is using for his claim that other countries are imposing high tariffs on U.S. goods are bonkers. Economist Paul Krugman points out that the European Union places tariffs of less than 3% on average on U.S. goods, while Trump maintained its tariffs are 39%.

Krugman said he had no idea where that number had come from, but financial journalist James Surowiecki figured out that the White House “just took our trade deficit with [each] country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.” He called it “extraordinary nonsense.” Washington Post economic writer Catherine Rampell posted that she was reluctant to amplify Surowiecki’s theory that the tariff rates were based on such a “dumb calculation,” but then the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it.

Certain observers in business had apparently persuaded themselves that Trump didn’t really intend to raise tariffs very much and that his many vows to do so were simply rhetoric, since economists agree that tariffs are a tax on consumers and will raise inflation and slow down growth. Today’s tariffs are higher than expected, and business leaders are alarmed.

JPMorgan tonight said that they “view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macro economic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts” and that “these policies, if sustained, would likely push the US and global economy into recession this year.”

Economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed. He told David J. Lynch and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post: “In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States…. In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

But not from every other country. While Trump imposed tariffs on Australia’s remote Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited except by wildlife like seals and penguins, it did not put tariffs on Russia. A different financial shift lifted sanctions against senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, to permit him to travel to Washington, D.C., today to meet with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff for what Alex Marquardt, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene of CNN refer to as “talks on strengthening relations between the two countries as they seek to end the war in Ukraine.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted tonight that the tariffs make no economic sense because “[t]hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” Murphy suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”

Murphy warns that “[t]he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…[s]o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”

There is also Trump’s apparent fascination with President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, at a time when high tariffs concentrated wealth in the hands of industrialists while workers and farmers, as well as their families, faced injury, hunger, and homelessness from dangerous working conditions, low wages and commodity prices, and seasonal factory closings.

Trump has frequently claimed those years were the nation’s wealthiest, and today he helped to explain his focus on that era when he referred to the 1913 Revenue Act, a law that has angered the right wing for decades. That act began the process of replacing the high tariffs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with an income tax, thus shifting the burden of funding the treasury from ordinary Americans through tariffs to wealthier Americans through the income tax. At least some of Trump’s tariff plans seem tied to his enthusiasm for tax cuts on wealthy individuals and corporations.

But in trying to reestablish the financial patterns of the late nineteenth century—patterns that led to profound economic instability in the U.S., including economic crashes—Trump is undermining the system of global trade that has fostered international cooperation since World War II. CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar told CNN’s John Vause: “This is Trump saying…I am going to overturn globalization as we’ve known it.” She added: “I’m hoping it doesn’t push the U.S. and the world into recession.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes the important point that “Presidents have no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever.” The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did today, declaring a “national emergency to increase our competitive edge, protect our sovereignty, and strengthen our national and economic security.”

That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but so far, Republicans have declined to do so. Today the Senate rebuked Trump by passing a resolution to block his tariffs on Canadian products, with four Republicans—Susan Collins (ME), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Rand Paul (KY)—joining Democrats to pass the resolution. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is unlikely to take the measure up.

Cory Booker makes history

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 1, 2025

Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.

For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.

Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that 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.”

On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.

Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”

“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”

Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.

“These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?”

Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.”

He emphasized the power of the people by calling out South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who until today held the record for the longest Senate speech: a filibuster he launched in 1957 to try to stop the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes, but unlike Booker, who used his time to make a powerful and coherent case for reclaiming American democracy, Thurmond filled time with tactics like reading from an encyclopedia.

But, Booker noted, Thurmond’s attempt to stop racial equality failed. After he ended his filibuster, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and Black Americans and their allies used it to demand the equal protection of the law, including the right to vote. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” Booker said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”

“It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with: John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him, to love this country so much, to be such a patriot that he endured beatings, savagely, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something. He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it, but there’s one thing that he would do, that I hope we all can do, that I think I did a little bit of tonight.

“He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let’s get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong.

“Let’s get in good trouble.

“My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.”

According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

The people spoke today in special elections. Republican candidates in Florida won by about 14 points in each of two U.S. House races, but just five months ago, Republicans won those seats by 30 and 37 points. It appears that voters are angry at the Republican Party.

In Wisconsin, the state supreme court race showed a similar dynamic. The candidate endorsed by President Trump and backed by more than $20 million from Elon Musk, lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford. Musk had campaigned in the state for Crawford’s opponent, handing out two $1 million checks and saying that the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.”

Crawford won by about 10 points.

“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said in her victory speech, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won.”

Restricting the vote is now a central part of Republican policy

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 5, 2023

In yesterday’s election in Wisconsin, the two candidates represented very different futures for the country. One candidate for the state supreme court, Daniel Kelly, had helped politicians to gerrymander the state to give Republicans an iron lock on the state assembly and was backed by antiabortion Republicans. The other, Janet Protasiewicz, promised to stand behind fair voting maps and the protection of reproductive rights.

Wisconsin voters elected Protasiewicz by an overwhelming eleven points in a state where elections are usually decided by a point or so. Kelly reacted with an angry, bitter speech. “I wish that in a circumstance like this I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” he said. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.”

Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin reinforces the polling numbers that show how overwhelmingly popular abortion rights and fair voting are, and it seems likely to throw the Republican push to suppress voting into hyperdrive before the 2024 election.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed the idea of “ballot integrity” or, later, “voter fraud” to justify voter suppression. That cry began in 1986, when Republican operatives, realizing that voters opposed Reagan’s tax cuts, launched a “ballot integrity” initiative that they privately noted “could keep the black vote down considerably.”

That effort to restrict the vote is now a central part of Republican policy. Together with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project, The Guardian today published the story of the attempt by three leading right-wing election denial groups to restrict voting rights in Republican-dominated states by continuing the lie that voting fraud is rampant.

The Guardian’s story, by Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey, explores a two-day February meeting in Washington organized by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and attended by officials from 13 states, including the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. At the meeting, participants learned about auditing election results, litigation, and funding to challenge election results. Many of the attendees and speakers are associated with election denial.

Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring.

That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!”

Republican efforts to gain control did not end there. On Twitter today, Johnson noted that she had “just had a visit from the head of HR and the House ethics lawyer,” who told her “that if I am expelled, I will lose my health benefits,” but the ethics lawyer went on to explain “that in one case, a member who was potentially up for expulsion decided to resign because if you resign, you maintain your health benefits.”

The echoes of Reconstruction in that conversation are deafening. In that era, when the positions of the parties were reversed, southern Democrats used similar “persuasion” to chase Republican legislators out of office. When that didn’t work, of course, they also threatened the physical safety of those who stood in the way of their absolute control of politics.

On Saturday night, someone fired shots into the home of the man who founded and runs the Tennessee Holler, a progressive news site. Justin Kanew was covering the gun safety struggle in Tennessee. He wrote: “This violence has no place in a civilized society and we are thankful no one was physically hurt. The authorities have not completed their investigation and right now we do not know for sure the reason for this attack. We urge the Williamson County Sheriff’s office to continue to investigate this crime and help shed light on Saturday’s unfortunate events and bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. In the meantime, our family remains focused on keeping our children healthy and safe.”

The anger coming from losing candidate Kelly last night, and his warning that “this does not end well….[a]nd I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it’s going to need it,” sure sounded like those lawmakers in the Reconstruction years who were convinced that only people like them should govern. The goal of voter suppression, control of statehouses, and violence—then and now—is minority rule.

Today’s Republican Party has fallen under the sway of MAGA Republicans who advocate Christian nationalism despite its general unpopularity; on April 3, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who has destroyed true democracy in favor of “Christian democracy” in his own country, cheered Trump on and told him to “keep on fighting.” Like Orbán, today’s Republicans reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority.

Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state.

Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same.

Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges.

And yet, in the face of the open attempt of a minority to seize control, replacing our democracy with Christian nationalism, the majority is reasserting its power. In Michigan, after an independent redistricting commission redrew maps to end the same sort of gerrymandering that is currently in place in Wisconsin and Tennessee, Democrats in 2022 won a slim majority to control the state government. And today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a bill revoking a 1931 law that criminalized abortion without exception for rape or incest.