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The second Trump presidency could represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War. How do we keep hope alive once we’ve truly grasped the danger(s) we face?
This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We’ve been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That’s how it’s been with the group we call “Group” (or sometimes “A Closed Group with No Name”). We’ve seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.
We’ve been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the “Global War on Terror”), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we’re facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group’s latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump’s new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days, and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.
Finally, I thought: If I can’t talk about him with these women I’ve known for more than 40 years, who can I talk with? I watched them, sitting in that living room nibbling on corn chips and guacamole, and finally asked, “Do you think we’ll look back on this time and know that it was the beginning of the end?”
The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat.
I didn’t even need to say the end of what: of American democracy; the rule of law; and the hopes of people of color, women, and queer folk? “The end” alone signified all of that and so much more.
“Absolutely we will,” was my partner’s instant response. The other women agreed that Trump’s second term represents a genuine break with the democratic history of this country; that yes, it’s as serious as that. We sat for a moment in overwhelmed silence.
It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important—say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late. This was the experience of many German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. For at least a century, their forebears had been assimilated into German life. It took time to recognize the individual stages of an extermination plan whose full horror only came into focus over a period of years.
The expression “paradigm shift” derives from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn’s pioneering analysis of the way scientific disciplines change over time. As he saw it, a paradigm is a shared fundamental understanding of how a complex phenomenon (physics, biology, a nation) works. A paradigm shift represents the abrupt replacement of one theory (like Newton’s theory of gravity) with something profoundly different (Einstein’s theory of relativity).
The point is that a paradigm shift in this country wouldn’t just be a tweak to business as usual like a change in the way the filibuster works in the Senate. It would be a wholesale upending of the constitutional balance of powers. In this case, it would potentially mean relocating the power to make, assess, and execute the law (powers now resting in three distinct branches of government) all in the person of the president. It would be a change from democracy to autocracy, or as President Donald Trump has implied, to dictatorship. And it’s happening now, in front of our very eyes.
Moving toward dictatorial control is the fundamental purpose of issuing a seemingly endless series of executive orders that clearly violate existing laws—for example, those governing the firing of inspectors general. It’s certainly true that Donald Trump doesn’t like the very idea of inspectors general. We should remember that from his first term. He wants a free hand to run all the federal departments and agencies without watchdogs getting in the way. But far more importantly, that executive order violated the 2022 Inspector General Act, as a former Pentagon inspector general under Trump toldNational Public Radio:
Well [Trump’s order] didn’t follow the Inspector General Act, which requires the president, if he wants to remove an inspector general, which he’s allowed to do, but he must give Congress 30 days notice before the removal, and the substantive rationale with detailed and case-specific reasons for each removal.
The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat. Similarly, he has used executive orders to attempt to freeze funds already approved by Congress under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. As the Senate Committee on Appropriations has pointed out, it is Congress, not the president, that holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. In its 1975 decision in Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court denied presidents the power to impound funds Congress has appropriated.
The same logic applies to Trump’s order, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to impose a 90-day halt to all U.S. foreign aid, civilian and military, except to Israel and Egypt. Again, this is an arrogation of congressional power by the president, and its point was undoubtedly as much to assert presidential power as to effect some as-yet-undefined foreign policy goal.
And that logic will undoubtedly apply to a flood of other previously unimaginable actions Trump will most likely take between the writing and the publication of this article.
The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer contains a long prayer known as the Great Litany. A litany is a ritual petition to God, a list of actions congregants “beseech” God to take. The Great Litany is most often recited during Lent, a 40-day period of reflection leading up to Easter. If you’re standing or kneeling, it can seem to go on forever. And just when you think you might be nearing the end, along comes a whole new section requiring a whole new response. As time passes, you may find yourself covertly glancing at your watch. It’s hard to stay focused through it all.
English speakers also use “litany” in a secular sense, as a metaphor for a long list of anything, especially when recited or recorded. We speak of “a litany of grievances,” “a litany of excuses,” or even “a litany of gripes and grudges,” which was how Vanity Fair described some of Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks.
In the single week since that inauguration, observers have already produced excellentlitanies of his many distressing actions. Although lists of these are available online, there is no space to catalog them all here. In fact, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because the list grows by the day, even the hour. Since I sat down at my desk this morning, Trump or his appointees have fired attorneys who worked with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on criminal cases against him, rescinded job offers to 200 bank examiners who were to have been employed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC, which insures our bank accounts), and launched an investigation into the prosecution of the January 6 rioters. And that’s just in the last six hours.
The Episcopal Great Litany, a long list of human concerns, leaps from topic to topic, petitioning for benedictions ranging from protection from “lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine” to a request that God “illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly.”
Some might argue that this last request was at least partially fulfilled in the sermon of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the first woman elected to her position, who, at the ecumenical service held on the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, had the effrontery to address the new president in these words:
Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.
And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.
Trump, of course, instantly demanded an apology.
In another bit of the Great Litany that seems particularly apt at the moment, supplicants plead with the Divine, “so to rule the hearts of thy servants, the President of the United States, and all others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth.”
If only.
The list of Trump’s post-election actions is its own kind of litany—not of benediction, of course, but of horror. Like the Great Litany, it, too, leaps from topic to topic. To name just a few:
Any one of those actions would have been sufficient to fuel a whole news cycle on its own. But that’s now inconceivable because before we, or the media, can focus on one Trump absurdity, another takes its place in the battle for our attention. To wit: in the last 15 minutes (while I was writing this), The Washington Postreported that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ordered a freeze on all federal grants, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” And now, in a head-snapping twist, the OMB seems to have rescinded the order—for the moment.
The Cambridge Dictionary offers an additional definition of litany: “a long list spoken or given to someone, esp. to someone who has heard or seen it before or finds it boring.” Taken together, this apparently endless flood of outrages reflects the infamous observation of Trump’s adviser (and exoneree) Steve Bannon during his first administration: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
And indeed, the litany of Trump’s autocratic actions has already flooded the zone with shit. The question is: How are we to navigate all that excrement? Can we do more than simply hope to stay afloat? Is there any way we can actually dam the floodtide? Or will we sigh and say we’ve seen it all before and find it boring?
At least we can try to build that dam. A few weeks ago, I wrote about some national organizing we could join or support, efforts that are crucial because—yes!—we have to think big. But we also have to think small. I’ve been surprised by how many writers have responded to Trump’s reelection by urging people to strengthen their own local connections with friends, neighbors, and family, while focusing on those among us who are most in need of protection from immediate attacks. In a way, that’s exactly what the members of my group of lesbians have done for each other all these years. It’s what the members of my own household of chosen family do for each other daily, when we leave gifts of food or books, when we plan together to protect immigrant friends at risk of being scooped up on the way to work.
All of that effort, big and small, must be sustained by hope. How do we keep hope alive once we’ve truly grasped the danger(s) we face?
I now ponder that question daily. This morning, one answer arrived in a newsletter by email, from a group called the Faithful Fools. The Fools live in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where they accompany the other residents in their daily lives in a neglected and despised neighborhood. Being Foolish, they don’t ask whether they can be of any use or recognize the puniness of their efforts compared to the edicts of a president who would be king. This morning’s newsletter brought me these words:
Plenty of people have asked the question, “After all these years, what keeps you going?” And we say, “Well, we keep going because we are Fools, of course.” This isn’t to say that our work is ridiculous or without foundation. It’s to say that we understand how uncertain the future is and we can’t lose our way when the road gets rocky and tiresome…
We aren’t foolish enough to believe that hope alone carries the day or soothes the soul. No, we believe it’s the other way around; we believe that actions driven by justice, solidarity, and compassion are what sustain hope. Small gusts of good will are acts driven by justice and compassion and solidarity, and they are what soothes our broken hearts.
In short, in the age of would-be King Donald Trump, we sustain our own hope by doing the small, essential things that sustain the hope of others.
Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing!
Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.
To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.
In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress. The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.
While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.
Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.
Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.
When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk.
Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.
Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.
Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!
When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.
Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.
What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs. They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children. Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.
Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.
Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.
The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.
The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.
The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.
The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.
The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult. Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.
Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.
The unforgiving reality of cash bail transforms “innocent until proven guilty” into “guilty until proven wealthy.”
When I was 17, I was charged with a crime I didn’t commit.
During an argument, I was arrested and wrongfully accused of threatening someone with a firearm, which I hadn’t done. My bail was set impossibly high, far beyond what I could afford, especially as a father to a newborn son. Forced to wait for my day in court behind bars, I came to a heartbreaking realization: If I or someone in my family had been wealthy, I could have walked free. Instead, I was denied my presumption of innocence and ripped from my family because I couldn’t pay for my freedom.
The American criminal justice system, which promises equal justice under the law, punishes poverty, tears families apart, and devastates communities like mine.
We need a system where release is based on case-by-case assessments of safety, not wealth.
Sadly, my story isn’t unique. It reflects a system that routinely prioritizes wealth over justice, especially for Black Americans. As someone who personally faced the burdens of cash bail and now works to alleviate that burden for others through The Bail Project—a national nonprofit providing free bail assistance and pretrial support to thousands of low-income people every year—I firmly believe that we have two systems of justice: one for the wealthy and one for everyone else.
This system incarcerates over 60% of people arrested before trial simply because they can’t afford bail. Safety, not wealth or race, should determine who is held or released before trial. Yet, wealth often dictates freedom. Many accused face nonviolent, low-level charges and pose no risk to public safety, but the unforgiving reality of cash bail transforms “innocent until proven guilty” into “guilty until proven wealthy.”
When someone is arrested, a court can impose a cash bail amount: a sum of money required for their release before trial. If you have the funds, you’re released from jail, no matter the circumstances. If you don’t, you’re locked up. Sometimes for weeks, months, or even years.
Judges tasked with setting bail often make these critical decisions in less than five minutes, relying on limited information and implicit biases that disproportionately affect Black defendants, during hearings that rarely require evidence, and often proceed without legal counsel for the defendants. As a result, Black defendants are detained more often than white defendants facing the same charges. On average, courts impose bail amounts nearly $10,000 higher for Black individuals than their white counterparts.
This disparity has devastating consequences, especially in communities of color. Being jailed before trial makes it harder to fight your case, leading many to plead guilty, even if they’re innocent, just to get out. It risks jobs, housing, physical health, and child custody while exposing legally innocent people to unsafe and traumatizing jail conditions.
Consider Christopher, a Black Gulf War veteran who was arrested for alleged possession of a controlled substance. His bail was set at $1,000: an insurmountable sum for him. Christopher was forced to wait in jail for six weeks before his case was dismissed. During that time, he lost his job as a house painter and his PTSD worsened. All of that suffering, and it was for nothing.
Then there’s Ashley, a Black woman eight months pregnant when a scheduling error led to her arrest for a nonviolent misdemeanor. Unable to pay a $11,500 bail, Ashley spent three weeks in a filthy, overcrowded jail cell, sleeping on the floor without a mattress. She lost her job, her apartment, and was forced to sleep in her car with her newborn daughter after giving birth.
We need a system that ensures fairness and protects safety for everyone. We need a system where release is based on case-by-case assessments of safety, not wealth.
Fortunately, alternatives to cash bail exist and work. Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail in 2023, and judges now determine who needs to be detained pretrial based on risk to others, not money. This shift has kept communities safe while reducing the number of people needlessly incarcerated pretrial. Nationally, more than 30 cities have safely minimized the use of cash bail, according to research from the Brennan Center for Justice.
This Black History Month, as we reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go to achieve racial equality, let’s not overlook the urgent need for bail reform. Ending cash bail is more than public policy; it’s a moral imperative.
It’s time to put an end to cash bail and write a safer, fairer future for everyone.
We need to organize in states and congressional districts across the country to pressure members of Congress to stand up to the Musk-Trump agenda.
The Musk-Trump administration has made its agenda perfectly clear: dismantle the government, then loot and privatize it. It is executing a carefully planned oligarchic coup, illegally firing workers, freezing funds and exerting power. Yet for several weeks, most congressional Democrats are operating as if it’s business as usual. It’s become clear that it’s up to us to push our leaders to defend our food, water, climate and democracy.
What the Musk-Trump administration is doing is totally unprecedented. Trump has empowered the richest man on earth to - without congressional approval or oversight - take over and shut down entire agencies. Musk and his team have taken control of key processes and data at the Office of Personnel Management (the HR department for the federal government), the Treasury Department and at General Services (federal buildings). And Musk-Trump is illegally shutting down congressionally-approved programs like USAID, with even more far-reaching plans targeting the Department of Education, FEMA and more.
On issues that impact our food and water, Musk-Trump has encouraged the resignation of all federal workers charged with food inspection and water safety. And it froze huge amounts of federal funding, causing chaos before a federal court intervened. They have also used manufactured public concern about DEI excesses to gut all environmental justice programs. This includes dismantling the environmental justice units at the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Climate Corps and the USDA Forest Service Climate Change Resource Center. They have also scrubbed hundreds of pages of information from websites related to food, public health, and the environment.
It may feel overwhelming, but all well-meaning people who care about the future of the country and the planet must engage now.
These are extreme, rapidly unfolding and unprecedented actions. They require a forceful, unified and powerful Democratic response—one that says this is totally unacceptable, and that every tool in the toolbox will be used to block, delay or otherwise obstruct the Musk-Trump destructive agenda. But with a few exceptions, Democrats have so far been muted, divided and ineffective, doing little to stand in the way of this terrible agenda advancing.
For example, the same day that Trump announced the federal funding freeze, the Senate confirmed Treasure Secretary Bessent with just 29 Democrats opposing him. Days later it advanced Interior Secretary Burgam with just 17 Democrats in opposition. On the same day that Musk’s team gained access to the federal payment system at the Treasury Department, Senate Democrats on the Agriculture Committee unanimously voted to advance Rollins for Secretary of Agriculture, and seven Democrats (plus independent Angus King) voted to confirm fracking industry CEO Chris Wright as Energy Secretary.
This is not how an opposition party should operate in the face of an unfolding crisis of democracy.
The threat to our democracy is too great. Bold action is required now.
Clearly we can’t wait for Washington Democrats to lead the path forward—it’s up to us. It may feel overwhelming, but all well-meaning people who care about the future of the country and the planet must engage now. We need to organize in states and congressional districts across the country to pressure members of Congress to stand up to the Musk-Trump agenda. This means pressuring Democrats and also Republicans. We must reject business as usual until they stop their illegal and unprecedented actions.
Food & Water Watch has been on the ground already numerous rallies in recent weeks, generating thousands of emails and phone calls, and achieving impactful media coverage. And we aren’t alone - there are other organizations mobilizing actions across the country as well. This is all really important, and more is needed.
As the protests have ramped up, we have begun to see some Democratic leaders stepping up to organize rallies in front of the federal agencies being gutted and using measures to delay the appointment of nominees. But it is not nearly enough and we must continue to push them to do even more. The threat to our democracy is too great. Bold action is required now. It’s on all of us to provide the required leadership if we’re going to protect our food, water, climate and the country we all love.