Trump Watch

Abundance co-author’s word salad about environmental review left us scratching our heads.

Over the past couple months, the Trump administration has fired approximately 2500 people at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which provides lifelong healthcare services and non-healthcare benefits such as disability compensation, home loans and life insurance to veterans. There has been widespread outrage among veterans in response to the administration’s actions thus far, but Trump and VA Secretary Doug Collins remain set on tightening the screws. 

“We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” 

These were the words of Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan after the Trump administration violated multiple court orders and deported people without due process. Are we in a constitutional crisis yet? (Yes, and this is not the first time Trump officials have refused to obey the courts; we are tracking these violations here.)

The Democratic Party could spell this out clearly and consistently for voters.

Senators shouldn’t go easy on Trump’s nominee to lead the SEC. Here are some things they ought to ask him about.

While the lion’s share of this weeks’ news cycle surrounds a potential partial government shutdown (readers of this newsletter know that the government already is substantially shut down by DOGE), Trump and his lackeys continue churning the corruption machine for their own benefit. Trump, Musk, and their underlings shamelessly use the government to get even richer while decimating the government’s capacity to help poor people, farmers, students, women, and well, all of us.

Senator Minority Leader Schumer’s stance on whether or not to accede to the continuing resolution depends in part on specific legal claims. We look at whether those claims ought to be accepted at face value or not.

Corporate profiteers want to ransack an institution older than America itself.

Even on the brink of a shutdown, the GOP remains committed to shutting down the federal government.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth right now about whether Congressional Democrats should, effectively, negotiate with terrorists. It goes like this: Congress has until March 14 to pass a bill funding the government to avoid a government shutdown. Republicans need some Democrats to vote in favor of the bill in order to get it past the 60-vote threshold in the Senate. Democrats don’t want to see millions of federal workers furloughed. But supporting the Republicans’ bill amounts to agreeing that business as usual can continue despite the coup; despite the illegal shutdown of agencies and unconstitutional impoundment of appropriated money and the flaunting of court orders. Despite, in other words, the five-alarm-fire that is our political reality.

High-energy progressives can provide a compelling daily account of everything going wrong and coordinate opposition to the Trump-Musk nightmare.

In 2017, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) led Congressional Democrats by having the highest rate of opposing votes to Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. Eight years later, however, the New York senator seems to have lost any interest in reprising that role. 

On Wednesday, February 26, Chief Justice John Roberts gave the first indication of the Supreme Court becoming involved in the ongoing legal battles over the Trump administration’s federal spending freeze. Roberts temporarily blocked a lower court’s ruling that ordered the release of nearly $2 billion in foreign aid assistance, opening the door for the full Court to weigh in on the issue.