The first 100 days: Why we must mobilizeNow is the time for all of us to become activists and force this despicable regime out of officeFriends,Today is the start of the 14th week of the odious Trump regime. Wednesday will mark its first 100 days.The U.S. Constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray.At this rate, we won’t make it through the second hundred days.Federal judges in more than 120 cases so far have sought to stop Trump — judges appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, some appointed by Trump himself — but the regime is either ignoring or appealing their orders. It has even arrested a municipal judge in Milwaukee who merely sought to hear a case involving an undocumented defendant.
What we must do now(And what I said at Berkeley)Friends,If the Trump regime can dictate what the universities of America teach or research or publish, or what students can learn or say, no university is safe.Not even the truth is safe.If the Trump regime can revoke student visas because students exercise their freedom of speech on a university campus, freedom of speech is not secure for any of us.If the Trump regime can abduct a permanent resident of the United States and send him to a torture prison in El Salvador, without any criminal charges, no American is safe.What do we do about this?We stand up to it. We resist it. We denounce it. We boldly and fearlessly reject it —regardless of the cost, regardless of the threats.As columnist David Brooks writes in his column yesterday (I’m hardly in the habit of quoting David Brooks):It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.But what does a national civic uprising look like?
Trump’s Three Unwinnable Wars: China, Harvard, and the Supreme CourtThe Trump regime overreachesFriends,It was bound to happen.Encouraged by the ease with which many big American institutions have caved in to their demands, the Trump regime — that is, the small cadre of bottom-feeding fanatics around Trump (Vance, Musk, Vought, Miller, and RFK Jr.) along with the child king himself — have overreached.They’ve dared China, Harvard, and the Supreme Court to blink.But guess what? They’ve met their matches. None of them has blinked — and they won’t.China not only refused to back down when the Trump regime threatened it with huge tariffs. It retaliated with huge tariffs of its own, plus a freeze on the export of rare-earth elements that America’s high-tech and defense industries depend on.Harvard also pointedly defied the regime, issuing a clear rebuke to the regime’s attempt to interfere with academic freedom. The regime is trying to strike back — at Harvard’s grants, and its tax-exempt status — but the federal courts will surely reject these efforts.
This week’s winners of the Joseph Welch and Neville Chamberlain awardsHarvard University gets the Welch. Seven big law firms get the Chamberlain.Friends,Today I’d like to announce award winners in two contrasting categories.First is this week’s Joseph Welch Award.As you may recall, Joseph Welch was the brave person who stood up to Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt at the Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 — asking McCarthy, in front of the nation’s television cameras, “Have you no sense of decency?” — thereby precipitating McCarthy’s downfall.This week’s Joseph Welch Award goes to Harvard University, which explicitly rejected policy changes demanded by the Trump regime — becoming the first university to directly refuse to comply with the regime’s demands.The Trump regime threatened to revoke $256 million in federal contracts and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as multiyear grant commitments unless Harvard agreed to “reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is ‘viewpoint diverse,’” among other steps.Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, responded on Monday in a statement to the university that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
The American oligarchy is petrified by Trump’s economic chaos but careful not to criticize him directlyFriends,As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move — in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.
Sunday thoughtFighting the regime’s crueltyFriends,It’s been another grueling week.Several of you have asked me how to live in a nation whose leader has embraced cruelty as public policy. How do we inhabit Trump’s America without becoming complicit in this cruelty?Molly watched Trump sign the executive order initiating criminal investigations of Miles Taylor (who wrote an anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed describing internal resistance to Trump in his first term) and Christopher Krebs (who played a major role in undercutting Trump’s false claims about 2020 election fraud).Molly asks: Is this America?No, Molly, it is not — at least not the America we have known and loved.Others of you are thunderstruck by Trump’s cruelty toward refugees who fled violence and have been living in the United States legally but are now being forced to return to their home countries and face more violence.
This week's small reasons for modest optimism
11 from this weekFriends,In many ways this was another horrific week. Like a terrible hurricane, the Trump dictatorship is sweeping more people into its maw while further destroying our public institutions and wrecking what’s left of our civil norms.Yet this week also featured 11 reasons for modest optimism:1. Wisconsin Supreme Court voteDespite Elon Musk’s hysterical warnings, cheesehead preening, and more than $20 million spent by the Republican in the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court — much of it by Musk — it didn’t matter: Liberal judge Susan Crawford won by a remarkable 10 points, securing the court’s liberal majority. A state that narrowly backed Trump in 2024 swung sharply away. Every county in Wisconsin shifted to the left in this race compared to the 2024 presidential race.Not only did Judge Crawford pile up huge margins in Milwaukee and Madison, but she kept those of her opponent, Brad Schimel, down in Milwaukee’s predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs, where the abortion issue doubtless moved some Republican women to cross over and vote for her.Wisconsin voters recoiled at the odor of Musk. At one point, Crawford referred to Schimel as “Elon Schimel.” That said it all.Elon is proving to be a huge political liability. Trump says Musk is leaving the regime in a few weeks, but I have my doubts.
Did you miss last night’s executive order?Friends,Today is actually April 2. Your calendar may show April 1 but late last night President Trump issued an executive order making all months 30 days long. That means March actually ended Sunday, March 30, and yesterday was April 1. “This will give dangerous aliens one fewer day each month to cross our borders illegally” Trump said.“It’s more efficient to do away with the 31st’s,” added Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been cutting days out of the calendar for months.But scientists are criticizing the move. “It leaves the earth six days short of a full cycle around the sun each year,” said Dr. Earnest Won, a Nobel Prize-winning geophysicist at the Berkeley Geodesic Laboratory.In a second executive order issued late last night seemingly in response to Dr. Won, Trump mandated that the six extra days be devoted to himself.
Why Trump opponents can’t find a lawyerHis campaign of vengeance against lawyers and law firms is chilling opposition to his regime, which is exactly what he wants.Friends,Last week I wrote to you about Trump’s crackdown on the pillars of civil society — the universities, the scientific community, the media, the legal profession, and the arts — with the clear intent of intimidating them into silence.Today I want to take a deeper dive into what Trump’s crackdown on the legal community — especially large law firms in Washington — actually means.Frankly, I couldn’t give a sh*t about large law firms in Washington. They make boatloads of money for their partners. Even those whose partners are active Democrats push the party rightward as they round up campaign donations from corporate C-suites and Wall Street and urge Democratic members of Congress to move to the “center.”But Trump’s bullying of Washington law firms is cutting off the litigation lifeline for nonprofit public-interest groups to challenge his policies — which is exactly why he’s doing it.
The Big Chill
Friends,
I was talking yesterday to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say. When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts. His response floored me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, suddenly worried.
“They! The university! The government! Gotta go!” He was off.
My friend has never before shown signs of paranoia.
I relate this to you because the Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each another. It is beginning to create mass paranoia, which is exactly what Trump intends.
The chill affects the four pillars of civil society — universities, science, the media, and the law.
Start with America’s major universities. Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s demands that the university identify every demonstrator and put its department of Middle Eastern studies under “receivership” — or else lose $400 million in government funding — is chilling communications there.
The Trump regime also “detained” a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder without criminal charges merely for participating in protests at the school. The regime’s agents have also entered dorms with search warrants and announced the “removal” of two other students who participated in such protests.
Other major universities are on Trump’s target list.
Now, consider science. Trump has mounted a direct attack on the three biggest funders of American science — the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation.
