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Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

The Expanding Attacks on Speech
Blocking legitimate journalists, deleting language, canceling GOP town halls, cutting university funding—these are all connected

Censor, purge, defund: how Trump is following the authoritarian playbook on science and universities
I have mapped 35 of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and universities to the authoritarian playbook – and consider what it means for attacks still to come

ICE arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University protests, his lawyer says
Ann Coulter questions effort to deport Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil
Judge blocks removal of Palestinian activist who was detained at Columbia University
Mahmoud Khalil is being held at a Louisiana detention center, his attorney said.

In The Cross Section, Paul Waldman notes that the point of the right wing’s dehumanization of political opponents is to dismiss the pain they are inflicting. If the majority of Americans are not really human, toying with their lives isn’t important—maybe it’s even LOL funny to pretend to take a chainsaw to the programs on which people depend.

“In the near future I want to do what has not been done in 24 years — balance the federal budget, we’re gonna balance it,” Trump declaimed in his speech before a joint session of Congress last week.

Trump is obviously lying, as his spending and revenue proposals do not suggest he’s even attempting to make a good faith effort to balance the budget. Nor is this new. Republicans have for decades — at least since Reagan — mounted up massive deficits while claiming to put forward responsible budgets.

As part of the Trump administration’s frenzied push to end remote work arrangements for federal government workers, the Veterans Administration (VA) is forcing therapists to provide mental health counseling in open cubicles. The therapists, who work for a network of clinical resource hubs operated by the VA, are now required to work in-person, but the facilities do not have enough private offices. The VA therapists are deeply concerned about the ethics and legality of conducting therapy sessions from a cubicle, according to internal VA chat logs obtained by Popular Information.

5 reasons veterans are especially hard-hit by federal cuts
The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning to cut 83,000 jobs, slashing employment by over 17% at the federal agency that provides health care for millions of veterans, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press on March 5, 2025.

Betrayed and Abandoned: Trump’s War on Veterans
Slashing the VA, Gutting Benefits, and Breaking America’s Promise to Those Who Served

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will be conducting its own study into whether vaccines cause autism, despite reams of past research failing to prove any links.

In 2019, President Trump claimed a power that was functionally limitless.

“I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he babbled to the rapturous crowd at a rally held by Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s rightwing brainwashing shop.

Article II of the Constitution did not give him the right to do whatever he wanted as president, and it still doesn’t. But the Justice Department is making that argument in private, and may well do it in court today to defend the illegal takeover of a tiny government agency that supports African development.

Tariffs Are Bad. Tariff Uncertainty Is Even Worse.
A broad-based tax on imports would harm the US economy, but delays and exemptions for favored interests hurt US competitiveness.

Stock Market Today: Dow, Nasdaq Fall After Trump Doesn’t Rule Out Recession
Treasury yields drop, while the WSJ Dollar Index hovers at its lowest since November

Stock Market Comeback Erased: S&P 500 Sinks To 6-Month Low As Trump Says Don’t ‘Watch The Stock Market’

Here’s why banks don’t want the CFPB to disappear

Will Wall Street turn on Trump — and Elon?
The vibes are changing on Main Street domestically and abroad, and now in the stock market, too.

Dispatch From The Society of Black Ex-Traders
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t look good.

Trump Promised Americans Booming Wealth. Now He’s Changing His Tune.
President Trump’s sweeping promises are running headlong into the reality of governing.

As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump promised an economic “boom like no other.”

But eight weeks into his presidency, Mr. Trump is refusing to rule out a recession — a striking change in tone and message for a man who rode widespread economic dissatisfaction to the White House by promising to “make America affordable again.”

On Friday, President Donald Trump stopped sharing American intelligence with Ukraine, and Russia responded by immediately stepping up its strikes on civilian Ukrainian targets.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk explained the situation succinctly: “This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians. More bombs, more aggression, more victims.”

But Tusk was being diplomatic. He was maintaining the pretense that Trump was merely foolishly or wishfully appeasing Putin. Trump isn’t acting foolishly or wishfully. He wants to help Putin.

Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. He then cut millions of dollars in federal support to house poor people.

He didn’t make any suggestions about solving homelessness, mind you; he simply wants the problem moved out of sight. It’s a classic Republican strategy, and will work about as well as putting a Band-Aid over cancer.

It wasn’t always this way in America.

They entered the 1920s with a growing sense of paranoia and a feeling that they had been robbed of something.

To deal effectively with a major problem, you have to hunker down and ready yourself for a long-term struggle. This was one of the great lessons learned by Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the Civil Rights Movement. There was little that was spontaneous about their movement, and that was a good thing. Preparation for actions was essential. In the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s, which essentially was a year-long siege of the white power structure of the city, elaborate efforts were made to secure communications, enlist churches, organize carpools to provide alternative transportation, and raise funds to pay for the gas for the cars being used.

Marco Rubio has put the final nail into the USAID coffin.

“After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID,” Trump’s secretary of state wrote on X early Monday morning. “The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.

The rift between Elon Musk and Republicans is about to get worse. The New York Times reports that in an extraordinary Oval Office meeting, President Trump’s senior agency heads fought bitterly with Musk. They are angry with him because they themselves know the cuts by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency will produce all kinds of fiascoes at their agencies. Tellingly, they expressly don’t want to take the blame for what Musk is unleashing! We talked to New Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff, who has a good new piece about some of DOGE’s hidden impacts. She explains why all this reveals deep schisms inside the administration that will only get worse for Trump. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

After all, a CR that maintains Biden-era budget numbers for another six months isn’t some big win for the Republicans. It actually shows how weak they are. If they were stronger, they could ram through a budget through reconciliation that would be filibuster proof.

The bigger problem remains that, under the proposed CR, Trump and Musk will be quietly granted greater license to abuse their power and reallocate funds without congressional approval. That’s the “Trojan horse” aspect of the CR.

And yet, it’s fair to assume that Musk would love a government shutdown, too. That way his DOGE hackers could be designated “essential” and continue their takeover while everything is shuttered. Many Democrats do not want to see that happen. In any government shutdown, it’s always the federal workers who suffer the most.

That’s why the CR is likely to pass in some form, assuming it gets out of the House. But it’s crucial to understand that just because the government stays open under a CR with Biden-era funding levels doesn’t mean the money will be spent as before. In fact, we should assume that it will not be, and that Trump and Musk will seize this opportunity to assert even more control of public funds.

1. Opposition town halls
2. Daily briefings
3. The shadow cabinet

Ontario slaps 25% tax increase on electricity exports to US in response to Trump’s trade war

The U.S. president on Thursday backed down on his plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican and Canadian products “out of respect for President Sheinbaum,” he said. It was the second time in two months that the Mexican leader won a delay of the penalties.

Sheinbaum is no longer just López Obrador’s protégée

Sheinbaum is consolidating her power

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Monday she has revoked the security clearances of former top Biden administration officials as well as the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation.

She also announced that former President Joe Biden is no longer receiving the President’s Daily Brief, a summary of intelligence regarding issues and events around the world.

Empathy should be easy to achieve but is often difficult to execute, especially when we can find multiple reasons to withhold it—whether due to justified anger, personal hurt, or moral clarity.

I often think of Shirley Chisholm, who famously visited segregationist George Wallace after he was shot. Chisholm was a trailblazing Black congresswoman, an outspoken advocate for the historically marginalized, and someone whose very existence challenged the racist power structures Wallace championed. Why, then, would she show him compassion?

Because she understood something fundamental: violence is always a terrible culmination of events. Whether it’s inflicted upon Black activists fighting for their civil rights or upon a conservative strongman clinging to a racist social order, violence corrodes our shared humanity. It is always wrong.