This is a president using the power of his office to punish lawyers for representing clients he doesn’t like. If that doesn’t terrify you, imagine how this precedent could be used against any law firm that helps fight government overreach. Imagine what it means for firms considering whether to help challenge unconstitutional surveillance programs, or defend whistleblowers, or protect platforms’ rights to moderate content as they see fit. The order doesn’t just attack Perkins Coie for representing Democrats — it explicitly attacks them for challenging laws in court. Think about that: the White House is using executive power to punish lawyers for filing legitimate court challenges to potentially unconstitutional laws. That’s not just an attack on free speech — it’s an attack on the very concept of constitutional checks and balances. The order’s punitive measures are carefully crafted to effectively destroy the firm’s ability to operate.
This situation has gotten a fair amount of attention from our news media, but this commentary in TechDirt gives it some of the best context I've seen – and it brims with the outrage journalists should be expressing rather than just treating it like yet another political fight.
The regime isn't just undermining the rule of law in its attack on the Perkins Coie firm. It's actively attacking it, in a way that has no precedent in our history, as even the normally far-right Wall Street Journal editorial board observes, saying Trump's vile order "breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice going back to John Adams and the Founders." (The Journal, true to form, recites some pure BS about what the law firm in question did in the past.)
The Trump-owned Republican Party, needless to say, is silent on – or cheering for – this absolute abuse of power. The Democrats still seem to be quivering in the corner, trying not to notice bad things.
So it looks like the only hope is for the legal profession itself to come to its own rescue. If America's lawyers don't – en masse – organize against this rogue regime, and simply leave it solely to one brave firm in Washington to defend Perkins Coie, you can be sure that they, and the rest of us, will someday regret their timidity now.
PubMed averages over 3.5 million usersopens in a new tab or window each weekday. According to Statista, it's the second most visited government website opens in a new tab or window after the U.S. Postal Service. Physicians, researchers, students, journalists, and curious citizens alike are all free to query the enormous wealth of information housed by the federal government – and therein lies the rub. Until recently, PubMed was a stalwart resource to us all. However, there are reasons to be extremely concerned about its continued existence.
The speculative worries in this commentary by an epidemiologist would be just that – speculation – in any times but these. The very notion of taking down, or bastardizing, "our national library for public health and medical research" would be absurd.
But the Trump regime's beyond-counterproductive dismantling of taxpayer-supported science, its handing over of public health to an absolute madman, and its visible intention to privatize everything in sight make wiping out or wrecking PubMed a real possibility. So this is the time, not after the fact, for the medical and scientific communities to be doing everything possible to a) prevent the worst from happening; and b) if that isn't possible, preserve what's there.
In reality, this is a hastily arranged partisan Republican budget that achieves much of their anti-government, anti-immigrant, pro-military agenda while paving the way for Trump to nullify whatever spending he deems unworthy. It doesn’t just tilt spending in a far-right direction, it actually abdicates congressional responsibility as the branch of government that makes federal spending decisions. Yet several Senate Democrats are thinking about passing it anyway.
The public is already visibly turning against what’s happening. We have lots of evidence for that. Democrats have this one chance to bring the matter to a head, increase the attention on something the public is already angry about. They need to take a real risk in order to change or at least slow the trajectory of the destruction.
When we talk about political turning points, here's one. Read these two smart commentaries in the American Prospect and Talking Points Memo, and understand what is at stake in the Senate's upcoming vote on a "continuing resolution" that is a mockery of honest legislation – a piece of extortion that will, if enacted, give the Trump regime everything it wants and make Congress essentially irrelevant.
The Democrats' inept and spineless leadership is running true to form these days. And the prospect that as many as eight Democratic senators will cave into the flagrant extortion from the Trump regime and its Republican elected cultists fills me with rage.
One argument for caving in makes sense in dismal way – the notion that the public will blame Democrats if the government shuts down and/or goes into default. For this belief to take root, the public would have to be convinced that up is down, because the Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Yet Democrats endless inability to state their own case, and our "news" media's endless willingness to parrot Republicans' framing on major issues leads me to believe that, just possibly, this conjuring of unreality could pay off for the most dishonest (by far) president and major political party since the nation's founding.
I do know this: If I lived in a state where a Democratic senator was thought to be wavering on whether to stand firm against extortion, I would be on the phone every day to his or her office, demanding that they locate their goddam spine – before it's too late.
[W]hat I’ve found remarkable in the past two months is how much putting the methods of private equity into the federal government looks like 1950s-style McCarthyism. So there’s both a sense of rupture, something new like private equity in power, and of continuity, something old like McCarthyism.
I highly recommend this long interview of Corey Robin in n+1 magazine. Robin is a political theorist who, in his 2004 book Fear looked at the way political opportunists and demagogues have wreaked havoc on societies by instilling fear.
The interview looks at, among other things, parallels between Joe McCarthy's evil doings and the horrendous tactics of Trump and Musk today. I promise this is worth your time.
How I put this together
This newsletter is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money. For more details, please read my About page.
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Mike Masnick
Katie Suleta, DHSc, MPH, MS
David Dayen
Josh Marshall
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