29 things people can do
- Protect Democracy has documented the authoritarian playbook. They also have a great weekly email that provides context for making sense of what is happening and what can be done.
- To learn what it means to be hopeful in dark times and how people have gotten through them in the past, check out Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, or On Tyranny by Tim Snyder.
See this Changemakers Alliance newsletter issue of some of the pushback of women’s voices.
Ongoing Round-up of the Republican Administration (as of 2/21)
Heather Cox Richardson, 2/20 — According to Linda F. Hersey of Stars and Stripes, about one third of all federal workers are veterans, while veterans make up only about 5% of the civilian workforce. … Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported today that Republican lawmakers are panicked over this weekend’s firings, concerned about the fired veterans and the firings of USDA and CDC employees who were dealing with the spreading outbreak of bird flu that is threatening the nation’s poultry, cattle, house cats, and humans.
Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon of CNN reported that nearly 78% of the announced investments from the Inflation Reduction Act in initiatives that address climate change went to Republican congressional districts. Today the Financial Times noted that House Republicans are in the position of cutting the law that brought more than $130 billion to their districts.
Rebecca Solnit — also widely read among our community, as is Heather Cox Richardson — has started a newsletter called “Meditations in an Emergency.” Excerpt from her February 2 launch: “They do not understand what the federal government does, how health care and environmental protection at home and across the world protect the whole, including the economies that their wealth is inseparable from, how wrecking the economy will put them at odds with even many among the wealthy and powerful.
“They do not understand that the reason they need to be authoritarian is because they are at war with the will of the people (not all the American people, of course, but a whole lot of us). Much of what they are doing is wildly unpopular and will only become more so. They do not understand power itself, and the limits on theirs. They do not understand that they cannot strong-arm all of us into abandoning our beliefs, values, commitments, and knowledge.”
Bullying as strategy in the GOP administration, from a federal employee, 2-14
Heather Cox Richardson, 1/10: Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush. In a statement, Biden noted that when he took office, economic forecasts projected that it would take years for the country to recover fully from the effects of the coronavirus shutdown. In fact, the U.S. economy has grown faster and created more jobs than any other country with an advanced economy. Working-age women are now employed at record levels, and the gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level on record.
Maria Popova offers timeless insights in her Marginalian newsletter. She quoted Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) after the 2024 election:
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.
Women and LGBTQ+ Rights
Rebecca Fielding-Miller, a UCSD public health scientist, noted that it was illuminating to see which words hadn’t been flagged as problematic. “I guess a word that’s not on here is ‘men’, and I guess a word that I don’t see on here is ‘white’, so I guess we’ll see what’s going on with white men and what they need.”
Trump pledged to roll back protections for transgender students. They’re flooding crisis hotlines
AP: Transgender youth in the United States have been flooding crisis hotlines since the election of Donald Trump, who made anti-transgender themes central to his campaign. Many teens worry about how their lives could change once he becomes president. The Rainbow Youth Project, which serves LGBTQ+ young people, has received more than 5,500 calls to its crisis hotline in the past 10 days — nearly 2,000 more calls than it typically gets in an entire month. Trump’s administration can swiftly start work on one major change: It can exclude transgender students from Title IX protections. Those affect school policies on students’ use of pronouns, bathrooms and locker rooms.
Racism
Neo-Nazi march in Columbus Ohio
November 17, CNN: Ohio officials have denounced a small contingent of neo-Nazis who paraded Saturday afternoon through a Columbus neighborhood – waving flags featuring swastikas and shouting a racist slur – in the latest public demonstration by White nationalists in recent years across the United States. The number of events organized or attended by White supremacists in the United States hit a new high last year at 282, the anti-hate Anti-Defamation League reported. Marches and public gatherings of White nationalists or people with Nazi flags have unfolded in recent years in Nashville, New Hampshire, Boston, Arkansas, Virginia, Washington, DC, and Michigan.
Health
The 19th, 2-7, on USAID and the impact on women and LGBTQ+ globally…
“According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, if no contraceptive care is provided by USAID in 2025, that will lead to about 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,000 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth complications.”
on the impact of Republican Administration on gender-based violence services
“According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, if no contraceptive care is provided by USAID in 2025, that will lead to about 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,000 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth complications.”
“The administration’s ongoing review includes several grant programs that benefit groups working on domestic violence and gender-based violence, according to a memo from the Office of Management and Budget of about 2,600 programs, which was reported by the New York Times.”
Environment
Many counties across California’s rural Central valley – home to much of its roughly $59bn agricultural industry – backed Trump in the last election, forming a red strip at the heart of the blue state.
“It is almost mind-boggling that this has happened,” said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science and water expert at California State University, Fresno, calling the act a “ridiculous blunder”.
Experts, who were left scratching their heads in the aftermath, have found no justification for the order. The reservoirs were not at risk of overflowing and irrigation isn’t necessary during the wetter winter months. These releases also didn’t support threatened ecosystems such as those in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, where contentious debates continue about flows and diversions.
Global Rights
Some Arab Americans who voted for Trump are concerned about his picks for key positions
AP 11/18: Some Arab Americans are expressing concern over Donald Trump’s picks for key positions in his next administration. The picks have been described as a pro-Israel “dream team” by a conservative group that helped with his outreach in the Jewish community. Arab Americans in Michigan helped Trump become the first Republican in over 20 years to win Dearborn, the nation’s largest majority-Arab city. Republicans who helped with Trump’s outreach with Arab Americans say it’s too soon to judge him based solely on the picks for his Cabinet and that he will be the final decisionmaker on policy. The two Trump advisers who led his outreach to Arab Americans have not secured appointments yet in Trump’s next administration.
Immigration
The Guardian, 1/13: Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker and presidential hopeful, said a section of his own Republican party was “rabid” over immigration and predicted Donald Trump’s suggestion that he could deport documented people as well as millions of undocumented people will not come to pass. … Gingrich spoke to the Guardian to mark the release of Journey to America with Newt and Callista Gingrich, a PBS documentary made with his wife about immigrants who have made major contributions to US public life. … Gingrich has put out a seven-step immigration plan, perhaps for Trump to consider. Gingrich offered another warning: “Lincoln once said that with popular sentiment, anything is possible; without popular sentiment, nothing is possible. Well, you get very many human stories about mothers or babies or children being deported, then support for the deportation program will collapse.”
AP: 1 million migrants in the US rely on temporary protections that Trump could target
More than 1 million migrants are living and working legally in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status. They are from 17 countries that the U.S. has deemed unsafe. But President-elect Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance have suggested they would scale back the use of TPS under their new administration. Advocates say that has created anxiety for those who been shielded from deportation. That includes hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela who fled political violence and economic turmoil. Haitians, Venezuelans and Salvadorans are the largest groups of TPS beneficiaries and have the most at stake.
Minnesota Politics
About the agreement finally reached between Republicans and Democrats in the House (Minnesota Reformer, 2/6)
On Mandate
Heather Cox Richardson, 1/12: On what is happening in North Carolina
When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.
Strib letter writer from Winona: The 2020 census counted 258 million people in the U.S. ages 18 and over. There were only 161 million registered voters for this election. [153, per AP data on 11/18] million of us cast votes for president, including third-party candidates; 75 million of those votes went to President-elect Donald Trump. That is not a “mandate” from the people. That is a minority ushering in Project 2025.
75 million of 258 million adults = 183 million U.S. adults did not vote for a Republican Presidential mandate
Trump on Day 1: Begin deportation push, pardon Jan. 6 rioters and make his criminal cases vanish
AP 11/12: Donald Trump has ambitious Day 1 plans for when he moves back into the White House in January. His list includes starting mass deportations of migrants and rolling back Biden administration policies on education. He’s also promising to reshape the federal government by firing potentially thousands of federal workers he believes are secretly working against him. Trump wants to pardon those arrested for their role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. And he wants to make the federal criminal cases against him go away. When Trump took office in 2017, he had a long Day 1 list, too. But not everything on that list happened right away.
Big voter turnout this year benefited Republicans, contradicting conventional political wisdom
AP 11/18: The 2024 presidential election featured sky-high turnout, approaching the historic levels of the 2020 contest. Conventional political wisdom was that Republicans struggle to win races in which many people vote. According to Associated Press elections data, more than 153 million ballots were cast in this year’s race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, with hundreds of thousands of more still being tallied in slower-counting states such as California. When those are fully tabulated, the number of votes will come even closer to the 158 million cast in 2020, which set records as the highest turnout election since women were given the right to vote more than a century ago.
Multiple election offices report receiving mailed ballots misdirected from other states
AP 11/20: The Associated Press has found numerous instances of completed mail ballots from around the country being sent to election offices in the wrong state. Many of those ballots might have been returned too late to be counted in this year’s presidential election. While a stray ballot ending up in the wrong place can happen during election season, the number of such ballots this year seems unusual. The AP found election offices in California, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico and elsewhere reported receiving completed ballots in the mail that should have gone to other states. The U.S. Postal Service said in a statement that it had been working closely with local election officials to resolve concerns, but did not address specific questions regarding the misdirected ballots.
Republican Leadership
Arwa Mahdawi, 1/11: Elon Musk has continued to post spurious claims about diversity initiatives (for example, “DEI means people DIE”), along with posts insinuating that if LAFD’s fire chief weren’t a woman, then things would be very different. Musk is not the only one trying to link wildfires to “wokeness”: all the usual suspects are at it. … Ideally, we’d just ignore these people and their bigoted – and entirely baseless – attacks on DEI (which are just thinly veiled attacks on women and minorities). Alas, we don’t have that luxury because the rightwing crusade against DEI is working alarmingly well. Companies are now slashing their DEI budgets and cutting their DEI policies in response.
Here are the people Trump has picked for key positions so far
AP 11/20: President-elect Donald Trump is filling key posts in his second administration, putting an emphasis so far on people who were his strongest backers during the 2024 campaign. Among his picks are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary. On Tuesday, he announced professional wrestling mogul Linda McMahon for education secretary, Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary and TV doctor Mehmet Oz as his choice to oversee the Medicaid and Medicare programs.
Defense Secretary
What to know about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to serve as defense secretary
AP: In picking Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense, President-elect Donald Trump has selected a military veteran and popular conservative media personality with a large following of his own. Hegseth has lobbied Trump to release service members accused of war crimes. Hegseth has served in the military, although he lacks senior military or national security experience. He joined the Army National Guard after graduating from college, serving abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
From Heather Cox Richardson: The secretary of defense oversees a budget of more than $800 billion and about 1.3 million active-duty troops, with another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions.
Trump Pentagon pick had been flagged by fellow service member as possible ‘Insider Threat’
AP (11/16): Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups. A fellow Guard member shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”
Attorney General
Gaetz pick shows value Trump places on loyalty — and retribution — as he returns to Washington
AP: Donald Trump has had few defenders in Congress as reliable as Matt Gaetz. That kinship was rewarded Wednesday when Trump named Gaetz as his pick for attorney general, turning to a conservative loyalist in place of more established lawyers who’d been seen as contenders. In announcing the selection, Trump underscored the premium he places on loyalty, citing Gaetz’s support during the Russia investigation as central to his qualifications and signaling his view that government leaders should function not only as a president’s protector but also as instruments of retribution.
Speaker Johnson says Gaetz ethics report should not be released, rebuffing senators
AP 11/16: House Speaker Mike Johnson says that he will “strongly request” that the House Ethics Committee not release the results of its investigation into ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz. The move effectively rebuffs senators who are demanding access now that Gaetz is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general. Johnson’s intervention is highly unusual, as the Ethics panel has traditionally operated independently, and seems certain to add the growing furor on Capitol Hill over Gaetz’s nomination to become the nation’s top law enforcement officer. The Florida Republican has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and said last year that the Justice Department’s investigation into sex trafficking allegations involving underage girls ended with no federal charges against him.
From Heather Cox Richardson: Gaetz is a deeply problematic pick for AG. A report from the House Ethics Committee investigating allegations of drug use and sex with a minor was due to be released in days. Although he was reelected just last week, Gaetz resigned immediately after Trump said he would nominate him, thus short-circuiting the release of the report. Last year, Republican senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told CNN that “we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with. He would brag about how he would crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”
Heather Cox Richardson 11/15: It is reported that the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old high-schooler at the time, testified before the committee.
From Minnesota Reformer, 11/14: According to Politico’s Playbook, the plan to appoint Gaetz as attorney general was last-minute and seemingly hatched without the knowledge of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Republicans were puzzled by Trump’s pick, as Gaetz is widely disliked among many Republicans on Capitol Hill and comes with a lot of icky baggage. For example, from an Atlantic profile earlier this year: “He used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” one former Republican lawmaker told me. “He’d show me a video, and I’d say, ‘That’s great, Matt.’ Like, what kind of a reaction do you want?” Conservative Star Tribune columnist Andy Brehm criticized the choice on X, saying Gaetz as attorney general “was a reckless and absurd appointment.” The response of Minnesota Rep. Walter Hudson, R-Albertville, to Brehm: “Choke on it,” he said in a now-deleted tweet.
If nothing else, the Gaetz pick served to overshadow the choice of former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — friend of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad— as director of National Intelligence. Here’s John Bolton, who once served as Trump’s national security adviser, on Gabbard: “I thought it was the worst cabinet-level appointment in history until I heard about the Matt Gaetz appointment.”
From Heather Cox Richardson 11/15: As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.”
New Government Role for Elon Musk
Prosecutor failed to show that Musk’s $1M-a-day sweepstakes was an illegal lottery, judge says
AP: A Philadelphia judge said the $1 million voter sweepstakes linked to Elon Musk was allowed to continue through Election Day because prosecutors failed to show that it was an illegal lottery. District Attorney Larry Krasner called the daily sweepstakes a scam. But Common Pleas Judge Angelo Foglietta in an opinion Tuesday said Musk’s political action committee made it clear they were choosing paid spokespeople. Musk committed more than $70 million to America PAC to help Donald Trump return to the White House and other Republicans win. He has now been tapped to help lead a government efficiency effort.
Elon Musk says he and Trump have ‘mandate to delete’ regulations. Ethics laws could limit Musk role
AP: Choosing billionaire Elon Musk to be what President-elect Donald Trump calls “our cost cutter” for the U.S. government, is not the first time an American president has empowered a business tycoon to look for ways to dramatically cut federal regulations. Former President Ronald Reagan tapped J. Peter Grace to lead a bureaucratic cost-cutting commission in 1982. But the chemical business magnate had fewer conflicts of interest than the world’s richest man does today. Musk’s SpaceX holds billions of dollars in NASA contracts. His Tesla electric car business benefits from government tax incentives and is subject to auto safety rules. His social media platform X, artificial intelligence startup xAI and other business interests all intersect with the federal government in various ways.
From Heather Cox Richardson: Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, conservative pundit George Will notes, will run up against reality. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%.
Masculinity
Heather Cox Richardson, 1/5: Investigators found two letters on a phone inside the remains of the rented Tesla Cybertruck that active-duty Green Beret Master Sergeant Matthew Alan Livelsberger exploded outside the Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump hotel on New Year’s Day. It appears that Livelsberger wrote them to explain why he was performing what he called “a stunt with fireworks and explosives.” Aside from his personal need to forget about the violence of his military career, he wrote, he wanted to “WAKE UP” service members, veterans, and all Americans.
He wrote that the U.S. is “headed toward collapse,” and he listed as reasons Americans’ moral failings and boredom, diversity programs, an economy that has permitted the top 1% to leave everyone else behind, and a weak and corrupt government.
His solution was to “[f]ocus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” he wrote. “Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He called for “[w]eed[ing] out those in our government and military who do not idealize” that masculinity and strength, and urged military personnel, veterans, and militias to “move on DC starting now.”
As Peter Baker recorded in the New York Times today, the country that President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration will leave behind when they leave office is in the best shape it’s been in since at least 2000.
No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars, murders have plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply, undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office, stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing, real wages are rising, inflation has fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment is at near-historic lows, and energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.
Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”
Education
Trump has called for dismantling the Education Department. Here’s what that would mean
AP 11/20: Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump heaped scorn on the federal Department of Education, describing it as being infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists.” He has picked Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive, to lead the department. But like many conservative politicians before him, Trump has called for dismantling the department altogether — a cumbersome task that would require action from Congress. The agency’s main role is financial. Annually, it distributes billions in federal money to colleges and schools and manages the federal student loan portfolio.
From Heather Cox Richardson 11/16: One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities. It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate.
Legal Protections
More from Heather Cox Richardson on the GOP corruption, 2/13: approving RFK to lead U.S. health policies, ignoring law
The first ten days in summation from Heather Cox Richardson, 2/2: (just one of many examples)
“With Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to. … ‘I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China — a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems — endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.’” (Follow-up in even more detail, 1-2)
- Another strong wrap-up from the weekend’s White House declarations, 1-3
- This 1-6 report covers some misrepresentations.
Heather Cox Richardson, 1/21: Inauguration day
Democratic state leaders prepare for a tougher time countering Trump in his second term
AP: Democratic governors and attorneys general are set to reprise their roles in battling President-elect Trump’s policies. They’re preparing for a tougher legal environment than they faced when he first took office eight years ago. Democratic attorneys general back then sued over Trump’s policies scores of times and had success in the courts, especially early in the term. But the courts are now more conservative, and officials expect Trump’s team to better organized this time. The legal filings probably won’t start until Trump is in office, but the meetings are already happening. And Democratic leaders are trying to ensure those disheartened by the election that they’ll push back.
Reproductive Rights
Heather Cox Richardson, 1/9: MAGA Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of antiabortion doctors for women because … “health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities.”
From Minnesota Reformer 1/6: The official 2023 abortion data from the state was released on December 31, 2024. The data show that abortions were up by 16% overall, driven in large part by a 50% surge in out of state patients. The number of patients traveling from Wisconsin more than doubled between 2022 and 2023, from 383 to 825. The number of abortion-seekers from Iowa tripled from 174 to 520. There was a fivefold increase in patients traveling from Nebraska, rising to 127 individuals in 2023.
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
