Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, sent a letter to Harvard. They responded by grading it.
Honestly, this is the level of petty I aspire to.
bhaugen
boosted
"Dugan’s example is meant to frighten Americans into submission. But I think it might be more likely that she inspires us to subversion. Legality and morality are different things, and what Dugan allegedly did, whether or not it was technically legal, was supremely moral, and not a little bit brave:"
~ Moira Donegan
bhaugen
boosted
"Trump voters are starting to turn on him because they took him seriously when he said he would lower costs and didn’t take him seriously when he said he’d act like a dictator. And now they are realizing the opposite is true."
~ Senator Chris Murphy
#Trump #tariffs #economy #recession#StockMarket #polls #immigrants
/11
"she refused to cooperate with a secret police force that was there to violate her courtroom, disappear her defendant, and interfere with her own distribution of justice."
"Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document."
~ José Olivares
#Trump#ICE #immigrants #children #cruelty
/10
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/28/ice-unaccompanied-immigrant-children
"Dugan’s example is meant to frighten Americans into submission. But I think it might be more likely that she inspires us to subversion. Legality and morality are different things, and what Dugan allegedly did, whether or not it was technically legal, was supremely moral, and not a little bit brave:"
~ Moira Donegan
"she refused to cooperate with a secret police force that was there to violate her courtroom, disappear her defendant, and interfere with her own distribution of justice."
"Trump voters are starting to turn on him because they took him seriously when he said he would lower costs and didn’t take him seriously when he said he’d act like a dictator. And now they are realizing the opposite is true."
~ Senator Chris Murphy
#Trump #tariffs #economy #recession#StockMarket #polls #immigrants
/11
"Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower – including Trump’s own first term."
~ Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy
If he could just find a nice church pew somewhere where he could chew gum and slumber. But we mustn't forget the business, tech, and media elites who inflicted him on us.
#Trump #tariffs #economy #recession#StockMarket #polls #immigrants
/12
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/27/politics/approval-rating-trump-100-days/index.html
“'Think about the litany of mistakes.' Rachel Maddow says Trump is attempting an 'authoritarian overthrow' of the US government, but is too incompetent to pull it off."
~ Mike Sington quoted by Greg Dworkin
"The early reviews are in: Trump 2 is a box office disaster.
Trump has now matched his own record as the only president in modern history to post net negative approval ratings just 100 days into a term."
~ Taegan Goddard
#Trump #tariffs #economy #recession#StockMarket #polls #immigrants
/9
https://politicalwire.com/2025/04/27/an-unpopular-president-is-a-weak-president/
"Such investigations should go on for months before an arrest occurs. That’s because before you go indicting judges on nothing more than vibes, you should establish your case with proof beyond a reasonable doubt and present that to the grand jury."
The politics of performative cruelty, spectacle and distraction, were front and center with the arrest of Hannah Dugan — not rule of law.
"Everything the government has done since Flores-Ruiz’s detention has been heavy-handed with a clear, even expressly stated intent to intimidate the judiciary.
Let’s start with a threshold question. Why did the government not first seek a grand jury indictment of Judge Dugan, as would have been customary? That of course would have taken some time to put together."
~ Jay Kuo
"While targeting a state judge for arrest for allegedly obstructing an attempt to detain a undocumented migrant doesn’t raise the same constitutional concerns as defying federal court judges, the highly unusual handling of the case shows how it is part of a broader campaign of intimidation and eroding the rule of law. It bears noting that President Trump is expected to sign a new executive order today targeting sanctuary cities."
"The arrest of a sitting state Judge Hannah Dugan outside of her courthouse was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s two-pronged attack on the judiciary and sanctuary jurisdictions."
~ David Kurtz
#Trump#ICE #immigrants #courts #judges#HannahDugan #sanctuary
/4
https://morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com/p/judges-are-starting-to-catch-on-to
"There’s neofascism and crypto-fascism and ur-fascism and Islamofascism. But Donald Trump has given us something new: clown-show fascism.
Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity."
~ Michael Tomasky
#Trump #fascism #incompetence#ClownShowFascism
/8
https://newrepublic.com/article/194463/100-days-trump-clown-show-fascism
"He then called out the NY Times, Washington Post and Fox News by name and demanding they be 'investigated for ELECTION FRAUD' for these polls. (Trump left out the other recent polls that show the same horrible approval numbers such as Pew, Reuters, CBS and The Economist.) He added for bad measure that the media is 'ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.'”
#Trump #tariffs #economy #recession#StockMarket #polls #immigrants
/7
"All of this actually [i.e., Trump's appalling poll performance] matters. And Trump—despite his obvious cognitive slide—gets it as well. That is why Monday morning he slammed the polls on social media as 'FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS.'”
~ Dean Obeidallah
#Trump #tariffs #economy #recession#StockMarket #polls #immigrants
/6
https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/trumps-collapsing-poll-numbers-matterwhich
"All of this is against the Supreme Court’s ruling that immigrants should be able to challenge their removals in court, of course, and against ICE’s own policies to coordinate for the care of minor children with caretakers. And against human decency. Didn’t human pinworm Stephen Miller just tell everybody the administration was deporting terrorists, rapists and criminals?"
Project 2025 indulges every fantasy of Trump’s cabinet members, a coterie of private fund investors and business founders with preferential ties to the fossil fuel industry, real estate, and Silicon Valley. The manual shows how the president could open up federal lands to fossil fuel prospectors and actively obstruct any progress on climate change mitigation. It shows how the Federal Reserve could abandon its function as lender of last resort and allow for a return to free banking, with gold or some other commodity equivalent (perhaps cryptocurrency) acting as backstops to privately issued money. And it shows how the Department of Housing and Urban Development could sell off the country’s remaining public housing stock and withhold support from low-income borrowers. Meanwhile, the president is urged to dissolve the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the independent government agency charged with preventing bank runs) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the agency that recently extended anti-fraud regulation to the digital finance sector). Project 2025 represents the apotheosis of the antisocial state: a state form that has withdrawn from the task of social insurance and placed its entire administrative apparatus in the hands of a small group of uber-wealthy business partners.From https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/trumps-antisocial-state/
I admire Melinda Cooper's analysis and I think she is spot on here too. People like to call what's happening in the US some variation of "fascism", but that's not what this is. This is rule by sovereign decree, a kind of monarchy or theocracy, ruled by dogma and raw power, happy to destroy knowledge and entire sectors of the economy.
#USPol #Trump #monarchy