Sanity Check After Trump’s First Week Back in Office
It’s not quite pitch black—but that’s no thanks to him.
IF YOU EXPECTED THE SECOND SEASON of Donald Trump: Dictator-President to start off with doom and gloom, you were right. There was plenty to agonize about. But to my surprise, there were also other types of moments—encouraging, inspirational, even funny.
Smiles? Hope? In the middle of this mess that’s going to hurt so many people, derail so many lives, and, if we fail, erase the country we know and very much want to keep? Yup.
To be clear, Trump himself was not a source of light, by his words or, especially, his actions. But at least he hasn’t totally blotted out the sun. Yet.
As we embark on Week Two, here are some of the people and moments that got me through Week One:
• Marc Elias, the Democracy Docket lawyer who fights for voting rights, created a list of “10 things we can all do to protect democracy.” He’s constructive about what to do and not do if you think Democrats aren’t meeting the moment, and using your own personal “town square,” be it the book club, the dinner table, or social media, to have difficult conversations. He won’t stand for cynicism, and any cheer he offers is well grounded.
One surprising suggestion: Believe in the courts. The Supreme Court handles relatively few cases, “and in some of those, the Court has sided with democracy,” Elias says. And it’s not the only court. As he said on a podcast last week, “Look at the voting cases that I litigated. Look at the record, and then tell me the courts don’t matter.”
Elias also urged Americans not to accept Trump’s bravado about his powers to do things like cancel the constitutional right to birthright citizenship via executive order. Later the same day, underscoring his point, a federal judge in Seattle—a Ronald Reagan appointee—called that order “blatantly unconstitutional” and temporarily blocked it.
• Amid an opening tsunami of anti-science moves, I was thrilled to see that the Silencing Science Tracker is back, accompanied by the Climate Backtracker and the Inflation Reduction Act Tracker. Information and data will be key to documenting setbacks, setting priorities, and jump-starting a recovery. The real-time record of science degradation in the first Trump administration helped us emerge from that dark age during the Biden administration, and we can do it again. Lists. We need lists. And—thanks in this case to Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center and its partners—we will have them.
• On Day Four of Trump the sequel, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Elon Musk—the real leader of a fake department to cut government spending—and offered thirty ideas she said would save least $2 trillion (his original ten-year goal). They include negotiating better defense contracts, cracking down on health insurers who commit Medicare fraud, expanding Medicare price negotiations, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, and fully funding the IRS to catch tax cheats.
Makes sense, right? But Musk, Trump, and the GOP won’t be on board for much if any of that. They’ve been trying to protect corporations and wealthy Americans from IRS audits and higher taxes. As for contracts, Musk’s SpaceX company alone has received at least $21 billion in government contracts since its 2002 founding and would win tens or hundreds of billions more if the United States embarks on a mission to Mars.
Are we all women now?
This was not Warren’s first shock-and-awe missive to a friend of Trump. On January 16, she sent health secretary hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a 34-page letter with 175 questions she wants him to answer. I often quote her description of herself as a tennis student who kept hitting balls “over fences, over hedges, over buildings. Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had.” She’ll get her chance to question RFK Jr. on Wednesday. Two words, senator: Bring it.
• The disorienting disruptions of the first week triggered a heartening rush of creativity, wit, and speed. When Trump & Co. disappeared the ReproductiveRights.gov website, which had information on medication abortion, emergency care, abortion access, coverage, and privacy rights, the Skimm found it in the Internet Archive and republished the site a day later. A small band of volunteers started a similar backup effort when, after Trump pardoned the January 6th rioters who stormed the Capitol, including those who assaulted police, information about their cases started vanishing from the Department of Justice website. And to make sure people know about Capitol rioters living near them, writer, comedian, and radio host Dean Obeidallah proposed that states “enact laws to create a ‘Jan. 6 Registry’ in the same vein that a registry for sex offenders was established under Megan’s Law.”
• When Trump set up a snitch line for people to tattle on colleagues they suspected of doing “disguised” DEI work, writer Craig Calcaterra posted a satirical email to the snitch line, reporting suspicious hires “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records”—namely Trump, Musk, RFK Jr., JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. He ends with a plea to “Please drain the swamp!” This was a couple of days before Trump told World Economic Forum attendees that he would “once again turn America into a merit-based country.” Eye-roll emoji here.
• Trump’s scientific ignorance was an irresistible target, starting with his repeated assertions that in America, now that he’s in charge, there would be only two genders, male and female. His executive order on the subject inspired a Mashable story by science writer Amanda Yeo headlined, “Did Trump’s executive order just make everyone in the U.S. female?” She notes that in attempting to sidestep a definition of sex based on chromosomes, Trump’s order instead defines “female” as the sex that “at conception . . . produces the large reproductive cell”—a definition that could be understood to include all embryos. “All Americans are now AFBT (assigned female by Trump).” Oops. Also, Trump apparently never heard of an intersex person.
• Speaking of inspiration, the serious kind that involves sticking to principles, it came from many sources over the past week. Among them: Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., who asked Trump as he sat before her in the National Cathedral “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” then refused to apologize when he later erupted. The nearly unanimous Costco shareholder vote Thursday to keep the company’s DEI program, which the board had argued—strongly and in detail—was good for business. And Capitol rioter Pamela Hemphill, who spent sixty days in jail after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pointedly refused Trump’s pardon. Why? “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty. I don’t want to be a part of contributing to them trying to rewrite history.”
No way to block out reality
To be honest, the whole time I was writing up this list of distractions from the main event, reality kept intruding. A Democratic senator turning out to be a lifelong RFK Jr. friend and possible vote for him. A report that Trump, on a “fiery” January 15 call with Denmark’s prime minister, aggressively insisted he needed to control Greenland. The 51–50 Senate vote that gave us an incompetent, misogynist defense secretary with a drinking problem who committed firing offenses while in the military. The debut of the Logoff, a Vox publication designed to limit the space Trump takes up in your head, that lodged him in my head for hours with this headline in the first edition I received: “A major blow to police reform.” Trump firing at least a dozen inspectors general—the independent watchdogs Congress created to keep federal agencies honest—in a possibly illegal Friday-night massacre.
As a hailstorm of executive orders began raining down on America, I literally thought, what can I do to escape this? The answer that came to me was very strange: Go clean out your spice rack. So I did. And discovered that, judging from the sell-by date on a rusted tin of red pepper, I hadn’t done a ruthless spice-rack purge since 1984.
In the end, there were twenty-two spice tins and jars to recycle. It was cleansing, I admit. It felt good. For about fifteen minutes.
What turned out to be more helpful was a sampler-worthy phrase from Greg Dworkin, a friend and retired pediatrician who writes for Daily Kos. “Rage is motivational,” he told me. Yes it is! So is FOMO, and I’m going to embrace both. As “recovering lawyer” George Conway put it (and later assured me he was serious), “I think I’m going to get back into the practice of law. Seems like a lot of fun litigation is erupting, and I don’t want to miss out.”
That’s the right attitude. This is a terrible moment, but it’s also a historic and challenging one. We can’t avoid it and we shouldn’t try to. Even if we occasionally have an inexplicable compulsion to put a blanket over our head, move to another country, or dive into a household chore we’ve put off for forty years.
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