June 17: A Day of Defiance
Millions hit the streets last Saturday to protest Trump, the president’s tank parade ended up as a fizzle — and a note about the future of this newsletter
Hey there. We hope you’re safe and well after an eventful weekend.
We’ll cover the tremendous protests from Saturday and headlines from the last few topsy-turvy days, but first, a programming note: this will be the final installment of this newsletter for now.
We’ve always meant this project as an experiment — a place where we can help people understand how President Trump challenges our rights and threatens our American values and way of life. To look around the United States on Saturday at thousands of No Kings rallies, organized by people from veteran organizers to first-time activists, that message has been received loud and clear.
There’s plenty more work to do, and we plan to keep refining even more effective ways of informing and activating folks. Make sure to check the links at the end of this issue — you can use those to hop over to other platforms where we’ll continue to provide value and understanding that we can all use to fight back together.
Twenty-two weeks into Trump’s second term, life in the U.S. seems ever more chaotic. Every new day seems to come with a blitz of headlines. But what have we learned? As we look back, a few lessons seem to come through clearly — so let’s run them down.
The Rundown: Lessons Learned Edition
Our Wallets: Picking Our Pockets to Pay Off the Richest
As Senate Republicans hustle to complete their gloss on the House-passed ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ guess who looks likely to take it on the chin again? You probably know: regular stiffs, such as the people covered by federally supported health insurance. The baseline set by the House version of the bill would cause 16 million people to lose their health coverage, but the Senate reportedly plans to clamp down further on funds for Medicaid by cutting federal reimbursements to state governments. (And since 49 states have to balance their budgets annually, the most likely result is fewer people covered.)
It’s another brick in the wall of evidence that the Republican plan will reward the wealthiest people in America at our expense. Causing millions to lose their health coverage, cutting billions from food and housing assistance, piling trillions onto the national debt: for the goal of delivering millionaires and billionaires a grand payday, these are sacrifices Trump and Republicans are willing to make.
The math, laid out with charts by University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers, is unmistakable:
Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs — still caught in an on-again/off-again state — continue to promise higher costs for everyday Americans. Last week the Department of Commerce announced that Trump’s steel tariffs would apply to basic household appliances like washing machines, dishwashers, and other equipment that finds regular use in most homes. Pretty sure nobody voted for that …
Our Leadership: Retreating From the World
Tariffs are the most obvious component of a priority Trump has pursued with zeal since January: blowing up treaty alliances, trading relationships, immigration flows, and other signifiers of U.S. relationships with other countries. “America First,” in Trump’s mind, must also mean America alone.
As the president’s ideas become federal policies, the U.S. has left an empty chair at international convenings. The upcoming G20 summit of wealthier economies in South Africa? Trump has banned all American participation in it. The World Health Organization? The U.S. has withdrawn from it. International aid programs? Trump (with help from his estranged sidekick Elon Musk) has scrapped them — with lethal results for people around the world.
Trump either doesn’t think about or doesn’t care that the most likely significant long-term effect of his retreat from the world stage is not that “America isn’t taken advantage of anymore” — but rather that former allies and other nations will move on without us. Even as Trump traveled this week (albeit briefly) to the G7 summit in Canada to represent what remains the world’s largest economy, he no longer received the deference given to U.S. leaders who thought of our interests as intertwined with other nations’ common interest in greater prosperity and security — or indeed, much deference at all.
For Trump’s Circle, a Carnival of Corruption
It makes sense that Trump has little concern for international affairs — he and his family are too busy raking in big bucks by trading on presidential power. Monday saw the newest example: a promised gold-encased smartphone, offered with optional ‘Trump Mobile’ cellular service, that the Trump organization claims will be manufactured in the U.S.:
Through a host of schemes — from a crypto company, World Liberty Financial, to the marketing of Bibles embossed with Trump’s signature — the president has raked in a federally disclosed income of $600 million since January. You can be sure that he, and his family, are just getting started.
The president has even turned the pardon power into a tool for self-enrichment — springing people from jail, pending sentences, and looming investigations in seeming exchange for investments in Trump’s family businesses. Last week, The Financial Times brought one such Trump pay-to-play arrangement to light:
An American financier invested $100 million in the Trump family’s flagship bitcoin project just nine weeks after a probe into his crypto business was dropped by the Trump administration.
DRW Investments, a Chicago-based company founded and controlled by trader Don Wilson, bought almost 4 million shares in Trump Media & Technology Group last month, according to public filings, as part of a funding round for the purchase of more than $2 billion in cryptocurrency.
The investment in TMTG, which is behind the Truth Social app and controlled by the US president’s family, makes DRW among the biggest financiers of the group’s crypto bet.
Trump’s children are just as zealous about capitalizing on access to the Oval Office. The president’s oldest son, Donald J. Trump, Jr., has moved far along with plans to open a members-only club catering to clients willing to ante as much as $500,000 a year to brush shoulders with Trump confidants. “Critics are worried,” the Washington Post notes, that the club “might not simply be a luxurious hangout for the kind of jet-setting titans (for whom a six-figure membership fee may not be a meaningful expense), but as an ante-up for those looking to get in good with the administration and its allies.”
America has thrived in part because people can come here — as immigrants, as investors, as inventors — and expect a steady rule of law, with no need to worry that officials might abuse their power to coerce bribes. Not only have Trump and company upended that arrangement, going even so far as to sideline public-corruption prosecutors and sharply ratchet down enforcement of anti-bribery laws; they’re also rewriting norms by flaunting their crookedness — training people to expect and and even celebrate leaders’ use of public office to enrich themselves. You know who’s cut out of that arrangement? You and me.
Wreck First, Ask Questions Later
Trump’s glee in corruption is rivaled by his team’s reckless destruction of institutions, programs, and services that they loathe or don’t even seem to understand. The administration’s blunderbuss approach to running the government came into sharp relief over the weekend, when the Voice of America (VOA) — after conflict broke out between Israel and Iran — recalled the furloughed Farsi-language reporters and staffers who had provided an objective news service to the Iranian people.
Deep reporting from The New York Times on Monday highlighted the administration’s careless touch even with programs as vital as Social Security — where Trump’s estranged sidekick, Elon Musk, sidelined veteran administrators to put a 21 year old in charge of combing for evidence of fraud:
The hell rained down on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other public-health institutions by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provides perhaps the clearest example of the administration’s wanton destruction. Kennedy embraces jumbled ideas about medicine with origins that date to ancient Greece — y’know, 2,000 years or so before Louis Pasteur discovered germs. Yet Kennedy stands empowered, as a senior official in the federal government, to sideline modern medical science in favor of his crank theories.
The consequences for the nation’s world-leading medical-research sector have been stark. The administration has canceled whole swaths of research devoted to reducing health inequities along gender and racial lines — in the process killing off research “to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage.”
Even small federal gestures of decency toward the nation’s heritage or to marginalized peoples can’t seem to elude the administration’s spite. Just last week, the White House junked a salmon-protection agreement with Native tribes in the Pacific Northwest — withdrawing a $1 billion commitment to replace dam-generated energy with renewable sources, and guaranteeing a revival of lawsuits that have mired federal government agencies for decades.
The American People Don’t Want This …
Enriching the wealthy, cutting ties with the rest of the globe, collecting bribes and kickbacks, destroying life-saving research and painstakingly built programs: do Americans feel they signed up for all this? Public polls give a clear answer: no.
Approval of Trump’s handling of the presidency has hit new lows over the days since he deployed military forces to Los Angeles. Strikingly, public reaction to his anti-immigrant policies — typically an issue on which support for Trump is at its most resilient — is now dragging him down:
The waning of public support for the president was on open view when his birthday para— sorry, the U.S. Army 250th Anniversary Parade — marched through Washington this weekend to sparse crowds. Even against the baseline of an ordinary summer day of tourism around the sights of the nation’s capital, the streets skirting the monuments and along the parade route looked notably deserted:
Forgive us — we’re taking a moment to tilt back in our chairs and laugh.
… and We’re Showing Up to Fight Back
In glorious contrast to the desolate scene in Washington, streets around the U.S. were thronged with protestors on Saturday — brought out by a call to show Trump that in America, we don’t do kings. The pictures of crowds gathered in squares, holding signs, and making chants speak for themselves:
Protests in suburbs and farther-flung communities were just as packed:
Even in St. Paul, where residents were shocked by the early-morning assassination of the Democratic former state House Speaker and her husband, Minnesotans defied the shadow of violence to rally at the State Capitol.
How many Americans took to the streets and raised their voices? Firm numbers will take a while to calculate, but data journalist and poll-watcher G. Elliott Morris has offered an initial estimate that runs well into the millions.
If nothing else is clear at this moment, Americans’ defiance — and their willingness to stand up — seems guaranteed to continue.
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People Fighting Back
The woman who defeated now-White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to become class president at Santa Monica (Ca.) High School is still contending with him — as an immigration lawyer fighting Trump and Miller’s mass-deportation campaign.
Cynthia Santiago remembers being on stage with Miller in 2002, when they were both running for student government at Santa Monica High School at the western edge of Los Angeles. She recalls that Miller was as much a deliberately provocative attention seeker then as now. … “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” [Miller asked students].
Santiago might have been more surprised if she had not heard him speak dismissively in class about diversity, affirmative action, welfare, non-English speakers and anyone else who did not completely assimilate to his notion of being an American, all of it derived from right-wing writings. The reaction of his fellow students to his truncated speech presaged the fate of his candidacy.
“They booed him off,” Santiago recalled on Wednesday. “He lost.”
Get ‘im, Cynthia.
Politicians Standing Up
Senator Alex Padilla (D) of California — who on Thursday was manhandled out of a press conference being held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and handcuffed by FBI officers — used the focus on him following that assault to draw attention to the Department of Homeland Security’s treatment of the targets of its ‘mass deportation’ push:
California Governor Gavin Newsom continued to call out the president and Republicans in Washington — lighting into the ostentatiously pious House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for suggesting that Newsom should be subjected to political violence:
Before we go, a quick thanks from us to you for your readership — and a clip of soldiers with the unfortunate duty of parading through Washington on Saturday marching to perhaps the least appropriate soundtrack imaginable: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s anti-Vietnam War anthem “Fortunate Son.”
Who picked that? Really?
That’s all from here. Follow us on Bluesky, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube for updates on Trump’s attacks on our wallets, rights, and families — and for a look at how Americans continue to stand up for their country and fight back against this administration.
Mahalo—
the TrumpVersusUS team