Trump's Favorite Time

How American citizens persevered

Anyone else looking for reassurance?.

I have a full day of filming for the documentary, Women Laughing, so I’m posting now. Our film will be funny, but it will also offer some serious notes. My usual missive, actually! So today: some worrisome news and some hopeful thoughts at the end.

Inspectors General of 17 major governmental agencies were fired by Trump in a “late-night purge” last night. The Justice Department was not one of them. When he was president in 2020, he dismissed five.

“Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse and preventing misconduct,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

Newly sworn-in Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered the end to all foreign aid from the US, except for Israel and Egypt. This includes development and military aid. But this move may be unlawful.

“Freezing these international investments will lead our international partners to seek other funding partners – likely US competitors and adversaries – to fill this hole and displace the United States’ influence the longer this unlawful impoundment continues,” a source in The Guardian said on condition of anonymity. One senior department official called this “manufatured chaos.” Agencies will have to stop work until reviewed by Rubio. Read fully in The Guardian.

This move is, to my mind, similar to Trump’s desire to end FEMA, and any governmental agencies to continue to end discrimination. He seems to want to completely cease spending money that is about helping others. He also ended the overseas program that provides funds to groups that provide abortion services.

Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Pentagon Chief last night. It was a tie vote, with Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, all Republicans, voted against his nomination. VP Vance had to break the tie.

Journalist Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian a list of ways to resist Trump’s neofascim.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist at the NY Times, wrote an opinion piece yesterday titled “How Trump Will Fail.” It begins with this:

“After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.”

Brooks writes that the era Trump seems to love in our is history between 1830 and 1899. According to Brooks, historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of that time, “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” I wrote the other day and noted that in his inaurgural “speech,” Trump said, “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Masculinity unleashed. Trump and his men want to plow their way into “saving” the world— in their minds we have gotten it all wrong for a century—and making more money.

What’s helpful to me about Brooks’ words is to remember that we’ve been here before. That time period mentioned above that Trump glorifies is about Americans conquering the west (and all the horrible history within that is ignored); but it is also about citizens, women and Black citizens, overcoming (to a degree), and pushing back. Here is Brooks’ piece, if you want to read it.

I recommend reading a book by Heather Cox Richardson on the Reconstruction era, West From Appomattox. In fact, I recommend all of her books.

We can do this.

Thanks for being here, see you tomorrow.