Not Mayday but May Day: Trump Craters, the Public Rises to the Occasion
There's an old saying that March came in like a lion and left like a lamb. April came in a bit sheepishly and is leaving roaring and baring its teeth, and tomorrow is May Day. Not Mayday as the distress signal,. May Day the historic red-green celebration of labor and nature, the rebel holiday, as Peter Linebaugh wrote about so beautifully, May Day as in "workers of the world unite," May Day as a big national day of protest against the regime and its lawless destruction being organized by Indivisible, 50501, and others in more than 1300 locations across the country.
In the last ten days or so consensus began building that the Trump regime is thrashing around and not exactly succeeding in crucial ways. A number of surveys showed that what the administration is doing is extremely unpopular with the public. The Public Religion Research Institute's new poll concludes, "Americans largely oppose President Donald Trump’s actions during his first 100 days in office. Most notably, a majority (52%) of Americans agree that 'President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.'"
The Washington Post reports, "President Donald Trump has proposed taking over Canada and Greenland, imprisoning U.S. citizens overseas and serving an unconstitutional third term. Most Americans say they think he’s serious about each proposal. And most -- including many Republicans -- oppose each one, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll." Trump is so unpopular abroad he's widely credited or blamed for changing the outcome of the Canadian election, in which the liberals did far better, the conservatives far worse, than seemed possible a few months ago (and Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney, is well respected by climate activists, unlike his predecessor Justin Trudeau).
At Vox, Zack Beauchamp has a powerful piece arguing that to succeed as a dictator, you do these three things: remove the limits on your powers, "compromise independent power centers such as the press and courts," and get the public and elites to comply, but "in each arena, Trump is facing effective and mounting pushback. He is routinely losing in court. He is failing to silence the media. And he is losing support among the elite as his poll numbers plummet." Beauchamp adds, "While he has certainly attempted to intimidate reporters into silence — by, for example, punishing the Associated Press when it refused to use the term “Gulf of America” — it’s clear from the headlines that most of the American press is not running scared. Since Trump took office, there has been a constant stream of negative coverage — including the sort of exposés that are most likely to hurt his standing with the public." Early in April the word "cave" as in cave to Trump's pressure showed up a lot; late in May the word "crater" as in Trump is cratering in the polls started to show up.
Opposition is spreading– all sorts of groups are organizing and showing up to resist. Everyone from autism associations to the legal profession to universities to immigration rights groups--and tons of environmental climate groups got together on a call to discuss a rumored Earth Day attack on their nonprofit status that didn't happen. But the Trumpists did decide to go after Act Blue, the fundraising central command a lot of nonprofits use. But so much of what this administration does backfires: the New Republic notes, " The Trump regime’s decision to target ActBlue has instead resulted in the left-leaning platform’s biggest fundraising day of the year."
They seem to act, again and again, as though their power is absolute and ours is nonexistent, since they don't seem to calculate on consequences– notably those of of insulting, endangering, and infuriating people and institutions who do, in fact, have power and more and more are realizing they do, they have to use it, and figuring out how to do that. In ordinary times a lot of this power is dormant, so much so people seem to forget they have it. This is no ordinary time.
People seem to be building their resistance muscles--there were protests the same day that Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested (on fairly bullshit charges of sheltering an immigrant from ICE). One striking thing I found at the Tesla Takedown protests in San Francisco and have seen in many interviews and news stories is that a meaningful number of the protesters are first-timers. It takes a lot to turn someone into a protester, but once they've crossed that threshhold they might discover they have power and a voice, and that solidarity is a beautiful thing.
This is in part because constituencies are impacted in ways they aren't before--immigrants (and anyone brown who might be mistaken for an immigrant), veterans, social security recipients, foreign students, people with autism, medical professionals, scholars, federal workers are all under attack. And yeah, dozens of autism-relation organizations got together to put out a statement against RFK's wrong and vicious statements about people with autism. I'm waiting to see more from the business community, from the financiers riding a completely Donald-made market crash to the individual businesses whose stocks and supply chains have just been devastated, but stockbrokers and captains of industry are not very good at participatory democracy of the protest and demonstrate sort.
On the other hand, Governor Pritzker of Illinois feels like the leader of the Democratic Party these days:
Many reports say that thanks to Trump's unforced-epic-error tariff war China has just stopped sending cargo ships, meaning that a lot of supplies are going to dry up from finished products for sale to parts and materials for domestic manufacture. That will impact the workers at US ports and truckers, as well as the businesses and their workers and consumers. That may hit in weeks to months, and prices are already rising, while the trade war is– well the word crater is also useful for what's happening to US exports. The tourism industry is also crashing, with foreigners understandably reluctant to visit the USA, whether out of fear, revulsion, or protest against the regime. This will devastate both big-city tourist-dependent businesses and a whole lot of rural and smalltown communities near scenic places.
If you didn't love lawyers before, this is your season to rectify that. I know, not all lawyers, because there's the fact that Pam Bondi is still a lawyer, for now. But as Kyle Cheney at Politico summed it up, "It took more than 100 lawsuits and 50 restraining orders from dozens of federal judges. But after 20 days of court losses, the Trump administration capitulated, reversing a decision that threatened the legal status of thousands of foreign students in the United States. The Trump administration’s abrupt move, announced by a Justice Department lawyer in court Friday, tacitly acknowledged what judges in two dozen states had been saying since early April: Terminating university students’ immigration records from a federal database — a step which appeared to jeopardize their legal authorization to remain in the country — was almost certainly illegal. And it was implemented so ham-handedly that judges felt compelled to intervene."
Lawyers and judges: the Associated Press (which stood strong against Trump from the beginning, including by continuing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico) reports: " A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of the ability to unionize and collectively bargain over working conditions. Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C., blocked an executive order Trump issued in March from being implemented pending the outcome of a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 160,000 federal employees."
ABC counts more than two lawsuits a day in the administration's first hundred days and quotes U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, who said "It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. There are moments in the world's history when people look back and ask, 'Where were the lawyers, where were the judges?' In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today." But Lawfare counts 255 lawsuits against the administration, and the ACLU claims credit for 55.
Lawyers and judges and law students: law students at Georgetown created a database tracking law firms and sorting them into five categories: “Caved to Administration,” “Complying in Advance,” “Other Negative Action,” “Stood Up Against Administration’s Attacks,” or “No Response.” Reportedly law students are declining to join the cave and comply sectors. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who went to El Salvador to check on his constituent Kilmar Albrego Garcia, declares: “I think you’re seeing the public stand up. Remember, bullies like Donald Trump, authoritarian leaders, they calculate that when they come down hard on people or try to silence people, you know, people will shrink into their corners and go away. So this is a moment we all have to stand up, which is why we have to applaud the colleges and universities who are standing up to Donald Trump and shame those who are not, same with law firms. ”
Harvard's refusal to become a puppet of an anti-education anti-immigration anti-science regime made a huge impact in the university world and beyond. More than 400 university presidents have signed a letter declaring, "As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.... Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation."
More and more Republicans are turning against the regime in ways that matter--not that they're doing nearly enough to uphold the power of the legislative branch of government and defend democracy, but it's nice to see defection from the cult. "GOPers Are Telling Us Trump Looks Weak," writes Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, and he headlines another story "Trump Already Lost." Elon Musk seems to be lying low now that he's realized the public has power and a lot of us hate him--Europeans are leaving Twitter/X in droves, so in addition to the precipitous crash of Tesla sales and stock prices and general poisoning of the brand, the decline of the social media platform continues. (The Wall Street Journal says Tesla is looking for a new CEO, and the news reportedly dropped the price of Tesla shares some more.) Kentucky Senator Rand Paul tried to pass a senate measure against Trump's tariffs, but lacked sufficient votes, though two other Republicans voted with him.
We haven't won, and the rampage of destruction continues, but this surge of resistance, opposition, and protest is encouraging both for the future of this country and as a sign of who we are. Ap lot of eople care about human rights, public land, the rule of law, democracy and the Constitution. They don't like dictators. We're not in the clear, we need to keep fighting, but there's enough out there now to show that we are fighting and it's working. Don't stop now.
p.s. Special bonus: Rachel Maddow saying she thinks we're winning. "The country is against them and the country is against him and he knows it. And the country is willing to go out and protest against him, they're willing to do it over and over and over..." https://substack.com/@heavenlight/note/c-113229726?r=twykd&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
p.p.s. Another form of resistance: beautiful story about librarians and archivists saving what's being deleted from federal websites. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge
