From Robert Reich’s substack of this morning:

“Friends,

I was talking yesterday to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say. When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts. His response floored me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.” 

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, suddenly worried. 

“They! The university! The government! Gotta go!” He was off. 

My friend has never before shown signs of paranoia. 

I relate this to you because the Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each another...

From a post by Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor,

“Friends,

Yesterday, Trump dismantled much of the Department of Education. He ordered wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her department, although student loans and special education funding will continue.

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.

But there’s a much larger story here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (whi...

“The administration’s attempt to ignore the laws the Constitution charges it with executing amounts to an attack on the right of the American people to establish the rules under which we live.”

That from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, dated March 19, 2025.

What a day it was yesterday. So brazen, so illegal, so outrageous. I’ll let Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American post from early this a.m. serve as a summary of this one day. And we’ll all still wait to find out if there is actually a way to enforce our Judiciary’s rule of law, or if this Congress will stand up for itself.

By Heather Cox Richardson: On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the Trump administration stop deporting anyone from the United States under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and that the planes carrying individuals to prison in El Salvador be turned around...

Read this.

The separation of powers is a central tenet of our system of government. This is something that was taught in elementary school when I was a child. Each of the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches are a check and balance on the other branches’ potential overreach of power. For sure, our history has seen many examples of one branch testing the limits of those checks. But, I believe, never more blatantly than the current Executive branch’s blatant refusal to acknowledge the power of the Judicial branch.

I am not alone in feeling deep, profound, elemental concern for the reality that the Justice Department, apparently no longer operating independently of the Executive branch, will not be a reliable enforcer of the Judicial branch’s rulings...

From for Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, on his substack:

From Ralph Nader, who paints with far too broad a brush, blaming everyone under the sun for everything–but his point about the danger of staying silent is nonetheless well taken:

March 14, 2025

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program...

Perhaps the courts will be a check on the onslaught from the Executive branch, but I’m not holding my breath…

Yesterday in court…

I’ll put this here, because Heather Cox Richardson enumerates the many elements of the chaos being sowed far better than I. From her “Letters from an American” that arrived in my emailbox this morning:

“Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beg...

What the hell is happening to your country?