From the NYTimes Editorial Board today:

In his attacks on law firms, universities and other American institutions, President Trump is relying on an illusion. The illusion is that the institutions are powerless to fight back and that they face a choice between principle and survival.

These institutions do not have to capitulate to Mr. Trump. They have a realistic path to defeating his intimidation. Some law firms and others have begun to fight. In doing so, they have provided the beginnings of a playbook for standing up to his attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy, including due process, free speech and the constitutional system of checks and balances.

For anybody who is skeptical of this idea and sees Mr...

It appears that Heather Cox Richardson’s posts on Facebook are not available any longer. Since she continues to post, but the posts disappear, one can only conclude that Facebook is removing her posts. Here is her post from substack which arrived in my emailbox this morning:

“Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.

For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Wa...

From Robert Reich’s daily posting:

“Friends,

The past week has been another horror show, and I share your anxiety and sleeplessness.

But the past week also reveals the utter incompetence of Trump and his regime.

Even The Wall Street Journal criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for trying to dismiss “Signalgate” as a hoax, calls Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff “out of his depth in dealing with world crises,” and condemns the administration for thinking “it can bully its way through anything by shouting Fake News.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) instructs the administration to “own it and fix it.”

During the ensuing uproar, Witkoff goes off the deep end, telling Tucker Carlson that Vladimir Putin is “straight up” and not a “bad guy,”...

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...