Week Three: The Pushback
I think of this as primarily a site for more thoughtful essayistic stuff but I was doing one of those news roundup in-the-moment things I do on FB and thought I should maybe try doing it here.
Right about now on the 20th, we entered this hideous new era. It's almost exactly two weeks since the inauguration right now.
FIRST CAME EXECUTIVE ORDER WEEK
And a whole lot of horrible executive orders came down, taking us out of the Paris Climate Treaty (eventually; that's a process), withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and basically handing a whole lot of perks to the fossil fuel industry that was already doing fine. Plus of course attacks on the great bogeyman of the new right, DEI, gender essentialism under the rubric "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" (the irony of an adjudicated rapist claiming to protect us while putting an alleged rapist in charge of the Pentagon is rich or maybe sad and poor and ugly).
Full list of those orders here: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5276293/trump-executive-orders
Trump has imperial fantasies both in the sense of anointing himself as a king and of grabbing territory and power, but Jamelle Bouie noted, "It is very telling of these guys’ conception of how power works that they see issuing a flurry of executive orders as evidence of presidential strength and vigor and not a sign that the president is too weak to pursue a serious legislative agenda.... We have a president with a tenuous grip on small legislative majorities who is out of the gate with a flurry of dramatically unpopular orders and who has just demonstrated his weakness on the international stage. if i were an elected member of his domestic opposition, I might try to draw real blood."
WEEK TWO WAS COUP WEEK
Proud to have been among the first to call it a coup attempt when last Monday night they put out that illegal order to just stop payment by the federal government to almost everything and everyone, throwing needed programs for healthcare, eldercare, childcare, and so much more into chaos. Because so many people showed up to make a ruckus they walked that back. (I spent all day Tuesday and part of Wednesday last week just trying to raise the alarm and get people engaged.)
The other shoe of the coup dropped when Elon Musk and his child soldiers invaded government offices to try to shut down the federal financial system and shut out the federal workers who run that system, aka crash the government. This was, of course, illegal and outrageous and unprecedented, words I hope we don't have to wear out. Also dumb, as in they don't understand how this works/ As Gwen Snyder said on BlueSky, "I mean for fuck's sake he has a 19 year old poking with a stick at the heart of the magical machine that makes money exist. This is not how you consolidate national resources in lockstep behind your authoritarian regime."
Someone called it January 6th in slow motion, and that made sense too.
But...
WELCOME TO PUSHBACK WEEK
This weekend, there were a bunch of protests all over the country in support of immigrant rights, and it's been great to see all sorts of organizing against ICE in defense of immigrants. There was also some good pushback on trans rights and healthcare access, including by the California Dept. of Education and New York's attorney general. Last night, a valiant protest in front of the office in which Musk and his boys were doing their damage went past midnight. A high-up guy at the FBI pushed back against partisan firings. A whole lot of federal civil servants were quietly uncooperative with the coup attempt and the pressure to resign.
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Indivisible, which did brilliant organizing during the first Trump administration, was back in action with some really good ideas. Turned out that a whole lot of the information scrubbed from federal websites was saved by the Internet Archive and the WayBack Machine and some of it was restored. So many moving parts but I'm just trying to give you a brief sketch of where we're at right now.
The Trumpists created a lot of disruption on the apparent theory that they are in charge of everything and then everyone came out and showed them that it's gonna be more complicated than that. While the coup stuff was going on Trump imposed his tariffs, which are part of an isolationist fantasy and an inability to understand what tariffs are and who pays them. Mexico pushed back and got some concessions. Canada pushed back hard. Including with tariffs on Teslas (and also Ontario cancelled its $100 million contract with Musk's StarLink).
Update: Trump delayed the tariffs by a month. There are probably betting pools on whether they'll end up in the attic with Infrastructure Week and Mexico paying for the wall, but we'll see....
What prompted me to put out this little interim post (I'm working on a real essay for you) is the Monday morning press conference out in front of the USAID building, pushing back against the attacks on USAID by Musk by furious congresspeople. It included Jamie Raskin and Ilan Omar, the former speaking with fury but the latter with a moving account of how USAID helped her and her family when they were refugees.
You can watch it here. https://www.youtube.com/live/stI7ZIb9FDg
This was the Democratic Party we wanted to see. Not just fiery rhetoric but some real language about what they would do--and after the conference they walked into the building to see what they could do. Obviously not enough but reassuring that they're awake, angry, and intent on using the powers they have.
Raskin: "Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don't control the money of the American people. The US Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution ... we don't have a fourth branch of government called 'Elon Musk.'"
There should be a warrant out for Musk's arrest for these crimes, but I'm not holding my breath. But it wasn't just this gathering of a dozen or so Democrats in Congress. The pushback took many forms.
I'm just here to say: welcome to Pushback Week. My greatest fear was never about what they would do. It's that people and politicians wouldn't stand up to oppose it. And here we are. We need so much more, but I am encouraged by this start.
Here's some stories about pushback week and a statement from a senator:
KATE BRUMBACK
"Lawyers for current and former career employees at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. told a top official on Sunday that the dismissals underway at the department violated the law and warned against making public the names of those who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol." https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/02/us/trump-tariffs?smid=nytcore-ios-share&fbclid=IwY2xjawIODL1leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHdpgbeY3xh-BCs-UIWh9x5xEz7pI2XkG5H6dp4qDM2F6yseQth2U09OPng_aem_1lsdhLX8TRK_adEg2ilOog#lawyers-justice-dept-firing
Usha Lee McFarling
p.s. By the way, I organized this livestream on the morning of January 20th in the hopes that it would let people enter this new era in with strength and solidarity (and keep a bunch of you from watching the inauguration, which seemed like unnecessary misery). Akaya Windwood, Bill McKibben, Charlie Jane Anders, Liz Ogbu, and Anand Giridharadas joined me to talk about Martin Luther King on his day, hope, power, resistance, joy, and civic life among other things.
