Happy Sunday, and welcome to the Trump administration’s 12th week, in review.
The chaos and nonsense from the administration are accelerating, and it is by design. Friday, in particular, was a blizzard of news — some stunning, some offensive, almost all of it patently ridiculous in any other period of U.S. history we’ve lived through.
But the popular backlash against President Trump’s reckless administration is growing, too. You can see it in polls, in economic surveys — and in the streets.
First we’ll dive into the chaos, and then we’ll take a look at some highlights of the week — and some stories to watch over the week ahead.
Oh: make sure to read to the end to see some hope and inspiration.
The Rundown: Trump Versus …
Our Families
- Department of Homeland Security personnel showed up last week at two elementary schools in south Los Angeles neighborhoods, asking to see students under false claims that parents or caretakers had authorized agents to speak with the children. School officials turned the agents away, in accordance with Los Angeles public-school policy.
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents also smashed the car window of a Maryland mother who had defied their efforts to take her into custody at her home — correctly citing that agents could not enter her residence without a warrant. Agents pulled away the 51-year-old woman, who they accused of being an associate of Salvadoran gang MS-13, as her 18-year-old daughter screamed “Mommy, no! Mommy!”
“Mommy, no. Mommy.”Daughter captures the moment masked ICE agents smash the window of her mother's car in order to take her into custody.The government claims the 52-year old seamstress is an associate of the MS-13 gang.www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/lo…
— Christopher Mims (@mims.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T22:49:40.392Z
- The firings orchestrated at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this month have reportedly made it impossible for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to enforce federal laws against selling tobacco products to minors.
- Also wrecked by the mass layoffs at HHS: efforts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect children from lead exposure, which can cause irreversible damage to young people’s brains and nervous systems. Last week the CDC rejected a request by Milwaukee to help address lead contamination in city schools — forcing the city to rely on its own resources to assess and address the extent of students’ exposure.
- HHS has in fact reportedly left the federal government unable to calculate the poverty level — a statistical boundary between low- and middle-income status that sets eligibility for a variety of federal and state programs. The mass layoffs at HHS eliminated the entire office responsible for setting federal poverty guidelines, affecting eligibility for Medicaid, Head Start, SNAP (also known as “food stamps”), and other forms of assistance that support millions of Americans.
"HHS leaders may be unaware of their legal duty to issue the poverty guidelines"::primal scream::kffhealthnews.org/news/article…
— Stephen Nuñez (@socio-steve.bsky.social) 2025-04-11T16:34:13.668Z
- The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 eliminates funding for Head Start, the federal program that provides early-childhood education to children from low-income households. Enrollees in Head Start have gone on to do better in school and in the workforce — but the White House framework nonetheless proposes to do away with meals, developmental screenings, and early education for 800,000 children.
- The U.S. Department of Education moved to stop all federal funding for K-12 education in Maine, citing alleged concerns over transgender athletes in youth sports. The Trump administration has engaged in a continuing campaign of threats and service disruptions against Maine ever since state Gov. Janet Mills defied Trump in an Oval Office meeting.
- Also sideswiped by the Trump administration’s efforts to spite Maine: the Children’s Museum of Maine, to which officials stopped delivery of most of a $225,000 grant. “When we pull funding from programs like this,” the museum’s executive director said, “we aren’t saving money—we’re robbing children of valuable educational opportunities.”
Our Health
- Also wiped out at HHS: the CDC team that inspects cruise ships and investigates shipborne outbreaks of norovirus and other diseases. The layoff saved no money for the federal government, since the inspection program drew its budget from fees paid by cruise operators — but bon voyage and happy sailing, everybody.
The CDC's cruise ship inspectors have been laid off, as well as agency's head epidemiologist for investigating cruise ship outbreaks That baffled health officials since this program is paid for by cruise ship fees, not taxpayer dollarswww.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-cru…
— Alexander Tin (@alexander-a-tin.bsky.social) 2025-04-10T22:49:08.849Z
- Meanwhile, FDA lost its entire workforce devoted to issuing alerts about the safety of medications and medical devices. “There’s no one left to write a drug safety communication,” one laid-off FDA worker said.
- Just remember — as if this offers any consolation — that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., may not even have awareness of what just got cut from his department or why:
In a scream-inducing interview with CBS News, Kennedy said he's "not familiar" with the specifics of HHS's $11 billion in health cuts.www.jezebel.com/rfk-jr-prett…
— Jezebel (@jezebeldotcom.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T21:36:03.979Z
- At his first all-staff meeting as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — which administers Medicare, the health-coverage program for tens of millions of older people — Dr. Mehmet Oz touted the possibilities of “artificial intelligence” (AI). Oz claimed that AI can serve patients at rock-bottom cost compared to a doctor, and reportedly asserted without evidence that “that patients have rated the care they’ve received from an AI avatar as equal to or better than a human doctor.”
- The National Institutes of Health (NIH) cut off funding for an award-winning researcher’s effort to document how abortion bans affect women’s health and economic well-being. Diana Greene Foster — who received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant for the Turnaway Study, which showed that even before the overturning of </span>yle=”font-weight: 400;”>Roe v. Wade, women who were denied abortions faced poverty more commonly than women who were able to obtain them — told The 19th that NIH had terminated a grant to support a follow-up study.
“Research programs based on gender identity,” NIH wrote in a letter to Foster, “are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”
Two points here: By attempting to suppress this study, Trump aims to obscure the harm done by his unpopular abortion policies. (Trump stacked the Supreme Court with justices who overturned a 50-year old right that over 20 states have now banned, so he owns the consequences. Also, it’s strange to bring up “gender identity” when this study has literally nothing to do with identity and everything to do with biology — a talking point that these folks have been screaming from rooftops for months.
Our Leadership
- A Trump administration envoy gave a hand-on-heart salute to Russian President Vladimir Putin before Friday talks about the Ukraine war in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg.
The envoy, Steven Witkoff, has reportedly advised U.S. President Donald Trump that handing Ukrainian territory over to Russia could achieve a swift ceasefire in the conflict:
“The fastest way to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine, said Witkoff, was to support a strategy that would give Russia ownership of four eastern Ukrainian regions it attempted to annex illegally in 2022, two U.S. officials and five people familiar with the situation told Reuters.”
- The purge of “woke” books at the library of the U.S. Naval Academy has resulted in some odd removals from the institution’s shelves. ‘I Know How the Caged Bird Sings’ and ‘Memorializing the Holocaust’ got withdrawn from circulation over so-called “DEI” concerns — but ‘Mein Kampf,’ the memoir of Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler, remains available.
- The administration relieved the top officer at Pituffik Space Force Base in Greenland, Col. Susannah Meyers, from command after a report that she had disavowed critical remarks Vance had made about Denmark — the NATO ally of the U.S. that governs Greenland — while on a visit to the base in March. “Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense,” a Pentagon spokesman posted on X.
- A top U.S. military commander in Europe advised Congress last week against a potential Trump administration plan to withdraw as many as 10,000 American troops from the continent:
“U.S. European Command chief Gen. Christopher Cavoli told the House Armed Services Committee that he’s ‘consistently recommended’ keeping the same troop levels since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. ‘It’s my advice to maintain that force posture as it is now,’ he said.”
- White House knives are out for the U.S. role in global climate research. The White House’s budget proposal for next year does away with more than half of NASA’s Earth science budget, as well as the scientific research division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — which would be removed from the agency’s org chart, with two-thirds of its budget lost. (Staff cuts under DOGE have already forced NOAA scientists to fill in for fired janitors by cleaning the bathrooms of their buildings.)
Our Rights
- Several leaders at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) quit this week after Trump officials went behind their backs to give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) access to the data of taxpayers suspected of being undocumented residents. Federal law forbids the use of IRS data in civil immigration enforcement — and tax law experts at New York University warned that “IRS officials who sign off on data sharing under these circumstances risk breaking the law, which could result in criminal and civil sanctions.”
"It's criminal." Nina Olson, former national taxpayer advocate at the IRS, emphasizes the illegality of the IRS sharing taxpayer data with ICE.
— MaddowBlog (@maddowblog.msnbc.com) 2025-04-10T01:44:39.523904Z
- Raising more privacy alarms, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” team appears to have used data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) that court orders appear to prohibit “DOGE” from seeing. A “DOGE” official made baseless claims about noncitizens receiving Social Security benefits appeared to have potentially relied on personal identifying information (PII) held in the SSA’s systems — but on March 20, a federal judge in Maryland issued an order blocking “DOGE” from accessing PII in the SSA’s data.
- “DOGE” appears to also be using SSA systems to cancel Social Security numbers that immigrants lawfully obtained. The records of thousands of such U.S. residents were edited to mark them as “dead” — as in legally deceased — in an effort to force them to leave the country.
A senior SSA executive who oversaw technology staffers at the agency called the tactic illegal, and warned that living people lawfully present in the United States could be hurt. In response, the Trump administration had security guards at the agency march the executive out of his office. - Meanwhile, “DOGE” team members at the IRS are working alongside Palantir, a company founded and chaired by Trump donor Peter Thiel, on a “project possibly touching all IRS data, which includes taxpayer names, addresses, SSNs, returns and employment data”:
“Should this project move forward to completion, DOGE wants Palantir’s Foundry software to become the ‘read center of all IRS systems,’ a source with direct knowledge tells Wired, meaning anyone with access could view and have the ability to possibly alter all IRS data in one place. It’s not currently clear who would have access to this system.”
- Erik Prince — infamous as the head of the defense contractor/mercenary company Blackwater during the Iraq War — has proposed to the White House what Politico describes as an “unprecedented” plan to expand efforts to exile undocumented immigrants to prison labor in El Salvador. “The proposal,” according to Politico’s reporting, “says it would target ‘criminal illegal aliens’ and would attempt to avoid legal challenges by designating part of the prison — which has drawn accusations of violence and overcrowding from human rights groups — as American territory.”
- The State Department is canceling the visas of international students at U.S. colleges and universities with no notice or warning — forcing institutions to check a federal website daily to determine whether their students have abruptly lost their right to stay in the United States. Institutions across the country have seen students lose their status, with over 300 affected so far. (For a president who says he cares about trade, Trump is jeopardizing a U.S. industry with an immense trade surplus; students who enroll in the United States bring $40 billion per year into the country.)
"One student was informed of her visa cancellation while she was in the hospital, having just given birth."www.insidehighered.com/news/global/…
— Laura Sell (@laurasell.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T09:57:10.395Z
- Continuing to blaze a noxious trail across the nation’s capital, Secretary Kennedy used an offensive epithet while talking to FDA staff about young people with developmental challenges. Some staffers at the agency reportedly walked out of the meeting, incensed. (The Trump administration’s plans to disband the Department of Education, bear in mind, would make protecting the rights of students with developmental challenges one of Kennedy’s responsibilities.)Helpful to remember in this context: Kennedy’s uncle Sargent Shriver founded the event known today as the Special Olympics, and his mother, Ethel Kennedy, herself advocated for the rights of people with disabilities.
Our Safety
- On the very day the White House invited miners to join in a celebration of efforts to open more federal land to coal mining, the nation’s top mine-safety agency announced its “temporary” suspension of a rule that protects minersle=”font-weight: 400;”> from breathing silica dust — a contaminant that causes black lung disease. The Mine Safety and Health Administration blamed the suspension on “unforeseen” recent layoffs at HHS — which, as you’ve read above, has carried out a highly public slew of firings this month.
- The administration went on a rampage against federal climate research and protection programs:
- The EPA reportedly plans to stop collection of data on greenhouse gas emissions from major polluters;
- The entire staff of the U.S. National Climate Assessment — a data collection and analysis effort mandated by federal law — has been fired;
- In a petty move, the Department of Commerce canceled NOAA-administered climate risk and modeling grants to Princeton University. The reason offered for the cancellation was rich: “the findings of Princeton’s work, according to a government statement, “contribut[e] to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”
- Another month (or are we measuring in weeks now?), another incident at the D.C. region’s Washington National Airport — where a scheduled passenger flight carrying six members of Congress was clipped by another plane on the tarmac.
Our Wallets
- As Trump’s tariff rates whipped back and forth, some in-the-know investors made big money at other Americans’ expense. Trading in the minutes ahead of a Truth Social post last week that “paused” some of the tariffs allowed unknown investors to strike gold when Trump’s post went online.
Alright, I think people knew of the tariff pause and traded it beforehand.You can see before Trump posted "buy" on Truth Social, traders opened $QQQ $TQQQ and $SPY callsRIGHT BEFORE THE NEWS, someone opened $SPY 509 calls, expiring TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Those calls are up 2100% in one hour.
— Unusual Whales (@unusualwhales.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T18:20:58.509Z
The pattern recurred before the weekend, when investors placed options on Apple shares shortly before the White House announced a ‘pause’ on tariffs affecting Chinese-manufactured computers and phones. (Trump vowed the next day to apply a different tariff to those goods, stirring even more confusion.)
Multiple members of Congress raised questions about the blatant appearance of insider trading on knowledge of the president’s plans.
- The president’s fugue state over tariffs has also unsettled buyers of U.S. treasury bonds, which investors have traditionally treated as a safe parking place for their money in turbulent times. Buyers last week were slow to buy bonds, forcing interest rates upward — directly affecting federal budgeting, because bonds represent stakes in the federal debt that the country has to pay interest on.
Trump has trashed a century of trust & confidence in the US economy. The bedrock has been stability, predictability, rule of law. This imbecile wrecked it in months. Things will get worse because Republicans have no guts to challenge stupid. www.cnbc.com/2025/04/12/i…
— Alexander S. Vindman (@avindman.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T19:04:31.617Z
The value of the dollar also drooped, leading to warnings that investors were losing confidence in — and moving money away from — the United States.
Surprise of surprises: American consumers really don’t like how Trump has handled the economy. You could say — to gauge from our chart of the week below — that Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff spree hasn’t inspired confidence:
New consumer sentiment data just out for April:Americans’ expectations for how the economy will fare over the next year are now at their worst in 45 years.Consumer confidence is down 40% since Trump’s inauguration, including a 20% drop among Republicans.
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch.ft.com) 2025-04-11T14:40:57.858Z
- Consumers foresee soaring prices over the next year. University of Michigan economists report that respondents to a survey expect inflation over the next 12 months to reach 6.7 percent — the highest level measured since 1981.
- Fate, it would seem, has a sense of irony: the oil-industry barons who looked ahead to a bonanza of drilling opportunities under Trump instead have seen oil prices plunge to a point that makes drilling operations in the United States unprofitable. U.S. companies — citing Trump’s tariffs and increased oil production in other countries — are considering layoffs and production cuts.
- The Trump administration, which ordered new tariffs on imported steel, has nonetheless drafted plans to cancel a $500 million grant to upgrade a dilapidated steel furnace in Middletown, Ohio, the hometown of Vice President J.D. Vance. The funding made available under the Inflation Reproduction Act, would create 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs — but this administration believes the Inflation Reduction Act has climate cooties, so. (If you wonder: yes, this seems senseless to us too.)
- Residents of western North Carolina, a region hit by catastrophic flooding last year as Hurricane Helene moved inland, received a fresh blow when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) refused to continue to cover 100 percent of the region’s costs for storm recovery.
Today, I learned that FEMA refused our request to extend its 100% reimbursement period for another 180 days. I got this news while I was in Newland with families who lost their homes in the storm.
— Governor Josh Stein (@ncgovernor.bsky.social) 2025-04-11T20:43:09.190Z
The Fight-Back Forecast: Bernie-ing Down the House
- Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue their Fight Oligarchy tour this week, after greeting a crowd of 35,000 at a Sarturday rally in downtown Los Angeles. Their next stops:
- Mon., April 14: Nampa, Idaho
- Tue., April 15: Bakersfield, Ca.
- Tue., April 15: Folsom, Ca.
- Wed., April 16: Missoula, Mont.
- Come Thurs., April 17, the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed plans rallies at dozens of campuses across the country.
- On Sat., April 19, the 50501 Movement plans another day of action — this one timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the Revolutionary War.
Looking Ahead
- Passover runs through Sunday, April 20, which is also Easter Sunday. A resurrection of liberal democracy in the United States is perhaps too much to expect over the next few days — but for those of faith and even for others, may this week remind us of the possibility of renewal.
Or, as was said at the table of a seder attended by this writer: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” - Tax Day is April 15. One perverse effect of using the data of undocumented taxpayers against them for immigration enforcement: costing the federal treasury billions of dollars. Economists and researchers at the Yale University Budget Lab warned last week that giving IRS data to DHS would scare immigrants from parts of the workforce that participate in the tax system — resulting in the loss of more than $300 billion of revenue over 10 years.
- The monthly home builder confidence index comes out on April 16. This should offer a glimpse at how tariffs, which have hit the supply of lumber from Canada — and higher interest rates, a result of reduced investor interest in holding U.S. treasury bonds as a safe store of value — are affecting property developers and construction firms.
- A judicial showdown over exiling a Maryland man to prison labor? The Supreme Court last week ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of an Maryland father sent by federal officials to a Salvadoran prison camp — but the Trump administration appears inclined to make no hurry to comply. The president suggested that the man was under the permanent control of El Salvador, and in a daily status report ordered by the district judge overseeing the case, an attorney for the Department of Justice wrote that the prisoner was under the “sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.” The next district court proceedings in the case should happen on Tue., April 15.
Waste, Fraud & Abuse Watch
- Dan Bongino, the Trump-friendly podcaster turned deputy director of the FBI, has become that agency’s first deputy director to enjoy a security detail. More strikingly, the full-time protective escort could require as many as 20 FBI agents — which requires, as you can imagine, quite an expense.
- Elon Musk’s “DOGE” appears to have worked out a way to fund itself: rather than taking credit for budget savings pulled out of thin air, Musk’s group is now reportedly charging service fees to government agencies for the privilege of having their systems ransacked and workforces slashed.
- Having depleted its ranks with massive layoffs, the FDA reportedly plans to restore some of its ability to inspect food and drugs — you know, minor functions such as those — by hiring contractors. Mmmm, that’s some yummy “government efficiency.”
Walkback of the Week
Trump’s tariffs — which remain near-impossible to keep track of.
WAPO: “.. The exemptions appear to undermine Trump’s ‘economic revolution’ that seeks to move high-tech supply chains and parts suppliers inside the U.S. ..” 🤡 @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T15:18:26.845Z
Win of the Week
Maine Gov. Janet Mills — who stopped another Trump effort to spite her by hurting Maine’s kids.
BREAKING: A federal judge has barred the Trump administration from freezing funds used by Maine to pay for school lunches and food for kids/adults in day care settings. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us…
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) 2025-04-11T22:36:00.428Z
Politicians Standing Up
We have to love the vibe from the Fight Oligarchy tour …
AOC: Donald Trump is a criminal—convicted on 34 felony counts of fraud. He is lying, and he is manipulating the stock market too. At his best, he enriches himself, the billionaires who back him, and the members of Congress who trade with him. Not you. Not me. Not the people.
… Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has a smart idea — a dashboard tracking funds withheld and canceled by the Trump administration …
a Minnesota dot gov dashboard, updated every day with detailed accounting of the money promised but not delivered to Minnesota by the federal government and a breakdown of all the stuff that’s been taken away – FUCK this is smart politics
… and we owe props to Rep. Steven Horsford for lighting up the U.S. Trade Representative over Trump’s tariffs.
Rep. Steven Horsford to Greer: "So the trade representative hasn't spoken to the POTUS about a global reordering of trade, but yet he announced it on a tweet? WTF! Who is in charge? It looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you. There is no strategy … is this market manipulation?"
People Fighting Back
Sean McGarvey, President of North America’s Building Trade Unions — who spoke out for a union apprentice, the Maryland father exiled to a Salvadoran prison.
@moreperfectunion Kilmar Abrego Garcia was in the first year of a sheet metal apprenticeship in Baltimore when he was deported because of an “administrative error.” His union @SMART union says, Garcia “was literally helping to build this great country.”
We’ll let Bernie Sanders, speaking onstage at the Coachella festival this weekend, take us out:
Let's see how Coachella reacted to Bernie mentioning Trump
That’s all for now. Catch us on Bluesky and Facebook for updates throughout the week — and look for us in your inbox again on Sunday, April 20.
Until then—
the TrumpVersusUS team