Happy Sunday, and welcome to the end of Week Nine of Trump’s second term. Here are some big-picture thoughts and details you may have missed from the week that was — and notes on what to look for next.
The Big Picture: Trump Attempts to Rule by Extortion
Given Trump’s history in the casino business in Atlantic City, it’s maybe not so shocking that an organized crime tactic — extortion — has become a feature of his administration’s attempts to expand its power.
One example: The U.S. Institute of Peace — a mid-sized nonprofit with headquarters in Washington — came under pressure from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to allow Musk’s team to take over. As a non-government group housed on private property, the institute held “DOGE” off for days. But on Monday, DOGE managed to enter institute offices and evicted its staff and leadership.
How did “DOGE” get in? By threatening the business that provided the institute’s security guards.
The institute had already ended its contract with the firm for guard service. “DOGE” nevertheless gave the firm an ultimatum: either let Musk’s people and the FBI into the building, using a key the company still had — or lose all of the firm’s contracts with the federal government.
“DOGE” used another tactic that should chill people: It threatened the company that provided the nonprofit’s security guards with the loss of all of its federal contracts — unless it helped Musk’s team enter the Institute’s private property.
— TrumpVersusUS (@trumpversusus.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 2:45 PM
By itself, the threats against the security firm look like a glaring abuse of federal power. In the context of just the last few days, though, they also illustrate a pattern. Trump and his team are deliberately using the federal government’s spending power to bludgeon the administration’s targets and scapegoats — and hoping that the sheer amounts of money at stake for those institutions will make some of them buckle.
The administration has also used financial pressure against:
- Columbia University. Faced with losing $400 million in federal grants — a sum equal to a sale price the university once refused to pay Trump for land to house an expansion of the school’s Manhattan campus — Columbia administrators accepted a list of demands that will stifle students’ freedom of expression and strip much of the faculty’s academic freedom.
- Paul Weiss, a large law firm. Trump targeted the 1,000-attorney firm with an executive order intended to undermine its business — by blocking its lawyers from entering federal courts or doing any work for clients that requires a security clearance. The head of the firm arranged a meeting with the president — and struck a deal to (among other things) provide $40 million worth of no-cost work “to support the administration’s initiatives.” (Other firms targeted by the president have either actively fought back in the courts or kept their heads down for the moment.)
With these quick wins for its shakedown tactics, the Trump administration has developed a potential strategy for future threats: taking on institutions one by one, hoping that its targets’ peer institutions will stay silent to avoid inviting similar pressure.
Lando's leadership of Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back turned out to be a tragically prescient parable for our time. Leaders of institutions: Pay attention! A story in four parts.cc: Paul Weiss, Columbia Universitybcc: all law firms, universities, and civil society organizations
— Brendan Nyhan (@brendannyhan.bsky.social) 2025-03-21T19:03:30.234Z
Emboldened by success against those targets, will the administration widen its use of financial threats to make institutions bend to its agenda? Will targets and potential targets of Trump’s pressure choose to carry on in the face of his threats, to fight back against the White House — or will they lower their profiles to try to stay safe?
In both of these examples, one can read the fine print and see little reason to worry. But the bigger picture is that the Trump administration is systematically working to weaken or destroy institutions that are theoretically big enough to effectively oppose its agenda. Indeed, the administration has wasted no time in broadening its attack on attorneys who oppose it, issuing a Justice Department memo late Friday night that seeks sanctions against lawyers and firms the department accuses of “engag[ing] in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States.” The memo even purports to apply to suits filed during Trump’s first term, going back eight years.
The point of these actions is no mystery. Last week, Trump advisor Steve Bannon said explicitly: “Let me repeat this. There’s major law firms in Washington, D.C., and our, what we are trying to do is put you out of business and bankrupt you.”
Once Trump’s attacks harpoon the big fish with resources, the little fish — people like most of us — will be easy prey. We’ll keep our eyes open to watch for new developments, and offer updates on Bluesky as news comes in.
The Latest Attacks: Trump vs. …
Our Wallets
- At the Social Security Administration (SSA), the “DOGE” team will stop accepting identity verification by telephone. The move will force citizens who need to verify their identities when applying for checks — or resolving issues with receiving payments — to either use the SSA website or travel to a Social Security field office. This comes days after the announced closure of several field offices — which means, put simply, that the administration has simultaneously required in-office visits and reduced access to its offices. The moves are expected to cause delays that prevent some Americans from receiving timely checks. (Here’s a good video rundown by More Perfect Union).
“We are not cutting Social Security” is hard to square with DOGE laying of thousand of Social Security employees, closing Social Security offices, and limiting phone services.
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 8:37 PM
- Food banks across the U.S. took a hard hit when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) suspended $500 million worth of food shipments. The stoppage of food aid was made without warning — leaving food pantries without meat, fruit, and vegetable supplies they had planned to distribute to low-income recipients. The suspension may also affect farmers already hurt by the loss of money spent for international food aid and school lunches.
- Elon Musk’s chainsaw-approach to shrinking federal agencies has rapidly proven to be pennywise and pound foolish — with officials warning on Friday that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) expects a 10% drop in tax revenue collected by April 15. The reason: the recent layoff of 20,000 IRS workers, among them tax collectors and auditors, has emboldened “an increasing number of individuals and businesses [to] spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed.”
The staff cuts have already forced the agency to drop cases against “high-value” — n other words, wealthy — “corporations and individuals.” The tax revenue lost after Musk’s staff cuts could total to $500 billion — a sum enormously larger than the amount of government spending Musk’s team claims to have pared back.
Our Safety
The Trump administration has disbanded panels of food-safety researchers and encouraged resignations by food inspectors. This has caused warning bells to sound that disease-causing microbes and contaminants could go undetected in U.S. food supplies could increase.. . Among the research groups phased out by the Trump administration: a panel examining ways of protecting babies from bacteria in infant formula.
Our Rights
- Officials in Texas indicted a midwife and another medical professional last week under the state’s near-total abortion ban. The criminal charges come as a consequence of President Trump’s appointments of judges and justices, during his first term, who enabled him to brag — as he said in 2023 — that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade”. The U.S. Supreme Court holding in Roe protected Americans’ access to abortion for 49 years, until a six-justice majority that included four justices picked by Trump overturned it in 2022.
Trump made the criminalization of abortion by politicians in Texas and other states possible, despite 64% of Americans believing that “abortion should be legal in all or most cases” and 60% agreeing that Americans should have the right to an abortion “no matter what state they live in.”
The indictment alleges that the midwife provided medication abortion, which is safe and FDA-approved, to another person. If convicted, the midwife and her aide face as many as 20 years in prison. - Trump administration officials, including Justice Department attorneys, continued to defend the administration’s flight of 200 Venezuelan refugees with temporary protected status in the U.S. to a Salvadoran prison camp without due process. The refugees selected for transportation to El Salvador to do hard labor were sometimes picked according to ordinary tattoos — of a rose or an owl, for instance — that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials appear to have misidentified as gang symbols.
- Justice Department attorneys continue to defy requests by the judge assigned to the case for basic information. Meanwhile Trump threatened, in a social-media post last week, to ship anyone convicted of vandalizing vehicles manufactured by Elon Musk-owned Tesla to the same Salvadoran prison camp.
Trump on migrants he sent to a slave prison in El Salvador: “They looked amazing frail, though, by the way they were handled.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 21, 2025 at 8:51 AM
Our Leadership
Regime officials in China and Russia publicly celebrated a move by the Trump administration last Saturday to place the staff of Voice of America (VOA) on administrative leave and suspend funding for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe. This has effectively silenced the journalism those organizations provided to people living under authoritarian regimes for the first time in decades.
Staff labor unions and journalists at VOA sued on Friday to try to force the Trump administration to reopen the network. Officials at the European Union, meanwhile, are reportedly exploring how to replace U.S. funding to keep Radio Free Europe on the air.
Our Health
A plan under consideration by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would wind down federal spending on domestic programs targeted toward preventing transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. According to the Wall Street Journal, “among the programs that could be scaled back or eliminated is the CDC’s PrEP initiative, which launched last fall as a pilot program and provides free pre-exposure prophylaxis, medication that helps prevent HIV.”
Our Families
President Trump moved ahead last week with a plan to mostly eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Ignoring the reality that the department was created by Congress and would need a congressional vote to dissolve it, the president vowed that he would “bring school back to the states where it belongs.”
Trump’s decision means that the functions of the department — which primarily administers student loans and seeks to ensure equal access to educational resources for students with disabilities, learning differences, and others — will have to be handled by other agencies. Trump announced on Friday that the responsibility for school nutrition and education of students with disabilities and conditions such as autism and ADHD would become the responsibility of the Health and Human Services, a department whose leader has long suggested without basis that vaccines cause autism.
Administering student loans, meanwhile, will apparently become the responsibility of the Small Business Administration — an agency whose leader on the same day announced plans to lay off more than 40% of its workforce.
Well, I’m sure the SBA has the manpower to deal with a sudden new influx of work and …
www.cbsnews.com/news/small-b…
— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Watch
Administration officials spent a lot of time last week acting as spokespersons for Elon Musk-controlled Tesla Motors. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick urged viewers of a television program to buy Tesla stock:
On Jesse Watters’ show, Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, tells viewers they should buy Tesla stock.
“I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla. It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened to prosecute defacement of Tesla-made vehicles as domestic terrorism, which carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison.
BREAKING: Federal prosecutors have filed charges against at least two people for allegedly damaging Tesla property.
AG Pam Bondi called the alleged property destruction “domestic terrorism” and said the DOJ has charged several people w 5-year minimum sentences. From me and @ethanscorey.bsky.social
— Meg O’Connor (@megoconnor.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 5:50 PM
And on Fox News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt nodded along as a host discussed the hypothetical use of the death penalty to punish people who vandalize Teslas:
Fox News is now talking about people getting the death penalty for attacking Teslas
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 20, 2025 at 8:26 AM
Meanwhile, a top official at the Department of Commerce resigned last week in protest of the expected hijacking of rural-broadband funding by Elon Musk-controlled SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite-broadband service. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” the official wrote in his resignation email.
Win of the Week
District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington blocked the Trump administration from enforcing its ban on military service by transgender people — denouncing the attempt to oust trans members from the armed forces as “soaked in animus and dripping with pretext.”
INCREDIBLE Ruling!
Judge Reyes just ruled that transgender people have served honorably in the military, judges Trumps trans military ban – which states trans people are inherently dishonorable – as unconstitutional and motivated by animus.
Trans military members may continue to serve.
— Erin Reed (@erininthemorning.com) March 18, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Chart of the Week
Surprise, surprise. According to the Budget Lab at Yale University, it turns out that the tax cuts Trump and Republicans want to make for America’s wealthiest, in combination with the repeal of benefits and tax credits needed to pay for those cuts, would leave most Americans — especially those lowest in income — much worse off.
People Fighting Back
Three stories this week. The first involves a schoolteacher in Idaho:
The good news is that there *are* people meeting the moment.
youtu.be/EJxRtjma7lc
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Just across the Idaho-Washington state border, in Spokane:
“Strand, a veteran who served in Vietnam as a Seabee, was there to express his anger and dismay with Trump’s cuts of thousands of VA jobs. He wants Rep. Michael Baumgartner to know it.
“I came home from Vietnam, betrayed,” Strand said. “I’m being betrayed again.”
www.spokesman.com/stories/2025…
— Rachel Maddow (@maddow.msnbc.com) March 19, 2025 at 9:56 AM
Last we go one state further east, to Wyoming — where Liz Cheney’s successor in the House of Representatives met a tough crowd at a town hall:
Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman was booed after defending DOGE at a town hall.
— NBC News (@nbcnews.com) March 20, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Politicians Running Scared
Representative Mike Lawler of New York, who weeks ago defended Trump’s government-service cuts, now seems upset that the administration plans to close a Social Security office in his district:
I never thought leopards would eat MY face
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 20, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Politicians Standing Up
Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine has reached her limit with Trump’s vendetta against her state’s governor, Janet Mills. Pingree last week called for the acting administrator of the SSA to resign over the White House’s attempt to punish Maine residents by making new parents travel to SSA offices to obtain Social Security numbers for their children.
Hearing the SSA’s Acting Commissioner admit that part of the reason he canceled two important contracts with Maine was because he was “upset” by our Governor standing up to the President—it makes my blood boil.
What Leland Dudek said and did makes him unfit to hold such an important position.
— Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (@chelliepingree.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 12:32 PM
A short distance down the Atlantic coast, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu made waves last week with her defiant state of the city address:
“We don’t listen to kings.”
Boston mayor Michelle Wu puts Donald Trump on blast. Great speech 🔥
— scott dagostino (@scottdagostino.ca) March 19, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Looking Ahead
- Congress is back after a week of recess, though the House schedule will be lighter due to funeral services for Representative Raul Grijalva in Tucson, Arizona in the middle of the week.
- The legal cases challenging the Trump administration actions will continue to work their way through the courts, including the high profile case with Venezuelans’ deportation where Trump has so far refused to provide the judge with answers to even the most basic questions.
- We’ll see some fresh economic data this week on housing sales, consumer confidence, inflation metrics, and personal spending and income data.
- March Madness continues with the Sweet Sixteen round starting Thursday for the men and Friday for the women!
That’s all for this Sunday. Follow us on Bluesky for updates throughout the week — and look for us here again on Sunday, Mar. 30.
Thanks—
the TrumpVersusUS team