Hello, and congratulations on reaching the end of the 10th week of Trump’s second term. If it feels like things are accelerating … well, they are. But everyday Americans (and even some politicians) are pushing back harder — and that’s making a difference, hurting Elon Musk’s bank account, and apparently hurting his feelings. So let’s dig in.
The Latest Attacks: Trump vs. …
Our Wallets 💸💰
- Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to rewrite the computer code that runs the Social Security program in a matter of mere weeks. Civic technologist Waldo Jaquith, an alum of now-shuttered federal digital-services agency 18F, wrote a thread on Bluesky to explain why this shouldn’t and can’t be done: “This is profoundly stupid and will definitely fail,” he wrote.
- Workers in the travel industry are bracing for a slow summer. Travel by Canadians into the United States has plunged through the floor with bookings on airlines that fly between the neighboring countries down 70 percent. Air Canada, Delta, and United have slashed their flight schedules in response. On top of that, several countries we consider(ed?) friends now have travel advisories … so yeah, it’s gonna get worse.
- Stock markets — and the worth of Americans’ retirement accounts — continued to plunge in response to uncertainty about Trump’s on again, off again, on again, no really on but not yet, okay now for real they’re on tariffs, worries about inflation, and the endless onslaught of federal job cuts. (Speaking of which, here’s our chart of the week:)
US consumers at all income levels have become much more pessimistic about the economy www.sca.isr.umich.edu
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-03-28T14:09:33.748Z
- Making housing discrimination okay again: senior Trump official Russ Vought — doing double duty as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — reversed a judgement against the firm Townstone Financial and gave back a $105,000 fine paid by the company. Journalist David Dayen, who literally wrote the book on the 2008 foreclosure crisis, wrote that Townstone “ran an openly racist radio program to get leads for its mortgage business” and essentially “[put] up a ‘whites only’ sign” at its business.
Our Safety 🦺⛑️
- Another week, another near miss for air travelers — this time again involving a proximity alarm sounding in the flight deck of a passenger plane departing Washington’s National Airport when a military aircraft came too close.
- Speaking of air travel, travelers who took heart from the Biden administration’s efforts to hold Boeing accountable for the design of the 737 MAX — the plane involved in two crashes caused by faulty software — might feel a pit in their stomach. Boeing is reported to be working to withdraw a plea agreement in the 737 MAX case. The company seeks to end the corporate probation that Boeing accepted to settle federal criminal charges against the company.
- Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told the president and others at a cabinet meeting that she hoped to “eliminate FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, by Oct, 1. Weather heads might know that the North Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1 and runs until November 30 — so a plan to wind down federal emergency assistance and support during hurricane season seems … badly timed? 🤨(Bear in mind: last year’s Hurricane Helene, which devastated portions of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, made landfall on Sept. 26.)
Our Rights ✊⚖️
- The president attempted to end the collective bargaining rights of a million federal employees last week. Ironically citing “national security” in the same week as Signalgate, the White House issued an executive order canceling workers’ contracts at such notable national-security agencies as the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the General Services Administration (which manages the federal government’s properties and leases). Unions are suing to block the move.
- In another attack on labor rights, the administration shut down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service — an agency that helps resolve strikes and disruptions to the economy and workers while costing only 0.0014% of the federal budget.
- The administration apparently believes accommodating Americans with disabilities costs too much. In what Attorney General Pam Bondi billed as a move to combat a supposed “cost-of-living crisis,” the Justice Department removed multiple guideline documents written to aid businesses in complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some affected documents date to as long ago as 1999.
- The Department of Homeland Security continues to snatch students from college communities and campuses — including one student enrolled at Tufts University in the Boston area, who was abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials apparently for writing an op-ed about Gaza critical of Tufts own administration and Israel in the school’s campus newspaper.
Video of the international student at Tufts being arrested by "federal authorities" in Massachusetts has been released and it's terrifying. They're not even uniformed officers. Just secret police thugs in hoodies and masks. From WCVB: youtu.be/PuFIs7OkzYY
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T17:34:18.672Z
Our Leadership 🇺🇸
Good news, if you’re trying to spy on the U.S.: “It’s never been easier to steal secrets from the United States government. Can you even call it stealing when it’s this simple? The Trump administration has unlocked the vault doors, fired half of the security guards and asked the rest to roll pennies. Walk right in. Take what you want. This is the golden age.”
Our Health ⚕️🏥😷
It was a fantastic week in Washington for germs and diseases. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:
- laid off 10,000 people — upping the size of staff cuts at HHS since Trump’s return to 20,000, nearly a quarter of the department’s payroll (it’s hard to say that bodes well for HHS’s new role supporting special-needs students as part of the attempted shuttering of the Department of Education);
- buried a government prepared measles-outbreak forecast that indicated a need for stepped-up vaccinations (the ongoing outbreak continues to worsen, with a 22% increase in cases across Texas and New Mexico in three days);
- canceled dozens of studies set up to seek possible vaccines and treatments for microbes that may cause future pandemics;
- reportedly laid off all staff at the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV Policy, as well as the Office of Minority Health; and
- forced the departure of the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine-oversight official — who wrote in his resignation letter: “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Our Families 🧑🧑🧒🧒👵
- But wait: we’re not done talking about HHS Secretary Kennedy’s busy week. HHS hired a pair of vaccine skeptics to open a new federal study into thoroughly debunked claims about connections between vaccinations and autism — including a man fined by Maryland for practicing medicine without a license. From The Washington Post:
Jessica Steier, a public health researcher who leads the nonprofit Science Literacy Lab that scrutinizes research on high-profile health topics, said that the Geiers’ research is riddled with basic flaws and that the pair have “demonstrated patterns of an anti-vaccine agenda.”
“This is a worst-case scenario for public health,” Steier said. “It’s a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have.”
- Workers who help veterans get through moments of mental-health crisis say they themselves are under enormous stress. Cuts to staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs, ongoing layoffs of veterans across the federal workforce, and directives handed down by Elon Musk’s “DOGE” team have combined to leave the Veterans Crisis Line “besieged by callers worried about their benefits, while the operators themselves feel beaten down and disrespected by government leaders.”
The Big Picture: Out with ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ in with ‘Disclose Intelligence Everywhere’
Call us old-fashioned, but it seems like a rookie move to discuss war plans/attack plans/whatever the technical term is on your personal smartphone’s Signal app.
Even if you know not to share war plans in an off-the-shelf group chat app, Trump’s team just got caught doing so mere weeks after arriving on the job. Even more bizarrely, Trump’s national security advisor accidentally looped a prominent journalist, the editor of The Atlantic magazine, into their group chat — where they shared classified details about imminent military strikes on Yemen, burned the identity of CIA staff, and jeopardized the cover of an Israeli intelligence source.
Let’s talk about the implications of it all:
- They don’t care about other people’s safety. Not only did members of the group chat lack the wherewithal to notice themselves sharing classified military actions with a reporter; they also lacked the restraint to hold back information that could identify a foreign intelligence source.American military personnel and families noticed this. To judge from press reports and what’s available on social media, they’re pretty pissed.
@kendallybrown News just broke that JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth (among others) violated the espionage act and endangered the lives of thousands of troops in Yemen and nearby countries by sharing HIGHLY classified information via a SIGNAL CHAT. #news #breaking #politics #military
- They want to cover their tracks. The federal government has tons of infrastructure to help people discuss confidential information. Securely. The Capitol, the Pentagon, and other buildings even have secured rooms where information can be discussed with no risk of conversations being wiretapped or eavesdropped upon. (Notably, you have to surrender any personal phones before entering those rooms — because they are too easy to hack.)Signal isn’t where leaders discuss government plans to keep them from spies. It’s where they discuss plans to keep them from you and me — and from the eyes of federal judges, members of Congress, investigators, or historians who might try to hold Trump’s officials accountable.
As I explain here, security isn't even the biggest part of the Signal Scandal. This is to keep actions secret from the US government. It's how to do crimes, bribes and more. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/signa…
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) 2025-03-25T16:07:36.763Z
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They don’t care about the laws. “But don’t laws require preserving government records,” you might ask. The answer: of course they do! The Federal Records Act was enacted with the express purpose of keeping internal government communications on file at the National Archives, for future use and reference.
It’s no great leap from Trump hoarding classified files at his West Palm Beach clubhouse to this latest scandal. He has a long tradition of mishandling official records, so the sight of his deputies doing so now comes as little surprise. But the punch in the gut is that the record-retention illegality was intended to hide other illegalities — such as war crimes.
Another disgusting part of all of this is the proof a blatant war crime to which the Vice President of the United States responded: Excellent.
— Maxwell Frost (@maxwellfrost.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T13:45:31.484Z
- They don’t even understand that they don’t know what they’re doing. “Clean on OPSEC,” read a message Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent to the group — referencing inside the Beltway lingo for “operational security.” Given that the world has seen Hegseth’s message, oy vey. But the depth of incompetence only became clear later in the week. Consider:
- a German magazine found contact info on the open internet — including the phone numbers of personal devices used to run the Signal app — for Hegseth and other national-security officials;
- National Security Advisor Mike Waltz left his Venmo friends list public — and so did White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles;
- Wired magazine tracked down the Venmo accounts of even more members of the Signal war-plans chat — and the magazine noted that “one made a payment with a note consisting solely of an eggplant emoji.”
The sickening irony here: Hegseth ousted the sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Black four-star general, on the grounds that he may have been promoted above his ability as a “DEI hire.” Yet Hegseth operates with worse discretion than the average kid reaching quietly into a candy jar — and from his placement of his podcaster brother as a Pentagon liaison to bringing his wife to meetings with foreign defense officials (imagine the pillow talk debriefings afterwards!), Hegseth continues to show no sign of having either the qualifications or judgement needed for his own role.
This is the simple pattern in everything this administration has done: They don’t know what they’re doing.The chainsawing of agencies, the market-tanking stop-and-go tariffs, the war plans dumped unwittingly to a journalist on an open channel.They’re idiots. They have no idea what they’re doing.
— Will Saletan (@saletan.bsky.social) 2025-03-24T22:03:44.791Z
Our last point is perhaps the most chilling. Officials in the chat seemed to lack any shared understanding of Trump’s timing, intent, or purpose in bombing Yemen. Eventually Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, weighed in to settle the team’s disagreements: “as I heard it,” Miller wrote, “the president was clear.”
Nowhere to be seen is evidence that an order to strike — and to strike when the raid in Yemen happened — came from the commander-in-chief of the U.S armed forces. So we have to sit with a fundamental question: if Donald Trump is checked out, who’s in charge?
Waste, Fraud & Abuse Watch
- NASA announced a contract with Elon Musk-controlled SpaceX for launch and cargo services on the company’s Starship rocket program — a program you might know about because its rockets keep blowing up.
- Congratulations to Vice President J.D. Vance for selling his house in Alexandria, Va., to (*ahem*) a lobbyist, for (*ahem*) $170,000 more than the asking price. Vance, seen below, celebrated the sale by meeting friends in Greenland:
Nothing I can write makes this funnier than it already is.
— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) 2025-03-28T19:47:35.137Z
- The public tab for the president’s golf habit, which he’s indulged on nine weekends of 10 since his return to the White House: $26 million and counting.
- Trump made another play to pump up the price of a cryptocurrency — plugging the $TRUMP coin as “so cool” on his Truth Social account.
Looking Ahead …
- The national unemployment report for March should come on Friday, April 4. With some federal employees on administrative leave but technically “back at work” because of court orders against federal job cuts, the effect of Trump’s job-slashing campaign on the unemployment rate seems difficult to predict.
- The SAVE Act — an effort by Trump allies in Congress to force states to use voter-registration requirements so strict that many people, especially married women, will be unable to comply with them — is scheduled for a vote in the House of Representatives. (We see this bill as more concerning than Trump’s “election protection” executive order — which attempts to exercise powers over state-run elections that presidents simply don’t have.)
- The Wisconsin Supreme Court race on Tuesday: with Musk having already spent $20 million trying to promote Trump supporter Brad Schimel, this race could shift the balance of power redistricting and access to abortion.
- The ‘Love, Queen’ exhibit by painter and artist Adam Pendleton will open at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum on April 4. Yes, we know about Trump’s Smithsonian executive order; no, we don’t see it as too important. As Smithsonian Institution leader Lonnie Bunch wrote to all staff last week, the official influence of the White House over the institution begins and ends with Vice President Vance’s role as an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board.
Win of the Week: Delay in Illegal “Deportations”
Huzzah! A federal court in south Florida has blocked, for the moment, the Trump administration’s attempts to “deport” people from the United States to third countries — in other words, to countries other than the places they are actually from.
Walkbacks of the Week:
In-person identity verification for Social Security is off — and efforts to track Ukranian kids kidnapped by Russia are back on.
The Trump administration is now delaying plans to needlessly force millions of additional Americans into understaffed, overcrowded field offices for in-person verification.
— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) 2025-03-27T14:54:46.905Z
www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec…
— John Hudson (@johnphudson.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T21:32:36.639Z
People Fighting Back
Yesterday saw the biggest Tesla Takedown Day of Action yet. Plus big shows of resistance in Boston, Westchester, NY and Washington.
410 people at the Devon, PA Tesla Takedown today – still growing!
A Somerville, MA resident sends along this image of all the people who turned out for an emergency rally today for Romeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University PhD international student who was essentially abducted by ICE yesterday.Thousands came "on six hours' notice."
— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T02:37:04.938Z
At the Mike Lawler empty chair town hall in Peekskill, 102 year old Dee in danger of losing her Medicaid, heard FDR on the radio in 1935 when he created Social Security. @indivisible.org
— Sandi Bachom 📹🎥🎬 (@sandibachom.bsky.social) 2025-03-23T04:03:42.627Z
EXCLUSIVE: Tonight at the Kennedy Center, Guster brought on cast members from Finn, an LGBTQ+ kids musical that was recently canceled when Trump took over the center. They performed the band’s song “Hard Times” to a standing ovation. Full story, exclusive quotes and video on The Handbasket:
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2025-03-29T02:27:57.091Z
Politicians Running Scared
President Donald Trump ✨
It looks like Trump feels worried about holding on to the Republican Party’s razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives. As a result, it’s too bad/so sad for Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) — whose dream of becoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has died, so that Republican control of Congress may live.
Trump admits the rationale for pulling Stefanik’s nomination is Republican fears about losing her seat.He won that seat by *21* points last year
— Aaron Fritschner (@fritschner.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T18:22:17.983Z
Now, now: don’t all cry at once.
Politicians Standing Up
"The response to authoritarianism isn't acquiescence. Bullies respond to one thing and one thing only: a punch in the face." – @govpritzker.illinois.gov
— Parker Molloy (@parkermolloy.com) 2025-03-24T19:29:35.379Z
As we signaled (*ahem*) above, we have a little joke for those of you who made it to the end. These aren’t actual App Store software update notes, as best we know — but if they had been, they still came too late for poor Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:
dead
— Sky Marchini (@sky.skymarchini.net) 2025-03-28T01:44:55.485Z
That’s all for now. Stay with us on Bluesky for updates throughout this week — and look for us to show up in your inbox again on Sunday, April 6.
Toodle-loo, and thanks—
the TrumpVersusUS team