Monday murals and then some

 

Flowers at Art in Bloom 2025, Center for the Arts, Black Mountain NC

Some words of wisdom from Facebook.

Sunday last Helen and I went to a free art museum trip in Asheville. Zoom tickets are available to lots of venues in Asheville, through our Buncombe County libraries. This one was for an air conditioned trip, and a pass lets two people in. We also signed up for a Van Gogh movie, taken from an exhibit at another museum, complete with docents talking about the paintings. It was pricy, but after all, we'd obtained the entrance tickets for nothing.

Around noon thirty in downtown Asheville, there was a Vegan-Fest. Too hot to go strolling for me, however.

I had to enjoy this lady's body art, who checked us in at the front desk.

A wonderful mural in the lobby of the Asheville Art Museum

Layers of wood, cut into a Black America. (My son Tai Rogers would love this, as he made many white map-like sculptural forms.)

Detail of "My Big Black America"

Today's quote:

Life, what an exquisite privilege.

Katie Rubinstein

And an environmental quote from Katharine Hayhoe:

“it's OK to grieve over the things we've lost and will lose, grief isn't the same as despair. We need to be brave enough to do the right thing."

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Early coffee at Four Sisters Bakery (where we also found day-old croissants available!) with Suzanne, a dear old friend yesterday morning. Well, I got a decaf Americano, while she brought her own Chai tea. She's trying also to downsize things and finds it hard to do. We discussed briefly the need to get accurate news, and I referred her to BlueSky. She's an artist that has breast cancer, and has given away and sold a lot of her supplies...but still has a good easel for some aspiring talented person. Her interests are similar to mine in many ways. We plan to meet more Sunday mornings and sit in the cool fresh air and chat. She's interested in that Podcast about the Trickster, which I posted about on "Inner Workings" blog. And like my friend Teresa, she's enjoying doing "slow stitching."

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We spoke highly of Thom Tillis (one of NC's Senators in Washington) who'd voted against the Big Ugly Budget Bill. And then later I saw he'd announced his not running for another election.

"After Trump attacked him yesterday for not supporting the budget reconciliation bill, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has announced he will not run for reelection next year, indicating his unwillingness to face a primary challenger backed by Trump. This puts the seat in play for a Democratic pickup.

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.” 

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?... [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office today said the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republican senators are trying to pass will increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years despite the $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other programs over the same period. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) called the measure “Robin Hood in reverse…stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich, this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top…. This is socialism for the rich.” 

Heather Cox Richardson 

Daylilies at Four Sisters Bakery

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My Old Photos:

4.21.48 Galveston TX, my father, George Rogers Jr, grandmother, Ada Rogers & Uncle Chauncey Rogers, myself, Barbara & little sister, Mary Beth. Mother was the photographer. We called it soapy water!

A political post for Flag Day

Don't miss Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American this morning...great history of the beginnings of the armed forces of America! (**see below)

I share the following editorial poss for the newest information about ICE and tRump.

My regular Saturday post is still up Saturday's Critters.

From Facebook this morning...

Feminist News

And just like that, TACO Trump strikes again.

Five minutes before midnight east coast time, Trump directed ICE to abruptly halt all immigrant raids at farms, restaurants, hotels, and the like. Trump also directed ICE to stop so-called 'collateral arrests' where ICE randomly detains and arrests non-criminal immigrants.

Last month, Trump dropped his tariffs. Weeks ago, Trump folded to Canada. This week he folded to China. And now Trump is folding on a key plank of his deportation agenda just a day after calling in the Marines to Los Angeles.

The midnight directive to ICE marks an abrupt pivot in Trump's immigration agenda and sidelines immigration hardliners like resident Nazi Stephen Miller in favor of MAGA's corporate and billionaire donors.

Trump's rich friends told him the reality which is immigrants contribute more than anyone knows to this nation. They grow all our food, prepare all of our food, distribute our food, and in many cases as caretakers and child care workers they spoon feed food. Immigrants pay a higher tax rate than billionaires and they are the single greatest factor behind economic growth. In short, Trump's rich friends put the scare on him.

Gavin Newsom also put the scare on him. Trump thought he'd bowl over Newsom and take control of California's National Guard without a fight, but California's Governor called him a cheesy, washed up, mentally unstable dictator in front of the entire national audience. He challenged Trump legally, morally, clearly and unequivocally. California Senator Alex Padilla attracted global media attention after he was tackled and arrested by Homeland Security goons.

Protesters across the country put the scare on him. Immigrant communities across the country are on the frontlines of resistance against the terror inflicted by the administration and they're fighting back more furiously and effectively than ever before. They are stopping ICE cars and busses, intervening in raids, de-arresting their friends and families, and generally making life hell on earth for the masked predators hanging out at schools and churches looking for children and moms to snatch up and whisk away in unmarked vans.

Trump paid a massive political price for trying to criminalize regular working people. The more voters see what his immigration agenda is really about, the more they hate it. Trump's polling numbers are going down faster than Kristi Noem at a MAGA keg party. He's nearly 20 points underwater on inflation, he's 13 points underwater on the economy, and on immigration—which was his one bright spot—he's now also underwater as of this week.

Let it be known for the rest of eternity that on the eve of the largest nationwide revolt against America's wannabe king, the silver spoon punk ass bitch chicken taco'd out and threw in the white flag BEFORE A SINGLE PROTESTER HIT THE STREET.

All reactions:

 

New meaning to Flag Day!

** The text for Heather Cox Richardson today:

Two hundred and fifty years ago, on June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved “That six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a captain, three lieutenants, four serjeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates…[and that] each company, as soon as completed, shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”

And thus Congress established the Continental Army.

The First Continental Congress, which met in 1774, refused to establish a standing army, afraid that a bad government could use an army against its people. The Congress met in response to the British Parliament’s closing of the port of Boston and imposition of martial law there, but its members hoped they could repair their relationship with King George III and simply sent entreaties to the king to end what were known as the “Intolerable Acts.”

In 1775 the Battles of Lexington and Concord changed the equation. On April 19, British soldiers opened fire on colonists just as Patriot leaders feared they might. In the aftermath of that deadly day, about 15,000 untrained Massachusetts militiamen converged on Boston and laid siege to the town, where they bottled up about 6,500 British Regulars.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord made it clear the British government endangered American liberties. The Second Continental Congress met in what is now called Independence Hall in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, to address the crisis in Boston. The delegates overcame their suspicions of a standing army to conclude they must bring the various state militias into a continental organization to stand against King George III.

With the establishment of the Continental Army, a British officer, General Charles Lee, resigned his commission in the British Army and published a public letter explaining that the king’s overreach had turned him away from service in His Majesty’s army and toward the Patriots:

“[W]henever it shall please his Majesty to call me forth to any honourable service against the natural hereditary enemies of our country, or in defence of his just rights and dignity, no man will obey the righteous summons with more zeal and alacrity than myself,” he wrote, “but the present measures seem to me so absolutely subversive of the rights and liberties of every individual subject, so destructive to the whole empire at large, and ultimately so ruinous to his Majesty's own person, dignity and family, that I think myself obliged in conscience as a Citizen, Englishman, and Soldier of a free state, to exert my utmost to defeat them.”

After they established a Continental Army, the next thing Congress members did was to name a French and Indian War veteran, Virginia planter George Washington, commander-in-chief. To Washington fell the challenge of establishing an army to defend the nation without creating a military a tyrant could use to repress the people.

It was not an easy project. The Continental Army was made up of volunteers who were loyal primarily to the officers they had chosen, and because Congress still feared a standing army, their enlistments initially were short. Different units trained with different field manuals, making it hard to turn them into a unified fighting force. Women came to the camps with their men, often bringing their children. The women worked for the half-rations the government provided, washing, cooking, hauling water, and tending the wounded.

After an initial bout of enthusiasm at the start of the war, men stopped enlisting, and in 1777 Congress increased the times of enlistment to three years or “for the duration” of the conflict. That meant that the men in the army were more often poor than wealthy, enlisting for the bounties offered, and Congress found it easy to overlook those 12,000 people encamped about 18 miles to the northwest of Philadelphia in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for six months in the hard winter of 1777–1778. The Congress had no way to compel the states to provide money, food, or supplies for the army, and the army almost fell apart for lack of support.

Supply chains broke as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant Congress did not appropriate enough money for food. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny, even as a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war.

By February 1778 a delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and, understanding that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. The army survived.

By the end of 1778, the main theater of the war had shifted to the South, where British officers hoped to recruit Loyalists to their side. Instead, guerrilla bands helped General Nathanael Greene bait the British into a war of endurance that finally ended on October 19, 1781, at the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia, where British general Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington and French commander Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau.

The Continental Army had defeated the army of the king and established a nation based on the principle that all men were created equal and had a right to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In September 1783, negotiators concluded the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war, and Congress discharged most of the troops still in service. In his November 2 farewell address to his men, Washington noted that their victory against such a formidable power was “little short of a standing Miracle.” “[W]ho has before seen a disciplined Army formed at once from such raw materials?” Washington wrote. “Who that was not a witness could imagine, that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon, and that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers?”

With the army disbanded, General Washington himself stepped away from military leadership. On December 23, Washington addressed Congress, saying: “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

In 1817, given the choice of subjects to paint for the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, being rebuilt after the British had burned it during the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull picked the moment of Washington’s resignation from the army. As he discussed the project with President James Madison, Trumbull told the president: “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success, and such irreproachable moderation.”

Madison agreed, and the painting of a man voluntarily walking away from the leadership of a powerful army rather than becoming a dictator hangs today in the Capitol Rotunda.

It is the story of this Army, 250 years old tomorrow, that President Donald J. Trump says he is honoring with a military parade in Washington, D.C., although it also happens to be his 79th birthday.

But the celebration of ordinary people who fought against tyranny will be happening not just in the nation’s capital but all across the country, as Americans participating in at least 2,000 planned No Kings protests recall the principles American patriots championed 250 years ago.

Veterans came out early to protest on the steps of the capital in DC.
 

Saturday's Critters in clay

I've been searching for some animals (and there once were quite a few) which I made either in the shape of animals (think cats or dragons) or as glazing detail on a functional piece.

Hummingbird plate (about 7 inches if I remember correctly.)

Simple trivets, or decorations (flat ceramic pieces that could protect a wood table from a hot dish.

Free standing cat mask

There were two times in my life that I created art forms (or humorous forms, as some may say) of clay. First was in the 1980s when I returned to college to work on a BFA degree at the U of Florida in Ceramics. I just have a few of those pieces left, and maybe a dozen photos. As I've moved about through the years, I've tossed many "artsy pieces" out.

Bee tea-set in celadon and dark green glazes, 2014

Then I again got a chance to work in clay after I retired from being an Activity Director for senior apartment residents.

Hummingbird vase

I made things in clay for 12 years after retirement, in my mid 60s till my 70s, My last efforts were a few months of work in my 81st year on dragons. My health now precludes me working in clay where dust and mold would interfere with my lungs.

Dragon girl one as a bisque level, waiting for glaze which didn't come out well, so I tossed this.

Monarch mug which I still have for morning coffee.

Blue bird of happiness

A silly little calico, these are altered forms after throwing "on the hump" of a bigger piece of clay on the wheel. 

Dragon tower - all slab built.

Cat and mouse teapot

OK, there are more, and now I want to make an album of them. So am off to see where photos have been stored for years of the giraffes, the hummingbird mask, the other bee teapot, the blue bird bowl, and others that I will be pleasantly surprised to find. I've got an entire external hard drive to plug in and search.

Yes, all of these are my work, from start to finish. I have a couple of them still.

Many pots were tossed away. My approach to clay creations is that "Everything is sacred. Nothing is sacred."

Sharing with Eileen's Saturday's Critters

==========

Current events from H.C. Richardson: At 101 days, the “Department of Government Efficiency” and its leader, billionaire Elon Musk, are also running into trouble. Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion from government spending, but that number kept dropping until he said DOGE will save about $150 billion. As David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine noted in the New York Times, that number is largely unsubstantiated. The DOGE team’s list of cuts is riddled with errors. In addition, the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE cuts have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year, not including lawsuits.

AND - from pagan leader, permaculture teacher, and Jew, Starhawk:

The Freedom Flotilla boat is attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, where the Israeli government has stopped all shipments of food and medical supplies since late March. Food programs have run out of supplies, and mass famine is threatening. Depriving a civilian population of food and medical aid violates international law and all basic human morality. In the face of this emergency, brave human rights have set sail to attempt to bring in needed aid. But tonight their ship was bombed in international waters outside Malta, and is now in danger of sinking. Please contact the Maltese government and demand that they send help. 30 people are on board!

Here's an easy way to send a message:
https://support.adc.org/a/malta

===============

Today's quote:

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.

Wendell Berry

 

It's still springtime!

 Some old and some new signs of spring!

Our Social Security checks keep us alive. 

Two versions of King Charles III. No idea why I'm including him today.

And for those who care about the state of our US economy...

"United Parcel Service (UPS) has already announced that it is laying off about 20,000 employees and closing 73 of its buildings by the end of June. It says it anticipates lower volumes of shipping from its largest customer, Amazon, because of the tariffs...

The Constitution gave to Congress, not the president, the power to set tariffs. Trump is taking that power to himself by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to enact his sweeping tariffs. This law authorizes a president to regulate international trade during a national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for his new blanket tariffs.

Congress could end Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”

In the Senate this evening, (April 30) Republican leaders killed a similar Democratic measure. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said: “Republicans are trying to give the administration…some space to figure out if they can get some good deals and awaiting the results of that.” Three Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky—voted with the Democrats.

Other observers are less hopeful of a good outcome for Trump’s tariffs. Washington Post legal and economic columnist Natasha Sarin said: “It’s just totally bonker bananas. Where are we going?! Are we near trading deals with India and Japan? That means less tariff revenue. But Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, says the tariffs are going to produce lots of revenue for deficit reduction. So that must mean they’re staying high? It’s a constant yo-yo that is impossible to plan around and is leading to investors being down on America, and with good reason.”

“Bonker bananas” is an apt description for an interview Trump did last night with Terry Moran of ABC News. In a discussion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration rendered to prison in El Salvador because of “administrative error,” Trump insisted that Abrego Garcia has “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles, for the gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. But the photo Trump held up for the cameras as “proof” of MS-13 tattoos was obviously photoshopped with letters and numbers apparently intended to be labels for Abrego Garcia’s actual tattoos.

As Moran repeatedly told Trump that the tattoos had been photoshopped, Trump got visibly angry, first suggesting that it was thanks to Trump that Moran got the interview, and complaining that “you’re not being very nice.” Trump then continued to insist that Abrego Garcia has MS13 tattooed on his knuckles and said that Moran’s refusal to agree to that “is why people no longer believe the news…. It’s such a disservice,” the president said. “Why don't you just say yes, he does[?]”

Trump couldn’t let it go. He brought it up again later in the interview, calling Moran “dishonest” for saying the tattoos were photoshopped.

Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and experts on MS-13 say his tattoos are not tied to the gang.

That was not the only astonishing moment in the interview.

Although the Supreme Court unanimously agreed with a lower court that the administration must work to get Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, the White House has insisted that it cannot comply because only El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, can release Abrego Garcia. But when Moran said to Trump he could pick up the phone and get him back, Trump replied “I could…. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.” When Moran replied “But the court has ordered you to facilitate that,” Trump replied: “I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers who don't want to do this.”

“You’re the president!” Moran replied.

SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson April 30, 2025

I haven't tried this yet. It sure sounds good though!

Today's quote:

We don’t have to pretend to be fine when we are not. We don’t need to push through and be strong. Gratitude is a soft landing place that requires us to be honest, open, and willing to look at everything we’re facing and not turn away.

Alex Elle

Black bee tea set by Barbara Rogers

Sharing with Floral Friday Fotos

The First 100 Days by Heather Cox Richardson

 Below is the entirety of Letters From An American for today

April 29, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson Apr 30

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”

In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR was speaking on July 24 to urge Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about,” he said. “If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of this depression, I answer, ‘They will if they want to.’”

Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”

In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.

But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in his first hundred days. Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people.

Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies.

As is typical with autocratic governments, corruption appears to be running deep in this White House. The president and his family are openly profiting from his office. And it would be hard to find a better example of a government letting cronies profit off public resources than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s relinquishing of control over the department to a DOGE operative, or of a government permitting businesses to profit from ordinary Americans than billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent creation of a master database of Americans’ information.

Trump’s dismantling of the modern American state has been a disaster. Trump spoke tonight in Michigan to tout his hope that his new tariffs will center auto manufacturing back in the U.S., but the economic chaos his tariff policies have unleashed has turned what was a booming economy 100 days ago sharply downward. That economic slump, along with Trump’s illegal renditions of men to El Salvador and the gutting of services Americans depend on, has given Trump the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years.

And that suggests another way to look at the first 100 days of a presidential term. For all that the 100-days trope focuses on presidents, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have shown Americans, sometimes encouraged by their allies abroad, pushing back against Trump to restore American democracy.

Democratic attorneys general began to plan for a possible Trump second term in February 2024, preparing for cases they might have to file if Trump followed through with his campaign promises or implemented Project 2025. California, with 5,600 staffers in its department of justice, and New York, with 2,400, carried much of the weight. They were able to file their first challenges to Trump’s January 20 executive orders on January 21. Their lawsuits, and those of others, have been so successful that they have sparked both Trump and MAGA Republicans to attack judges and even the judiciary.

Early observers of the movement to stop Trump’s destruction of the modern state argued that the opposition was too burned out to mount any meaningful pushback against a newly emboldened Trump. But, in fact, people were not in the streets because they were organizing over computer apps and at the local level, a reality that burst into the open at Republican town halls in late February as angry voters protested government cuts at the hands of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, told Republicans to stop holding town halls to stop the protests from gaining attention. So Democrats began holding their own packed town halls in the absent Republicans’ districts.

On March 20, 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Las Vegas. Unexpectedly huge crowds flocked to their rallies across the West, revealing a deep well of unhappiness at the current government even in areas that had voted for Trump.

At 7:00 on the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched a marathon speech attacking the Trump administration and imploring Republicans to defend democracy because, he said, he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.” Before he finished twenty-five hours later on April 1, his speech—the longest in congressional history—had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

The quiet organizing of the early months of the administration showed when the first call for a public “Hands Off!” protest on April 5 produced more than 1,400 rallies in all 50 states and turned out millions of people. Organizers called for “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”

On April 11, Harvard University rejected the administration’s demands In a letter noting that the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract.

Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

Last Sunday, April 27, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire, telling them to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” he said.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact— because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”’

And so, even as Trump tries to erase the government FDR pioneered, Americans are demonstrating their support for a government that defends ordinary people, and proving the truth of FDR’s words from 1933, that when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”

—

Notes:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-recovery-program

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5379554/trump-100-days-numbers-laws-immigration

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-100-days-speech-detroit/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-lowest-100-day-approval-rating-80-years/story?id=121165473

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/democrats-taking-trump-musk-winning-00206310

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/04/congress/gop-town-halls-richard-hudson-00210024

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-bernie-sanders-rally-democrats-rcna197296

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/05/us/hands-off-protests-trump-musk/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/harvards-president-says-school-will-not-compromise-trump-admin-rcna202564

https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf

https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-american-higher-education/

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-surveil-track/

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5259589-interior-secretary-doug-burgum/

https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Harvard-Response-2025-04-14.pdf

YouTube:

watch?v=vXdqHXbp04s

watch?v=zMndfvxVeRo

Bluesky:

drewharwell.com/post/3lls2yurefk2x