Fridays in Trumpland: 2.14.2025

Freefall

Back in early 2017, in the comments on my daily broadcast on politics and activism, folks would sometimes ask me when we would hit bottom with Trump.

At the time, I was confident in the backstops of democracy. I was, after all, a lawyer who was trained in Washington D.C., who had handled high profile white collar and human rights cases, who had gone up against the Bush Administration in court, and (admittedly due to my indoctrination into the mythology of the American legal system) I believed the barriers would hold.

“There will be a bottom,” I would say. “There is always a bottom.”

I suppose I still believe to some extent that’s true. Fascists always lose in the end. In the words of the poet singer Brandi Carlile, “I’ve seen how it ends, and the joke’s on them.”

The problem, though, is that on the way to their inevitable demise, they inflict an incalculable amount of death and damage and trauma and pain, seemingly without end.

And this week–- well, this week has felt like a freefall into the all-the-way-down, and still dropping.

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This week saw the shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, Musk’s invasion of the Department of Education and the IRS, and the rehiring of one of Elon Musk’s Nazi Youth Brigade– he of the infamous nickname Big Balls– to a role at the State Department (!!!).

Trump’s DOJ cut the shadiest of shady deals with indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams to drop charges against him in exchange for unfettered ICE access to vulnerable communities, only to then turn around and have Elon Musk steal $80 million in FEMA funds straight out of New York City’s own bank account, with no justification. DOJ then filed a civil suit against Adams, New York D.A. Alvin Bragg, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and others, claiming that they had somehow prioritized undocumented people over American citizens.

And then, to cap it all off, Trump’s own Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York resigned via a scathing, eight page rebuke rather than act on orders to dismiss Adams’ charges that alleged nothing short of a quid pro quo, complete with an allegation of obstruction of justice against Deputy AG Emil Bove— a corruption scandal so serious that it would sink any ordinary Deputy AG, not to mention the Attorney General. The heads of the DOJ Public Integrity unit and the DOJ Criminal Division (also Trump’s own appointees) and three others resigned shortly thereafter in protest.

Meanwhile, new aluminum and steel tariffs dropped, inflation rose, and the GOP dropped a proposed budget that slashed Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP benefits in favor of a $4.5 trillion tax break to the rich. Meanwhile, another airplane crashed, and Trump and Putin cozied up to try to bully Ukraine into ending the war in exchange for being plundered for minerals. Meanwhile, Trump expanded DOGE’s (fake) authority to every federal agency save those associated with law enforcement and immigration.

There was an Oval Office presser where Elon acted like the president as his emotional support offspring picked his nose at the Resolute Desk, while Trump quietly seethed. Trump threatened to invade Canada, again, and to seize Gaza for his own personal use, again. Elon cut a corrupt deal for $400 million in cybertruck purchases for the U.S. military, just as Germany threatened consequences for his election interference in their own elections.

And despite some wins in court– most notably, a stay of Trump’s executive order targeting medical care for trans youth, and a stay of mass layoffs from USAID– and the intervention of an epic halftime show from Kendrick Lamar, the week reeked, too, of Democrats seeming to lack enough backbone to stop voting for most of Trump’s nominees, to shut down the Senate, to do much of anything, really, to stop this oncoming, ongoing high speed train aimed straight at the heart of American democracy.

Freefalling all the way down, with no bottom in sight.

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On Tuesday morning, the day before the traitorous Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as DNI and two days before a crackpot brain-worm-infested disease-spreading former heroin addict was confirmed at the Secretary of HHS, I got up at 4:30 a.m. and began Signal chatting with one of my old friends, a fellow lawyer and organizer.

Over the next two hours, we shared the way that we are pitching, hour by hour, from panic, to rage, to total dysregulation, to organizing and fighting back, and how despite knowing that all this trauma was by design and a clear component of the fascist coup we’re living through, we were both desperate to game out how it could end.

Hypervigilance is a hell of a drug.

After spinning through scenarios and more scenarios and potential responses, pounding our phone keyboards and pouring out all the spiraling emotions, there was a pause.

And then she said this to me: “So little of this is within our control. We can take action, we can love our people, we can build community, but so little of what is happening is within our control.”

I’ve never skydived. The idea of orphaning my children has always carried too much threat for me to even consider it.

But I wonder if there’s a moment when you’re falling where you just have to surrender to it, and blindly hope that after all the safety checks and all the work and all the trust in those around you, your parachute will open in the end.

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Candidly, I don’t know when, or even if, the parachute will open here. But I do know that we have some safety checks, and some actions still to take that will aid in any hope for our survival, and people with us who we can trust.

We can get involved on the ground with organizations that are acting to save people’s lives: food banks, community care centers, volunteer medical clinics, warming shelters for the unhoused.

We can offer support to organizations working on behalf of immigrants, and trans and LGBTQ+ people, and in service to abortion access.

We can look around where we live and see who needs help and offer to give it, and ask for help if we need it ourselves.

We can be in community with people who get it, who provide safety, who see it all without any need to explain and who will witness us when we cry and despair and fear for all that has happened, and all that is yet to come.

We can love each other, as best we can, and promise to organize and to fight for each other and for what we know is right.

I do not know if the parachute will open before we hit the ground. I do not know if the landing will be hard or even deadly to our democracy.

But I do know that this week, the bottom fell out of America.

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As this week comes to an end, I find myself wishing that for all of us, we find and create for one another a safe place to land. Mutual aid. Dual power. Comfort where possible and grieving where not. That we will be the cushion to the blows of so much harm and so much damage, and that we will love each other through it.

Here, this week, is a gift to you.

Hold tight, friends.

Choose to fight and to carry on and to do the work of caring for one another.

As we freefall into who knows what, at the bare minimum we need to hold each other on the way down, and promise to do what we can to make the landing easier.

“And be the light in the dark of this danger,

‘til the sun comes up.”