Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration; The Guardian, April 7, 2025

Rainesford Stauffer, The Guardian; Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

"For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.

Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy...

Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.

While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state...

Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram accountissued posts appearing to mock grantees."

Remember when ethics in government mattered?; Virginia Mercury, March 25, 2025

Ivy Main , Virginia Mercury; Remember when ethics in government mattered?

"Trading favors among the rich and powerful seems to be how it works in Trump’s America. Anyone who isn’t using his public position for his own gain is a chump. And while the laws prohibiting corruption are still on the books, Trump has ensured there are no federal prosecutors left with the independence to go after his allies. 

Besides which, in the unlikely event your cupidity actually gets you convicted of a crime, the president has a history going back to his first term of handing out pardons to MAGA loyalists regardless of their crimes. Sufficiently demonstrating fealty to the president may be enough to secure your place in his No Grifter Left Behind program. Frankly, the judge who sentences you has more to fear from the president than you do.  

By design, Trump’s attacks on American government, civil society and the world order have been so various and extreme as to leave opponents breathless. The resistance looks like a team of firefighters trying to deal with a large and very determined pack of juvenile arsonists. 

Yet, of all the fires now burning, Trump’s attacks on the rule of law might pose the single greatest threat to the country’s stability and prosperity. Trump’s firing of government watchdogs, blacklisting a law firm that represented his enemies, and defying judges who rule against him are unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Our economy as well as our democracy was built on a system of checks and balances that made corruption the newsworthy exception rather than the dismal norm."

In His Second Term, Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation; The New York Times, March 24, 2025

 Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times; In His Second Term, Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation

"This time, Mr. Trump is joined by a coterie of cabinet officials and advisers who have amplified them and even spread their own. Together, they are effectively institutionalizing disinformation.

While it is still early in his term, and many of his executive orders face legal challenges that could blunt the impact of any falsehoods driving them, Mr. Trump and his advisers have ushered the country into a new era of post-truth politics, where facts are contested and fictions used to pursue policy goals."

Ethics expert breaks down Trump administration’s conflicts of interest; PBS News, March 14, 2025

Laura Barrón-López, Ian Cousins, Doug Adams, PBS News ; Ethics expert breaks down Trump administration’s conflicts of interest

"It’s been less than two months since President Trump took office. In that time, Trump, his family and administration members have seen personal and financial gain in ways aided by their power and influence. This week, the president lined up Teslas at the White House to help Elon Musk as Tesla stocks plummeted. Laura Barrón-López discussed more with Don Fox."

Trump targets libraries and state-funded media organizations amid Voice of America’s staff cut; The Independent, March 15, 2025

Gustaf Kilander, The Independent; Trump targets libraries and state-funded media organizations amid Voice of America’s staff cut

"The Trump administration continued its gutting of the federal government on Saturday as it began making significant cuts to Voice of America and other state-operated programming supportive of democratic ideals. 

As Congress passed government funding on Friday night, Trump ordered the administration to cut back the functions of a number of agencies as much as possible in accordance with the law. One of the affected institutions was the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Asia, as well as Radio Marti, which broadcasts news in Spanish in Cuba. 

In an executive order signed late on Friday, Trump eviscerated a number of smaller offices and agencies that do everything from battling homelessness to funding libraries.

The order stated that the agencies and offices will see their federal grants reviewed. The grants will be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”...

The advocacy group said it “condemns this decision as a departure from the U.S.’s historic role as a defender of free information and calls on the U.S. government to restore VOA and urges Congress and the international community to take action against this unprecedented move.”...

The latest reductions are especially provocative because the Agency for Global Media is an independent agency chartered by Congress, which passed a law in 2020 limiting the power of the agency’s presidentially appointed executives. Trump has already taken several moves to gut congressionally-mandated programs, setting up a potential Supreme Court showdown over the limits of presidential power.

Trump also took aim at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that supports libraries, archives, and museums in all U.S. states."

More Universities Are Choosing to Stay Neutral on the Biggest Issues; The New York Times, March 11, 2025

Vimal Patel, The New York Times; More Universities Are Choosing to Stay Neutral on the Biggest Issues

"According to a new report released on Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted “institutional neutrality” policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack...

The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion policies...

On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has already said it is looking to target other universities."

Worse Than We Feared: Five weeks in and the Trump administration has been more corrupt, dangerous, and evil than we expected.; The Bulwark, February 28, 2025

JONATHAN V. LAST AND 

WILL SALETAN

, The Bulwark; Worse Than We Feared: Five weeks in and the Trump administration has been more corrupt, dangerous, and evil than we expected.

"Will Saletan was in for Sarah today and we did a giant, super-sized show. It’s a great conservation, the through-line of which is basically: We are living in something close to the worst-case scenario."

Trump’s firing of watchdog agency chief illegal and would give ‘license to bully officials’, judge rules; Reuters via The Guardian, March 1, 2025

Reuters via The Guardian; Trump’s firing of watchdog agency chief illegal and would give ‘license to bully officials’, judge rules

"A US judge on Saturday declared president Donald Trump’s firing of the head of a federal watchdog agency illegal in an early test of the scope of presidential power likely to be decided at the US supreme court.

US district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington had previously ruled that Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel who is responsible for protecting whistleblowers, could remain in his post pending a ruling.

Jackson said in her ruling on Saturday that upholding Trump’s ability to fire Dellinger would give him “a constitutional license to bully officials in the executive branch into doing his will”.

The justice department filed a notice late on Saturday saying it was appealing against Berman’s ruling to the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia."

How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch; The Nation, February 19, 2025

EZRA LEVIN and LEAH GREENBERG , The Nation; How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch

"For the millions of Americans now desperate to reclaim our democracy from the plutocratic vandalism of the second Trump administration, the main challenge before us is simple: We have to unify and fight back. This isn’t new and it isn’t rocket science—the one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition. What that should look like and what that demands of each of us is the heart of the new movement to defeat a more disciplined and lawless Trump White House, but before we get to where we’re going, we have to start with where we are.

We run a national pro-democracy grassroots movement organization that’s been helping to marshal local volunteer groups against Trumpism for nearly a decade. Trump’s innovation in his second term is his strategic alignment with neoreactionary forces personified in Elon Musk. As one underground memo circulating in pro-democracy circles recently explained, the neoreactionary goal is “replacing the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.” It’s no wonder that historians like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson are raising the alarm about a boiling constitutional crisis...

A week after the election, we published Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink, an open-source handbook for building nationwide opposition to the coming authoritarian takeover. The first step: total opposition to Trump’s Project 2025...

We’re under no illusion that any senator or representative can summon forth the opposition on their own. It’s up to each of us to try, and learn, and improve, and build. Constituents should be organizing in their own communities as engaged neighbors, pro-democracy volunteers, and educators. Rank-and-file Democrats should be feeding off that energy and harnessing its power. And Democrats in leadership should be corralling their caucuses to produce a unified front with aggressive, creative tactics and messaging. Nobody has all the answers, and we’re all going to have to try, fail, go back to the drawing board, and try again.

These are frightening times, and frightening times call for active, courageous leadership. Musk and Trump are really seeking to annex the operations of the state to their pet vanity projects, bigotries, and conspiracy theories , but our enemy is not one or two men. Our enemy is apathy, cynicism, and fatalism; the pernicious, authoritarian-friendly belief that we are merely victims of world events rather than active participants in a global struggle for freedom and justice. Every time one of us—a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator—takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious.

Take that step, and steel yourself with the knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-year experiment in self-governance—a real-life pluralistic democracy, imperfect as it is, striving to be more perfect. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; they crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions; they kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout Europe; they broke the back of the southern segregationist political bloc; they fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall. We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games is going to roll over us now.

We will not finish this fight, but we can each be damn sure to do our part while we’re here. Together, we are the opposition, and this is our republic—if we can keep it. This is the part where we keep it."

Trump 2.0: The most damaging two weeks in history; The Washington Post, February 4, 2025

 Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post; Trump 2.0: The most damaging two weeks in history

"No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. As we enter Week 3 of President Donald Trump’s second term, the chaos and disruption of his first look quaint by comparison. The country survived Trump 1. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively — all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.

This column will concentrate on the third piece of that trifecta: efforts to undermine the basic functioning of government...

None of this is normal. Little of it is legal. All of it is misguided, and that’s a mild term. The damage to the federal workforce is incalculable. Years of expertise down the drain. The ability to recruit talented employees, same. Why would anyone join an operation that treats its workers this way?

The reason to worry about this is not because of unfairness to federal employees, although there is that — it’s because of the debilitating, even dangerous, impact on government operations. Disruption is one thing in Silicon Valley, where the stakes are merely profit and loss. It is quite another when you are talking about a government charged with ensuring the safety of its citizens.

“What is happening right now,” Stier said, “is the destruction of the institution itself.”

And if you think that can be repaired four years from now, ask yourself: If Trump is successful in purging the government of perceived opponents and putting loyalists in their place, would a new Democratic administration politely play by old-school rules — or would it be justified in engaging in a tit-for-tat response?

The damage has already begun, and it will be difficult to reverse."