by Joyce Vance
Feb 12, 2025
Just to give you some idea of how vast the diameter of the firehose that Trump is spewing stuff through is right now, I decided to go back through social media to give you a sense of all of the legal issues I was tracking on Tuesday. Just Tuesday and just the mainstream legal issues. This is the opposite approach from the one I have schooled myself to stick with here, trying to take it all in and distill it down to just a few key items each evening. That’s the approach I’m committed to here and with The Democracy Index.
But this little zoom out is important to get a sense of just how much Trump 2.0 is doing and how fast they are doing it. It serves to underscore what we all know, that none of this is normal.
If a new president was really looking for evidence of waste and fraud in agency spending, he’d send in forensic accountants, investigators, and prosecutors—not coders and hackers. If he really wanted to reform government, he wouldn’t do it by breaking laws, like the ones about how to go about lawfully replacing inspectors general. The lack of commitment to good government—and by extension, to us, the citizens of this country—is apparent everywhere.
Right now, there is so much going on that it’s virtually impossible to track everything. At least we know why there is so much happening—Trump is trying to flood the zone with distraction in hopes we will be unable to figure out what’s most important, let alone focus on it. It’s become relatively clear that his goal is accumulating power, using non-government agency DOGE to do the dirty work of disrupting democracy to get there.
That basic idea, that Trump is engaging in a major disruption and transformation of government, properly called an internal coup, continues to remain front and center for me. This morning, in the pre-caffeine haze that is becoming so familiar, I had an idea and dictated a start on my column for tonight on that theme. That’s the column you may have seen this morning (complete with the name misspelling of Allen Charles Raul, whose excellent column in The Washington Post I discussed). Instead of saving the column to work on later after I got my first draft down on paper, I hit send. This is my life in the time of Trump; even as you try to maintain some sanity in the face of everything that’s going on, the crazy can still get to you.
I share this both out of embarrassment and apology, but more importantly, because it feels so emblematic to me of what happens now that we’re constantly drinking from the gushing firehose. The next four years are not going to be easy for any of us, but they’re going to be important. We may have to tolerate a little mess to get the job done.
If you didn’t get a chance to read “Call it What It Is” this morning, since it landed in your mailbox at an odd mid-morning time, I hope you’ll take a look tonight. The central idea feels very important to me right now.
As for the big picture on Tuesday, by the end of the night I had so many tabs open on my computer—half a dozen court decisions and even more news reports—that it was groaning about lack of memory. Here are some of the crazy in bullet points: [pop –I’ll stop this at two]
- In a clear, and also an extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.” Later in the day, they were refused access.
We have serious problems. This is ridiculous.
2. The New York Times is trying to get DOJ to release Volume 2 of Jack Smith’s report, the one about the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. So far, DOJ has refused. The Times is appealing the decision administratively, inside of DOJ, but they’ve filed a lawsuit as well, in the likely event DOJ refuses to release Volume 2.
…
Lest you think it doesn’t work, following the public outcry over the weekend after the vice president seemed to suggest that the administration should flout judges’ orders if they lost in court, three Republican Senators went to bat for the rule of law. Josh Hawley said the president doesn’t have the power to defy the courts. That might seem like civics 101, but in today’s context, it was critical for him to say it. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley chimed in to say that he had “learned in eighth grade civics about checks and balances, and I just expect the process to work its way out.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune expressed his belief that the courts play an important role in the balance of power between the branches of government. These aren’t folks who tend to make statements like this—ones that cut against the leader of their party—just for fun. It was a response to the alarm bells we raised. So, let’s keep going. Don’t let the crazy overwhelm you.
We’re in this together,
Joyce