This makes me sick
As some of you may have figured out by now, I’ve been severely under the weather for the past few days (now more than ever, be sure to stay up on your vaccinations). Fortunately, I’m feeling substantially better today. While I haven’t been able to write as much as usual this week, I’ve been fully keeping up with the news cycle. Suffice it to say that it’s been making me a different kind of sick.
Even as Trump’s tariff reversals and resulting stock market yo-yo have played out in the foreground, something just as sinister has played out in the background. The Republican House and Senate have used the distraction of Trump’s tariff insanity to come together on an utterly disastrous budget that will eliminate essential support to millions of vulnerable Americans. I’d like to say there’s a way we’re going to be able to derail this, but I don’t think there is. It only requires a simple Senate majority, and suffice it to say that the likes of Susan Collins aren’t coming to rescue us.
As I said at the start of the Trump 2.0 nightmare, this is war. In war, you win some battles and you lose others. The losses are always unacceptable. But we have to keep fighting nonetheless, because every victory we achieve will indeed help the most vulnerable among us – and incrementally weaken the other side.
So what do we do? We keep looking for battles we can fight and win. We keep talking about just how buffoonishly Trump handled this entire tariff fiasco, and how unstable he’s making the US economy. We keep asking who if anyone benefitted from Trump’s market manipulation. We keep talking about Trump’s Signalgate scandal so the media doesn’t dare stop talking about it. We keep calling out DOGE for its idiocy. We keep playing up the worsening feuds among Trump’s own top advisers. And we keep talking about Trump’s worsening cognitive impairment until the media is finally willing to get on board with it.
I’m proud of the fight we’ve put up over these past eighty days. I continue to believe that things will get more difficult for Trump once he hits the hundred day mark, because that’s how any presidency always plays out. And frankly, it’s why the Republican House and Senate are trying to ram through their budget right now, before Trump turns into a pumpkin in twenty days and they have to start focusing on the midterms instead of whatever Trump wants.
So let’s hang in there and continue fighting. It may not always feel like we’re making a difference, but I promise you we are. However ugly things might get on the darkest of days, they would be even darker if we weren’t still showing up and fighting.
