The Week Ahead

April 13, 2025

Our job this week is to push back against what we all know Trump is doing: trying to overwhelm us with too much insanity, too much happening all at once. For one thing, this approach lets him, like other would-be dictators, hide the most dangerous changes he’s making in the barrage. It hides mistakes, such as what he’s done with tariffs. It also encourages people to tune out because they feel overwhelmed, disgusted, and sad. The incessant crazy is meant, at least in part, to get people to succumb to feelings of helplessness and an inability to do anything about what’s happening. But that’s the easy way out.

We aren’t powerless. The place to start fighting back is with knowledge. During his first term in office, Trump turned the idea of being “woke” into something negative. That pretty much epitomizes his whole shtick. If people are uninformed about what he’s doing, they won’t object. So our job is to be well informed, to understand what’s going on. Pick the issue that matters to you the most and do a deep dive on it, or pay attention to a number of different issues. Have conversations with friends—and with total strangers—about what’s going on. But don’t be complacent. That’s the dictator’s trap, and we are not going to fall into it.

Voting and the SAVE Act

This is another good week to call your members of Congress and express outrage. The House passed the SAVE Act, which will make it dramatically more difficult for millions of eligible American citizens to register to vote if the Senate passes it too, so it’s time to start campaigning for the Senate to reject it. The Capitol switchboard phone number, where you can ask to be connected to your members’ offices, is (202) 224-3121. Or Google your individual members. Calling a local office may give you the chance to talk to a real human. Consider a visit in person if you can.

If the SAVE Act becomes law, all Americans will have to provide a birth certificate, a passport, or one of a limited number of documents, such as certain (but not all) military ID cards, every time they register or reregister to vote. It seems innocuous enough, the idea that you have to prove you’re a citizen, but at least 21 million Americans don’t have that kind of proof readily available. Only 51 percent of Americans have passports, which cost adults applying for the first time a $165.00 fee, not to mention assembling the documents you need, getting a photograph of yourself, and making it to an appointment.

The bill would end registration by mail and online because it requires voters to show proof of citizenship to election officials “in person” when they register. That would also make it difficult, if not impossible, to conduct voter registration drives, say, at churches or schools. States that automatically register voters when they turn 18 would no longer be able to do so. And if you move or need to reregister for any reason, this applies to you, too. You’d have to bring your passport or original birth certificate in for inspection every time you do that.

If you’re a married woman who changed or hyphenated her name, you can expect problems if your name doesn’t match your birth certificate. Hillary Clinton, who has been right about so much, is right about this, too. More hoops to jump through. Almost like it’s a 2025 version of the poll tax. Almost like it’s 1950 again for the “wrong kind” of voter.

The SAVE Act is a massive attack on voting rights from a party that doesn’t want every American to be able to vote. The time to keep this from happening is before this horrendous excuse for a law can be passed.

Using Presidential Power to Exact Revenge on Personal Enemies

Trump is also continuing his revenge tour, following up the two executive orders directed at individuals that we discussed Friday night with an order directed at Susman Godfrey, the law firm that successfully sued Fox News for defamation on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems, resulting in a $787.5 million settlement. Trump is desperately trying to relitigate the 2020 election. Apparently, it’s incredibly important to him to wipe out that loss.

That helps us understand a lot of the erratic, abusive presidential conduct we’re seeing. Trump is a failed candidate who lost an election and then tried to lie, cheat, and crime his way into staying in the White House. He may have won in 2024, but that loss in 2020 still weighs on him heavily. He wants us to forget about it or even rewrite its history. We must not do either of those things. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” When you destroy history, Orwell concludes, “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Susman Godfrey fought back, with a lawsuit filed Friday night by former Obama Solicitor General Don Verrilli. The firm issued a statement: “The executive order targeting Susman Godfrey is unconstitutional and retaliatory. No administration should be allowed to punish lawyers for simply doing their jobs, protecting Americans and their constitutional right to the legal process. But this goes far beyond law firms and lawyers. Today it is our firm under attack, but tomorrow it could be any of us. As officers of the court, we are duty-bound to take on this fight against the illegal executive order.”

It’s good to see another law firm decide against bending the knee. Because here’s the fundamental truth: You can never do enough once you start. Today, it might be agreeing to provide $100 million in free legal services to the president’s favorite causes, such as his mention of using them to help coal companies lease federal land. Tomorrow it will be something else, and even worse, at some point, the deal these businesses thought would save them will eat their souls. Better to rip off the bandage now and be able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning.

Where Things End Up Is Not Where They Start Out

The attacks on law firms and the attempts to settle scores with people who showed loyalty to the Constitution rather than to the man in the Oval Office are not where this will end. We are at the start. It will inevitably progress to a much worse place if he is not stopped. That is why it is so important that we reclaim “woke” as defining a positive commitment to defending democracy and make sure we each make that commitment.

Talk with the people around you if you sense they’ve decided they can tolerate this and just look away, that they’ll be okay in all of this. Today it’s immigrants; tomorrow it might be them. People who went to work for Trump didn’t anticipate this at the beginning.

And let’s be clear: It’s not okay that to this is happening to immigrants—to students, people who fled gang violence, to people who brought their kids here for a better life. Citizens or not, and even criminal or not, our Constitution is expansive enough in its belief that all people are human beings (despite the fact that it executed that view so very imperfectly at the founding) that everyone, American or not, is entitled to fundamental constitutional rights such as due process before they are summarily evicted from their lives and deported from the country. Trump would turn the power of the presidency into a tool for keeping people in line, for preventing dissent. We see that in so many of the early steps this administration is taking. It is no different here. Today he attacks groups he thinks people won’t have sympathy for—immigrants, law firms—but it doesn’t stop there. Our job is to be informed and to connect the dots and understand that this is an unprecedented, radical way to transform the country from a democracy into something else. It may have started with law firms, colleges, government agencies, and immigrants, but ultimately, the target is all of us.

An example came in Saturday morning’s report in The Washington Post that the Trump administration overruled the objections of senior career people at the Social Security Administration and “purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead.” They did this to make it impossible for those individuals to continue working, in hopes they would deport themselves. Then they put a 25-year employee who oversaw the databanks and objected to tampering with them—it’s illegal to create false government records—on leave. According to the Post, “the dataset is used by government agencies, employers, banks and landlords to check the status of employees, residents, clients and others.”

DOGE and DHS officials were behind what happened at Social Security. Earlier this year, employees began to fear that “bad actors” could target people for punishment by declaring them dead: “Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way….” It starts with immigrants who are here without legal status—people the Trump administration thinks few people will care about. But it could end with any of us. Step out of line, and, suddenly, you’re dead, with no ability to earn, bank, have a residence, travel, or receive benefits. It sounds extreme, and it is. But it’s also the new reality we are living with.

Many people will still pass this sort of thing off as a fantasy. But tell that to students whose visas have been canceled. Tell that to the people in a Salvadoran prison whose stories we don’t know because they are being held incommunicado.

Stay woke.

We’re in this together,

Joyce