The Week Ahead

March 2, 2025

On Tuesday, Trump gives his first State of the Union address for his second term in office. He will assume the podium in front of a joint session of Congress with no credibility whatsoever. People who are being honest—that includes Republicans in the House and the Senate—understand how horribly he undermined the world order last week. He abandoned longtime allies in the process, not only Ukraine but NATO allies who now face an unpredictable future. Trump will offer his comments Tuesday after confirming the view of those who believed him to be Putin’s toady.

Trump’s speech should have been one about making good on promises, like the one to bring down prices on day one of his administration. But he cannot do that. Instead, we will have tariffs this week. Tariffs, just a reminder, are simply taxes—taxes imposed on the American public. Trump has promised 25% tariffs on our allies, Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% on China (unless he backs out again at the last minute, as he did when he previously threatened tariffs). Folks who claim to have voted for Trump because they wanted a better economy under Trump failed to read the room and Project 2025. As a result, we will all suffer.

Trump’s first State of the Union address should have also been about peace in Ukraine. Remember how he promised he would get that done before he even took office while he was on the campaign trail? Trump’s idea of peace, however, turns out to have been forcing Kyiv to take responsibility for Russia’s invasion, give up valuable resource rights, and accept permanent occupation. That didn’t go well, and you can watch it on video because Trump and Vance thought it was a good idea to bring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into the Oval Office to try and overpower him into submission, which didn’t work out for them as planned. The humiliation was theirs. Zelensky emerged as the hero and the champion for people everywhere who love peace and value freedom.

When Donald Trump takes the stage to deliver his address Tuesday night, the truth will be this: The state of our Union is…compromised.

Vice President Vance was not welcome in Vermont, where he went on a weekend ski trip.

Trump’s sycophancy towards Putin knows no bounds. On Friday, when a reporter asked about why Russia should be trusted to honor a ceasefire after all of their incursions and violations, Trump came to Putin’s defense and put himself squarely within the Russian dictator’s embrace. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” he responded. “He went through a phony witch hunt.”

Hillary Clinton was right. It was always Russia. It still is.

What about the unlikely possibility that the Republican Party will wake up at long last? We will get a sense of that Tuesday from the crowd’s response to Trump. There is no reason, as of yet, to hold out much if any hope. Republicans, it seems clear, are more worried about their social lives after they leave Congress and staying in the herd than they are about the actual state of our union. Even Lisa Murkowski was unable to summon more than being “sick to her stomach.” Seriously, she’s a Senator, one of the few people with actual power to act in this crisis. Do better.

We need action from members of Congress. They are there because, presumably, they wanted to serve their country. They took an oath to uphold the Constitution. If this was a functioning Congress, there would be a prompt move in the House to impeach and in the Senate to convict both the president and the vice president for engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors. Of course, that is extraordinarily unlikely to happen with this crowd, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep up a constant demand that they do the right thing. Democrats in Congress, in turn, need to refuse to cooperate with a leader who has lost his legitimacy and makes a mockery of the notion of governing.

It is against that extraordinary backdrop that this week takes shape. It is sure to bring yet another cacophony from Trump. Again, we will has the task of separating what is important from the noise. Trump loves the sturm und drang, and clearly understands its value, again attempting to overcome us with so much that we cannot focus on any of it. We fight back with knowledge, information, and civil discourse with our fellow Americans.

I’m watching a number of things this week, and am sure more will be in play before it’s over:

• On Friday, Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), over an executive order Trump issued earlier this month that threatens the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Congress established the FEC in the wake of Watergate, creating a board that is required to remain bipartisan to enforce federal campaign finance laws.

The president appoints members of the commission’s board, and they must be confirmed by the Senate. Trump fired the head of the Board, Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic nominee. The FEC is “set to decide multiple complaints involving Trump and his top-donor-turned-right-hand-man, the billionaire Elon Musk.” If Trump’s order stands, it would permit him to capture the FEC and direct its decision-making to benefit his party in future election cycles.

• Trump/Musk continue to rip apart the federal government, firing employees and gutting entire offices. We all understand this at a macro level, but it’s more difficult to understand exactly how it will affect us months or years down the road as the damage begins to manifest itself. In order to try and make this more immediate and personal, we’ll be focusing on some of these “decisions” in the coming weeks. One action that surfaced last week involved a unit known as Project 18F.

The laid-off workers explained their role, “For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.”

Some of the specific work they were doing at the time of the layoffs included improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, and support for free tax filing with the IRS. In other words, exactly the kind of work you want government doing for you. The layoffs came with no warning; work came to an abrupt halt, and fired workers have no access to their computers, which means there won’t be an orderly transition to continue the work. It is, as an old FBI agent I used to work with was fond of saying, “dead right there.”

Mark Cuban subsequently posted that he would step in and help fired 18F employees form a private consulting firm.

These layoffs have nothing to do with efficiency and preventing waste. They are about the whims of two little men. Men like Musk and Trump and Vance who are challenged by words like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “climate.” Men who, it seems, want to tear government apart and maximize private profit-making potential. In this case, instead of ensuring that a unit that helped the government maintain a cutting edge on information technologies continues to succeed, Trump is gutting it.

• On Wednesday, the temporary restraining order (TRO) in PFLAG, Inc. v. Trump expires. The case involves Trump’s executive order (EO) prohibiting the federal government from spending money promoting what the EO labels “gender ideology,” the idea that gender identity can differ from biological sex. It would devastate services that benefit transgender people, including research, medical care for people under 19, medical coverage for people who receive government-provided medical benefits, and coverage insurance provided to government employees. It also focuses on suing medical providers civilly for provision of care. Judge Brendan A. Hurson, a former federal defender, was appointed to the federal bench in Maryland by President Biden. He will have to decide whether to grant a preliminary injunction, which would prevent Trump’s EO from going into effect while the litigation is ongoing, presumably before the TRO expires. To receive a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs must convince the court that (1) they have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits, (2) that they would suffer irreparable injury without an injunction, (3) that an injunction won’t substantially injure other parties, and (4) that an injunction is in the public interest. It is a more demanding legal standard than the one required to receive a TRO.

• On February 17, I wrote about a case called Bessent v. Dellinger, where Trump tried to fire the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, who refused to leave. More detail to follow on legal theories in that case. On Saturday, District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia ruled in Dellinger’s favor, issuing an order that clarified that he is the Special Counsel of the Office of Special Counsel and that Trump’s effort to terminate him being unlawful, he remains in office for the five-year term to which he was appointed and confirmed by the Senate. The Trump administration wasted no time, appealing the decision within an hour. The issue in this case involves when and who a president can fire at will and has implications for more than just Mr. Dellinger. We’ll delve into the legal principles here, involving an old case, Humphrey’s Executor, when the appellate process gets underway.

And of course, no matter how serious the news is this week, I’m going to be bombing you with cute new puppy pictures on all of my social media channels.

Bob named her Elsa, and she is exactly the tonic we need for the times we live in.

Monday is a good day to call your senators and representatives and ask them how they feel about NATO and whether they believe Ukraine invaded Russia. If they say they think it’s a mistake for the U.S. to be aligned with Putin, and especially if they’re Republicans, demand that they show up and stand up, that they state their views clearly and plainly. Otherwise, the coup continues.

We’re in this together,

Joyce