On May 1, barely six months after the midterm elections,
Donald Trump appears to have abandoned the White House and abdicated his role as president. He
issued no formal statement, though four White House aides — who spoke on the condition of anonymity
— claim they found a napkin on the president’s desk in the Oval Office on the evening of April 30,
scrawled in red ink with the following message: "Blame Crooked Hillary & Hfior & the Fake
News Media."
"Finally!" say women
From #MeToo to ‘You’re Fired’
Donald Trump would have done well to read some history —
after all, the 1789 women’s march on Versailles helped to spark the French Revolution, and the 1917
International Women’s Day March helped bring about the abdication of Russian Tsar Nicholas II.
How DC stepped up to shut down Trump
As big protests dominated headlines over the past six
months, everyday acts of resistance undermined support within Trump’s administration and fed a sense
of crisis around his presidency. Some workers saw disobedience as self-care, while others saw it as
their chance to join a lineage of movements that stalled Nazis in occupied France and won civil
rights victories in the Jim Crow South.
Former President
Trump slips into a private car in the wee hours of the morning.
Pres. Pence begins ‘clipped duck’ term
“I suspect that 50 years from now Mike Pence will be
regarded primarily as the answer to a trivia question,” said Josephine Ellis, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning presidential biographer. “And it will seem an unfairly obscure question, at that.”
The actions that turned the tide
When one elected official was asked to comment on
whether the protests had influenced her decision first to support the Bundle and then to
participate in the filibusters that paralyzed Senate proceedings during much of April, she
replied, on condition of anonymity, “Duh.”
The story must be told.
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Team progressive steals a base
Most of the measures now heading through Congress — like
reining in corporate power, raising taxes on the wealthiest, universal health care — have long
been popular with voters across the political spectrum. But until 2019, Democrats refused to
capitalize on that popularity, instead maintaining their allegiances to corporate donors. Now,
thousands of Americans are fanning out nationwide to ensure that even the stodgiest of Democrats
change their tune — in part to preempt future Trumps.
A look at the 64 bills
Here’s a look at some of the most important and notable
bills in the package of progressive legislation with support across the political spectrum.
The Civil War that never was
Shortly after he disappeared from public view, Trump
implored his “big beautiful base” to “vote with your trigger finger.” 1.5 million people showed
up to make sure they didn't.
World leaders react
Recently-sworn-in President Pence has yet to issue an
official statement on foreign policy — or, for that matter, to do anything whatsoever. In the
third of three chaotic press conferences today, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee
Sanders answered a reporter’s question about Pence’s plans by saying that the incoming President
“intends to keep as low a profile as possible,” before realizing the strangeness of what she had
just said. “That’s because our new President is a humble man, a man of God, and in no position
to govern, I mean before asking God. Next question.”
A “Bundle” of bills is changing
America
“It’s precisely during moments of intense political
polarization that things can change massively,” said a historian. “Polarization creates new
political openings. It did in Scandinavia and Germany in the 1930s, in the United States during
the 1960s, and in Chile under Allende. It can go either way.”
3 unexpected “revolutionaries” and
how they’re shaping politics
Among the millions who pushed the president to leave
office in last weekend’s dramatic protests, many had been steadily working for change in
lower-profile ways ever since Trump took office. We talked with three of the demonstrators who
helped propel this historic uprising.
Major news outlets on Trump’s rise
to power: ‘Our bad’
Some of the goals of the conference: more clearly
defining “objectivity” in reporting; revisiting the recent uptick in restrictions on reporters’
rights to attend protests or otherwise engage in “political” activity in their personal lives;
training reporters to avoid “fairness bias” — giving equal voice to opposing perspectives, even
when one is less valid or categorically false; and focusing on strategies to responsibly cover
leaders with autocratic tendencies in a way that does not normalize their policies or behavior.
Fictional Washington Post eerily
predicted real events
Distributed four months before Donald Trump fled
presidential office, a fake Post's tagline was a readers’ first clue that it was an elaborate
fantasy rather than a real issue of the paper: Instead of the usual “Democracy Dies in
Darkness,” the mock paper read “Democracy Awakens in Action.” The lead story announced that
Trump had fled presidential office — eerily prefiguring today’s actual news.
Coffee With A Scholar
"We may have avoided a new civil war, but we sure do
have slavery," said Forten. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution specifically allows
slavery for those convicted of crimes, and some consider that to be one of the reasons the
private prison industry has mushroomed equally under Democratic and Republican presidents.
"Having millions of people performing free labor has been too good for industry to give up,"
added Forten.
