Trump's latest crackdown is a sign of weakness
Most Americans didn't vote for this freak show stuff.
Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.
It’s scary out there right now. I felt dizzy all week. But there are fireworks blasting off outside my window overlooking East Harlem right now, a free, unlicensed, and impromptu show lighting up the night. Thrills are irrepressible, even in the darkest hours.
Programming note: On Sunday evening at 8:30 pm ET, I’ll be hosting a live stream interview with Wisconsin state Assembly Member Francesca Hong, an outspoken progressive and activist who this past week declared her candidacy for governor. I’ll send out an invitation in the morning — it should be a really fun conversation, so please come check it out!
Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.
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You’d think that working as a political journalist and sometimes-strategist would have inured me to bad news at this point, but at least once a day, I find myself grimacing at some outrageous, heretofore unthinkable headline and muttering “we live in hell” under my breath. Yesterday, it was the news that a state legislator in Oklahoma filed a bill that would require all public universities to build prominent campus monuments to Charlie Kirk, the late white nationalist whose death has provided pretext to intensified aggression by a fascistic White House and the paleo-conservative movement.
In keeping with the coerced memorialization of the Turning Points USA founder, the monuments would be constructed under duress: a school would be fined 1% of its annual budget every month that it did not comply.
A few years ago, this kind of bill would have been strictly a right-wing virtue signaling exercise and fundraising gimmick, but today, it’s not a stretch to believe that it could pass; the Senate just made Kirk’s birthday into a national day of remembrance, a resolution supported by more than a dozen Democrats.
Kirk is being deified by force and his bigotries are being codified into a state religion, as both an ideological propaganda project and as cover to pursue policies that further concentrate power in the hands of the parasitic elite.
The White House is in full autocrat mode, politicizing and weaponizing the FCC’s regulatory power to reshape mass media to its liking. Gone are Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, both nuisances to the administration; Colbert was almost certainly cut as a condition of the Paramount sale, while Kimmel’s suspension follows ABC’s earlier capitulation to Trump’s frivolous lawsuits.
What’s more, the White House is using extortion to install allies atop the desiccated remains of the nation’s most important outlets. Now, Paramount is owned by the billionaire Trump loyalist Larry Ellison, whose son has already installed a conservative as CBS News’s ombudsman and is on the verge of hiring the unbearable billionaire whisperer Bari Weiss to oversee the entire editorial operation.
The Ellisons are also in pole position to gain operating control of TikTok, the most politically influential social media app among young people, and reportedly plan to bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the media conglomerate that owns CNN.
Sinclair, a right-wing media company that turns local news stations into conservative propaganda mills, is broadcasting a hagiography of Kirk to its tens of millions of TVsubscribers this weekend (uploaded to YouTube on Friday, it totally tanked, making the decision to put it on TV a borderline act of DEI). Sinclair has business pending before the FCC, as does Nexstar, the other enormous local TV operator that decided to pull Kimmel’s show after FCC chair Brendan Carr made the demand explicit on Thursday.
For good measure: Late Friday, it emerged that the Department of Defense plans on requiring an oath of loyalty from national security reporters, who must pledge to not collect any information that the military does not purposely disseminate for public consumption. Reporters who refuse to become mouthpieces for Pete Hegseth and DoD command will be stripped of security clearances, which would be devastating to major newspapers and especially broadcasters.
There are few things more alarming or symptomatic of fascism than the demise of the free press and hostile takeover of the nation’s major communications platforms. But in this case, the strongman act also indicates a fundamental weakness. Donald Trump is desperately trying to take full control of the media for the same reasons that he’s strong-arming governors into gerrymandering more Republican seats and attempting to illegally hijack states’ election systems: he’s a deeply unpopular crook, Americans are once again sick of his shit, and Republicans would get walloped in any free and fair national election right now.
According to Decision Desk HQ’s poll average, Trump just hit his lowest point yet with independent voters, sinking to 27.5 points below water, a 28-point swing from his high point in February.
As hard as the sycophantic right-wing media tries to pretend otherwise, Trump was not elected to prosecute a relentless reactionary culture war. There was no demand from swing voters to reinstate segregation, no clamoring from moderates to launch military occupations of American cities, no national consensus on throttling access to vaccines and abortion pills. In fact, the policies that Trump has prioritized and flogged to the public during this second term are actually deeply unpopular.
Here are the issue top line numbers from the latest Washington Post-Ipsos poll:
Trump won a slim victory last November because people believed him when he said that he’d tame inflation and create millions of new jobs, but his administration has interpreted that victory as a mandate to do pursue an unhinged ideological war on civil society.
Nine months into his second presidency, immigration enforcement represents the only real growth industry for anybody not exorbitantly wealthy enough to invest in AI (a money loser at the moment). The wars that Trump promised to end have only gotten worse, ICE has morphed into a masked secret police force that proactively terrorizes law-abiding school kids, and the public can reflexively blame every penny of inflation on his tariff policies.
With such across-the-board disapproval for the administration’s sociopathic agenda, it’s little surprise that Americans — including Republicans — feel so deeply negative about the direction of the country, as measured in the Associated Press’s latest poll.
This survey went out the day after Charlie Kirk was murdered, so some of the negative sentiment from Republicans is likely linked to the collective shock and subsequent partisan outrage ginned up by conservative politicians and TV hosts. Yet Trump receives mixed-at-best marks from Republicans in several specific categories, including his efforts to commandeer local police departments: 43% of Republicans disagree with the tactic, while 44% are okay with it.
If Trump has one saving grace, it’s that people trust Democrats even less on most issues, largely because they have not taken any discernible position on most of them. They should probably get on that before the media is co-opted entirely by the state.
It’s hard to feel much optimism these days — again, we live in hell — but this week was not without good news.
👶 New Mexico will become the first state to implement truly universal childcare, with no means testing or limited budgeting. It should save families an average of $12K per year. It’s impossible to overstate the positive impact of programs like these: New York City’s universal preschool is a lifesaver that — even with the cost of aftercare — has made staying here viable for countless families (including my own).
🚖 California’s Uber and Lyft drivers will have a chance to unionize after all. Five years after tech giants poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Prop 22, a misleading ballot initiative that condemned many gig workers to second class, non-employee status, a deal has been struck that will allow around 800,000 rideshare drivers the opportunity to join a union that would negotiate pay and other benefits on their behalf.
Because they still wouldn’t be full-time employees, it would be more like sectoral bargaining than traditional unit-based collective bargaining, but that may be the best chance of organizing high turnover, part-time industries. California’s law would also make it more likely that they’d land a contract than under the traditional NLRA process, which has been further hobbled by the Trump administration.
⛰️ Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette will face a primary challenge from courtesy of University of Board of Regents member Wanda James. A low-profile moderate, DeGette is in her 15th term representing Denver, which has become much younger and more progressive than her over the course of her tenure.
James isn’t exactly a maverick outsider, having managed Jared Polis’s first Congressional campaign and built a reputation as a prolific fundraiser, but she’s not afraid to speak out, even when it gets her into trouble. The Colorado Democratic Party is staying neutral in the race.
🫰 Washington State may see two cities boost the minimum wage to $20 this year. Activists in Lynnwood, a bedroom community north of Seattle, are working to collect signatures on an initiative that the city council could either adopt or send to the ballot, likely in February 2026.
Voters in Tacoma will get to vote on adopting the $20 wage after a judge ordered the city council to put the measure on the ballot in either November or February. The court order represents a victory for activists, who sued after the city council slow-walked the measure so that it would miss the ballot deadline in August.
🙅 Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told the Trump DOJ to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine” after it sued her for refusing to hand over sensitive voter file information that the feds have zero right to request or access. Several Democratic and Republican states have rebuffed such requests, but the DOJ has only filed suit against blue states. A shocker.
🔨 Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar dropped the hammer on the biggest Islamophobe and all-around scumbag in Congress, who will from this point forward be known simply as “whoever that Randy guy is.”
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I'm going to have to take issue with Rep. Omar about whether Nancy and who-ever-that-Randy-guy-is being stupid. I see a couple of problems: (1) The possession of skills and education, a critical component of being "smart", is a major determinant of class in America, and the focus of a lot of resentment. If you can get the people who have been called stupid, or who are afraid they're stupid, to vote for you you've got a solid majority. I think the Republicans understand that- look at how Trump or W talk. (2) Ever since I read Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" I've distrusted the usefulness of the whole smart-stupid divide. In this case, I don't think the Republican politicians are dumb. For example, they are very good at manipulating their constituents, which takes some intellectual skill. They just don't care about reality. To dismiss them as stupid, rather than lying and intellectually lazy, gives them too much credit.