The Week Ahead

The week ahead is a week in Trump’s America. They all are right now, but he enters this week having gotten what he wanted most from the Supreme Court and from Congress, and he moves closer to creating the unitary executive he wants the presidency to be. None of that is good news for democracy.

The Supreme Court has freed Trump from the restriction of nationwide injunctions against even the most unconstitutional of acts. There is literally nothing more unconstitutional than a president thinking he can rewrite the 14th Amendment with a stroke of his pen, as Trump did with birthright citizenship. Even though that issue itself won’t be decided until the case returns to the Court, perhaps because his Solicitor General, John Sauer, was successful at divorcing the substantive issue of birthright citizenship from the issue of the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions, Trump is more powerful than he was a couple of weeks ago. Lawyers’ options for pausing even the most blatantly unlawful moves until a court can consider their constitutionality will take longer and be more cumbersome. And Congress delivered a budget that will leave everyday Americans worse off while billionaires benefit.

Meanwhile, our hearts break for the families in the Texas Hill Country who have lost loved ones, and for those who are still missing, especially the children. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed following Hurricane Helene, which decimated parts of North Carolina last year, that Democrats can “control the weather” was ridiculed at the time by President Biden, who called her falsehoods “irresponsible.” Sadly, those conspiracy theories were being circulated on social media before Texans could process what had happened. Greene announced in a Saturday night Tweet that she would be introducing a bill that banned “weather modification and geoengineering.”

It’s Orwell’s 1984, where a government that is always fighting an enemy for reasons you’re not quite sure of demands blind obedience. You must accept their patently false storyline. If you didn’t think it could happen here in 2025, take a look at this email, sent to Americans nationwide from Social Security, on Thursday after the budget bill passed.

The email is full of disinformation lies, starting with the fact that Social Security income is still taxed under the bill. "While the deduction does provide some relief for seniors, it's far from completely repealing the tax on their benefits," Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told The Associated Press ahead of the bill’s passage. Even if Congress had voted for a measure that did, it wouldn’t have become effective since Republicans were forced to use the “reconciliation process” to avoid a filibuster by Democrats that would have kept the bill from passing. Reconciliation can’t be used to make changes to Social Security.

The same article that cites Watson does an excellent job of walking through the details in the bill if you want to see more. The temporary tax deduction of $6000 for people over 65 and $12,000 for married seniors will last just long enough for Trump to tout it in the next two elections. But tax experts conclude it won’t apply to everyone and will have other impacts, like speeding up the date the Social Security trust fund runs out of funds from 2034 to 2032.

We’ve seen enough of the performative cabinet meetings Trump holds to understand that in this administration, his appointees’ status is measured in numbers of compliments paid to the president. While Trump’s Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano, may not be a full fledged cabinet secretary, he runs that important agency for Trump and clearly wanted to take his own shot here. The letter is almost on a par with AG Pam Bondi’s claim at the public cabinet meeting celebrating Trump's 100th day in office that he had saved “258 million lives” since the start of his second term, by virtue of DOJ’s fentanyl seizures. The population of the U.S. as of today is 347,305,342, but no one in this administration is checking the math. David French, writing in the NYT, characterized Trump’s cabinet this way: “a group of people that bears far more resemblance to a collection of North Korean generals than it does to a traditional American cabinet.”

The posturing and the outright lies are particularly disturbing for another reason. Given Trump’s history in 2020 and steps taken, including the SAVE Act and his EO on elections that will make it more difficult for Americans to register to vote, this is not a moment when we want an Attorney General in place who made the palpably false claim in an effort to flatter Trump in a Cabinet meeting that he was “overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority” ever. The NYT reported that, “Senior Justice Department officials are exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems, according to people familiar with the discussions.” The story continues, “The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people.” So what does that leave? Presumably, a political motivation.

This week, and every week, we will be focusing on election-related issues. Would-be dictators like Trump don’t tend to cancel elections because it creates a public outcry. It’s easier to suppress the vote, and that’s what we are already seeing at work. Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET, I’ll be joining Marc Elias for a Substack Live and we’ll discuss the latest.

As we head into another difficult but pivotal week, remember to stay informed, but also, to take some time for yourself. We are running a marathon in a race with a would-be dictator who understands that overwhelming people is one of the best ways to get them to give up. We cannot afford to let that happen.

Finally, one piece of litigation we’re expecting this week involves the administration’s decision to withhold $6 billion in school funding, claiming they’re reviewing programs because they subsidize “a radical left wing agenda.” The administration’s intention of reviewing “the grants to ensure they align with President Donald Trump’s priorities” conflicts with the constitutional grant of the power of the purse to Congress. Lawsuits can’t be far behind.

Another long week ahead.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

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