Checkpoint February 11, 2025

As the first post after Trump II inauguration this will be a little different from our recent articles. It’s a bit of patchwork rather than a true narrative thread – partly because of the firehose of executive actions and other activities, which were intended to be disorienting (and were). First we address the disinformation that there is no resistance to the administration’s anti-democratic behavior. In fact, resistance has taken the form of virtual and in-person rallies, communications to Congress, numerous lawsuits, etc. Then we recap some recommendations for coping with these “Tryin’ Times.”

You Don’t Need an Ohmmeter

Civil rights attorney Sherilynn Ifill noted in a recent newsletter that reports of no resistance to the second Trump administration are patently false. On February 2nd 50,000 people joined a Zoom meeting co-hosted by Indivisible, MoveOn, the American Federation of Teachers,  National Nurses United, the Working Families Party and other groups. The immediate foci of the meeting were organizing nationwide protests at senators’ regional offices, and calls to senators offices to protest the proposed freeze in federal grants to nonprofit organizations (pending an ideological review). 

On Wednesday, February 5th, largely grassroots protests were held in all 50 states, including conservative strongholds Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming. These events received some guidance from the progressive group Political Revolution and a related Reddit group. The same day hundreds in Washington, DC including Senators Booker, Kaine, and other lawmakers joined together to protest the Trump administration’s attempt to furlough nearly all employees of the US Agency for International Development.

Federal courts have stayed several Executive Orders, at least temporarily. Judges in New Hampshire, Washington state, and Maryland blocked the executive order ending birthright citizenship. A federal judge in New York blocked the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to US Treasury computer systems. District of Columbia federal Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, paused the administration’s attempt to put 2,200 USAID employees on administrative leave. DC Judge Royce Lamberth blocked administration efforts to move transgender women to men’s prisons and end their gender-affirming care; a Massachusetts judge blocked prison officials in a similar case there. And on February 11, responding to a lawsuit brought by Public Citizen on behalf of health advocacy group Doctors for America, DC Judge John Bates ordered government agencies to restore public access to web pages and data that had been removed in response to an executive order.

State attorneys general are emerging as key players in the resistance to Trump administration actions, having prepared for the “potential eventuality” for two years. Labor unions have joined several of the lawsuits listed above, among others. The AFL-CIO also announced the creation of the “Department of People Who Work for a Living,” a jibe at DOGE whose activities it intends to monitor and publicize. Union organizers and members are also increasingly participating in public rallies, advocating for democracy and urging Democratic lawmakers to stand up to Trump.

The Trump executive branch has also experienced numerous leaks to the press, including the plans to pause federal loan and grant programs, the investigation of attorneys who prosecuted January 6 rioters, the proposed federal workforce buyout, and – ironically – various plans to stop leaks.

While Trump and Vance have made statements challenging the judicial branch’s authority to constrain the executive branch, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck told PBS’s Geoff Bennett that, although a Rhode Island judge found that the administration was not complying fast enough, “… [T]here’s really no sign yet that the administration is affirmatively choosing not to comply with these court orders.”

The web site JustSecurity is tracking legal challenges to administration actions – 51 as of this writing.

Resilience

Writing on 404media.co, former VICE editor Janus Rose quotes sociologist Katherine Cross who warns that doomscrolling and social media posts by people who “ think they can quote-dunk their way out of fascism” ends up “oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them.”

The path to effective resistance, says Rose, is through trusted information networks that have at their core not online “affordances,” but real relationships between neighbors. She cites neighborhood efforts to defend migrant communities from potential ICE raids, protect vulnerable populations who have lost essential services, and so on. Mutual aid groups are one way “ordinary people” can participate in social justice movements.

Choose Democracy’s David Hunter has a ten-point outline for “grounding ourselves,” observing that “good psychology is good social change.” Of particular note, he highlights Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer, famously adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, but written as Niebuhr observed the rise of Nazi Germany. The prayer asks for the serenity to accept what one cannot change, but the courage to change what one can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You can read Hunter’s full article on resilience.org 

Three days after Inauguration Day, Brookings Institution fellow and Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes published a “User’s Guide to Following the News,” excerpted and summarized below:

Principle #1: Slow Down

The news actually doesn’t care if you follow it. Not a single one of the president’s executive orders, nominations, pardons, or statements would have been worse if you had ignored it, come to it a few hours later, or stressed about it less. Your emotional reaction to the news actually affects it not one whit. Stressing about the news doesn’t make the news better. It just makes you feel worse….

Not only does your anxiety not accomplish anything productive, it actually inhibits productive thought on your part….

You need to accept that you can’t follow all the news. There’s too much of it. It’s coming too fast. And a lot of it requires genuine expertise to understand….

Principle #2: Feel Free to Ignore Important News

There’s an important principle that follows from not being able to follow all of the news: You have to ignore some of it.

Grant yourself this indulgence. If you follow everything, you follow nothing well. Allow yourself to specialize. You’ll be better at the stuff you do follow.

Note that ignoring the rest does not mean deciding the rest is unimportant. Far from it. The rest is very important….

[But the] first trick to staying sane is deciding which part of the news is your job to follow and which part is not…. 

Principle #3: Let Others Do the Work for You

There are many different levels at which one can follow the news. It’s critical, if you want to keep your head above water, to choose the right altitude at which to understand a given issue you have decided to follow. Once you decide you don’t need to do things right now, you actually have the option of letting experts do a lot of the work for you…. The quality of the information [will be] dramatically better than you’ll get by doom-scrolling. You just have to be willing to wait 12 hours, or 24, or 72 until someone has taken the time to do the work—rather than getting your news hit at the speed of the feed….

[It’s ok to rely on expert resources.] They will help. They will also slow you down—and that increased slowness is a good thing.

Principle #4: Choose Trusted Sources

This is really important. There’s a lot of garbage out there. And a lot of it is specifically intended to rile you up. If you’re reading something that sounds dramatic, consider the possibility that it may not be true. Ask yourself why you haven’t seen it anywhere else. Ask yourself whether you know and trust the writer, the publication, the supposed source of the information. A lot of the time, you will not regret ignoring things that seem to fall into the “big if true” category—because they are not true, or not true as stated, or true but actually not that big. Sometimes the answer to the “why is nobody talking about this” question is that nobody is talking about it because it’s not true or not interesting. There are very few news items that are so urgent that you need to react right now and can’t give yourself time to breathe, evaluate, and check against other news sources.

Principle #5: Don’t Get Your News From Social Media

I have nothing against social media…. But it’s a bad way to get news.

The reason is that while it appears to put control of the news in your hands (you decide whom to follow, after all), it actually does something else: It lets you decide to whom to subcontract your sense of what is important. And it asks an algorithm to decide for you what is “for you” or what you should “discover” or what is popular among your friends.

…[I]f you get your news principally by scrolling, you are likely to speed things up, be less cautious about information, and be more anxious about it.

Just say no.

Or, failing that, just say no more of the time.

Principle #6: Use the Information You Are Taking In

It is good citizenship to be informed. But the ideal citizen is not one who voraciously inhales news and does nothing with it except fret.

It is better to absorb less news and use that which you take in efficiently in the exercise of thought and civic action than to take in more than you know what to do with and just stew on it.

One good way—by no means the only one—to discipline one’s intake of information is to decide to give away a certain amount of money per unit of time and use one’s news consumption to determine how to spend that money. For example, one might commit oneself to donating a dollar a day to something and consume information with the goal of doing that in an informed fashion. [ In other words, use your time reading or watching the news to help decide where to donate your money.]

Another good strategy is to team up with a group of people and brief each other on important issues…. This can induce a sense of responsibility toward information quality, and the briefings can offer a chance to discuss sourcing and how we purport to know what we know.

My point here is that doom-scrolling is a choice, not an inevitability. There are better ways to consume information, particularly in periods in which information is coming at you fast and it’s hard to tell what’s important.

Principle #7: Don’t Be Afraid of Primary Sources

For those issues you decide you really care about and want to follow most carefully, get into the habit of reading the primary sources themselves.

… Does that slow me down? Yup. Do I care? Nope. In fact, I think it’s good. It makes me move at the speed of the actual text of a document someone took the time to write, rather than at the speed of an often ungenerous caricature of that document that someone else chose to [post].

 

The bottom line is that consuming information, not unlike consuming food, is a matter that requires a certain amount of deliberation and strategy.

Otherwise, you feel gross.

Reasonable Hope

Psychologist Robert Hilliker has written about what he calls "reasonable hope." Citing fellow psychologist Kaethe Weingarten, Hilliker writes that reasonable hope is "relational," that is it is created through connection with others. Hope is a "practice," not something that we have, but something that we do. Reasonable hope sees the future as open and not predetermined. And hope accommodates doubts, and contradictions. To paraphrase one of Hilliker's patients, "In the face of despair we can find hope."