News Day

Almost half a century ago, I was a small-town lawyer in a solo practice. I drew up wills, checked titles and prepared deeds, consoled and fought for clients through divorces, incorporated small businesses, and represented kids charged with truancy or adults accused of drunk driving or disorderly conduct. My rural county had a single judge. When I crossed swords with him, he promised to retaliate against any of my clients who appeared in his court. 

I could not ethically allow clients to suffer because of his abuses of judicial power. I closed my practice and moved away. The judge’s misconduct, for which he eventually got a slap on the wrist from the state board concerned with judicial ethics, deprived my clients of representation. 

My small-town law practice has very little in common with Perkins Coie, a powerful Washington DC law firm with more than a thousand lawyers. What we do have in common is the impossibility of continuing to represent clients in a situation where legal authorities will retaliate against your clients in order to punish you. 

Years ago, in response to some scolding, a beloved child told me, “Mom, you broke my last heart!” I know the feeling, but I also know that there is no “last heart.” 

What the Trump/Musk cabal is doing to our country, to our world, is heart-breaking. But that is not the end of it. I refuse to give in or give up or stop fighting. 

Even when my heart breaks over what my government is doing in my name, I will not quit living and loving, failing and falling, getting up and going on. I take heart again from brave people speaking out and fighting back. 

Last week I promised a friend that I would write blog posts about reasons to hope and about ways to resist. Then came a week of urgent medical errands, and here I am at Friday, only now getting to the task. But—here I am also with hope and resistance. 

Resistance first, because hope grows out of resistance. Today, February 28, is the first of many days of national protest. Today is a “consumer blackout, a day to buy nothing from Amazon, nothing from Target, nothing from any big merchandiser, manufacturer, peddler of gas or automobiles or a hundred, a thousand other profit centers for the oligarchs. Today is a day to buy only from small local stores and restaurants, especially in immigrant corridors (Lake Street, University Avenue) struggling to survive as fear keeps customers hiding at home. 

The Trump/Musk machine says they are going to protect U.S. health by using Title 42 to keep out migrants. Migrants, they say, pose a public health threat. What threat? Measles? No, that’s Texas. Avian flu? That’s migrating birds, not people. 

Trump/Musk and company are still trying to figure out their 21^st century reprise of this venerable racist trope.  In the meantime, they are protecting U.S. health by firing the border inspectors whose literal job is … to protect U.S. health by inspecting humans, animals, and agricultural products crossing the border. Yep—they fired CDC and USDA border inspectors, leaving some ports of entry with no health inspectors at all. 

In another public health move, the Trump administration is targeting health and medical research. On January 29, a judge ordered an end to Trump’s freeze on grants and funding. That should mean that grants for health-related research are once again possible, right?

Trump/Musk firings, spending freezes, and program cuts affect Minnesota as well as the rest of the country. For many Minnesotans, the impact of the Trump/Musk firings hits where it really hurts, abruptly ending their jobs, with no notice, no severance pay, and no guarantee of continuing health insurance. 

First, Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head up DOGE. Then Ramaswamy left to run for governor, leaving Musk as the sole head of DOGE. Musk repeatedly spoke as the head of DOGE and claimed that he and DOGE were rooting out fraud and inefficiency, though without ever furnishing evidence. 

From November 6 to February 17, Trump and Musk and everybody else called Musk the head of DOGE. They said he was a “special government employee” and did not have to follow any pesky ethics rules about conflicts of interest. Trump, his press secretary, and Musk himself repeatedly boasted of Musk’s actions as head of DOGE. Musk and Trump appeared together in the Oval Office to tout DOGE and Musk’s work. 

Then came half a dozen lawsuits challenging the scope and legitimacy of the power of DOGE and Musk. 

In a Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Trump/Musk regime sent mass firing notices to tens of thousands of federal employees across the country, effective over the weekend. The firings had nothing to do with performance, nothing to do with merit, nothing to do with efficiency. Their common characteristic was cruelty. 

Those fired were “on probation.” That means a one- or two-year period after hiring or after transfer from one position to another or one agency to another. During this probationary period, civil service protection against firing does not apply. That’s the only reason for these firings: the Trump/Musk/DOGE machine COULD fire people, and so they did. 

Don’t bother reading this unless you eat food. 

The head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety division just resigned. He said that the Trump/Musk firings in his division and the RFK, Jr. threats to dissolve it made his work impossible. His work, and that of the fired FDA employees isn’t important unless you eat food. 

Republicans in the House and Senate continue to uncritically support the Trump/Musk dismantling of government. They own the unfolding disaster that is the Trump/Musk administration.

Musk and his DOGE team decided that the most efficient way to save money was to fire every “probationary” federal employee. Working their way from department to department, they sent a fusillade of termination emails. 

On Valentine’s Day, they realized they had screwed up, big-time. 

Republicans in the House and Senate continue to uncritically support the Trump/Musk dismantling of government. Among the latest moves: unpublishing OSHA workplace safety pages. 

Why? Some idiot in Musk’s DOGE decided that any publication containing the words “diverse” or “diversity” or “gender” should be trashed. That’s part of their war on DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Among the pages they trashed: