Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: John Nichols with our protest update for the week. Topics include Tesla dealer showroom picketing; national park protesting; Ukraine support demonstrating; and town hall yelling.  But first: the Supreme Court has taken up its first case challenging one of Trump’s executive orders.  Rob Weissman of Public Citizen will explain – in a minute.
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The Supreme Court ruled on the first legal challenge to one of Trump’s executive orders on Wednesday morning, and it’s a major defeat for Trump. The issue was Trump’s Day One executive order declaring what he called “a pause” of foreign aid, $2 billion for the US Agency for International Development that had been appropriated by Congress. The case challenging that was brought by, among others, the nonprofit group, Public Citizen, their co-president Robert Weissman joins us now. Rob, welcome back — and congratulations on this victory at the Supreme Court. It’s a big one.

RW: Yeah, thank you very much. It is a big deal, and hopefully the first of many.

JW: This was the first Supreme Court test of Trump’s effort to take complete control of the federal government slash its workforce and spending. But let’s look at the specifics of this case. What did Trump try to do with USAID and its funding?

RW: Well, this is not about the agency itself, but it’s about the grants that the USAID makes and the State Department makes. So foreign assistance grants to contractors around the world who provide healthcare and medicine to people who are sick, provide food to people who are hungry, assistance to women and girls who are trafficked and abused, invest in environmental protection development programs, and so on. And Trump came in and said, “Okay, we’re putting a pause on all those grants.” Even though those grants are being put forward through duly enacted contracts, spending money that Congress has appropriated for that purpose.

JW: And you went to court and the courts agreed with you that the executive branch has an obligation to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress. The Trump administration appealed that restraining order, restraining them from withholding the funds to the Supreme Court, which they have a right to do. Obama appealed to the Supreme Court issues where he had been challenged by lower courts. So did Biden. What did the Supreme Court say in their decision Wednesday morning?

RW: Actually what happened is that the lower court issued a temporary restraining order and said, “Look, while we’re considering the underlying issue, let the money start flowing again because based on an original look at the case, we think the plaintiffs, our clients, are likely to win.” The Trump administration didn’t do it. Then the court issued an order saying comply with our order, and the Trump administration didn’t do it. And then the court did another one and they didn’t do it. In fact, the evidence is they did nothing to release a dollar over a course of almost two weeks.
Finally, the court was fed up and said, “Okay, now you’ve got 36 hours and we meet at this time.” Then the Trump administration appealed first to the appellate court, which said, “We don’t have jurisdiction.” Then the Supreme Court, which said, “We’ll listen to the case, or at least we’ll take the case based on written submissions.” And today the Supreme Court on a 5/4 decision has said, “Trump administration, you have to follow the order from the lower court judge.”
So in one way it should be completely non-controversial that the administration has to follow orders issued by the judiciary. But also simultaneously it’s a giant deal because this administration is of the view that it doesn’t have to follow the law. And the Supreme Court, at least for now, has said, “Yes, you do.”

JW: As you said, the vote was five to four with John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the liberals and a written dissent by Samuel Alito, who asked, “Does a single district court judge have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out and probably lose forever $2 billion taxpayer dollars?” What’s your answer to Justice Alito?

RW: The answer is “yes, he does.” But the more substantive answer is that’s an unreasonable framing. It was the government’s framing. But what happened is the US government is involved in contracts with agencies and contractors around the world to provide the services that I referenced to advance humanitarian purposes. The administration comes in and says, “We’re not paying the contracts.” The judge said, “Well, I think you’re probably going to be required when this case is over to pay those contracts. In the meantime, start the money flowing, and if you win then you can stop paying. But for now, start paying.”
It’s not an order to suddenly pay $2 billion that the government had already obligated itself to pay. It’s just saying your intervention to stop the payments that otherwise would have been made is illegal and cannot stand. So Justice Alito’s framing is misplaced and doesn’t really characterize what’s going on in this case at all.

JW: So although the Supreme Court took this case, it wasn’t really about a constitutional issue. In fact, Trump’s lawyers made it clear in their court papers they were not challenging the underlying issue here of the separation of powers that Congress appropriates funds and the President faithfully executes the laws and the courts are empowered to review those actions. Trump’s lawyers did not argue he had the power to defy Congress or defy the courts. So exactly what was this decision about?

RW: Well, it is true in a way that, as I said, it’s really just about an enforcement order on a temporary restraining order that had not been challenged, that the government accepted it was legitimately issued. So in that way, it’s very specific and really should be non-controversial. And in view of what’s actually going on in the world and with what the administration actually is, it raises exactly the questions that you were raising. Can the Trump administration refuse to follow a judicial order? Can the Trump administration completely undermine, ignore, circumvent, and basically trash the congressional power of appropriations.
And the Supreme Court, today at least, to both those questions said, “No, you have to file the orders and you can’t trash the separation of powers. Congress appropriates money. You’ve got to spend it the way Congress said to do it.”

JW: Some of our more skeptical friends think Trump and the Musk people will simply defy the court and continue doing what they did before and just not disperse any of the money. But I just want to underline here, that’s not what Trump’s lawyers told the court. In fact, they said the opposite in their appeal. They said the administration, “Takes seriously its constitutional duty to comply with the orders of federal courts. That government is undertaking substantial efforts to review payment requests and release payments.” So it seems like they were challenging only the deadline they were given by the court. Have I got that right?

RW: Well, we shouldn’t really presume good faith in the side of the Trump administration. So that’s sort of right and sort of not. I think what we really won today was an important legal victory, practically it involves getting money to the grantees. It’s a little more murky. It’s also the case that this administration is playing that if they lose in court, they’re going to try to find a way to do the thing they were just told not to do, claiming some other authority.
So I think we’re going to win this case. The freeze is going to be found to be illegal and unconstitutional, and the money’s going to have to flow, except that the government has already said it plans on canceling and thinks it already has canceled about 90% of the grants it has through the US Agency for National Development and maybe something like two thirds of the grants through the Department of State. So as regards to the humanitarian nightmare that’s being forced by this, and it’s fair to say probably tens of thousands of lives have already been lost from these canceled grants, we’re not out of the woods on that at all.
But in terms of the legal issue at the Supreme Court, we won something important and the counter scenario would’ve been a disaster. If the Supreme Court had ruled the Trump administration is free to refuse judicial orders, to just not acknowledge them or follow them, then we would’ve really been speeding into a state of lawlessness-

JW: Yeah.

RW: … worse than what we otherwise face.

JW: Yeah. Just hypothetically here, if the administration fails to disperse the money now, according to the court’s schedule, what happens then? What will you do?

RW: Well, I think they’re going to, but they’re going to probably fight over exactly what it means to disperse the money, including they’re going to say they shouldn’t disbursed it to grantees they’ve canceled. So we’re going to have to deal with that. But if they out-and-out refuse, then we’ll move again as we did earlier for contempt of court on the officials who were responsible for this.

JW: One other question: didn’t they fire everybody at USAID? Is there anybody left at the agency to actually disperse the money?

RW: It’s a huge practical problem. So there are a number of grantees in the last day or two who have received notices saying, “Your freeze is over, resume your work.” But there’s no human being for them to talk to, the people they were engaged with before to get the funding flowing to enable them to resume the work. So yeah, that’s a real serious practical problem and it’s a disaster in this case, as I said, people’s lives are being lost as a result of this. And it speaks to this broader problem we’re going to face throughout this administration, that their complete willingness to obliterate federal agencies, their readiness to ignore or circumvent the law, combines to mean that even when we win cases, they’re not going to be clean victories. We’re going to still have to push and push and push again and it’s going to be unsatisfactory even in the winning circumstances many times.

JW: And we do have a reminder of what is at stake with the funding in this case. There was a memo from a man named Nicholas Enrich, Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. He released series of memos last weekend that he had prepared about the effects of the Trump cuts to humanitarian assistance. Let me just read some of the highlights. You’ve kind of referred to them briefly in passing.
If the money is not restored promptly, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care. 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio. One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Twelve million new cases of malaria this year, 30% increase in TB, 775 million cases of avian flu. I could go on. He did go on. And of course he was fired right after releasing that memo.
You’re saying some of this damage is already beginning. If the funding is restored, it will have lifesaving benefits for millions of people. But you’re saying we can’t be sure today anyway that this is actually going to happen.

RW: I think the money’s going to start flowing and I think it’ll probably start flowing a little imperfectly. And also the administration has said, from their point of view, they’ve already canceled the vast majority of these grants. So what they did with the freeze, it was a blanket thing. They said, “We’re putting everything on pause while we review the grants.” Now they claim to have reviewed the grants, an implausible claim given that there’s thousands of them, that they’ve reviewed the grants that cancel the majority of them. So that’s going to be the next phase of this fight.
And those statistics that you’re reading, those are human beings and it’s heartbreaking and it is utterly pointless. There’s no business interest that’s advocating for this. There’s no religious interest that’s advocating for this. There’s no national security interest promoting this. It is just destruction for its own sake and with massive human consequences delivered by people who are oblivious to other human’s needs, wellbeing, and even lives.

JW: So this was not a Supreme Court ruling about Trump’s effort to take complete control of the federal government and slash its workforce and spending. There are many other of Trump’s executive orders that challenge the constitutional separation of powers. But do you think that Wednesday’s five to four vote against Trump at the Supreme Court has implications for other cases dealing with his unconstitutional executive orders?

RW: We’re doing pretty well in the courts, in the lower court, so far in challenging the administration’s rampant illegality. We can’t keep up, the collective ‘we,’ we can’t keep up. And there are problems. Some of the things that identifiably illegal don’t lend themselves to litigation, but the record in the lower courts is very strong. This case implicates some of the key themes that are underlining all these cases, separation of powers, duty to follow judicial orders, questions about whether the government has to spend money that’s congressionally appropriated. So it’s a hopeful sign. It’s a hopeful sign. We’re for sure going to lose some of these cases along the way, but today was a good win.

JW: Rob Weissman — Co-President of Public Citizen, which won a huge victory at the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning when the court rejected Trump’s efforts to halt foreign aid spending mandated by Congress. Rob, congratulations on this victory, and thanks for talking with us today.

RW: Thank you.

The first legal challenge to Trump’s executive orders is at the Supreme Court now. We’re talking about the lower court’s order that Trump release $2 billion in foreign aid and funding for USAID, the Agency for International Development, appropriated by Congress. That suit was brought by Public Citizen. Their co-president, Robert Weissman, joins us now. Rob, welcome back.

Rob Weissman: Hey, it’s great to be with you.

JW: We’re speaking on Tuesday afternoon, and we are waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on your case to restore funding for USAID. Remind us what this case is about and why it’s important.

RW: The Trump administration has decided, unilaterally and illegally, to end our foreign assistance program. They’ve tried to dismantle the main agency that carries it out, the US Agency for International Development, USAID, and they put on hold all grants and assistance arrangements we had with organizations around the world for supposedly a 90-day freeze with an exemption for Israel and Egypt. But that was an illegal action, and we’ve sued them to force the freeze to be undone. We want a temporary restraining order in the case, saying the money should flow, and government hasn’t followed the order. The court has issued subsequent orders directing the Trump administration to comply with its orders and that’s now the case at the Supreme Court.

JW: It seems that the constitution is perfectly clear on the underlying issue here. Congress appropriates funds, the president is required by the Constitution to faithfully execute the law. So, what’s the issue here?

RW: Well, from our point of view, there really isn’t very much issue. Individual contracts are subject to suspension and cancellation by the president. These contracts have terms in them that give whatever administration the ability to undo them, but not to undo them all simultaneously for no reason whatsoever, which is what the administration has done.

JW: As I understand it – and I’m a little shaky on this – Trump’s lawyers have not defied the court. We had David Cole on our podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he was very forceful in arguing that this is normal jurisprudence. The judge issued an order stopping the freeze on the release of these funds. The administration went to court saying, “We have a different legal basis for doing this.” The court said, “No, you’re wrong. You’re required to release them. Here’s the deadline for releasing them.” The administration has a right to appeal. They did appeal. They lost their appeal. They have a right to go to the Supreme Court. They’ve gone to the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration lawyers have never said, “We’re going to defy your order. We’re going to do it anyway.” In fact, they said the opposite. In their appeal to the Supreme Court, they said the administration “takes seriously its constitutional duty to comply with the orders of federal courts. The government is undertaking substantial efforts to review payment requests and release payments.” And it seems like they’re challenging only the deadline that they were given by the court. They’re not challenging the constitutional principle that Congress appropriates and the president executes. Have I got that right?

RW: You have got that right, and I agree with David Cole – this is not an instance of the Trump administration saying, “We don’t care what the courts say. We’re going to do what we want to do.” And there’s a degree to which it is the sort of normal back and forth where you have half-hearted compliance, and the plaintiff has to force full compliance. It’s sort of that, but it’s also something different too. It is a hundred percent noncompliance. None of the money started up. It wasn’t like half of the money started, and they held back on the other half. None of the grants have been paid out.
Again, they’re not saying they disagree with the ability of the court to issue a ruling and that they’ll file the ruling. They say they’re following the ruling, but they’ve got separate grounds for not letting the money go. So, that’s disingenuous. It’s not the same thing as saying they defy the court, but it does speak to an issue that we’re seeing in this case and other cases. It is plainly going to plague us throughout the entirety of the Trump administration, which is even when we went in court, they’re going to come back and try to do the same thing again simultaneously or immediately thereafter.
So, wins are going to be vitally important, but they’re not going to be sufficient, and we’re often going to see wins in the court undermined by the facts on the ground by a really bad faith administration that doesn’t care a whit about the courts, the law and policy impacts on human beings.

JW: So, why do you think the Supreme Court took this case? It doesn’t seem like there’s a constitutional issue at stake here, at least the way the two sides are presenting the issues right now.

RW: Well, it would’ve been better if the court had rejected it out of hand. This is a case that moves forward on the so-called shadow docket. It’s not like a full-blown Supreme Court argument where you have to have these petitions to say, “Please listen to our case,” and the full court considers whether or not it wants to do that as part of the thousands of cases it’s looking at.
This was just granted by Chief Justice Roberts with a so-called administrative stay, extending the deadline for the government to comply with the judge’s order in this case. So, we’re going to see what happens. Yeah, it would’ve been better if they didn’t. It’s not a great sign if they took it, but taking it is not really a signal that’s going to go against us. We’re just going to have to wait and see how it turns out.

JW: And what do we make of the schedule here? I thought this would be decided pretty much right away since it’s not a full constitutional argument.

RW: Well, we’re talking Tuesday afternoon in East Coast time, and it could be decided anytime. There’s really no way to know what’s going on. It’s not going to take a long time. The government filed a reply to our argument yesterday morning, Monday morning. It’s possible that will delay the court a little bit. We expect something this week and really any moment.

JW: I quoted the statement from the government’s brief saying the administration “takes seriously its constitutional duty to comply with the orders of federal courts.” I do have to note that Elon Musk has called for the impeachment of the judge who issued the original temporary restraining order. He wants the Senate to impeach this guy. That kind of suggests a different approach.

RW: Well, Elon Musk is completely out of control. He’s out of control in his role inside the administration, and he’s out of control in his role outside the administration. There’s no way for regular human beings to distinguish between those two things. However, the White House has said those comments are being made in his individual capacity, not in his capacity as co-president or head of DOGE.

JW: And of course, he’s not the head of DOGE. This woman is the head of DOGE. He’s not even an employee of the DOGE.

RW: Right. He’s just a special government employee and a senior advisor to the President of the United States.

JW: Just to underline why US Agency for International Development funding is important, we saw that memo from a person I’d never heard of, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID. He released a series of memos that they had prepared about what cuts to humanitarian assistance would lead to.
Let me just read some of the highlights. “If the money is not restored promptly, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care, 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio, 1 million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition, 12 million new cases of malaria this year, 30% increase in TB, 775 million cases of avian flu.” I could go on. He did go on, and of course then he was fired right after releasing that memo. We know that the health effects of things happening in Africa do spill over into our country, so that’s a huge issue, but the effects on American democracy are a separate issue here.

RW: Well, we’re very much concerned with both. I mean, you can’t be a human being and hear what you just said and not be worried about it. I can tell you for me personally, which dovetails with Public Citizen’s organizational interest, I did a lot of work on the price of antiretrovirals, HIV drugs, way back in the 1990s when the price for developing countries charged by big pharma was more than $10,000 a year per person to get treatment.
So, in the middle of the spike of the AIDS pandemic, it was basically impossible for people in Africa to get life-saving treatment. And we did campaigning and focused on the importance of generic competition, and the price of those drugs that were once more than $10,000 a year per person fell first down to hundreds of dollars, and now around a hundred dollars a year for more than $10,000 a year per person.
That lowering of price directly led to the creation of the US AIDS program called PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives since then. So, I’m acutely aware of these public health issues. Public Citizen has done ongoing work in that space, including on HIV drugs, on COVID treatments, and much more. So, we come to it equally and maybe even first on the humanitarian basis, and also, as you say, with these core democratic and constitutional issues.
And if the president has the ability to unilaterally shut down congressionally created agencies or the ability to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds, well, there’s really not much congressional check on presidential power whatsoever, and you have the Supreme Court decision from a couple of years ago now, giving the president immunity for criminal prosecution for almost anything he does while in office, he being Trump.
This is a kind of, if this is permitted, a kind of presidential power, really more consequential than that because it’s a core constitutional issue where our constitution disperses power and really makes, if anything, Congress primary and absolutely makes Congress primary over decisions about spending. This completely guts. This approach from the Trump administration completely guts that core constitutional principle and understanding and transfers power over into the individual of Donald Trump along with his henchman, Elon Musk.

JW: You have a number of cases challenging Trump’s executive orders. I think it’s a total of seven. Let me just ask you about a couple of those. You have one case challenging the dismantling of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the CFPB. Remind us what that one is about and why it’s significant.

RW: The CFPB was an agency created after the 2008 financial crash. It was created in the so-called Dodd-Frank bill. It was Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild that we should have a special agency focused on protecting consumers, not just regulating banks and worried about the bank’s interest. It’s come into existence. It’s done a fabulous job.
During the Biden administration, it was headed by probably the most effective consumer champion in government in the last 50 years, Rohit Chopra. It’s returned more than 20 billion to American consumers. It’s handled tens of thousands of consumer complaints. It’s issued rules to stop junk fees and high credit card fees and overdraft fees to protect student borrowers, to protect mortgage borrowers, protect consumer privacy and much more.
they’ve been an extraordinary agency, and so for that reason, Donald Trump and his associates have designed to close it down. Elon Musk has a special interest in closing it down because he wants Twitter X to become a money transmitter. It’s kind of like a Venmo. And if it were to become that, it would be regulated by the CFPB. So, Musk and Russ Vought, who’s the lead aggressor in the Trump administration, have conspired to completely dismantle the agency, to fire everyone who works for it, to close the building, take the sign down from the building, return the building to other uses, and they sought to destroy literally every record that the agency has ever accumulated to effectively burn all the records by deleting them.

JW: So, you sued to stop this.

RW: Yesterday, on Monday of this week, we were in court arguing for preliminary injunction to maintain the hole, to keep the agency intact, and stop Musk and Trump from going forward with these plans to fire everyone and delete all the records. So far, it’s looking good, but we’re still a little ways away from really having that guaranteed.

JW: I think we have time to talk about one of the other big cases that you have brought. You challenged Trump’s executive order censoring public health agency websites, the CDC, in particular. Remind us about what that case is about and why it is significant.

RW: Well, this is a case that involves the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies, including especially the Centers for Disease Control. It’s really happening across government where, as part of this fanaticism around what they call DEI or what they call made-up gender ideology, they’re ordering agencies to strip information from the Internet. So, if the word ‘gender’ is included or if the word’ diverse’ is included, take it down. So, agencies are implementing this directive very aggressively.
In the case of the CDC, for example, one thing that came down was a data set on heart disease by county in Florida by gender. So, they took that down because it had the word ‘gender’ in it. Well, it turns out the kind of information they’re taking down is really important for clinicians who rely on CDC guidance to give care to their patients. It’s also used by researchers, but especially this clinician information is really important to have available and easily available.
So, we sued to have the information put back up, saying taking it down was arbitrary and capricious and also violated a few rules about how the government has to manage information. So far, we’ve won that case. The information is going back up.

JW: Rob Weissman – he’s co-president of Public Citizen, which has filed, and so far is winning, seven lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders. You can get more information about the organization and about those cases at citizen.org. Rob, thanks for all your work and thanks for talking with us today.

RW: Thank you, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time for this week’s protest roundup – the many ways people have marched, picketed, rallied, and generally yelled at Trump and Musk and Republicans. For that, we turn to John Nichols. He’s national affairs correspondent for The Nation. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: It’s great to be with you, Jon.

JW: Our task today is to talk about some of the anti-Trump and anti-Musk protests going on just in the last couple of days. My list is Tesla dealer showroom picketing, immigrant rights marching, Bernie Sanders rallying, Ukraine support demonstrating, National Park protesting, and town hall yelling. Let’s start with Tesla dealer showroom picketing under the slogans “Tesla take down” and “Pull the plug on Elon.” We’ve seen protests outside Tesla dealers in lots of places. Tucson, Denver, Boston, San Francisco’s been a big center. “Honk, if you hate Elon” say the signs people are carrying in the center of town on Van Ness and O’Farrell. More than 100 people have been gathering there every Saturday. New York City, at the Tesla showroom downtown on the Far West Side, Washington Street at the corner of West 13th, for news reports of noisy, peaceful, nonviolent action, organized by Rise and Resist. What do you think? It’s an unusual form of political protest, picketing car dealerships.

JN: Look, this is a way to get a message to Elon Musk and to the Trump administration about the horrific cuts and the disastrous approach that they’ve adopted toward the federal government and toward federal workers, and it’s proven to be incredibly successful. Maybe because it’s an easy thing to target. In Tucson, they had in the range of 13 to 1,500 people out on Saturday. In Denver, they had about 1,000. It looks like roughly a thousand or more in New York, but even in smaller communities across the country, we’re seeing three, four, or 500 people show up. When you add this all up, just the Tesla targeting, what you see is something that is very akin to the nascent early Tea Party movement of 2009, 2010 against Barack Obama. These are people who are coming out without a lot of organizing, without a lot of structure, and saying, “We want to send this message.” It’s a big deal, and I think it’ll be bigger this coming weekend.

JW: One more thing. Tesla stock, as of today, is down more than 25% for the year. This has wiped out, I don’t know, $600 billion in market value since December? This has cost Elon Musk something like $140 billion of his net worth. You think he notices $140 billion drop?

JN: I think the billionaire class, who I’ve written a lot about, they notice every penny. That’s the weird part about it. It’s never enough, right? They always want more, and if they lose something, it bugs them.

JW: I want to talk also about the Ukraine support rallies in Chicago and Vermont, elsewhere, since Trump staged that media event where he humiliated Zelenskyy. In Boston, hundreds, thousands of demonstrators carried signs saying, “We stand with Ukraine,” in blue and yellow, the colors of the flag of Ukraine. The most notable was in Vermont, where JD Vance planned a ski vacation with his family. On the roads from the airport to the ski slopes, he was greeted by more than 1,000 protesters lining the street of his route. Signs reading, “Go ski in Russia.” That protest seems to have been organized by the Indivisible group up there, Mad River Valley – certainly, made for some great TV footage.

JN: You know, the thing about Elon, or about JD Vance – I’m sorry to confuse the actual vice president with the sometimes shadow president, but the thing about JD Vance is he’s supposed to be a pretty smart guy, but I’m not sure what the logic of going to ski in Vermont was. You’re actually going to one of the most liberal states in the country by any measure, and I can’t repeat some of what was written on some of the signs on a family podcast, but what I can tell you is that they had a lot of fun mocking him and they had a lot of fun focusing on him. They would’ve protested anyway, I think, but I think the crowds were larger and I think the crowds were more impassioned, frankly, because this is one of the first opportunities to push back on what you saw in the Oval Office, or in the White House, when Zelenskyy came to visit. Because it’s pretty clear that, in that meeting, if you watch the whole 50 minutes of it, that Vance was the driving force there. He was the one trying to upend this deal.

JW: We haven’t seen hardly anything of JD Vance, it’s all been Musk in the news. This was Vance’s reemergence as a part of the Trump administration.

JN: What was striking was that Trump actually sat back through a lot of it and Vance kept driving it. I think that, suddenly, we’ve got a triumvirate of people that folks want to protest against now. Initially, it was Trump and Musk, and I think Vance has succeeded in putting himself into that space and having a lot of people who are frankly very upset with him.

JW: He’s a little bit like Elon Musk, in that nobody really likes JD Vance. He doesn’t really have a base.

JN: Not to relitigate the 2024 presidential campaign, but I know that Andy Beshear of Kentucky really wanted to be the vice presidential nominee, because he had this whole theory of going after JD Vance and how successful it could be of saying, “Look, I’m the governor of a state that actually has Appalachia in it, not a guy who came and vacationed in Appalachia and then wrote a nasty book about it.” I agree with you that Vance is not a beloved figure, I think Trump likes that. I think Trump likes it when he’s not the least popular guy in the room, and Vance really – he’s had a bad couple of weeks, because if you’ll note, his visit to the security conference in Munich didn’t exactly go well. There’s actually thinking that what Vance came and did where he reached out to the AFD, the far-right party in Germany, actually harmed the AFD—

JW: Yeah, they didn’t do as well as was expected. 

JN: Vance is a universal global downer.

JW: Great. Well, I also want to talk about the National Park support rallies. Thousands of people protested last weekend at National Parks everywhere, basically, to protest the Trump administration firing at least 1,000 National Park Service employees last month. Organizers here seem to be a group called Resistance Rangers, off-duty park rangers, some of whom had been fired. There were protests at at least 145 sites, other people say 400 sites. The famous places, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone. A lot of the National Park protests were in red states. In Montana at Glacier National Park. In Wyoming, at Yellowstone. In Utah, at Arches National Park, Indiana Dunes National Park. In Kentucky, the protests at Mammoth Cave National Park where my family went for a vacation when I was a kid. One protester said, quote, “The parks are not political. The parks are for everybody, they belong to everybody. They’re meant to be enjoyed by future generations,” close quote – and that’s coming from Kentucky.

JN: Going after the National Parks may have been one of the dumber things that they did. I have always said that the most popular public employees are postal workers, and I think people love postal workers, but I am discovering in recent weeks that people love park rangers maybe even more.

JW: Yeah.

JN: I was at an event in Eastern Iowa, it was one of these Bernie Sanders rallies, and they had a park ranger come up and speak before Sanders did. It was standing ovation immediately. Beyond that, his presentation, was a young park ranger, and it was so poignant, because he was clearly not a particularly political guy. He was just saying, “I love the out-of-doors, this job was a dream come true for me. The thing I love the most is introducing young people to the out-of-doors, so that they could be a part of their life.” There were literally people with tears in their eyes as this guy spoke. I do think, in a way, what we’re looking at here is a fabric of protests, different kinds of protests in different places for different reasons and different focuses, but people understand something here, and that is that there’s a need to push back against what Musk especially is doing, but also what Trump and Vance are doing, and they’re looking for entry points. One of those entry points is the National Parks.
It’s a labor-of-love job, and pretty much all they ask of the federal government is a fair wage and maybe a pension some years down the line. These are not people that anyone sees as taking something from the taxpayer, so I think they’ve been very, very effective as one space in which a lot of protest has occurred.

JW: Now it’s time for Your Minnesota Moment, news from my hometown of St. Paul that you won’t get from Sean Hannity. I just want to review a couple of the protests in the past week in Minnesota. In Duluth, on Sunday, was the largest gathering yet outside the office of Representative Pete Stauber, he’s the Republican who’s taken over the house seat in northern Minnesota. Protesters lined the street, waving flags, brandishing signs, demanding that he hold a town meeting. He’s one of the people who’s refused to hold a town meeting.

JN: A lot of them are, Jon.

JW: This is the third protest there in less than a month demanding that he hold a town hall. One of the protesters said, “We’re here because we want to make sure Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security continue to be supported. Pete Stauber made a promise back in 2019 that he would support those, and we want to make sure he is doing that, but now he seems to be catering to Trump in his policy of undermining the democracy of this country.” That was in Duluth. In Richfield, suburban Minneapolis, hundreds of demonstrators marched to Richfield City Hall to protest immigration enforcement by ICE in suburban Minneapolis. Apparently, there was an ICE raid in St. Louis Park, another suburb west of Minneapolis, where ICE detained a total of seven people that they found in a factory. In Red Wing, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, south of St. Paul, high school students protested restrictions on DEI and their defense of Black studies, and in Minneapolis on Friday night, several hundred people marched from the Ukrainian American Community Center across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge in support of Ukraine and Zelenskyy. There’s a group, Stand with Ukraine Minnesota.
The Ukrainian American Community Center in Minneapolis says there are more than 20,000 Minnesotans of Ukrainian descent. This has been your Minnesota moment, the special feature of this broadcast. But I don’t think Minnesota’s especially unusual in what’s been going on in the last week.

JN: Places like Red Wing are not big left-wing centers. Duluth is a pretty progressive place. And so when people are getting out on the streets, people are coming from a lot of different perspectives, but with a clear desire to change the course of what this administration is doing.  And it’s happening very early in the administration. That’s significant, because I think a lot of the Republicans in Congress are being almost blindsided by this. They’re around Washington, they think Trump is very popular, they bought into this fantasy. Some of them just fear Musk’s money. If they go awry, they’ll face a primary challenge, but many of them I think were really bought in, and then they’ve gone back to their districts, often very gerrymandered districts, and run into crowds of very angry people.
Why is that? Because I think maybe Democrats and progressives made a mistake along the way. They didn’t talk much about what the federal government does for people, and suddenly, as Musk has attacked it all, folks are waking up and saying, “Look, I want scientific research to tackle Alzheimer’s and to go after glaucoma and all these other issues. I want universities to be funded, I want health research, I want Medicare, Medicaid, I want Social Security. I want all of these things that the federal government has a hand in.” Now, that doesn’t mean people don’t want the government to be more efficient, and some of them probably are pretty conservative, but the notion that you would just lop it all off and just start to destroy it, right down to the National Parks, that is generating a movement, and that movement I think is ultimately going to be quite comparable to the Tea Party movement of 2009, 2010.
The Tea Party movement had a lot of fake elements to it, it was pushed by a lot of corporations. I think this is a lot more genuine, but it’s still this core concept that a movement develops that initially forces a political party, the Tea Party movement is the Republicans, this movement, it’s the Democrats, to be much stronger in its opposition, but that ultimately transforms into an electoral force. I think that what we’re seeing across the country will have repercussions for Trump and the Republicans in this year’s off-year elections and next year’s midterm elections.

JW: One last thing. Some of our friends say, “None of these protests are going to change Trump, so why are we doing them?” What’s your answer to those people?

JN: I think there’s no question that they could change Trump. I don’t think for a second that, if you know the history of Donald Trump, that he can’t be changed, or that he can’t shift. In his first administration, I wrote a book called Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse. It was about all the people in his cabinet and all of his assistants and aides, and the problem for the book was, after a year, he had fired just about everybody. Yes, I think he can be moved, and I actually think that the place where the biggest movement may already be occurring is in some of the places where he had his greatest strength. Farmers are very upset about tariffs, older folks are very upset about threats to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security, and one of Trump’s great successes was the in-roads that he made with young men.
Yet we’re now seeing a situation where polling and other data suggests that some of these younger folks who are at least open to Trump as a way of disrupting things are becoming very, very concerned about whether they’re ever going to have a job, especially a job in something that they might want to work in. Some of them might even want to be park rangers, and so at the end of the day, I think these protests are, in the great American tradition, our right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, working in exactly the way they should. As I go out and cover them and see people at them, what’s probably striking to me is I don’t see many sad faces at protests. Folks seem to be energized, they seem to be hopeful, they seem to believe that it’s worth it.
Remember where you and I come from, Wisconsin and Minnesota, these are cold places. People are willing to go out on a very cold day and protest, sometimes with a lousy sound system or whatever. That suggests to me that there’s a vibrant opposition to what Donald Trump is doing, and it’s nascent, it’s still developing, it’s still taking form, but as it begins to link up and people who go to a Tesla rally one day, go to a National Park rally the next, you have the potential for a dissenting movement in this country that I think can actually get the country back.

JW: John Nichols – read him at thenation.com. Thank you, John.

JN: Thank you.