100 days of losses for Trump, 100 days of wins for The Contrarian

Publisher's Roundup, 15

This was a banner week for The Contrarian as we turned 100 days old and prepared to analyze 100 days of the Trump regime with our big virtual online conference coming up on Tuesday of this week.

When we launched back in January, we did so in a general atmosphere of fear and foreboding. As I wrote at the time, our country was sleepwalking into autocracy and needed to wake up. The Contrarian was Jen and my contribution to that wake-up call. We and all of you who have joined us then and since then refused to go along with numb compliance with authoritarianism.

From our very first day and every day since, we pointed out the fundamental weakness and stupidity of Trump's policies and personnel. We did so not only through the writing that forms the backbone of this project, but with video, podcasts, and special events like our mockathon of Trump's inauguration. We covered (among many other things) the fundamental illegality of the Trump project—and then separately proved that illegality in multiple legal cases that your paid subscriptions have supported.

I’ll let you in on a secret: Jen and I did not think that through in advance! But thanks to you, our subscription numbers exploded, and we realized that—since we are owned by nobody—we could put our profits toward fighting for our democracy. It’s the most unique bargain in American journalism: you get our great coverage and you get to participate in the battles we are waging in court.

Our analysis was that if we were loud about Trump authoritarianism and our opposition to it, and if we covered acts of patriotic resistance (such as litigation), that combination would spark a movement. 100 days later it has, with lawful, vigorous opposition spreading from court proceedings, to popular protest, to polling places, to political leadership. Regular readers know that I term these the four P’s. As we have explained, resistance is flourishing across all of them.

When you look across all those fronts—each of which we covered this week (as covered in my usual round-up below)—you can only come to one conclusion: Trump lost his first 100 days. To take only one of many examples that we covered, in the space of a little over 48 hours this week, there were no fewer than seven court orders shutting down different aspects of his autocratic project. You Contrarians supported two of those wins that I worked on: stopping Trump’s effort to violate the First Amendment by shutting down Voice of America, and his effort to violate the elections clause of the Constitution by promulgating an executive order favoring his voters.

You know who else knows he lost the first hundred days? Trump. That’s why he is increasingly frantic, doing things like having a state court judge arrested in Wisconsin, on Friday. As I’ve noted, his attack on Judge Dugan will fail, as have so many other initiatives—with nearly 100 court orders against him in total. As for his attacks on me, I take them as backhanded compliments; as encouragement to work even harder. We will have more legal actions to announce this week—and every week!

The Contrarian is an essential element of those fights, and will continue to be.

In just 3 months, you’ve indeed helped build a movement—560,000 strong and nearly 800 pieces published, all in defense of democracy. Thank you for showing up, sharing, and believing. We’re here because of you, and not only are we not backing down, we’re revving up!

The Contrarian covers the Democracy Movement

This week we saw 50501 protests in Massachusetts, California, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and more. As Trump appears intent on relentless attempts to dismantle all we hold dear, we must always be looking ahead to the next moment when we can collectively demand that he keep his tiny hands off our Constitution.

A number of protests are already in the works for this Thursday, May 1, aka International Workers’ Day. We are enthusiastic, vocal fans of the labor movement, home of some of the staunchest recent support for American democracy. Though it falls midweek, consider making time to get out and show your support this May Day. Find out more here and here and here. And as always, find protests in your area at mobilize.us, and send us your protest photos at submit@contrariannews.org.

For an extra dose of motivation, watch Stronger Together: Liz Shuler on the Power of Labor Unions. Jen spoke with AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler on the movement’s role in fighting authoritarianism. “When you have unions, negotiate a contract or collective bargaining agreement in a workplace, it inevitably lifts the standards for all working people.”

Check here to find a town hall in your area. To see what’s drawing others out for collective action, enjoy in the States, in which The Contrarian’s Jamie Riley collected local coverage of the already deep, underreported impacts of Trump’s tariffs, education funding cuts, rampant layoffs and more policy chaos. Potters, truckers, students, teachers: these are the stories of real people, real loss, but also a response of authentic opposition; the likes of which we must not let up.

But, as our weekly Democracy Index highlights, if you feel like this was a particularly chaotic news week, you are not alone. Joyce’s team began the week wondering whether Trump could dissolve our democratic government faster than the courts can stop him. Speaking of which…

A Week of Major Legal Wins

On Thursday, Jen and I went Live to discuss breaking news of the flood of legal wins, with at least four preliminary injunctions dropped across immigration, education, and voting rights—including one case litigated by yours truly, along with my extraordinary colleagues.

Dr. Mary Anne Franks on the legitimacy of the judiciary. Though we indeed saw the courts holding strong, Dr. Mary Anne Franks of George Washington University joined Jen to discuss a persistent, pressing question: what if Trump refuses to comply? This regime blatantly disrespects our rule of law, though the fate of our democracy depends on combating it. “The point of this executive is to intimidate people…to harass people…to create a climate of fear.”

Earlier in the week, Jen spoke with our friend at the ACLU, Mike Zamore, on the midnight SCOTUS ruling blocking Trump deportations. The Roberts Court’s emergency decision to block the Trump Administration from deporting Venezuelans in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act (a ruling, remember, which came only a few weeks after a prior SCOTUS ruling permitted the act’s use. “If the government is allowed to just lock people up or send them into a foreign gulag on their own say so with no proof—who is safe? Nobody.”

It’s not about immigration. It’s about upholding the Constitution. Mimi Rocah praised the Supreme Court’s weekend ruling blocking the summary deportation of Venezuelan men. It took them long enough, she says, but finally a majority of the court seems to recognize the Trump administration’s flagrant violation of due process as a threat to more than immigration policy.

By Contrast, a True Leader

Trump will be out of place at Pope Francis’s funeral. Jen Rubin wrote that the prospect of Trump at Pope Francis’ funeral today feels less like homage, more like trespass. One man built bridges, the other walls—and in a broken world, we should all strive to be a Francis, not a Trump.

What people are saying about the death of Pope Francis. After the beloved pope’s passing early Monday at age 88, leaders worldwide offered condolences. We rounded up responses from Barack Obama, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and more.

Sam Sawyer on the legacy of Pope Francis. Sam Sawyer, a Jesuit priest and editor of America Magazine, joined Jen to discuss the legacy of Pope Francis, touching on his kindness towards the poor, the plight of migrants, and those who will bear the brunt of the climate crisis. “He reminded us of what was happening at the edges and the fringes and the margins—where people were in need and vulnerable.”

The Relatable Pontiff. Meredith Blake explained the abiding—and surprisingly universal—appeal of Pope Francis’s simple lifestyle in an era of excess. Leading with humility, compassion, and quiet courage, Francis chose simplicity over spectacle and people over power, leaving the next pontiff with big, sensible shoes to fill.

Constitutional Crisis & Righteous Response

Though I remain optimistic about the fate of our republic, I have to agree with Jen, whose first column of the week put to bed a question that we can no longer ponder with uncertainty. Stop Waiting for a Formal Declaration of “Crisis” delivers the reality that—when courts are defied, powers usurped, and legal residents disappeared, we’re not approaching crisis—we’re already there. What we must do now is to marshal the will to end it.

Our video team offered a crucial, devastating portrait of the ongoing dehumanization in The Disappeared.

Where is Rumeysa Ozturk? Brian Hauss on Tuft Student’s Case. ACLU attorney Brian Hauss joined Jen to discuss the case of another one of the Trump administration’s disappeared: Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, who remains in a detention facility despite a judge ordering her return to Vermont. “If they can do this to a student on a foreign visa, a Venezuelan, a legal resident from El Salvador, they can do this to anyone.”

CECOT Slingshot. Jonathan Alter, Susan Glasser, and Katie Phang joined Harry Litman on this week’s Talking Feds to discuss looming Supreme Court action and the administration’s ongoing campaign to take control of large civil institutions.

In a must-read analysis, Brian O’Neill notes that CECOT has no rules. Gitmo might be next. The piece looks at CECOT in terms of the Trump regime’s rebuilding of the machinery of disappearance—an effort that includes ICE detention and the infamous site of militaristic overreach, Guantánamo Bay. “The threat is not that Gitmo becomes CECOT. The threat is that Gitmo becomes what it once was: a place where executive power silences oversight, and due process becomes optional.”

That’s not the only analogy drawn about this crisis. Shalize Manza Young notes that what’s happening to undocumented immigrants is not new to Black Americans. As shocking as the Trump bullies’ moves on immigration have been, Young argues that the plight of Latino migrants, while barbaric, is not wholly unprecedented—not when many elements echo what Black Americans have endured for centuries. Different target, same playbook.

Meanwhile, Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, spoke with Jen on the support for Trump among white Christians–even as his immigration policies grow crueler. It’s the oldest story in American Christian nationalism, he explained. “I’m afraid that if we're counting on white Evangelicals to pump the brakes, we shouldn't be holding our breath.”

Breaking News: Free Press. Jen and I (from Prague!) went Live, globally, to discuss one of my proudest victories: that despite the Trump administration’s efforts, Voice of America journalists are back at work—a testament to the endurance of democracy, the hard-won triumph of Contrarians, and the rising value of independent journalism.

A Collective of Clowns

Independent journalism allows us to call out MAGA for disregarding our nation and our fellow humans…. This motivated Jen, in this week’s installation of Words & Phrases We Could Do Without, to declare she has had enough of GOP lawmakers excusing complicity with the justification that they are “afraid.” Bad press or a tough primary are not threats to life or liberty—but most importantly, if these cowardly careerists are so terrified, “why do they tolerate a president and a party that operates, in essence, by extortion?”

Which begs the question of why they also tolerate an unelected, unhinged, of-late-unseen billionaire making decisions that will have a profound influence on their constituents! In not with a bang but a backdoor, Brian O’Neill wrote on the major counterintelligence threat hiding in plain sight: DOGE’s unchecked access to sensitive federal systems. “The fox is not just guarding the henhouse; it has changed the locks.”

Musk—a whining and waning presence—has certainly played an unwelcome role in the first 100 days of the Trump regime. But even his antics can’t top the astounding buffoonery on display in the president’s Cabinet of Clowns. Though Bondi, Rubio, Noem, and Patel have all revealed their utter lack of principles or patriotism, the man leading the Pentagon continues to take home the award for being the least qualified member among the misfits.

Jen Rubin drew that out in Senate Republican Toadies Won’t Quit Hegseth. “Donald Trump is responsible for nominating the single most disastrous, obviously unfit secretary of defense in history, Pete Hegseth,” she wrote. But equally responsible for the ongoing leadership crisis are the Senate Republicans who seem incapable of saying enough is enough.

Plus, the repeat echo of Signalgate makes him simply too easy to ridicule, making him irresistible fodder for editorial comics, as seen in Michael de Adder’s Signaling secrets and Nick Anderson’s Student driver.

Even in Hegseth’s absence on Fox & Friends, Sunday morning talk shows have been offering a maddening latitude to Trump officials, allowing them to peddle disinformation week after week. Josh Levs offers an exasperated advisory on this in Note to media: For heaven’s sake, fact check Trump’s team. “When networks know guests will lie—and air them anyway—that’s a failure.”

Courage, Cowardice, & Capitulation

A War Worth Winning. In making Harvard the flagship target of his war on supposedly “woke” higher education, wrote Marvin Kalb, Trump got more of a battle than he bargained for. Harvard’s noncompliance showed how we must wage—and win—the war.

Oopsie! RJ Matson added a bit of dark comic humor to imagine some other consequences of the little “mistakes” the regime is claiming they made (though still assigning blame to others).

Hey, TV, Don’t Bend the Knee! Jonathan Alter (from his Substack, Old Goats) led our extensive coverage of the resignation of Bill Owens, longtime producer of 60 Minutes and the Evening News, who went out on the noble grounds of refusing to apologize for an accurate story—casting a long shadow on the credibility and integrity of the onetime crown jewel of broadcast journalism.

In the wake of Owens’ abrupt exit as Executive Producer, Oliver Darcy explained the state of play, the inside politics of CBS, what Owens’ departure means for the future of the company, and the importance of editorial independence. “People are basically having to decide between their principles and perhaps the survival of their company.”

And Dean of American broadcast journalism Marvin Kalb, who started working at CBS in 1957, unpacked Trump’s “love me or lose me” obsession with the press—and how the forced resignation of Owens suggests he’s succeeded in pressuring one of America’s most respected programs to bend the knee, in 60 Minutes is Losing Time.

Perhaps the organization will crumble, but the fact that Owens exited with integrity made him one of four individuals tapped as this week’s Undaunted figures. The other three honored were Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom. Acting without institutional or political support, these heroes firmly defied authoritarian power plays.

How this year’s Correspondents’ Dinner became a celebration of capitulation. The First Amendment is alive—but not well. David Litt gave us an unvarnished appraisal of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year: a “Nerd Prom” not only willing to bend the knee to Trump, but also willing to hold a party for the principles it failed to uphold.

Trump’s Attacks on the Economy

Let’s do lunch! Economist Justin Wolfers joined Jared Bernstein for his weekly Contrarian live Econ Q&A.

Ginny Canter & Richard Painter Join Jen to Detail Trump's Crypto Conflicts of Interest. Legal experts discussed their just-published report detailing Trump’s elaborate connections to the cryptocurrency industry. “The whole thing is completely antithetical to a democracy and a free market capitalist system.”

Neera Tanden in conversation with Jen Rubin. Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, spoke with Jen on Trump’s oligarchy playbook: tariffs, tax cuts, and “the largest-scale movement of wealth from middle-class people to the wealthiest among us perpetrated by any person in our history.”

Sports, Culture & Critique

Jen and Pablo Torre Step Up to the Plate! Jen revealed more of her sports fan bona fides in a now-weekly series of chats with Pablo Torre! This week they delved into sports as a results-driven business, religion and sports, the new role of college coaches, and much more.

The NFL draft shows us where the people are. Michael Franklin took on the NFL Draft, which he sees as a (missed) opportunity for civic leaders to show up and show out. Culture builds politics, he writes, and we should meet people where they already are.

Feminist Storytelling Against the Backdrop of Authoritarianism. With Tony nominations a week away, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf headed to Broadway to measure our collective cultural pulse. What role, she asked, can feminist theater play against the backdrop of authoritarianism?

Split Screen: The politics of Sarah Palin photos. Azza Cohen cast her keen eye back to 2008, when Sarah Palin was named John McCain’s running mate—and promptly became, in the way she was visually framed, a textbook case of ingrained gender bias of political coverage. You don’t have to agree with her politics to recognize the belittling, sexualized pattern.

The media’s celebrity obsession is killing our democracy. Josh Levs diagnosed the will-he-or-won't-he hysteria around Stephen A. Smith running for president as symptomatic of a media disease that helped get us into the Trump mess to begin with: celebrity obsession.

Tammy Kupperman Thorp wrote on the politicization of our Navy and Marine Corps. The U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) released a list of 381 books it removed from the library — books by American luminaries such as Maya Angelou (“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”), books about racism, books about white privilege, extremism, gender identity and roles, the Holocaust. Denying or revising history doesn’t erase history, but it does limit intellectual discourse.

Resources explained: Parents & Caregivers Guide. Perhaps you’ve been hearing about Netflix's “Adolescence”? (You have–by us!) This week, Pasha Dashtgard, director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), wrote an intro to the “Parents & Caregivers Guide,” a resource for parents seeking to mitigate children’s exposure to potentially radicalizing online content.

Contrarian Culture Corner Recommendations. This week in timely entertainment and/or distractions, Meredith Blake invited us to check out Conclave (“far more entertaining than any movie about the inner workings of a musty institution has the right to be”) and Hacks (“a toxic workplace duo…constantly falling in and out of platonic love with each other”). Enjoy!

Tom the Dancing Bug. This week’s SUPER-FUN-PAK COMIX™️from Ruben Bolling features the Floating Head of Irrelevant and Wrong Predictions and the one and only Air Baby!

Jamie Schler offers a delicious Chocolate and Marble Cake recipe, seasoned perfectly with a meditation on being a food writer during turbulent political times.

Closing out with a crowd favorite, our Contrarian Pet of the Week comes from our colleague Josh Koppel, who suggests that you meet his Bengal cat, Bella! (Or maybe don’t.)

That’s it for now, Contrarians. As our coverage demonstrates, this was the week it became clear that Trump had lost his first hundred days. Our analysis is that it will only get worse for him from here. To understand why, join us for our big hundred days Zoom conference we are sponsoring with The New Republic on Tuesday, April 29, from 12-3.

Watch it Live here on Substack or view it on our YouTube! See you there.

Warmly, Norm