Pushback

Nationwide protests, overflowing town halls, and Republican cold feet indicate that Trump’s aggressive actions are finally facing a public reckoning.

It’s been 30 days of turmoil, chaos and fear. We’ve seen headspinning executive orders; ICE raids and cruel deportations; brazen, illegal takeovers of our federal payment and computer systems by Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers; mass firings of federal workers; and shutdowns of entire programs and agencies.

But this week, we also saw Trump’s assault on our democracy begin to falter.

I’m not just talking about the scores of lawsuits now pinning down the Justice Department and revealing to the federal judges just how haphazard, dangerous and incompetent the new administration is. The pushback has come from ordinary Americans all around the country, and it’s starting to have a noticeable effect.

Protests and civic action

Across America, protests erupted in state capitals. The biggest demonstrations took place on Presidents Day. A grassroots effort by the 50501 Movement, which called for 50 protests in 50 states, saw thousands turn up despite frigid temperatures to protest the anti-democratic and illegal actions by Trump and his billionaire allies like Musk.

The largest protest was in Washington, D.C., home to tens of thousands of federal workers impacted by the mass firings.

Here was an aerial video shot of the crowd in Sacramento, California. (Note: I use Xcancel links to avoid sending traffic to Musk’s platform. However, they sometimes take longer to load and don’t consistently work on every device or browser. If you’re having issues viewing the video, you can remove the word “cancel” from the url to view the link at Twitter.)

Protests also greeted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Thursday in Los Angeles, California. Duffy was savagely booed by the crowd after criticizing the state’s high speed rail project and calling for a compliance review on $4 billion in funding.

Here’s a clip where you can hear the crowd begin a spontaneous chant of “Build the Rail!” after Duffy called the project “crappy” and a train “to nowhere.”

In town halls by Congressmembers, capacity crowds have begun to turn up demanding they stand up for their constituents. With an overflow crowd spilling out of Roswell City Hall, Rep. Rich McCormick was likely surprised to find himself drowned out by angry voters in his ruby red district in Georgia over DOGE’s chainsaw approach to cost cutting.

One woman received cheers and a standing ovation from many when she asked when Rep. McCormick was going to “rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.” He was met with boos and catcalls when he said that he had had “the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected.”

The crowd also hammered McCormick over DOGE, and it seems the owner of the X platform was so rattled by the footage that the platform apparently began censoring the videos posted by a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Trump’s allies are wavering

A wave of personal stories, both narrative and in video form, has flooded social media. Fired federal workers are telling their stories and dominating the public narrative. And that is having an effect, even upon some of Trump’s closest allies.

Jesse Watters of the Fox Network surprised his co-hosts when he complained that a friend, who was a long-serving veteran, was now afraid for his federal job.

On Wednesday's episode of popular show called "The Five," Watters spoke about a 20-year military veteran whom Watters had first met at a shooting event.

Watters described him as "one of the guys who has killed a lot of bad guys. Put his life on the line. He punched out after 20 years of working for the Pentagon. And he's only been there a few months, so his probationary period, he just found out he's probably going to get laid off."

It was a near perfect FAFO moment. “I thought they were only supposed to fire the DEI folks!” Watters didn’t seem to appreciate the karmic nature of what was happening. He went on to say of his kill-the-bad-guys, gun-loving veteran friend,

“He's going to get DOGE'd. He texted me and said: 'Jesse, this isn't good. I'm upset. This is really sad.' This guy is not a DEI consultant. This guy is not a climate consultant. This guy is a veteran. So when you're talking about DOGE-ing people, veterans should get priority. Because if you're going to go out there and kill enemies, put your life on the line for this country, you shouldn't be in the same category as people that are doing DEI."

Wait, what about a veteran that does DEI, is that bad or good? I’m just asking questions. Here’s the clip:

Watters isn’t the only voice on the right starting to speak up about Trump going too far. Republican Rep. Troy Balderson of Ohio said on Thursday that Trump’s executive orders are “getting out of control” and that Congress decides whether the Department of Education goes away. “Not the president, not Elon Musk.”

It’s too early to tell whether these are isolated cases or the beginning of an internal revolt, but one thing is clear: There are cracks now in the GOP dam protecting DOGE and Trump.

Other warning signs for Trump

While the U.S. press has been cowed and pitifully quiet over the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine in favor of partnering with Russia, the European press has not. British papers, for example, including some right-leaning ones, savagely blasted Trump for blaming Ukraine for being invaded, with one even mocking Trump as “Putin’s Poodle” and calling him the “Orange Manbaby.”

Meanwhile, because of the unchecked spread of bird flu—for which the White House’s response appears to have been to fire the federal workers who were working on it—the price of eggs has shot up to over $8 per dozen on average. But don’t worry! Trump’s USDA has discovered its error and is now trying to figure out how to rescind those terminations and rehire the fired workers.

But is all this anecdotal evidence merely noise around the edges? That appears not to be the case. In the past week, Trump’s poll numbers have collapsed, with his approval underwater in all major surveys including Quinnipiac, CNN and the Washington Post.

This all spells big trouble for Trump should he continue to move so aggressively. A precipitous negative shift in public opinion could signal to his own party members that the White House has overreached. And this could jeopardize the massive $4.3 trillion tax cut for the wealthy that the GOP wants to see passed, all at the expense of the poor and others who rely on Medicaid.

If Republicans think Americans are mad now at what’s happening, wait until they learn the GOP truly is serious about cutting Medicaid to the bone. That program is relied upon heavily by poorer voters, particularly in red states. Some of them are finally beginning to realize that they’ve been scammed and that their faces are about to be eaten by Republican leopards.