Something is shifting," scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder posted on Bluesky yesterday. "They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power." Rather than backing down on their unpopular programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are intensifying their behavior as if trying to grab power before it slips away. Trump's blanket pardons of the people convicted for violent behavior in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were highly unpopular, with 83% of Americans opposed to those pardons. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent. And yet, on February 20, the Trump Justice Department expanded those pardons to cover gun and drug charges against two former January 6 defendants that were turned up during Federal Bureau of Investigation searches related to the January 6 attack. Then, on February 21, a number of people pardoned after committing violent crimes, including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—who was sentenced to 22 years in prison—and Proud Boy Ethan Nordean (18 years) and Dominic Pezzola (10 years), as well as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes (18 years) and Richard "Bigo" Barnett, who sat with his feet on a desk in then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi's office (four and a half years), held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to announce they were going to sue the Justice Department for prosecuting them. Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that the group followed the route they took around the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then posed for photos chanting as they had that day: "Whose house? Our house." Protesters nearby heckled the group, and when one of them put her phone near Tarrio's face while he was talking to a photographer, he batted her arm away. Capitol Police officers promptly arrested him for assault. A number of the January 6 rioters were visiting the Capitol from the nearby Conservative Political Action Conference being held in Maryland. There, MAGA participants continued to normalize Nazi imagery as both Steve Bannon and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui threw fascist-style salutes to the crowd. Yesterday, Tarrio posted a video of himself following officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 though the lobby of a Washington hotel where the anti-Trump Principles First conference was taking place. According to Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, Tarrio followed officers Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, and Aquilino Gonell, saying: "You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 f*cking years. Now you don't want to look in my eyes, you f*cking cowards." Fanone turned and told him: "You're a traitor to this country." Today, the hotel had to be evacuated after someone claiming to be "MAGA" emailed a threat claiming to have rigged four bombs: two in the hotel, one in Fanone's mother's mailbox, and one in the mailbox of John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor turned critic. After listing the names of several of the conference attendees—and singling out Fanone—the email said they "all deserve to die." The perpetrator claimed to be acting "[t]o honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump." Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are also ramping up their behavior even as the public is starting to turn against the government cuts that are badly hurting American veterans, American farmers, and U.S. medical research. The courts keep ruling against their efforts and their claims of finding "waste, fraud, and abuse" are being widely debunked. Rather than rethinking their course in the face of opposition, they seem to be becoming more belligerent. On Saturday, Trump urged Musk to be "more aggressive" in cutting the government, although the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential advisor. "Will do, Mr. President," Musk replied. He then posted a command to federal employees: "Consistent with [Trump's] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation." Shortly after, emails went out giving workers 48 hours to list five things they had accomplished in the past week. This sparked outrage among Americans who noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. S.V. Date of HuffPost noted on February 18 that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on 9 of his first 30 days in office and that Trump's golf outings had already cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million. Reddit was flooded with potential responses to Musk's demand, scorching it and Musk. The demand also exposed a rift in the administration, as department heads—including Kash Patel, the newly confirmed head of the FBI, as well as officials at the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of the Navy—asserted their authority to review the workers in their own departments, telling them not to respond to Musk's demand. Then users pointed out that the new government employee email system the Department of Government Efficiency team set up explicitly says that using it is voluntary, and that resignations of federal employees must be voluntary. Musk responded by sending out a poll on X asking whether X users think federal employees should be "required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished" in the past week. The entire exercise made it look as if the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus are dangerously loose. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: "Drunk on power and ketamine." Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump's destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a "thief and a robber." "[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another," Locke wrote. Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, "with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws." Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to "uphold their obligations and protect our freedom." "Otherwise," Neem writes, "Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency." He continues: "Trump's actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself." In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is "grossly unconstitutional." Trump's concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is "absolutely straight up unconstitutional," King said, "and it's illegal." "[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power," King said. "They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn't want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure," King said. "[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened," he said to his Senate colleagues, "is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we're just sitting back and watching it happen." "This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country," King said. "It's the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don't want to buck the President, we'll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat's a copout. It's our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That's what we swear to when we enter this body." "What's it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what's going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What's it going to take?" "[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we've got to respond to it. I'm just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat's what the framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that's what we're headed for…. We've got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America." Senator King, along with Maine governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state. On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. "I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges," she said. "I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear." On July 28, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen (R-ME), who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority to draw up articles of impeachment against Republican president Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, "I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office; it's just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment." Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate coverup came to light. "Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president," Cohen recalled. "That's when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, 'We were wrong, and you were right, and we'll support this.' " It's a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying: "As Maine goes, so goes the nation." — Notes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/tablet/2025/02/19/feb-13-18-2025-washington-post-ipsos-poll/ https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/nx-s1-5304454/jan-6-pardons-drugs-firearms https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/21/proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-arrested-00205513 https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-arrested-us/story?id=119057808 https://www.justsecurity.org/108229/what-just-happened-musk-email-federal-employees/ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-doge-musk-email-goes-seriously-sideways https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/politics/mar-a-lago-trump-remote-work-golf/index.html https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-golf-doge_n_67b50fbfe4b0319f377e6c6a https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5159062-donald-trump-elon-musk-advice/ https://people.com/ashley-st-clair-sues-elon-musk-for-sole-legal-custody-of-their-son-rsc-11684615  Johann's SubstackI remember that day in 1985 when I accompanied my parents to a courthouse in San Francisco. As I recall, they stood before a judge and, with other new Americans all around them, said the Pledge of Allegiance and became American citizens. We then went out for sandwiches. I was in fifth grade. It was one of the most significant days of my life. That was t… 11 days ago · 52 likes · 5 comments · Johann Neem https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/upshot/doge-musk-trump-errors.html https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf https://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/28/bill-cohens-lessons-from-watergate/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/22/enrique-tarrio-capitol-police Bluesky: timothysnyder.bsky.social/post/3lirihxoyyc24 jennydee.bsky.social/post/3liryo5n47k2p meidastouch.com/post/3lisr5cfd2k2m gtconway.bsky.social/post/3lisnkx6exs2u marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3liu2sx53gk2d joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3liu2xz2xqk2k joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3liu3n7ra4k2k ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3litrsp2s7k2o evansutton.bsky.social/post/3lit4cz6cxk26 yasharali.bsky.social/post/3lis4q5meph2f YouTube: X: You're currently a paid subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. 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© 2025 Heather Cox Richardson
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The name "Gulf of Mexico" first appeared on a map in 1550 and in a historical account in 1552. The region had various names on earlier maps, including "Sea of the North" and "Gulf of New Spain," but the name "Gulf of Mexico" became the standard and was widely adopted on international maps by the mid-17th century. The name reflects the geographical and cultural significance of the region, particularly in relation to the land of the Mexica (now Mexico), which was a destination for mariners crossing the gulf.
The adoption of the name "Gulf of Mexico" in European maps and texts set a pattern that persisted into the colonial and post-colonial eras. By the 18th century, it was commonly recognized in various languages, and official Spanish admiralty charts labeled it in terms reflecting its connection to Mexico. This naming was standardized among European maritime powers and has been internationally recognized since then (Gulf of Mexico - Wikipedia) (The Gulf of Mexico | A Name Rooted in History) (Gulf of Mexico — Wordorigins.org)."
The Associated Press (AP) was founded on May 22, 1846, in New York City. It was established by five daily newspapers in New York to share the costs of transmitting news of the Mexican-American War. The AP quickly evolved to become one of the most robust news gathering organizations in the world, known for its comprehensive and apolitical coverage of news events.
In terms of its role within the media landscape, describing the AP as "the quintessence of establishment American news agencies" is not unreasonable. It epitomizes mainstream news reporting in the U.S., given its longstanding history, its reach, its influence, and its role in shaping journalistic standards. The AP's work is relied upon by a vast network of media outlets, both within the United States and globally, making it a central pillar of the establishment media.
«As a supporter and Democrat, I am appealing to you to resist the Trump takeover of our Constitutional system in every way possible. Rick Wilson, a former Republican, has made clear that effective resistance means NOT allowing the cowardly Republicans to codify the devastating cuts and destruction of government being inflicted by Musk and Trump. That means NOT VOTING for their budget. No matter what. We simply cannot endorse or be complicit in any of these policies. Tell Leader Jeffries your constituents are demanding that Democrats say NO to Trump and his attack on the Constitution, and that means NO cooperation with the Republicans until they start resisting the attack on our Constitutional system along with us! Thank you»
Take action.
Judy
Please forward to everyone you know
"The 24 hour Economic Blackout Day, Friday, Feb 28 "
12:00 am to 11:59 pm
WHAT NOT TO DO:
Do not make any purchases
Do not shop online, or in-store
No Amazon, No Walmart, No Best Buy
Nowhere!
Do not spend money on:
Fast Food
Gas
Major Retailers
Do not use Credit or Debit Cards for non essential spending
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Only buy essentials of absolutely necessary
(Food, Medicine, Emergency Supplies)
If you must spend, ONLY support small, local businesses.
SPREAD THE MESSAGE
Talk about it, post about it, and perhaps document your actions that day!
WHY THIS MATTERS!
~ Corporations and banks only care about their bottom line.
~ If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.
~ If they don't listen (they wont) we make the next blackout longer (We will)
This is our first action.
This is how we make history.
February 28th
The 24 Hour Economic Black Out Begins.
