Exactly one year ago today, Jen Rubin and I and a small band of colleagues were furiously working to launch a new publication dedicated to the idea of honest but unabashed defense of democracy. We were just three days from the January 13 birth of The Contrarian. Too many mainstream outlets and powerful people and institutions were bowing down to the incoming would-be autocrat. We didn’t know whether our new publication would be a success, but we knew we would fight authoritarianism with every ounce of our and The Contrarian’s being.
What a difference a year makes! Yes, the devastation, destruction, and even death Donald Trump has wrought have been vast. But we and the entire democracy movement have again and again frustrated his efforts to impose dictatorship. You have helped make that possible, dear Contrarians, through your paid subscriptions that not only fund our coverage but also my and my colleagues’ pro-democracy litigation. As I like to say, we have met Trump’s flood-the-zone autocratic approach with rule-of-law shock and awe.
SubscribedTrump initially pursued his authoritarian aspirations using the traditional tools of the presidency. That included, for example, the power of the pen, surging an unprecedented number of illegal executive orders, such as those purporting to end birthright citizenship or asserting control of American elections.
We covered all of that here at The Contrarian–unabashedly, as promised. And you Contrarians also supported me and the coalition of democracy, civil rights, and other nonprofit groups to push back in one of the most extraordinary litigation campaigns in American history. In about 200 cases in this and parallel areas (including his abuse of spending authority and firing authority), federal judges again and again stopped Trump from capturing the dictator flag. (Yes, he fared better at the Supreme Court, but it takes only a small fraction of the cases.)
Those birthright citizenship and elections EOs were among the many that my colleagues and I and our wonderful partners and clients went to court to help stop. We also blocked the firing of tens of thousands of government employees and kept multiple government agencies open, all fueled by your paid subscriptions. Because we at The Contrarian are a not-for-profit, all proceeds go to support our scintillating coverage and this kind of pro-democracy advocacy.
All of that losing was very frustrating for Trump, so he looked to other outlets for his dictatorial energies. Having confronted failure again and again in civil litigation, he turned to exercise his criminal-justice powers, where an administration typically has broader leeway. The old saying goes that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and Trump deployed hand-picked cronies, including his former defense lawyer Alina Habba, to occupy once-distinguished federal prosecutorial offices.
Here, too, Trump met failure. Charges against two principal adversaries, Letitia James and Jim Comey, were tossed out because another one of those hand-picked cronies, Lindsay Halligan, was illegally installed by Trump. Contrarians, you were again a part of that. My litigation colleagues and I helped secure the very first precedent that these appointments were illegal. Then we filed a brief in support of Comey and James that helped their wonderful counsel get those cases dismissed.
Then there was a third area of Trump flexing and ultimate frustration: deployment of the National Guard. For all of the other disappointments at the Supreme Court (extensively covered here at The Contrarian), it finally did the right thing at the end of the year when it ruled that he had overreached his powers in Chicago. Trump was forced to admit defeat and pull back the Guard from multiple big cities, including Los Angeles—which my litigation colleagues and I are proud to represent pro bono, again made possible by your paid subscriptions.
As presidents often do when they’re facing domestic defeat, Trump has turned his autocratic attention abroad. This week, I wrote for The Contrarianwith colleagues about the illegality of his Venezuela campaign and broke the news of our legal campaign to push back on it. Judging from the chaos surrounding Venezuela and the unpopularity of the invasion in the United States, Trump has another flop on his hands. That includes this week’s War Powers resolution, which passed the Senate with members of his own party breaking off to oppose him.
And that’s just a few of the examples of our coverage and legal pushback on all this and so much more, made possible by you. It has been the privilege of a lifetime to share the journalistic and litigation fight of the past year with over half a million Contrarians. Yes, as you will see from this week’s Contrarian roundup below, Trump is as dangerous as ever, but he’s much less powerful. That is thanks in no small part to each of you. Happy anniversary Contrarians!
3 comments:
..let's give him less power when we vote in November.
We are all shocked by his actions in particular his threat of taking over Greenland. He seems determined on starting a 3rd world war.
Thank you for continuing to share articles from The Contrarian. We only seem to hear of Trump's outrages on this side of the pond. It is heartening to read of rational resistance to the tangerine tyrant.
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