As Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sat seething in his office last month, watching President Trump blame diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration for the deadly plane crash over the Potomac River, members of his staff warned him against publicly venting his rage.
Annie Karni, The New York Times

One of the unacknowledged advantages of the horrendous era we’ve entered is that it has revealed for all to see the putrid connections between great wealth and great power. Oligarchs are fully exposed and they are defiant. It’s like hitting the “reveal codes” key on older computers that let you see everything.
Robert Reich

What exactly is Trump doing? Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.
Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.
David Brooks, The New York Times

He authored the Constitution to forestall a despotic president. We’ll see if those safeguards suffice.
Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

A rapid-fire array of directives by the Trump administration has left farmers and businesses in rural America reeling.
Linda Qiu and Julie Creswell , The New York Times

Will Westmoreland, a seasoned Missouri farmer and political consultant, sits down with Skylar— a younger farmer who voted for Trump and now faces losing his farm due to Trump’s funding freeze. With kindness, empathy, and hard-earned wisdom, Will breaks down how rural communities were misled about Trump’s true plans, including his connection to Project 2025.
Will Westmoreland, YouTube

Rachel Maddow looks at growing public anger at Donald Trump's war on the U.S. government, and looks at how cuts in the federal workforce, slashed funding to the NIH for medical research, and the decimation of USAID is having a profoundly negative economic effect in places that were previously supportive of Trump. 
Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC

I want to talk today about the media’s coverage of the Trump-Vance-Musk coup. I’m not referring to coverage by the bonkers right-wing media of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators.

I’m referring to the U.S. mainstream media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Public Radio — and the mainstream media abroad, such as the BBC and The Guardian.
Robert Reich, Substack

Recently one of my opposite numbers, a columnist up in Vancouver, B.C., announced that he couldn’t take America anymore. He broke up with us.
Danny Westneat, The Seattle Times

Farmers report missing millions of dollars of funding they were promised by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, despite promises from the Trump administration that a federal funding freeze would not apply to projects directly benefiting individuals.
Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta and Anumita Kaur, The Washington Post

Last Sunday, the head of the Lutheran social services outfit in the Northwest woke to find his phone had been blowing up.
“I had texts and calls that had come in overnight from people all over the country, some of them extremely alarmed,” says David Duea, CEO of Lutheran Community Services Northwest in Tacoma.
Danny Westneat, The Seattle Times

Governor Ferguson and Steve Starr have the same idea. Steve, Grant County chair and ARC expert, will talk to us tomorrow about what is happening in north central Washington. He was going to touch on the employment effects of data centers in Quincy. Bob thinks Steve is on the right track.
Don Schwerin, Chair, Ag & Rural Caucus

This April 19th marks the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution and its war against monarchial power. It comes at a time when those who oppose President Trump’s exercise of powers that go well beyond those the Constitution allots to presidents are stunned by the speed and scope of his actions, and uncertain about how they can even begin to counter them.
Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

Musk’s rats continue to burrow into sensitive government payment systems. According to the best source I’ve found on this (Nathan Tankus’s Crises Notes), Musk and his rats have now gained unrestricted access to your Social Security number, your confidential bank information, your confidential medical information, and much more.
Robert Reich, Substack

Yesterday afternoon, about seventy people showed up at the Spokane office US Representative Michael Baumgartner (R-CD5). Baumgartner wasn’t there, but surely his staff relayed the message that his constituents were upset.
Jerry LeClaire, Indivisible

The mood around Department of Energy offices in Richland is grim as Elon Musk reportedly plans to eliminate half of the federal jobs across the nation as part of his Department of Government Efficiency work for President Trump.
Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald

As of 5 pm ET today, Trump will halt tens of billions of dollars in federal spending. This isn't about cutting the size of government. It's about further concentrating power in Trump's hands.
Robert Reich, Substack