“Spitting in the Face of the Law”: Dems Plan to Protest Trump Speech

The president’s first speech to a joint session of Congress will take place Tuesday at 9:00 p.m., but some key members of the intended audience won’t be in attendance.

A growing faction of Democrats are planning to boycott Donald Trump’s unofficial State of the Union address in protest against the administration’s violent agenda, Elon Musk’s apparent takeover of the federal government, and Trump’s abysmal negotiations with Ukraine.

Washington Senator Patty Murray announced Monday that she wouldn’t be in the crowd during Trump’s first major speech to the legislative branch, posting on X that the true state of the union is that Trump is “spitting in the face of the law.”

“He is letting an unelected billionaire fire cancer researchers and wreck federal agencies like the Social Security Administration at will,” Murray wrote.

Murray has been joined by Senators Ron Wyden, Chris Murphy, and Don Beyer, all of whom are planning to skip.

Members from the House are also joining in on the protest. Colorado Representative Diana DeGette announced Tuesday morning she would also be staying away from the speech. Speaking with NBC affiliate 9 News, DeGette said that the Trump administration’s “barrage of illegal attacks against public servants and vulnerable groups, have disgraced and embarrassed our country.”

The plan flies in the face of the silent protest that top Democrats in Congress have tried to organize. In a letter issued Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged his party to make a “strong” and “dignified” presence at Trump’s speech, rather than run away.

“It is important to have a strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber,” Jeffries wrote. “The House as an institution belongs to the American people, and as their representatives, we will not be run off the block or bullied.”

While Donald Trump took questions from the press at the White House Monday afternoon, the stock market plummeted, and Fox News displayed a graphic showing the dip while carrying Trump’s remarks live. 

Trump told reporters that he planned to enact his long-threatened 25 percent tariffs against goods from Mexico and Canada and 10 percent tariffs against goods from China starting Tuesday, to which the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 did not respond well. Fox News, along with their usual breaking news chyron, also had the Dow index displayed while Trump was speaking, showing a fall of more than 650 points.

Trump’s remarks were preceded by his early afternoon announcement on Truth Social addressed to “the Great Farmers of the United States.” 

“Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!” Trump posted. But it seems that there was little fun to be had in the stock market based on the fears of higher prices and other  negative ripple effects.

This, coupled with fewer food imports from three of America’s largest trading partners, will ultimately lead to higher food prices across the country, something that Trump campaigned against during the 2024 election and that ultimately played a factor in his victory. Plus, the prices of various other goods, from cars to electronics to over-the-counter pills, also will likely see a sharp increase. 

Don’t expect Trump to take responsibility for a sinking stock market or higher prices, though. He’s already saying that rising inflation isn’t his fault and has tacitly admitted that his tariffs will cause prices to go up. His administration is even discussing how to juke economic numbers to try and hide how badly Trump’s radical changes, including those from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, are hurting the economy. It looks like our wallets are about to have a rough spring.

Donald Trump is scheduled to speak with several Cabinet members Monday regarding Ukraine policy and the possibility of ending military assistance to the beleaguered Eastern European nation.

That could include withholding equipment, such as ammunition and radars, as well as limiting the amount of intelligence shared with the Ukrainian military, according to a U.S. official who spoke with The Washington Post.

The meeting will involve Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, the last of whom met with Russian officials last month regarding a potential peace deal.

During a White House press conference earlier Monday, Trump repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions as to whether his administration’s actions had aligned U.S. policy with Moscow. Rather than saying “no,” Trump went on a breathy rant claiming that the war never would have happened if he was in office at the onset of the conflict.

“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh, and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

When asked whether he had discussed the ending of military aid to Ukraine, however, Trump said that “things” were happening “as we speak.”

“I haven’t even talked about that right now,” Trump told reporters. “I mean, right now, we’ll see what happens. A lot of things are happening right now, literally as we speak.”

On Friday, Trump and JD Vance overtly showed where their loyalties lie: Seated in front of the press in the White House, the pair refused to let Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Putin at the cost of denigrating former American officials. And in doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to its adversaries.

Donald Trump buffered while trying desperately to talk around a direct question Monday about aligning U.S. foreign policy with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s designs for Ukraine. 

During a press conference, Trump was asked whether he was “considering canceling military aid to Ukraine” after his disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy Friday. 

Trump and Vice President JD Vance put on an outrageous display berating the wartime president for failing to prostrate before them as they demanded he pay the U.S. back for aid, imploding negotiations with Ukraine to the delight of the Kremlin.  

The president was also asked to respond to concerns that he was moving the “U.S. worldview in alignment with Moscow.”

In response, Trump rattled off a list of everything that “would have never happened” if he’d won the presidential election four years ago. 

Trump’s nonanswer, which veered further and further off-topic, included the October 7 massacre, “Israel,” inflation, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and China possessing the Bagram Air Base (the Taliban has denied that China controls the former U.S. base). Finally, he circled back to Ukraine—but only to complain, not to actually answer the question. 

“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.

Zelenskiy was quoted Monday saying that peace with Russia “is still very, very far away,” following his talk with the U.S. president. Trump called the quote “the worst statement that could have been made,” in a post on Truth Social.

Trump was also asked whether Americans should be disturbed that Kremlin officials said his foreign policy was “largely in line” with Russia’s vision.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, I think it takes two to tango,” Trump replied. “And you’re gonna have to make a deal with Russia, and you’re gonna have to make a deal with Ukraine. You’re gonna have to have the, uhhhh, assent and you’re gonna have to have the consent from the European nations, ’cause I think that’s important—and from us. I think everybody has to get into a room, so to speak, and we have to make a deal. And the deal could be made very fast. It should not be that hard a deal to make. It could be made very fast.” 

Trump previously claimed that he could resolve the war within 24 hours of entering the White House. 

Then the president pivoted to continue whining about Zelenskiy: “Now maybe somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, and if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long. That person will not be listened to very long. Because I believe that Russia wants to make a deal. I believe certainly the people of Ukraine want to make a deal—they’ve suffered more than anybody else. We talk about suffering, they suffered.”

“But if you think about it, under President Bush they got Georgia, right? Russia got Georgia. Under President Obama they got a nice big submarine base, a nice big chunk of land where they have their submarines. You know that, right? Crimea,” Trump said, inhaling heavily. 

It’s worth remembering that Trump had been a cheerleader for Putin following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, claiming that Crimeans “would rather be with Russia.” 

“Under President Trump they got nothing. And under President O’Biden they tried to get the whole thing,” Trump said, garbling his predecessor’s name. “They tried to get the whole big, uh, big Ukraine. The whole thing. If I didn’t get in here, they would have gotten the whole thing.”

Trump’s support for the foreign dictator emboldened Russia, and his lack of support for Zelenskiy weakened the country, making way for Russia to launch its ground offensive in 2022.

With Trump in office, Russia wouldn’t walk away empty-handed. 

The White House instructed the State and Treasury departments Monday to draft a plan lifting U.S. sanctions on Russian individuals and entities, including oligarchs, who Trump recently claimed “are very nice people.” It wasn’t immediately clear what the U.S. would receive in return for sanctions relief. And earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested that Kyiv should abandon hopes of restoring its illegally seized territory from Russia.

A leading spokesperson in the Department of Health and Human Services announced his resignation Monday after stark disagreements with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over how to manage the growing measles outbreak.

Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Thomas Corry resigned effective immediately on Friday only two weeks after starting the job, he posted on LinkedIn, wishing his colleagues in the department “the best and great success.” Corry reportedly butted heads with Kennedy and Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, over how to manage the department, according to Politico.

Specifically, Corry was not happy with Kennedy’s initial response to Texas’s growing measles outbreak, which has infected at least 146 people and caused the first measles death in the United States in 10 years. Last week, Kennedy said during a Cabinet meeting that measles outbreaks were not unusual, despite the fact that measles had been declared eliminated in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since then, Kennedy said that HHS was helping health officials in Texas respond to the outbreak and spoke approvingly of the measles vaccine, but has still stopped short of calling for everyone to get vaccinated, writing Sunday in a Fox News op-ed that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”

“Parents play a pivotal role in safeguarding their children’s health,” he wrote. “All parents should consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options to get the [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine.

Corry is a Trump administration veteran, having served during the president’s first term as senior adviser and communications director at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, so his resignation so soon into Trump’s second term is sure to arouse suspicion. Kennedy has long had a reputation for being anti-vaccine, although he tried to deny his previous comments during his confirmation hearings.

Since his confirmation to lead HHS, Kennedy’s actions have not been reassuring. He has paused multiple vaccine developments in the department and on his first day fired critical employees, including members of the CDC who respond to outbreaks. Only a couple of years after a global Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy is applying the wrong lessons and is not proving himself to be up to managing the country’s public health.

In a move to further castigate the Ukrainian president, Trump reportedly wants Volodymyr Zelenskiy to formally apologize for his behavior before any rare earths deal goes forward.

“I have been told by a senior official here that nothing’s gonna happen with this minerals deal until Zelenskiy goes in front of cameras and makes an explicit public apology for the way that he behaved himself in the Oval Office,” said Fox’s Peter Doocy on Monday.

This is more fallout from the disastrous meeting that Zelenskiy, Trump, and Vice President JD Vance had on Friday, in which the president and his sidekick berated the weary Zelenskiy to his face, chiding the Ukrainian president for not respecting them enough and not appearing gracious enough while he deals with Russia’s unprompted assault—which Trump also blames him for. Trump later kicked him out.

Trump has been particularly obsessed with these minerals in the past weeks, making a deal a prerequisite for any further aid to Ukraine. Now it’s looking like the U.S. will waltz in and seize control—with the Kremlin’s help.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is once again reorganizing its wall of hunting trophies from supposedly slain government contracts. This time, it has quietly removed five of its seven largest kills from last week, erasing $4 billion in supposed savings.

The New York Times reported Monday that the night before, DOGE erased or altered 1,000 claimed savings, or roughly 40 percent of entries into its “wall of receipts,” which has previously proven to be exaggerated or fraudulent. That appears to have been the case with the contracts that were removed Sunday.

The removals included the site’s biggest trophy, a canceled contract with Centennial Technologies for technical support for the IRS, which was supposedly worth $1.9 billion. Although DOGE had bragged about the “incredible job” the U.S. Treasury had done in identifying the waste, the Times reported earlier last month that the contract had actually been canceled in November, during the Biden administration. On Sunday, it disappeared from the wall.

Another vanished entry claimed $133 million in savings from canceling a contract between USAID and development firm Chemonics International in Libya, but a LinkedIn post revealed that the contract had ended last year.

In some cases, it seems that DOGE didn’t even earn its biggest hunting trophies. Other entries were removed due to obvious accounting mistakes that appeared to be the product of human error.

One claimed $149 million in savings from a canceled contract to provide administrative support to the Department of Health and Human Services. But DOGE’s website linked to the wrong contract, which didn’t list the correct company, purpose, or value.

Even after the latest round of deletions, errors still persisted on the site. DOGE still claimed that it had saved $106 million by canceling two contracts for administrative support to the U.S. Coast Guard—but in reality, those contracts were completed during the Bush administration.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. DOGE’s website, which was once meant to showcase the organization’s major victories, has turned into a hall of humiliation, subject to constant reorganization and worthy of extreme doubt. The latest massive deletion has yet to be acknowledged by DOGE.

Just last week, DOGE deleted the top five highest savings from its website, after various news outlets documented the multiple errors in its accounting, including a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration that was actually only $560,000, an $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was worth about $8 million, and three supposedly $655 million cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development that amounted to only $18 million.

Despite the rescission of some of the group’s largest cuts, the website now boasts to have saved $105 billion, as a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

The Department of Government Efficiency’s wide-ranging and haphazard cuts to the federal government have reached the nation’s nuclear safety programs.

Just before Valentine’s Day, at the direction of Elon Musk, the Trump administration nixed 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce despite the objections of senior officials, The Washington Post reported Monday.

“The president said workers critical to national security would be exempt from the firings. But then there was an active decision to say these positions are not critical to national security,” one unidentified official at the agency told the Post. “It is so absurd I don’t even know what to say.”

Previous reporting had revealed that the staff reductions at the nuclear agency were part of a larger layoff by DOGE directed at the Department of Energy that sought to ax up to 2,000 employees. DOGE pledged that the mass firing only affected noncritical employees who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles,” but that was little more than a bold-faced lie.

One of the staffers forced out of his position included acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the “top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency,” The Bulwark reported last month.

Other critical employees dismissed in the purge included staffers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and minimizing radiation and potential damage from accidents at the nuclear site. The cut workers included an emergency preparedness manager, a radiation protection manager, the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives.

The losses were considered so ill-advised and extreme that the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration reversed course on the hatchet job, welcoming the affected employees back to their jobs. The White House also walked back the decision after it received a “stream of panicked calls” from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who demanded the immediate reinstatement of some 314 nuclear staff workers, including engineers, technicians, and managers, according to the Post.

“These are jobs directly tied to keeping bad things from happening at facilities in places like Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Kansas City, Missouri,” another anonymous official who recently left their job told the newspaper. “A lot of them are in red states. These lawmakers are not thrilled by the potential for bad things happening in their communities.”

But the process wasn’t as simple as an invite back to the office. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the NNSA are considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure of if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

Musk’s rapid-fire cuts at the NNSA serve as another monstrous example that Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” philosophy can’t be easily adopted or translated into a federal bureaucracy providing critical services. The tech billionaire has similarly had to walk back cuts that his juvenile team made to the nation’s disease-prevention programs, as well as Food and Drug Administration teams responsible for reviewing AI-assisted surgery protocols and food safety, among other layoffs.

Further still, DOGE has not lived up to its promises. The organization has had to rescind claims that it saved the government billions of dollars, deleting details from the group’s “wall of receipts” after journalists fact-checked that the programs they slashed never actually tallied up to the bold savings.

Trump issued an ominous message to American farmers as he announced his planned kneecapping of their most profitable market: foreign exports.

“To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!”

This will have a massive, direct impact on how much money farmers—many of whom are still reeling from the tariffs (and subsequent bailout) from Trump’s first term—will make from the products they grow. Agricultural exports like soybeans, grains, fruit, vegetables, and livestock products provided U.S. farmers with about $180 billion in annual revenue in the 2023 fiscal year.

It’s unlikely that the farmers will see the “fun” in having to radically readjust their processes for less revenue. This coincides with Trump’s tariff war, as he plans to levy massive 25 percent tariffs on imported goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on goods from China. Chinese state media over the weekend reported that China planned to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. agriculture—perhaps leading Trump to decide to destroy American farmers himself.

Donald Trump is celebrating his administration’s move to ignore a law that targeted money laundering.

On Sunday, the Treasury Department announced that it would stop enforcing “any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either.”

In effect, the government will no longer require shell companies to disclose their owners and beneficiaries, allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to hide their profits from the public. The rule was part of the Corporate Transparency Act, or CTA, passed in 2021, which required some businesses to report information on people who own or control a company, indirectly or directly, to the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Trump quickly took to Truth Social after the Treasury announcement, posting, “Exciting News!”

“This Biden rule has been an absolute disaster for Small Businesses Nationwide,” Trump’s post read. “Furthermore, the Treasury is now finalizing an Emergency Regulation to formally suspend this rule for American businesses. The economic menace of [Beneficial Ownership Information] reporting will soon be no more.”

Republicans have long opposed the CTA, claiming that the requirements are too steep for small businesses and companies to fulfill. The rule on beneficial ownership was supposed to go into effect in January, but a federal court order froze enforcement of the rule. The CTA was passed by the Biden administration to tackle tax evasion and corporate cronyism, which, unsurprisingly, is at odds with the Trump administration.

Since his inauguration, Trump has gone after financial regulation as well as government agencies that seek to curb corporate power, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Earlier this month, the president also issued an executive order freezing enforcement of the 48-year-old Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits any person or company tied to the United States from paying money or offering gifts to foreign officials to help their business.

It seems that Trump wants his friends in the corporate world, as well as his own businesses, to be able to rake in profits with much less restrictions, and if they so choose, hide them from the public. It will now be easier for a business with unpopular practices, or a president with shady business interests, to avoid scrutiny.