On May 1, barely six months after the midterm elections, Donald Trump appears to have abandoned the White House and abdicated his role as president. He issued no formal statement, though four White House aides — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — claim they found a napkin on the president’s desk in the Oval Office on the evening of April 30, scrawled in red ink with the following message: "Blame Crooked Hillary & Hfior & the Fake News Media."
"Finally!" say women
Donald Trump would have done well to read some history — after all, the 1789 women’s march on Versailles helped to spark the French Revolution, and the 1917 International Women’s Day March helped bring about the abdication of Russian Tsar Nicholas II.
As big protests dominated headlines over the past six months, everyday acts of resistance undermined support within Trump’s administration and fed a sense of crisis around his presidency. Some workers saw disobedience as self-care, while others saw it as their chance to join a lineage of movements that stalled Nazis in occupied France and won civil rights victories in the Jim Crow South.
Former President Trump slips into a private car in the wee hours of the morning.
“I suspect that 50 years from now Mike Pence will be regarded primarily as the answer to a trivia question,” said Josephine Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer. “And it will seem an unfairly obscure question, at that.”
Worldwide, impromptu street parties popped up in major cities and small towns as people realized the American president had fled. As news spread of what appeared to be the first U.S. presidential resignation since Richard Nixon, crowds from Buenos Aires to Cape Town waved American flags, played American music, and congratulated the United States.
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Shortly after he disappeared from public view, Trump implored his “big beautiful base” to “vote with your trigger finger.” 1.5 million people showed up to make sure they didn't.
Most of the measures now heading through Congress — like reining in corporate power, raising taxes on the wealthiest, universal health care — have long been popular with voters across the political spectrum. But until 2019, Democrats refused to capitalize on that popularity, instead maintaining their allegiances to corporate donors. Now, thousands of Americans are fanning out nationwide to ensure that even the stodgiest of Democrats change their tune — in part to preempt future Trumps.
Recently-sworn-in President Pence has yet to issue an official statement on foreign policy — or, for that matter, to do anything whatsoever. In the third of three chaotic press conferences today, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders answered a reporter’s question about Pence’s plans by saying that the incoming President “intends to keep as low a profile as possible,” before realizing the strangeness of what she had just said. “That’s because our new President is a humble man, a man of God, and in no position to govern, I mean before asking God. Next question.”
“It’s precisely during moments of intense political polarization that things can change massively,” said a historian. “Polarization creates new political openings. It did in Scandinavia and Germany in the 1930s, in the United States during the 1960s, and in Chile under Allende. It can go either way.”
Among the millions who pushed the president to leave office in last weekend’s dramatic protests, many had been steadily working for change in lower-profile ways ever since Trump took office. We talked with three of the demonstrators who helped propel this historic uprising.
Some of the goals of the conference: more clearly defining “objectivity” in reporting; revisiting the recent uptick in restrictions on reporters’ rights to attend protests or otherwise engage in “political” activity in their personal lives; training reporters to avoid “fairness bias” — giving equal voice to opposing perspectives, even when one is less valid or categorically false; and focusing on strategies to responsibly cover leaders with autocratic tendencies in a way that does not normalize their policies or behavior.
Distributed four months before Donald Trump fled presidential office, a fake Post's tagline was a readers’ first clue that it was an elaborate fantasy rather than a real issue of the paper: Instead of the usual “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the mock paper read “Democracy Awakens in Action.” The lead story announced that Trump had fled presidential office — eerily prefiguring today’s actual news.
"We may have avoided a new civil war, but we sure do have slavery," said Forten. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution specifically allows slavery for those convicted of crimes, and some consider that to be one of the reasons the private prison industry has mushroomed equally under Democratic and Republican presidents. "Having millions of people performing free labor has been too good for industry to give up," added Forten.
Here’s a look at some of the most important and notable bills in the package of progressive legislation with support across the political spectrum.
