Photo from Save Our Services Feb. 19 rally in New York City, posted on Facebook page of Cong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "Federal workers do work that is the lifeblood of our society, keeping essential services running and our communities strong."

How To Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch

A plan to harness grassroots energy—and to hold Democratic leaders accountable. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers.

By Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg  

The Nation via Portside

Feb 20, 2025 - For the millions of Americans now desperate to reclaim our democracy from the plutocratic vandalism of the second Trump administration, the main challenge before us is simple: We have to unify and fight back. This isn’t new and it isn’t rocket science—the one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition. What that should look like and what that demands of each of us is the heart of the new movement to defeat a more disciplined and lawless Trump White House, but before we get to where we’re going, we have to start with where we are.

We run a national pro-democracy grassroots movement organization that’s been helping to marshal local volunteer groups against Trumpism for nearly a decade. Trump’s innovation in his second term is his strategic alignment with neoreactionary forces personified in Elon Musk. As one underground memo circulating in pro-democracy circles recently explained, the neoreactionary goal is “replacing the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.” It’s no wonder that historians like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson are raising the alarm about a boiling constitutional crisis.

It’s hard not to sound alarmist about such alarming events. Whether we call it a coup, a constitutional crisis, a hostile takeover, or something else, we side with the two-thirds of Democrats who want Democrats in Congress to oppose Trump at every turn rather than appease him.

From our perspective as political organizers, the most important thing about this agenda is that it’s wildly unpopular. Project 2025, the governing blueprint for the neoreactionary ideology, polled at just 4 percent support before the election. The marginal voters who gave Trump another term wanted lower prices for bread, and instead they’re being served a hot dish of techno-dystopian fascism with a side of egg shortages.

For those of us looking to break the MAGA coalition, this should be a major political opportunity. Trump and his allies in the White House are overreaching dramatically. And rather than acting as a check on executive power, congressional Republicans are rubber-stamping nominees and helping Trump and Musk consolidate their power.

So far, they have not paid much of a political price. To change that, we need an opposition capable of making Republicans own their complicity.

A week after the election, we published Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink, an open-source handbook for building nationwide opposition to the coming authoritarian takeover. The first step: total opposition to Trump’s Project 2025.

Congressional Democrats should lead this charge, but so far, their response has been sluggish, unimaginative, ineffective, and—an absolutely killer liability in our algorithmically driven world—boring. Senate Democrats embraced “strategic silence” on Trump’s nominees. Many House Democrats have focused on professing powerlessness and voicing an interest in reasonable-sounding bipartisan compromise. It hasn’t worked. Even before Trump’s inauguration, too many Democrats helped expedite a MAGA immigration bill to his desk. Democrats have provided votes for almost all of Trump’s cabinet nominees. There have been moments of fight—but they haven’t been linked to an overarching strategy to make Democrats an effective opposition party.

Democrats seem to be waiting for Trump, Musk, and MAGA to naturally become unpopular, instead of working overtime to make them unpopular. We can’t wait. We need a unified, aggressive, and creative opposition in this country. Here’s what that federal opposition could look like in practice:

Slow the Senate. Lawmakers in the upper chamber of Congress don’t have a big red “stop everything” button—but the Democratic Senate minority can slow business as usual and dramatize its opposition. One expert in congressional procedure, Norm Ornstein, has detailed these tactics—-from the famous filibuster to simply forcing Senate leaders to read the daily journal prior to conducting legislative business. One concrete example: Senator Brian Schatz has placed a “hold” on all State Department appointees—a major obstacle to Senate Republicans who want to speed through diplomatic confirmations. Senate Democrats should do this for all nominees, of which there are hundreds.

Make congressional Republicans work for Democratic votes. When their votes are not just symbolic, Democrats should filibuster where they can, force Republicans to squirm for as many hours as possible, and extract a serious political price for standing down. The next obvious leverage point for Democrats here is the March 14 funding deadline. Republicans will inevitably fail to pull their majority together to fund the government on their own, and Democrats should extract what they can when Speaker Mike Johnson comes begging for votes.

Break the norms around congressional collegiality. It’s typically considered rude for one member of Congress to confront another in public. But these aren’t typical times. The complicity of congressional Republicans in the trashing of our democracy cries out for the kind of loud and frequent confrontation that will cause members of the Washington Post editorial board to clutch their pearls. For those Republicans who refuse to face their constituents, Democrats should travel to their districts or states in order to publicize the real costs of MAGA appeasement to working families there. For those members who share concerns privately while declining to say anything publicly, congressional Democrats should expose them for the cowards they are. Get creative—and give protesters and activists a morally righteous conflict to rally around.

Work with the new surge in anti-Musk, anti-Trump grassroots energy. Congressional Democrats should treat the current historic popular protests against the Trump-Musk putsch like an opportunity rather than a threat. Since November, we’ve seen record-breaking numbers of new local Indivisible groups forming and new members. These local volunteer groups are focusing on their own elected officials—Democrats, independents, and Republicans. They’re making calls, protesting, showing up at congressional offices, attending town halls, and demanding accountability from their representatives.

This is, as they say, what democracy looks like. And the only pro-democracy party in the country ought to tap into that energy with enthusiasm.

We’re under no illusion that any senator or representative can summon forth the opposition on their own. It’s up to each of us to try, and learn, and improve, and build. Constituents should be organizing in their own communities as engaged neighbors, pro-democracy volunteers, and educators. Rank-and-file Democrats should be feeding off that energy and harnessing its power. And Democrats in leadership should be corralling their caucuses to produce a unified front with aggressive, creative tactics and messaging. Nobody has all the answers, and we’re all going to have to try, fail, go back to the drawing board, and try again.

These are frightening times, and frightening times call for active, courageous leadership. Musk and Trump are really seeking to annex the operations of the state to their pet vanity projects, bigotries, and conspiracy theories , but our enemy is not one or two men. Our enemy is apathy, cynicism, and fatalism; the pernicious, authoritarian-friendly belief that we are merely victims of world events rather than active participants in a global struggle for freedom and justice. Every time one of us—a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator—takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious.

Take that step, and steel yourself with the knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-year experiment in self-governance—a real-life pluralistic democracy, imperfect as it is, striving to be more perfect. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; they crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions; they kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout Europe; they broke the back of the southern segregationist political bloc; they fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall. We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games is going to roll over us now.

We will not finish this fight, but we can each be damn sure to do our part while we’re here. Together, we are the opposition, and this is our republic—if we can keep it. This is the part where we keep it. 

[Ezra Levin is a cofounder and co–executive director of Indivisible

Leah Greenberg is a cofounder and co–executive director of Indivisible.] ...Read More

Photo: Members of the American Federation of Government Employees union protest against firings during a rally to defend federal workers in Washington, DC on February 11.

Federal Workers Are Rallying the Labor

Movement to Fight Musk’s Takeover

The Federal Unionists Network, a new labor group, mobilized workers in a nationwide 'Save Our Services' day of action.

By Jenny Brown

Labor Notes via Truthout

Feb 20, 2025 - Federal employee union members have been speaking out, rallying, and suing, as agency after agency has been hit by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) — a private unaccountable entity that has been demanding access to all government records while spreading wild lies about waste and fraud.

Around 20,000 workers have been summarily fired so far.

Federal workers raised the alarm at over 30 “Save our Services” rallies around the country Wednesday, including in New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston, Boise, Chattanooga and Chicago.

Workers protesting included those fired, or under threat, at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the IRS, Social Security, the Veterans Administration, and an alphabet soup of other agencies that do everything from running national parks to warning residents about impending floods.

Protesters warned of the potential privatization of essential services like Social Security and veteran’s healthcare, and the elimination of consumer and environmental protections.

“The only way we have out of this is if the federal workforce on the front lines puts out a call to the broader labor movement and enters the streets and makes this a political crisis that they cannot manage,” said Chris Dols, president of IFTPE Local 98 at the Army Corps of Engineers, at one of three Wednesday Save Our Services rallies in New York City.

Dols is one of the leaders of a new group, the Federal Unionists Network, which called the protests. Using lists they had been building for months and contacts made through the explosion of energy over the past weeks, members called federal union activists around the country, asking them to bottom-line local actions. Many of these rallies were endorsed by local or national chapters of federal worker unions.

“Everybody right now and for the weeks or months or whatever it takes needs to become an organizer,” said Dols. “If you’re a federal employee and you don’t know what your union is, get involved with the FUN, we’ll help you figure it out. If you don’t have a union, we’ll help you learn how to organize one.”

Indiscriminate Firings

First in line for firing, according to the administration, are 200,000 workers who are on probation, usually because they have been in their role for less than 12 months.

“It’s stressful because you have probationary people that are learning their job and they’re getting emails with no notice that they’re terminated, just ‘Goodbye’,” said Jaclyn Imperati, an AFGE member who works at the Executive Office of Immigration Review in New York City.

“You just changed your life, you left a job to come here, and now you’re being terminated. Wow.”

At many agencies, workers report they were put on “administrative leave” in letters that said the worker’s “ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency.” The letter was boilerplate: Workers received them even when they had superb evaluations.

The language may be designed to avoid lawsuits by claiming that the firings were for cause. However, some workers said the letters didn’t even include their names, instead containing fields that said ‘firstname’ and ‘lastname.’

Imperati said that people are turning to the union due to the threats. “We doubled our membership in our building the day that all this started happening,” she said.

“I think working for the federal government has always been viewed as something that’s protected,” she said. “You can’t just be fired at will. You can’t just be fired because somebody had a bad day.”

Now, she said, her co-workers see “the union is the only protection you have from being terminated without cause.” (Federal workplaces are open shop so workers don’t have to join the union.)

Jobs Frozen

The Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers and strangulation of federal funding continued this week at the Federal Housing Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Administration for Children and Families, which is responsible for the Head Start program, which offers early childhood education and nutrition services for low income families.

Some laid off workers are responsible for checking medical devices to make sure they’re safe. Others work on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Around 400 FAA employees were fired: They do maintenance of FAA navigation equipment. FHA workers help people get mortgages who otherwise can’t get them.

On top of the firings, no-one is being hired to fill existing vacancies. “Veterans Affairs, the EPA, the Department of Justice, there’s a hiring freeze across the government,” said American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) staffer Timothy McLaughlin. He said there were already 50,000 vacancies in the VA system.

“There’ve been thousands of probationary employees and potential hires who have been told, you’re not coming, we’re retracting our offers,” said McLaughlin. “I’ve gotten calls from people crying. This is ruining people’s lives.”

Many of Musk’s and Trump’s actions are being held up in court or walked back as constituents raise hell. Some workers who were told their jobs no longer existed have later been told to come back.

Medical Research Halted

“Hands off our research!” was the message at a 500-person rally at the University of Washington in Seattle. Members of Auto Workers Local 4121, the University of Washington Academic Workers, rallied against funding freezes that are bringing their research to a halt and causing layoffs.

“I’m proud that I will have contributed something to helping leukemia patients in the future,” said Philip Creamer, a Hematology and Oncology postdoc researcher at the rally, “But I can’t do this without a stable source of funding and so much of that comes from the NIH.”

The union plans a rally at the Department of Health and Human Services and nationwide phonebanking aimed at lawmakers.

NIH Fellows United, a new union at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, issued a demand to bargain over the hiring freeze, bans on travel, cancellation of all meetings, and a “communications blackout,” the union said.

“The law is clear, the Trump administration can’t unilaterally change the terms of our employment,” said Marjorie Levinstein, who is on the union’s bargaining committee and researches drug addiction. They are members of Auto Workers Local 2750.

Dols, in New York, urged unionists to think bigger than contract violations: “Sure, our union contracts are being scrapped. They’re breaking the deals and that’s awful. They’re really breaking laws. But the real message is to save our services, because there is no Social Security without Social Security workers. There is no environmental protection without the Environmental Protection Agency and the people who work for it.”

Wholesale Data Theft

“How do you spell corruption?” “E-L-O-N!” workers chanted at the Federal Plaza at a noon picket in New York City.

Workers at the CFPB, at Social Security, and at IRS, charged that Musk’s minions have been grabbing the public’s data with no oversight or accountability. ...Read More

Anti-Trump 50501 Protests Break Out Across the Country

Protests against Donald Trump and Elon Musk took place nationwide on President’s Day.

By Edith Olmsted

The New Republic

Feb 17, 2025 - Thousands of protesters gathered in different cities across the country Monday to declare President’s Day as “No Kings Day” in protest of the unlawful actions of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to upend the federal government.

The swath of protests were organized by the 50501 Movement, a name which refers to 50 protests in 50 states on one day. The group, which originated on social media, previously planned a series of demonstrations that took place earlier this month in response to Musk and Trump’s early efforts to overhaul the federal government.

Since then, the fascist duo have only continued their plot to cut popular federal programs and launch mass firings of federal employees.

In Washington, D.C., thousands of people gathered around the reflecting pool beside the U.S. Capitol building. “Hey Congress, grow a spine!” they shouted, according to independent journalist Alejandro Alvarez.

Alvarez wrote that it was likely the largest demonstration to take place in the capital city since Trump was inaugurated last month.

Other protests took place across the country, from Augusta, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to Orlando, Florida.

In New York City, a video from Freedom News TV showed thousands of protesters marching through lower Manhattan, cheering to “Stop the Coup!”

In Boston, Massachusetts, nearly 1,000 people marched through the below freezing temperatures shouting, “No Kings on President’s Day!” ...Read More

Photo: Trump picked the Jackson painting for his Oval Office.

The Man Madison Warned Us Against

He authored the Constitution to forestall the rise of a despotic president. We’ll soon see if those safeguards suffice.

By Harold Meyerson

The American Prospect 

Feb 17, 2025 - One of the themes recurring in conservative media these days is the normalization of Donald Trump by historical analogy. This kind of sweeping arrogation of power, we’re told by Wall Street Journal editorialists, columnist George Will, and other conservative commentators, has ample precedents in the records of progressive presidents particularly: Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. So why this harping on poor Donald Trump?

Trump’s overreaching claims to power, Will tells us, “is an institutional consequence of progressivism.” Journal editorialists note that “Mr. Trump is stretching laws to see what he can get away with, but so have other recent Presidents,” including both Obama and Biden.

As historical analysis, this is malicious piffle. No previous president has told the nation’s many thousands of autonomous school boards what their schools should teach; required his cabinet secretaries to affirm his Big Lie that he actually won a presidential election he actually lost; dictated which shows are suitable, and which not, for the Kennedy Center; told the NCAA which athletes to disqualify; or excluded media organizations from the White House that didn’t conform to his renaming international bodies of water. If we seek precedents for this kind of conduct, we must look not to American presidents but to, say, the Bourbons of France.

The power of our presidents has grown chiefly during wartime or other crises, and as the development of mass media, beginning with radio, enabled them to speak directly to their fellow Americans. There was nothing pernicious or threatening about Franklin Roosevelt’s aptitude for radio or John F. Kennedy’s for television. Trump’s tweets, on the other hand, are pernicious and dangerous, not because he’s mastered that medium but because he deliberately peddles lies and slanders. Nor has he taken power at a time of crisis; rather, he’s claimed this to be a time of national emergency that presumably justifies his power grabs, though that emergency is not visible to the naked eye.

So Trump’s opening salvos are in no way like Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days, as some right-wingers have argued. Roosevelt took office in a time of genuine crisis, when unemployment stood at 25 percent and when an epidemic of runs on banks had shuttered every depository institution in the nation on the eve of his inauguration. To address this, Roosevelt did order federal examiners to spend the next several days assessing the solvency of the country’s banks, but then he turned to Congress to enact the emergency measures that defined his first months as president. At his behest, Congress enacted a bailout for American farmers and a semi-cartelization of American industry, created deposit insurance for the nation’s bank depositors, and established a Civilian Conservation Corps that provided work to jobless young men and improvements to national parks and forests. He did not claim for himself powers he knew presidents did not have; he asked Congress, successfully, to enact these far-reaching changes.

Progressive presidents have indeed enlarged government’s regulatory capacity, but invariably because public interest and public safety demanded it. Congress established the departments and agencies that these presidents sought and the public desired. The growth of the administrative state did not come from presidential decrees, unlike the destruction of the administrative state flowing from unlawful executive orders today.

Teddy Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration so that Americans wouldn’t be poisoned so frequently by what they consumed. Wilson’s allies pushed a bill through Congress that established the Federal Trade Commission to aid consumers and small businesses struggling to deal with corporate domination of markets. FDR signed congressional legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Congress, responding to the financial chicanery that led to the crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, passed a bill that Obama signed, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This was all government by consent of the governed, with Congress passing, the president signing, and the courts upholding the constitutionality of these newly created agencies. None of these fundamental changes were due to presidential executive orders, decrees, tweets, or pronunciamentos.

If there is a model in the annals of our history for the agency closures and funding impoundments that Trump has unilaterally ordered, it’s the despotic one that James Madison cautioned against in his Federalist Papers arguments. There, he explained why the Constitution he’d just co-authored created separate branches of government precisely to forestall the prospect of a despot’s rise.

The possibility that the new American nation could degenerate into the monarchical form of government that then prevailed across Europe was very much on Madison’s mind. “The accumulation of all powers—legislative, executive and judiciary—in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” Madison wrote in Federalist 47. To keep that from happening, he wrote in Federalist 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” To this end, he installed the French philosophe Montesquieu’s ideas of separation of powers and checks and balances as the centerpiece of the Constitution.

Despite that, a cowed and supine Republican Congress has raised nary a peep at Trump’s seizure of its power; because Republicans want these agency closures and funding impoundments but know they could not get them through their chambers of the legislature, they’d rather the president seize their power while they go mute. And while federal courts, so far, have sought to curtail those seizures of power, the Supremes have yet to be heard from.

Ours is the only constitution enacted in the 18th century that’s still operative; the constitutions of every other nation were drafted and enacted in more modern times, when the specter of a monarchial despot had by then generally receded. Ours was by no means a fully democratic document, limiting popular sovereignty to the lower levels of government and endeavoring to ensure rule by elites. While amendments have mitigated some of these biases, vestiges (the Senate, the Electoral College) are still with us today.

Yet the Founders’ emphasis on a separation of powers rooted in fear of a despotic president has long been a kind of background noise in discussions of our constitutional order. It’s there, and we’re generally glad it’s there. But as a result of the nearly 250 years that we’ve gone without a wannabe despot president, it’s not the sort of thing that has merited much attention.

Mr. Will’s and the Journal’s stabs at Trump normalization notwithstanding, it does now.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect ...Read More

Photo: Palestinians enjoy the beach on a hot day in Gaza City on July 17, 2023 [File: Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

A Letter from Gaza to Mr Trump

Gaza was already the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ and it will be again – when we, the Palestinians, rebuild it.

By Hassan Abo Qamar

Gaza-based writer, al-Jazeera

Feb 18, 2025 - Dear Mr Trump,

I am writing to you as a Palestinian and a survivor of genocide, who was born and raised in Gaza – a city of love and resilience.

I have read your statements about Gaza and frankly, I am confused.

You claim to be a “peacemaker”, but encourage Israel to continue its genocide, calling for “all hell” to break loose if your demands are not fulfilled.

Mr Trump, we have already been through hell. We lost 60,000 martyrs in it.

You claim credit for the ceasefire deal, and yet your government – one of its guarantors – refuses to pressure Israel into fulfilling all its obligations under it.

You call Gaza a “demolition site” but conveniently fail to name the criminal responsible—while simultaneously supplying it with more bombs, funding, and diplomatic cover.

You talk about Palestinians being “safe” and “happy”, yet you refer to us as if we are a burden to be offloaded onto Jordan, Egypt, or any country willing to take us.

You claim that we “only want to be in the Gaza Strip because [we] don’t know anything else”.

Mr Trump, I think you profoundly misunderstand who we are and what Gaza is to us.

You may think of us as a mere obstacle to your vision of luxury resorts, but we are a people with deep roots, long history, and unalienable rights. We are the rightful owners of our land.

Gaza is not your business venture, and it is not for sale.

Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.

And no, it is not true that we want to stay here because we “know nothing else”. Although the 17-year-long Israeli siege has made life incredibly difficult for us, some of us have still managed to travel – for education, medical treatment or work. But these people still return because Gaza is home.

A powerful example is Dr Refaat Alareer, an inspiring figure, who the Israeli occupation targeted and killed in 2023. He earned his master’s degree in the UK and later completed his PhD at Universiti Putra Malaysia.

Despite having the opportunity to stay abroad, he chose to return to Gaza, where he taught creative writing and literature at the Islamic University. He also co-founded We Are Not Numbers, an initiative that paired young Palestinian writers with experienced authors to amplify their voices and resist occupation through storytelling. One of these voices is mine.

Last spring, I, too, had the opportunity to leave, but I decided against it. I could not leave my family, friends, and Gaza amid a genocidal war. However, like many others, I plan to travel to complete my education and then return to help rebuild and support my people.

This is the Palestinian way – we seek knowledge and opportunities, not to abandon our homeland, but to build and strengthen it.

Speaking of building – you talk about your plans to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. The thing is, Gaza was the Riviera of the Middle East. Our ancestors built it into a flourishing trade hub, port city and cultural centre. It was “magnificent” – to use your words – until Israel was created and it started destroying it.

And yet, after every brutal Israeli assault on Gaza, Palestinians would rebuild. Despite all the Israeli violence, restrictions and thievery, Palestinians still made sure Gaza was a safe place with a cosy rhythm of life, where its youth were doing their best to pursue decent livelihoods, where families were happy and together, and where homes thrived.

Israel has now tried to reduce all of Gaza to rubble and death so we are no longer able to live in it. You have picked up on the idea, effectively endorsing our ethnic cleansing under the veneer of humanitarianism.

No, Mr Trump, we will not be “happy” and “safe” elsewhere.

But I agree with you on something else you said: “You’ve got to learn from history”. Indeed, history teaches us that settler-colonialism in modern times is unsustainable. In this sense, your plans and Israel’s plans are doomed to fail.

We, the people of Gaza – like any Indigenous people – refuse to be uprooted. We refuse to be dispossessed. We refuse to be forced into exile so that our land can be handed to the highest bidder. We are not a problem to be solved; we are a people with the right to live in our homeland in freedom and dignity.

No amount of bombs, blockades, or tanks will make us forget that. We will not be relocated, resettled, or replaced.

Power and wealth will not decide the fate of Gaza. History is not written by thieves – it is written by those who resist, by the will of the people. No matter the pressure, our connection to this land will never be severed. Surrender and abandonment are not an option. We will honor our martyrs with resistance by nourishing this land with love, care, and remembrance.

Wishing you all the best in your futile pursuits,

Hassan Abuqamar, Gaza, Palestine ...Read More

Photo: From left, Georgetown University students Ethan Henshaw, 20, Asher Maxwell, 21, Felix Rice, 20, and Darius Wagner, 20, are students pushing to end legacy admissions at the private university in Washington. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Legacy Admissions In D.C. Could End Because Of These Students

The move comes as similar efforts have escalated across the country in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling barring affirmative action.

By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Susan Svrluga

The Washington Post

Feb 20, 2025 - Felix Rice was so overwhelmed with excitement when he moved into his dorm room at Georgetown University as a freshman, he sat down on his bed and cried.

He was coming from Texas, relying on financial aid and money he had earned at a sweaty and difficult summer job at a warehouse — a job that made the stakes of a college education very clear, he said.

Something else felt just as stark: Everyone was rich. He could see it in peoples’ clothes, in the way their parents looked, in the way they talked. He could feel it in discussions in class and in dorms, in the ways students spend their breaks, in the issues that spark activism on campus or just … don’t.

After the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions in 2023, Rice and some friends talked about what they could do to make elite colleges like theirs more diverse. They soon zeroed in on legacy admissions preferences — an advantage sometimes factored into decisions about applicants who are children of alumni — which felt like it helped people who were already privileged.

“The fact that they would get further preference in getting in — it’s ridiculous to me,” Rice said.

The friends have written letters to administrators, started a petition, handed out stickers, and founded an organization since then to press the issue on campus and beyond.

On Wednesday night, the group, now formally known as Hoyas Against Legacy Admissions, scored their most significant win to date: The D.C. State Board of Education voted seven yeses to one abstention to introduce a bill banning legacy and donor admissions preferences at some private universities in the city to the D.C. Council. If passed, the legislation could affect some private universities in the city, but not those where at least 30 percent of students receive federal Pell Grants.

“We together can take a step to knock down a long-dormant barrier that perpetuates inequality: That barrier is legacy admissions,” said student body vice president Darius Wagner, a Black first-generation student who is Pell-eligible, at the hearing.

The proposed bill, known as the Furthering Admissions Inclusion and Representation (FAIR) Act of 2025, will likely move to the desk of Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who will decide how to move forward. The measure could be referred to committee, where it could see a hearing or sit there indefinitely. It’s not clear it has the support to pass. Mendelson’s office declined a request for comment.

Legacy preferences in admissions typically give a tip to applicants whose mother or father went to the school. Proponents of the practice argue that it can strengthen alumni ties to a school, bolstering support and, perhaps, donations. Those gifts could then be used to provide more financial aid for needy students, they say. And some alumni say the preferences can now finally benefit groups that had historically been excluded from elite universities, and advocate to keep them in place.

In 2015, almost half of four-year colleges considered legacy status in admissions, according to Education Reform Now, an advocacy group that is tracking the issue, but by their count, just under a quarter do now.

States have also taken action in the last year. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) signed bills last year banning legacy preferences at the states’ public colleges. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed legislation in the fall to ban legacy and donor preferences in admissions at private, nonprofit universities in that state. Illinois has also restricted legacy preferences in the past year.

The D.C. measure, if passed by the council, would prohibit certain universities that consider legacy or donor status from receiving city resources, including tax breaks, permits, contracts and grants. The proposal would also mandate increased disclosures on recruitment, acceptance and enrollment of D.C. residents to the city.

The FAIR Act would create an exemption for the descendants of the GU272, a group of 272 people enslaved by Maryland’s Jesuit priests who were sold in 1838 to save Georgetown when it was on the cusp of financial disaster. ...Read More

WATCH: AOC Just Gave One Of The BEST Speeches Of Her Career

Tom Homan’s Obsession With Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez Is A Political Miscalculation

This could be the opening Democrats need to re-engage Latinos who have been waiting for someone to stand up.

By Julio Ricardo Varela

MSNBC Columnist

If President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, thought he could intimidate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for holding a “Know Your Rights” webinar for her constituents, he picked the wrong Latina.

In multiple media appearances, Homan insulted her intelligence, mocked her credentials and claimed she was undermining law enforcement. And he said he was “working with the Department of Justice” to see whether the congresswoman was “crossing the line.”

Ocasio-Cortez did not back down. “This is why you fight these cowards. The moment you stand up to them, they crumble,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on social media Monday.

That evening, Homan confirmed he had spoken to the Justice Department about investigating her. But Ocasio-Cortez, unsurprisingly, is undeterred.

“In clear scenarios such as these, the best way to handle paper tigers is to call their bluff.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“The Trump administration understands that it does not have absolute power and that it must rely on creating a false illusion of power to create a chilling effect to get everyday people to respond to fear, comply in advance, and censor their own free speech. Ultimately, in clear scenarios such as these, the best way to handle paper tigers is to call their bluff,” Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday in written responses to my questions about the Trump administration and Homan’s tactics.

Homan “can baselessly threaten duly elected legislators with jail and throw around schoolyard taunts all he wants. The very fact that he is tripling down publicly is because he knows he has nothing else,” she added.

No matter how many times Homan goes on television, immigrants have rights protected by the Constitution. His latest obsession with Ocasio-Cortez is a political miscalculation. 

With Trump’s anti-immigration machine ramping up its propaganda and actions, fear is spreading among immigrants. That fear is real, and how communities respond will determine whether they thrive in these times. Enter Ocasio-Cortez, with a possible resistance plan that Latinos and immigrant communities have been craving. As she told Latino USA’s Maria Hinojosa this month, “I’m not going to give them my fear.”

Questions over identities of immigrants sent to Guantánamo Bay

“Schools, churches, small businesses, neighbors, families, and everyday people have been clamoring for information and wanting to know what their rights are in the event that they are approached to be searched without a warrant or cause. They want to know what the law does and does not permit, and I am happy to present them with that information,” Ocasio-Cortez told me on Wednesday.

The country’s most prominent Latina politician is doing exactly what needs to be done. With people now impersonating ICE agents, the need for accurate information has never been greater. Politicians need to be there for immigrant communities, even if it means going toe to toe with the Trump administration. Ocasio-Cortez’s grace under pressure is what true community leadership is all about.

This could be the opening Democrats need to re-engage Latinos who have been waiting for someone to stand up.

“There is absolutely backlash occurring to the Trump administration’s actions.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The November election affirmed that Latinos have been shifting away from Democrats for a while now. Since then, there has been more talk about how Latinos got there and less about how to get them back. Homan’s prominence in the new administration highlights the problems Democrats still face. They are still a “Republican lite” party on immigration, especially when restrictive immigration bills earn Democratic support in both chambers of Congress.

“There is a difference between a party benefitting from Trump backlash and a party that earns enduring support through a proactive agenda,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “There is absolutely backlash occurring to the Trump administration’s actions, but the recent support among many Democrats of the Laken Riley Act, which guts due process and sets the stage for DREAMers to be deported on the mere accusation of a crime, demonstrates that we have a long way to go.”

The feeling that Democrats still have a “long way to go” is what immigrant communities are worrying about. So far, the mood since January has been deflating and defeatist. Yet if Homan continues to target Ocasio-Cortez, she will just continue to gain more respect and admiration from the communities she is informing and serving. While immigration might not be the issue getting people motivated to vote, seeing Ocasio-Cortez’s fight to call out “the cowards” is a sign of hope. That you can fight and not let others dictate what you should do. ...Read More

Trump’s Putinization of America

It’s not just in foreign policy that the President is turning Russia’s way.

By Susan B. Glasser

The New Yorker

Feb 20, 2025 - No matter how many times Donald Trump openly parrots the Kremlin line, it’s never not going to sound wrong coming from the President of the United States. In 2018, at a press conference in Helsinki, Trump announced that he accepted Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia did not intervene in American elections, despite our own intelligence agencies’ conclusion to the contrary. I watched the scene sitting outside in the glaring Finnish summer sun on a CNN set, with Anderson Cooper, who, after a short, stunned silence, concluded, “You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American President.”

Later, Fiona Hill, the National Security Council senior director who had staffed Trump at the summit, would recall what it felt like inside the room when she heard Trump’s words: she thought about faking an illness, pulling a fire alarm, anything to stop him from talking.

On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after his foreign-policy team met in Riyadh with Russian officials to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine, the President had what can only be described as another Helsinki moment. Holding forth at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago about why he had refused to include the Ukrainians in the Saudi meeting, Trump said that there was no reason to have done so, since Russia’s invasion, three years ago this week, was actually Ukraine’s fault.

“You should never have started it,” he said, addressing Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. “You could have made a deal.” To hear Trump tell it, Ukraine might as well be bombing its own cities and killing its own citizens. He claimed that the United States had spent three hundred and fifty billion dollars helping Ukraine, and that Zelensky’s popularity had plummeted to just four per cent in recent polls—both statements so far divorced from reality that Putin himself might not have been brazen enough to make them.

By Wednesday, Zelensky pushed back on Trump’s ridiculous assertions by saying that he was living in a Russian-made “disinformation space,” and, in response, Trump attacked the Ukrainian leader as a “Dictator without Elections” in a long, falsehood-riddled social-media post. His officials, meanwhile, have made clear in the course of the last week that Trump’s pro-Kremlin rhetoric is more than just empty words; he appears ready to concede to Russia on most of its major demands for a peace deal, including pledging that Ukraine will never join NATO, not allowing U.S. troops to participate in providing security for Ukraine after a ceasefire, pressuring Ukraine to cede illegally occupied territory to Russia, and lifting Western sanctions imposed on Russia. Trump’s embrace of America’s adversary and rejection of its ally has been so swift and complete that even top Kremlin officials are astonished. “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” the former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev posted on X.

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That all this has taken place exactly one month into his second term seems fitting, however, for an American President who’s never made much secret of his inexplicable desire to suck up to Putin. One difference from Trump’s first four years in office, though, is that he has now adopted not only a pro-Putin take on Russia’s conflict with Ukraine but an approach to foreign policy over all which echoes Putin’s throwback view of the world, as a playground for predatory great powers to exert nearly unlimited control over the smaller nations that fall within their sphere of influence.

How else to explain Trump’s initial moves on the world stage since returning to office, as he threatened to outright seize territory in the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Greenland and Panama? Surely he has been emboldened by Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014—and one of many concessions Trump will now press on Ukraine is to admit that this territory has been lost to Russia forever. Trump’s second Inaugural Address, in stark contrast to his first, even resurrected the nineteenth-century term “manifest destiny,” invoking the idea of American expansionism as a divine right that should extend not only to making Canada the “fifty-first state,” as Trump has taken to calling it, but all the way to the planet Mars.

Trump’s overt endorsement of a pro-Putin foreign policy has, understandably, shaken the world in the last few days. Just as jarring, in my view, has been Trump’s embrace of Putin-like tactics at home, a hallmark of his return to power which has unfolded with a speed and ferocity far different than what Trump was able to pull off in his first term. Call it the Putinization of America.

A quarter-century ago, as a young foreign correspondent for the Washington Post based in Moscow, I reported on Putin’s takeover of Russia, a process of crushing the country’s nascent, flawed democracy. Targets included any possible rival power centers that did not owe their authority to Putin, from independent media and wealthy oligarchs to elected governors. Within a few years, the Kremlin had dismantled or defanged them all. At the same time, Putin empowered former K.G.B. colleagues from the security services, who created a modern-day dictatorship for him from their stronghold in what Russians call the “power ministries.”

This playbook is the same one being followed now by Trump. It’s important to be clear-eyed about this. I don’t know where it will end, or how far Trump will take it. America, thank goodness, is still a vastly different country from Russia, with a long tradition of democratic freedoms, decentralized power in the states, and constitutional governance. But tally up the damage from one month, and it is considerable. And no, I’m not just talking about ominous theatrics like Trump openly musing about staying in office for an unconstitutional third term or, just one day ago, proclaiming himself a “king” on social media and having his White House circulate a fake image of him wearing a crown on the cover of a Time-like magazine.

Washington today echoes with so many uncomfortable reminders of that transitional moment in Moscow—the sudden, fearful silence of critics who had previously spoken out, the business tycoons rushing to kiss the President’s ring, the lying and reality distortions to fit the official narrative. Trump’s consolidation of power this time has been fast and consequential. In a slew of executive orders, he has asserted the right to unilaterally revoke the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, cancel billions of dollars in federal funding, and assume executive control over independent federal agencies. He has empowered the world’s richest man to fire tens of thousands of government employees and eliminate long-established, statutorily authorized programs, ranging from America’s famed Epidemic Intelligence Service to its entire foreign-aid program.

Although some of the cuts are being fought in the courts, the G.O.P.-controlled Congress has allowed this unprecedented usurpation of its prerogatives with hardly more than a few isolated bleats of concern. In the Senate, Republicans have rolled over on even his most controversial, unfit nominees, including, most ominously, voting on Thursday to confirm Kash Patel as director of the F.B.I., despite (or perhaps because of) the prospect that Patel will use the agency to go after Trump’s enemies—a list of whom Patel helpfully itemized in a book published last year.

In some ways, Trump seems to believe he’s already a dictator with unchecked power. That certainly was the message of his social-media post over the weekend, channelling his inner Napoleon with a quote often attributed to the nineteenth-century French emperor: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Just this week alone, Trump has ordered New York to stop charging cars extra for driving into Manhattan, has mused out loud about bringing the District of Columbia under federal rule, and has confirmed that he banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool for refusing to go along with his personal whim—codified in yet another executive order—to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

In a federal courtroom on Wednesday, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, personally argued to drop the corruption prosecution of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, so that he could help advance Trump’s anti-immigration policy agenda—a quid pro quo so obviously crooked that it led to multiple prosecutors quitting in protest. Coming soon, according to multiple news reports on Thursday, is a loyalty purge of top generals at the Pentagon, including possibly the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This time, Trump wants to insure that the power ministries are fully in his control.

Back in 2019, Putin crowed in an interview with the Financial Times about the end of the “obsolete” liberal world order that had long since “outlived its purpose.” The President of the European Council at the time, Poland’s Donald Tusk, pushed back on him, insisting that what was “really obsolete” was Putin’s own heavy-handed brand of governance, with its “authoritarianism, personality cults, and the rule of oligarchs.” Just a few years later, reading that sentence evokes only sadness: it’s no longer just Putin’s Russia that threatens the foundations of Western liberal democracy but Trump’s Washington. ...Read More

'Can't Stand Him': From Policy To Personnel, Trump Scores Historically Low Poll Numbers...12 min

From Upton

Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University

Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education

By Daniel Morris

and Harry Targ

Paperback USD 17.00

This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.

Click HERE to Purchase

New Studies

on the Left

Paperback $19.95

...is a journal of socialist theory and practice. It is the successor to ‘Dialogue and Initiative, published as an annual journal of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in book form from 2012 to 2022. It will continue the CCDS policy of left unity, including articles with a variety of left perspectives, including debates.

This issue contains over 30 articles grouped under the headings of Analysis and Global Reach, Debate and Controversy, Labor, Socialism, and Book Reviews. Some are reprinted from other sources, but many appear here for the first time.

Among the authors are David Bacon, Joan Braune, Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jerry Harris, Jay Jurie, Paul Krehbiel, Sun Liping, Adewale A. Maye, Duncan McFarland, Jasmine Payne-Patterson, Vijay Prashad, Nikhil Pal Singh, Harry Targ, and Janet Tucker.

Table of Contents

Click HERE to purchase

Click here for a free copy of Paul Krebiel's article 'Union Stewards Councils: the Next Step Forward'



HOLIDAY SALE ON EVERY TITLE BEGINS TODAY!

Hard Ball & Little Heroes Press is sharing the holiday spirit by offering a 25% discount on ALL TITLES from November 15-December 25. Enter SOLIDARITY in the discount box when you order a book, 25% will be automatically taken off your cost.

Happy holidays! Tim Sheard, editor

For the children...



Good Guy Jake...An inspiring Children’s Christmas story for Labor!

Imagine young children reading a book about a union that wins back the job of a sanitation worker unfairly fired for taking toys out of the trash. That’s what they will discover in Good Guy Jake. 

For years Jake has repaired and painted broken toys he pulled from the trash on his rounds and given them to the children in the local shelter at Christmas. But when an angry motorist reports Jake to the sanitation company, Jake is fired for breaking city regulations. 

His union takes the case to arbitration. There, the union brings in a crowd of children, who show the judge the toys Jake gave them and tell her that he taught them the true meaning of Christmas.

History Lesson of the Week: New Revelations On 60th Anniv of Malcolm X Assassination

The Indypendent

Feb 20, 2025

This Friday marks the 60th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination in the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan. The mystery around X’s murder has been with us for just as long, even as the veil of secrecy has begun to unravel in recent years. His biographers now widely agree that the assassins came from a Nation of Islam mosque in Newark, New Jersey. At the same time, there were other, far more powerful entities — starting with the FBI and the CIA — that saw Malcolm’s attempts to forge unity between the Black population in the United States and the newly decolonized people of Africa as a grave national security threat. What role did they play?

While we still don’t know who ordered the hit, Theodore Hamm writes that “archival records recently reviewed by The Indy shed insight regarding the surveillance of Malcolm X during his final six months by both the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and top officials at the CIA.”

For more about what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms and others were up to, see the article below. ...Read More

Adelante #4 is out! A special on immigration for the closing days of the election. Use it everywhere!

Get it here: http://ouleft.org/Adelante-4.pdf

By Bill Gallegos, excerpted from our new fall issue of “¡Adelante!”

U.S. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump demonized Mexicans and immigrants as a central part of his 2016 presidential campaign. In 2024, he has doubled down. If elected, he promises to unleash an ethnic cleansing campaign to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is horrible enough as a complete violation of human rights. But this pogrom is only one piece of the larger anti-democratic ‘Project 2025’ of the Heritage Foundation. They are coming for all of us. While singling out Mexican immigrants, Trump aims at all immigrant communities, including growing communities in the South, Midwest, and East.

Thankfully the political energy has shifted since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic Party candidate, and the polls show a significant shift in her direction. More than a million new volunteers have signed up for Harris, and hundreds of millions of new dollars have been contributed to her campaign.

The Biden-Harris Administration has been mixed on immigration: on one hand, it continues to support the legalization of Dreamers (DACA) and pushes for a path to legalization for the spouses of immigrants with legal residency. On the other hand, it has denied asylum protections for refugees crossing the southern border and supported legislation for increased militarization as well as new administrative hurdles. While our most important fight is against the MAGA right, the fight for full rights and protections for immigrants is a long-term struggle beyond the November elections.

The Biden dropout also creates significant opportunities for the left and progressives to advance the fight against the fascist threat, to advance a progressive platform, and to put new pressure on both Biden and the Harris campaign to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. It enables us to push back strongly against Trump’s racist threats against immigrants while advancing a positive program for immigrant rights.

This week's topic:

DRONES, BANKS, AND MULTITUDES: 2025

Click the picture to access the blog.

Tune of the Week: Rising Appalachia - Texas Hold 'Em (Beyoncé Cover) ...4 min

Book Review: If Race Does Not Exist, Why Does It Matter So Much?

Amazon Reviews:

This is a paradigm-shifting tour of genetics and identity, arguing that race is at once a biological fiction and a social reality.

Biologically, race does not exist. Scientists have proven that human DNA is 99.9 percent identical. But we know that racism and its structural impacts shape our health, opportunities, and lives in profound ways. What is the true relationship between genetics and race? And how should we talk about identity in science and medicine?

In What’s Real About Race?, sociologist Rina Bliss illuminates the truth about one of the most misunderstood, controversial concepts in our society and reveals why we cannot confuse race with genetic difference. Blending energizing prose with the latest in genetics research, this paradigm-shifting tour unmasks what’s truly real about race: namely, racism’s impact on our bodies and lives.

Bliss traces the history of race, revealing how unscientific categories of identity―White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native―became the modern standard, and illuminates how the myth of biological races endures in science and society, warping our understanding of complex topics like intelligence, disease susceptibility, and behavior. Along the way, What’s Real About Race? busts enduring myths about IQ, ancestry tests, behavioral racism, and more. In fascinating explorations of gene research, medicine, and social justice, Bliss argues for a new way forward. To create equity in science and society, we must disentangle our understanding of genetics from identity and see race for what it really is: a purely social category

At a time when misinformation about our bodies and identities is dangerously prevalent, What’s Real About Race? is an indispensable resource and a powerful reminder that, biologically, our similarities vastly outweigh our differences.

Dr. Rina Bliss is the award-winning author of Rethinking Intelligence, Race Decoded, and Social by Nature and an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. ...Read More

TV Review: 'Zero Day' Is Suspenseful Nail-Biter Backgrounded By A Tech-Obsessed America

The six-episode political thriller is now streaming on Netflix. Robert De Niro is true to his craft for every character he plays.

By Peter Travers 

ABC News

Feb 21, 2025 - It's an event right here, having acting legend Robert De Niro, 81, take on his first major TV role in "Zero Day," a six-episode political thriller now streaming on Netflix.

In it, De Niro plays a former U.S. President who's widely respected as a leader you can trust. And before the script leaves him tangled in a hopeless muddle, the actor does the role proud.

Given De Niro's well-known criticism of the current occupant of the White House, you might be expecting a soap box. Relax. "Zero Day," sometimes to its detriment, is above all a suspense nailbiter backgrounded by a tech-obsessed America hooked on conspiracy theories.

The creative team is unimpeachable. Besides De Niro, leading an A-list cast, the series is the work of Eric Newman ("Narcos"), former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim and New York Times correspondent Michael S. Schmidt. And the director of every episode is the award-winning Lesli Linka Glatter, who knows the political disruptor turf from "Homeland."

De Niro is in top form as ex-POTUS George Mullen, who's called out of retirement by current President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) to aid in a terror crisis. A sudden cyberattack, source unknown, has crippled the country with the malware, knocking out air and traffic control systems and causing the deaths of 3,402 citizens in just a minute.

Panic ensues with digital messages on everyone's smartphones warning that "this will happen again." Mitchell wants Mullen to head the Zero Day Commission, empowered by Congress to hunt down the perpetrators, with the legal right to grab people off the streets without warrants in a scary attack on civil liberties that echo the aftermath of 9/11.

PHOTO: (L-R) Eden Lee as Agent Angela Kim, Mozhan Navabi as Melissa Kornblau, Robert De Niro as George Mullen, Connie Britton as Valerie Whitesell, Jay Klaitz as Tim Pennington and Ignacio Diaz-Silverio as Cesar Rocha are seen in a still from "Zero Day." 



(L-R) Eden Lee as Agent Angela Kim, Mozhan Navabi as Melissa Kornblau, Robert De Niro as George Mullen, Connie Britton as Valerie Whitesell, Jay Klaitz as Tim Pennington and Ignacio Diaz-Silverio as Cesar Rocha are seen in a still from the Netflix series "Zero Day."

Mullen's daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), twice elected to Congress, tells her father not to accept the job, citing that he's been out of politics too long to catch up. His wife Sheila (the great Joan Allen), in the running for a federal judgeship, counters that he's the only man capable of doing the job.

No party affiliations are mentioned in the script, but you'll have fun guessing.

Matthew Modine as Richard Dreyer, left, and Lizzy Caplan as Alexandra Mullen, center, are seen in a still from the Netflix series "Zero Day."

Sarah Shatz/Netflix

Who's responsible for the cyber invasion? Is it the Russians? Or maybe it's an enemy within, such as tech billionaire Robert Lyndon (Clark Gregg), media giant Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann), CIA Director Lasch (Bill Camp), House Speaker Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), or influential podcaster Evan Green (a terrific Dan Stevens), whom Mullen's chief adviser Roger Carlson, the reliably excellent Jesse Plemons, believes is not all he says he is.

Jesse Plemons as Roger Carlson, left, and Robert De Niro as George Mullen are seen in a still from the Netflix series "Zero Day."

"Zero Day" zips along excitingly when these topical issues are in dramatic play. It's the soap opera elements of the plot that drag it down, especially the references to the fatal drug overdose of the Mullens' son and the wedge the president's infidelities drove through his marriage and his relationship with his resentful daughter.

Another story thread that runs aground is the depiction of the former president's own state of mind. We watch him rise daily at his compound in Hudson, New York, taking a vigorous swim, walking his dog and looking the picture of heath. ...Read More

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