By Jennifer Shutt — President Donald Trump said Friday he will try to reverse any law, pardon or still-in-effect executive order that former President Joe Biden signed with an autopen, though it wasn’t immediately clear how that would work or whether it would be legal.
There’s this kind of frightening but flattering thing that happens when you do the work that I do, when you spend a lot of time writing and reading about and working against the forces undermining a better society, when your friends and loved ones are aware that you are hopelessly impaled upon a fascination with the beliefs and mechanisms which are constantly creating and destroying our world. People ask you questions they might not have ever asked out loud before. Questions like, “is it really as bad as it seems?” and “is there any way out of this?” and “for the love of god, what do we do?”
Living through history, the kind of history that you know will make it into the textbooks, is a surreal thing. The threats can be seen approaching for years on end, the parallels to other times in history can be perfectly obvious, and yet there can remain a thin, persistent membrane of unreality between us and the belief that what happened in those other times, those other places, can actually happen to us here.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 14, a man dressed as a police officer knocked on the door of a home in New Hope, Minnesota. When the inhabitants, a married couple in their 50s, opened the door, he shot them to death. His target was the woman, Democratic Speaker Emerita of the state House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman. An hour earlier, the killer had shot another couple, that time targeting the man, Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman. In the killer’s car, police later found a target list including information on other Democratic lawmakers, abortion rights activists, and a Planned Parenthood clinic.
At this tragic moment, you’d think it would be easy to find Republicans who would tell the Colorado Times Recorder why they regret voting for Donald Trump.
During an April 2 telephone conversation with constituents held by U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO), one caller from Greeley raised concerns about Trump’s decision to impose steep tariffs across the board, calling them a “regressive tax,” and asked Evans what he was doing to save his constituents money.
If you go to the Colorado Capitol, you’ll see an empty space on a wall where a portrait of President Donald Trump once hung. That space should remain empty.
March 15, 2025 at approximately 11:10 PM. That’s when the United States entered a constitutional crisis which the separation of powers laid out by the nation’s founding fathers did not prevent and does not provide a pathway out of. It took just 54 days of the second Trump administration to reach this point.
If you’ve been wanting to speak out — in one direction or another — about the political machinations of the moment, this week gives you multiple opportunities.
I do not envy the mainstream press at this moment. With multiple unthinkable things happening on a weekly basis, the task of triaging and prioritizing stories which could each dominate multiple news cycles in calmer times cannot be easy. Though I don’t envy them, I will criticize them. They play a vital role in society, keeping us apprised of events which could impact our lives – and they are currently missing a big one.
