The resistance meets daily on Microsoft Teams.
The country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general log on at 4pm ET for a thirty-minute confidential video chat to coordinate their plans for pushing back against the Trump administration. They share updates on the seven cases they have moving through federal courts and argue about whether to treat Elon Musk as a lawful arm of the government or an uncredentialed interloper to it. They plot where to respond next, leveraging timezone differences to expand the workday.
The American left has floundered during Trump 2.0. The mass protests of 2017 have not emerged, and donors to progressive causes are not giving the way they did then, either. Democratic congressional minorities have been cowed by Trump’s assertions of executive power, while many of the governors who stand as their party’s leading figures are cautious about provoking fights with the president. In confronting Trump, elected officials have largely yielded to labor unions and advocacy organizations.
Then there are the attorneys general, who see themselves as the last backstop between the people and the president. Their multi-state lawsuits have temporarily stopped the president from revoking birthright citizenship, freezing federal funding and cutting off money for medical research. This week, they filed their sixth amicus brief in an action against the Trump administration, with 23 attorneys general signing on to argue the importance of the Affordable Care Act. The US Department of Justice declined a request for comment on that suit, or others it is defending.
“Right now in the United States, the Democratic AGs are the only group of people who are united and working to prevent some of these unconstitutional actions from continuing,” Hawaii attorney general Anne Lopez boasted in an interview.
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