To mark his first 100 days in office, Trump spent the weekend touting his “accomplishments,” and making big promises for the next 1,362 days of his term. Vice President Mike Pence spent his weekend calling moderate House Republicans to tell them, it’s gonna be may and we still need a vote on Trumpcare. Now, the House is expected to vote on the bill by Wednesday or Thursday. That ain’t no lie. We’ve seen these votes come and go, but this is not a drill, majority leaders are pulling out all the stops to round up enough votes to pass the bill this week.
Speaking of disconnect between the White House and Congress, yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Trump said Trumpcare “guarantees” coverage for pre-existing conditions. It does not do that. In fact, on top of stripping coverage from 24 million people and cutting $880 billion from Medicaid, Trumpcare has gotten even worse by allowing states to strip protections for people with pre-existing conditions. More than 130 million of Americans live with pre-existing conditions and many of them literally cannot afford this bill to pass.
TrumpcareToolkit.org has all the tools you need to resist Trumpcare including an updated whip list, the number of people with pre-existing conditions by congressional district, sample social media and more.
ACTION OF THE DAY
#RiseUp. Today on May Day, immigrants and allies all over the country will rise up in resistance to demonstrate the power, resilience and strength of immigrants in America. The #RiseUP movement is leading in cities with marches, rallies, and community events to shut down hate in our communities. Here’s how you can plug in:
- Tweet using #RiseUp highlighting the Muslims, LGBTQ, undocumented, DACAmented and more that make us great.
WHAT’S TRENDING
Making deals. Trump may not be doing it, but Congress is (kind of). Last night, Congress avoided a government shutdown and agreed on a $1 trillion spending bill to keep the government funded through the end of September. The bill doesn’t include a lot of the most contentious things Trump wanted to put in the bill including: funding for “the wall,” funding for additional ICE agents, a rider restricting funding for sanctuary cities, a rider defunding Planned Parenthood, or a rider undermining the ACA. More details on the package here.
The Philippines Human rights violations? A penchant for authoritarianism? Not a red flag, apparently. Over the weekend, the President had a “very friendly” conversation with the notorious and “death obsessed” President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duerte, which ended with Trump extending an invitation for Duerte to visit White House, so the two leaders can “talk strategy” on North Korea. The President also praised Duerte for “fighting very hard to rid its country of drugs”—a reference to Duerte’s brutal war on drugs which has resulted in the extra-judicial killings of over 7,000 Pilipinos. Face, meet palm.
History lessons. Trump is apparently missed many days in history class, based on an interview he gave in which he claimed Andrew Jackson saw the Civil War and could have stopped it. Andrew Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War started, so this is very unlikely. Jackson was also responsible for the deaths and suffering of thousands of Native Americans, so who knows if he really would have been on the right side of history during the Civil War. Trump also questioned why the Civil War occurred.
Popular. Someone tell Galinda, because it looks like Trump isn’t as popular as he thinks. Donald Trump held a rally to celebrate his first 100 days in Pennsylvania this weekend. Of course, he bragged about the crowd size, but photo evidence of empty rows shows otherwise. Sad!
New faces. The New York Times added one to its columnist team last week and it has not gone well. Bret Stephens’—a conservative columnist and climate denier formerly at the Wall Street Journal—argued in his first NYT op-ed that reasonable minds can “disagree” about the science behind human-caused climate change. The column is so fraught with misstatements and fallacies that it was immediately discredited. ThinkProgress’s Joe Romm breaks down what was wrong with the column and the New York Times’ response to it here.
UNDER THE RADAR
“Updating language.” Late on Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its plans to change its website to update “language to reflect the approach of new leadership.” Turns out this update meant removing the agency’s pages relating to climate change, climate science, impacts of climate change. An EPA spokesman said, “We want to eliminate confusion by removing outdated language first.” In the spirit of eliminating confusion, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is a longtime climate denier and Trump still thinks climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
GOOD NEWS
“Don’t destroy the earth, I buy my tacos here.” That was just one of the thousands of amazing signs from the People’s Climate March this weekend. Over 200,000 people marched on Saturday, celebrating Trump’s 100th day in office with one of his least favorite things (a protest). These signs from the march will make you feel better about the future.