Casey Michel On Government By Thieves (Video), Trump's Disapproval Keeps Rising, Is The US Surrendering To Russia …

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more   Watch now   Casey Michel On Government By Thieves (Video), Trump's Disapproval Keeps Rising, Is The US Surrendering To Russia And China? 10% Off An Annual Hopium Paid Subscription Through March 31st Simon Rosenberg Mar 22   READ IN APP   Afternoon/Morning all. Today, as I try to make sense of it all, I’m trying to keep two ideas in my head at the same time: Trump is stumbling early, making mistakes, seeing meaningful setbacks in the courts, is weaker than he was a few weeks ago while our movement is stronger His government, however, isn’t slowing down and is pursuing his illiberal, cruel and dangerous wrecking ball agenda with incredible ambition and aggression First, the stumble, the struggle and and our gathering strength. On Thursday I went into this in-depth in both a comprehensive post and video, America Is Not Winning Under Trump. This morning let’s look at how Trump’s approval/disapproval compare to other recent Presidents drawing from the former 538 lead G. Eilliot Morris’s new Substack, Strength In Numbers: Given that today’s polling averages are pumped with very right leaning, pro-Trump data it’s possible that Trump is actually much closer to his 2017 numbers right now. Either way he is hovering around the lowest approval of a President at this point in his Presidency since polling was widely adopted in the 1950s. The economy is slowing, inflation and interest rates remain too high for consumers, and there is data now suggesting that those weak Trump voters critical to his 2024 win have begun to lose faith and his coalition is unraveling. Politically this Trump thing is not evolving as they hoped, for he is losing a lot more than they anticipated and his numbers are coming down very, very fast. I also think our Opposition movement had an important weak of growth and maturation. The campaign to degrade Tesla’s brand is growing and expanding, Tesla’s stock has lost 50% of its value and folks are trading in their Swastikars at record rates: Motorists have traded in a record number of Tesla (TSLA), opens new tab electric vehicles this month, Edmunds data showed, amid a wave of protests against CEO Elon Musk's work as an adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump. Tesla cars from model year 2017 or newer accounted for 1.4% of all the vehicles traded in until March 15, up from 0.4% in March last year, according to data provided to Reuters by Edmunds. Analysts at the national car shopping website said that share could grow through the second half of the month. Bernie and AOC drew enormous crowds on their Western swing this week. Locally driven Town Halls and empty chair events are now becoming a major thing across the country, a powerful bottom up tool for engaging the public. Just typing “empty chair town halls” into Google generates stories about events in Indiana, North Carolina and Wisconsin: As I discussed with Jane Kleeb earlier this week, these events are generating a lot of local media attention, and are becoming a very important new innovation that I think will likely keep repeating and become a hallmark of our nascent Opposition movement. Below I offer a variety of ways you can support our candidates and party committees before the all important March 31st deadline and Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on April 1st; and ways you can keep taking action to make sure our voice is heard and our movement gets stronger. We are gaining ground now and need to keep working really hard. Upgrade to paid That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that the terrible Trump government grinds on, continuing to wreck our country and stealing the dreams of Americans and others throughout the world. People, including US and Canadian citizens, are disappearing into Trump’s new domestic security regime; legal residents without criminal records are being flown to a horrible prison outside the US; a French scientist was denied entry to the US due to anti-Trump postings; foreign governments are issuing travel warnings to the US and tourism and all the money it brings is plummeting; universities and prominent law firms are joining major media organizations in yielding to Trump’s corrupt pressure; Trump’s escalating attacks on judges brought a rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts; yesterday the Trump Administration announced that is was revoking the legal status of over 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans next month, giving no time for these people with families, kids in school, jobs and lives here in the US to properly prepare to return to countries with some of the worst governments in the world that they had fled. To provide our community a greater understanding of what Trump is doing I share this morning a new interview with Casey Michel, a leading journalist and author who focuses on global money laundering, corruption and “kleptocracy” - a society or system ruled by people who use their power to steal their country's resources. I have learned a great deal from Casey’s writing and commentary over the years, and I strongly encourage you to watch or listen to our interview, or read the transcript. We often call Trump’s team oligarchs. I think the concept of kleptocracy, or as Casey calls it in our discussion “a government of thieves,” is something that we have to come to better understand, develop and advance through our networks in the months ahead. For they are stealing from us now, and plan on doing so again with their huge budget-busting tax cuts later this summer. This is without questions the most corrupt government America has ever seen. To go deep into all the immigration related horrors of the past few weeks plan on joining me Monday at 4pm ET where I will also be hosting my first live event through the new and powerful “Substack Live” feature. Joining us will be good Hopium friend David Leopold, one of the country’s leading immigration experts and a long time collaborator of mine. Look for more details on how to join us live in Monday’s Hopium post. Look at this screen shot from the NYT this morning. Trumpian and Musky turmoil, chaos, destruction, illegality, abuse of power: Let’s drill down on one of those stories, the one on the upper left, that has this remarkable subhead: The Department of Government Efficiency is shuttering organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert Here’s how shocking story opens (gift link): When President Trump announced on Friday that the United States would move ahead with a long-debated project to build a stealthy next-generation fighter jet, the message to China was clear: The United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, probably far longer, to contain Beijing’s ability to dominate the skies over the Pacific. But here on earth, the reality has been very different. As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through agencies across government, its targets have included some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. And, as with much that Elon Musk’s DOGE has dismembered, there has been no published study of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced. On the list of capabilities on life support is Radio Free Asia, a 29-year-old nonprofit that estimates its news broadcasts reach 60 million people in Asia each week, from China to Myanmar, and across the Pacific islands where the United States has been struggling to counter China’s narratives about the world. It furloughed all but 75 of its Washington staff members on Friday, trying to stay on the air while court cases develop on Trump officials’ moves to defund U.S. government-supported media. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Office of Net Assessment, an internal think-tank. With an annual budget that accounted for a few seconds of Pentagon spending each year, the office tried to think ahead about the challenges the United States would face a decade or two in the future — such as the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and the hidden vulnerabilities of supply chains for military contractors. It was a revered institution, what a Wall Street Journal editorial this past week called “The Office that Won the Cold War.” Mr. Hegseth said in a statement that it would be reconstituted in some unspecified way “in alignment with the Department’s strategic priorities,” though its value was that it challenged conventional thinking about those priorities. Over at the Department of Homeland Security, a series of cyberdefenses have been stripped away, at a moment when China’s state-backed hackers have been more successful than at any time in recent memory. Among those dissolved, at least for the time being, is the Cyber Safety Review Board, created on the model of the National Transportation Safety Board, which examines aircraft accidents and tries to extract lessons learned. The cybersecurity board was just beginning to take testimony on how Chinese intelligence bored deep inside America’s largest telecommunications firms, including the system the Justice Department uses to monitor its “lawful intercept” system, which places wiretaps on people suspected of committing crimes or spying — including Chinese spies. In another shocking moment, this morning we got to see Trump’s lead in the Ukraine-Russia negotiations unable to name the regions in dispute in the conflict while mindlessly parroting Russian talking points on Tucker Carlson’s pro-Putin podcast: One of Donald Trump’s top foreign policy envoys has been criticized for being unable to remember the names of the Ukrainian territories that he is negotiating with Russia over. Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer with no prior diplomatic experience, floundered on TV as he tried to reel off the Russian-occupied districts of Donbas, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk. “I think the largest issue in the conflict is those so-called four regions ... Donbas, Crimea, Lugansk... and there’s two others,” he said during an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News journalist. Mr Witkoff’s failure to remember the names of territories was taken as proof by critics that the Trump administration is out of its depth in the Ukraine-Russia negotiations. They also pointed out that Mr Witkoff had confused Crimea for one of the four occupied eastern territories, when in fact it is an area on the Black Sea that was seized by the Kremlin in 2014. Mr Witkoff also said that the occupied territories had held referendums “where the overwhelming majority of people have indicated they want to be under Russian rule”. He was referring to Kremlin-organised votes six months after invasion in 2022, widely denounced as sham votes designed to give the Russian land-grab a veneer of legitimacy. “Witkoff can’t even remember the names of the Ukrainian oblasts [territories] that Putin wants,” wrote one critic on Twitter. “He cites a sham vote organized by the FSB as ‘evidence’ that people in these regions want to join Russia ... It’s deeply concerning that someone who is supposed to be a neutral negotiator between two warring countries is siding with the aggressor and spreading their propaganda.” And if surrendering to Russia and China wasn’t enough, yesterday, in another shocking moment, Commerce Secretary Lutnick, a deeply loathsome and odious new Trumpian villain, said it was no biggie if Social Security recipients don’t receive their regular check: Let’s Get To Work. We Cannot Leave Our Great Country To These Fuckers - Due to space constraints today, head here to review our current core four actions we are taking - calling our reps to protest the Trump-Musk assault on our government and our Constitutional order; calling our reps to protest Trump’s selling out of America to Putin (and perhaps Xi); organizing in the Republican-held battleground House districts including supporting the DNC/House Dem/State Party “People’s Town Halls;” and contacting and thanking the Dem AGs who have been fighting and winning so effectively for all of us. Paid subscribers should self-report their actions today in our daily chat. So inspired by how hard so many of you are working. I want to make a special plea to all Hopium readers in states with Republican Senators - please make your calls, every day. Even 50 to 100 people calling every day in every red state can make a difference. We have hundreds of Hopium subscribers in every state in the country and it’s critical that we all do our part now. Next, for those wanting to do more traditional political/campaign work we have four Hopium-backed efforts we're rallying behind in addition to our new House Hopium 7 (for full writeups on each of the efforts visit and to learn how volunteer visit here): Susan Crawford and Ben Wikler - Wisconsin Supreme Court - Donate - Goal $175,000, $171,000 raised and over 2,000 donors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Hopium House 7 - Donate - Goal $50,000, $26,000 raised Abigial Spanberger For VA Governor - Donate - $100,000 goal, $66,000 raised Anderson Clayton and NC Dems - Donate - $50,000 goal, $26,000 raised Ken Martin/DNC - Donate - $100,000 goal, $102,000 raised Help Hopium Celebrate Our 2nd Anniversary - In a recent post I reflected back on our work together over these past two years, and made two asks: 1) Commit to bring in one new Hopium subscriber at the your current subscriber level this month. Help us grow this community, and bring our plucky, upbeat, hardworking spirit to more people across the US. 2) Upgrade your subscription to paid or paid to Founding (10% off annual paid subscriptions through March). The resources you provide allows me to work full time at Hopium and keeps our community vibrant, growing and making all sorts of good trouble every day. Gift and group subscriptions are also a great way to grow our community! Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon Upgrade to paid Share Leave a comment You're currently a free subscriber to Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid   Like Comment Restack   © 2025 Simon Rosenberg 5185 MacArthur Blvd, NW #600, Washington, DC 20016 Unsubscribe