Thursday Catchup: 4/24/25

[Editor’s Note: This Thursday Catchup technically is coming out Friday morning for some of you - that is a bug not a feature and it will normally be earlier.]

Hi. It’s the first ever Thursday Catchup [name subject to change]. The weekend is in sight, and hopefully you’ve spent the week focusing on important things like your family, or your job, or Jimmy Butler’s pelvis.

Before we head into the weekend, what are the things that should be keeping you up at night or creating a small island of joy? I’m gonna throw out some stuff you should keep in your brain hopper.

THING ONE!

Donald Trump is using his executive orders to nullify and reverse parts of the Civil Rights Act. And yes, I mean the same Civil Rights Act you’re thinking of. The part he’s trying to kill right now is a pretty big deal. It is, basically, the legal foundation of the idea that organizations or groups or power structures can be discriminatory without having specifically discriminatory language on record. What’s the endgame here? It goes back to a Core Belief Of The Blog (CBOB? CBTG?): the Project 2025 Guys are legit white supremacists, and what gets them up in the morning is the idea of returning to an America that’s enshrined whiteness as a born on third base level advantage. These are the guys who, if you get six Michelob Ultras in them, will start explaining that it’s actually not unfair to orient society around white men, because white men built society. [“Have you said thank you once?”]

So they’ve got an argument that’s a level of diabolical un-speak it can only be brewed up by stewing over blog posts about phrenology and AI videos of Nordic-blood families loosing their dogs on America’s migrants. The pitch, so you understand it, is this: American is a land of equal opportunity. Everyone, regardless of sex or race or origin, has the exact same chance to succeed right now in 2025 America. But the woke libs want to guarantee equity of outcome — they want to take those lazy Blacks and those whiny broads and elevate them sans merit to the places white men can naturally achieve. The Civil Rights act is part of this — its Title VII means we’re liable for bias that we don’t write down! What do they want from us? We took down the “No Coloreds” sign; what more do you want, it’s fixed! You can come in! Sure everyone running the place just poured hot coffee on your head, but now you have an equal seat at the table!

Here’s The Thing: This, like most of Project 2025, is either straight up illegal or the kind of dipshit idiocy that can immediately be reversed by another administration. It’s done by EO because no way in hell do a bunch of GOP senators want “HE VOTED AGAINST THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT” in their opponents’ campaign ads in 2026. So someone will sue, it will get held up, we will hold our breath as to what SCOTUS says because they seem to believe racism is not a thing. The important part here, in everyday life, is the reality that we knew this was coming.

Project 2025 was out there. Lots of people read it. Lots of people campaigned against it. And when Trump and the GOP said “we promise it’s not our plan,” the media gave them a pass and Trump voters pretended they believed him. This is the kind of thing you press your “hesitant Trump voting” friends on, because either they liked this and couldn’t admit it pre-election, or they didn’t like it and boy I’d love to hear what they are going to do about that now.

THING TWO!

Wow! Thing One was way longer than I thought! I’ll have to really work on pacing these out so they’re not 10,000 words long! But the next thing is fun, which is that House Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) is resigning instead of facing a primary challenge! This seat is serving as a kind of litmus test for which way blue voters want their side of the aisle to go.

Schakowsky (great name) has been in Congress for 14 terms, or in pop culture terms, since before Britney Spears was a thing. She’s in the Progressive Caucus (although one could say the label has changed since she first took it on) and is 80 years old. And a few months ago, a primary challenger popped up out of nowhere: Kat Abughazaleh, a 26 year old with lefty politics and a pretty solid social media footprint. When she announced, it got heat. She just got a profile in GQ. And she’s running on what I would characterize as a platform of “saying the things every young person is yelling into their phone when they see the news.” The Dems aren’t fighting enough, this is a different moment, we can’t do business as usual… it is the guttural cry of “Do Something” turned into a candidate. So it raised some eyebrows — what was this gonna do election wise? Would there be a wave of primaries on old Dems from young aggressive ones? Would the old dogs of the party like James “My Brain’s Turned To Gumbo” Carville be able to snuff out this attempt at representative Democracy?

And so far, the answer seems to be: no! More and more primary challengers are hopping in the race, particularly against 80-something candidates who in a debate will make Joe Biden look like Robin Williams.

Here’s The Thing: Primary challenges are a great thing for you to figure out your opinion on now, when we’re still a year out from voting in them. The more centrist establishment position is to play it safe — there are limited resources and attention, so why spend any of those on Democrats when we should be fighting Republicans? And on the other side, the Progressive argument is that now is our time for action — that comfortable centrist old Democrats haven’t stepped up to the fight and are too willing to sit back and complain instead of break norms, so it’s time to replace them with young knife fighters. Those fights are going to happen across the country, but what sticks out in this one is the question… do the old heads even have enough fight in them for the primary?

THING THREE!

Uh oh! Thing Two was also long! What are you doing, Greg?! Who wants to read something this long?

Ok, third big thing — and honestly might be the one biggest thing — is the new data that shows Trump’s poll numbers are cratering in every measurable category. And I know there are always bad polls and doomed infographics and MeidasTouch youtube videos saying “Trump’s in Trouble Now!” with a photoshopped image of Trump crying at Elon Musk’s feet. But the tariff “Liberation Day” really broke a lot of people out of the fever dream, and the pain of tariffs is now hitting tons of the 30m+ small businesses in America. [Fun Fact: if you win by 1.5m votes, but you destroy 5% of America’s small businesses, that probably means you lost 1.5m votes!]

In a Reuters poll, 37% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of economy, and their top two important issues were Inflation [87%] and cost of living [86%]. That’s… uhh… rough! That is Rotten Tomatoes talking about a movie you found in a bargain bin at a Flying J level bad! The Economist/YouGov poll has his job approval at -13. Minus thirteen.

Here’s The Thing: Trump is, if you enjoy democracy and stability and an economy where bread costs less than gold, doing a bunch of insane stuff that’s bad. And it should be somewhat encouraging that huge swaths of America — including a growing chunk of people who just voted for Trump — are upset with how it’s going. Because there’s definitely a version of this where people are just lockstep down with the guy regardless of if he’s destroying their ability to every own anything again. And we aren’t there yet. Does it mean his voters have swung over to sign up for AOC/Bernie rallies? No. But 2024 was the closest Presidential election since 2000. Anyone running for a GOP house seat within…. 10 points? 15 points? has to look at this moment just start staring off into the middle distance of their office until a staffer comes in and asks them, “Are you okay? I didn’t know a human being could sustain one single scream for that long.”

WHAT ELSE, WHAT ELSE

Those are the ones that stick out to me heading into the weekend, but there’s obviously a ton more if you’re feenin’ for more news.

• Steve Witkoff went to Russia, had a 3 hour meeting with Putin alone in a room with no one else, and now is suggesting we lift Russian sanctions — a thing even Marco Rubio 2.0 thinks is bad. Witkoff is not a negotiator, a diplomat, a counterintelligence expert, he’s a real estate guy and he just got in the ring with one of the best counterintel monsters on planet Earth. So watch what he does.

• Trump is hosting a dinner for his biggest memecoin investors, and in a different world that kind of emolument (PAGING RESISTANCE 1.0!) would lead to impeachment and removal. But it won’t, because that kind of open corruption is a given with Trump. The Republicans support it, the Democrats can’t stop it, and a huge chunk of voters just think it’s doing in the daylight what other Presidents do in the dark. Is it bad? Absolutely. Is it gonna change anything? No way.

• Rumors are the administration is looking for an “off-ramp” with China. As part of the tariff war, Trump ganked tariff rates sky high, and China did the same. You probably know this, but a trade war that creates an ersatz embargo really effects the economy of the United States. That pain is hitting now, and Americans are complaining to Washington, but Trump made one critical mistake in his avalanche of economic mistakes. (Don’t forget that his first mistake was “going with a 1930s economic plan that all economists from left and right agree is proven to fail and drive us into a recession.”) But Trump swung at China, and they aren’t as easy to knock over as a DC law firm or the New York Times. They are in it to win it, and don’t seem particularly keen to pick up the phone and talk to us about how to end this thing. Trump may have created a situation where America is left to swing in the wind and think about what it (he) has done, and if that happens, egg prices are gonna seem quaint.

Well, I’ve been told that if I let this get to 2000 words I’ll be drug into the street and have my fingers smashed by the attention span police, so that’ll wrap it up for now. Be back Sunday night with the Sunday Service, and possibly have a bonus piece on something stupid before then!

I don’t have a signoff so… uhh…. bye!