‘Fight Them Every Inch of the Way.’

Courage is contagious. Here are few of the people who have stood up for our democracy and values this very week, setting an example for the rest of us.

Two months ago, in Washington, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Board of Governors member Lisa Cook at an open board meeting. Both are still in their jobs. (Photo Saul Loeb via Getty Images.)

Just seven days ago, I wrote that for the first time in my long life I thought the United States faced graver uncertainty about its survival as a democracy than it had during the disastrously violent year of 1968.

Things have gotten darker since then. This may be the most threatening week for American democracy since the Civil War. And it is still Thursday.

Here are just some of this past seven days’ events, in a run-on paragraph:

The troops occupying the nation’s capital are now armed. Trump has threatened to send them to large “hellhole” cities elsewhere, including Baltimore and Chicago. In both of those places crime rates have been falling rapidly, but they have large Democratic voting majorities and are run by Black mayors. Trump’s FBI staged a dawn raid on the home of Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who has become a trenchant critic. Trump fired the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a three-star general, as the DIA was reporting that Trump’s strikes on Iran had only limited effect. This had obvious parallels to his firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics this month, after a weak jobs report. Some 180 current and former FEMA officials were among signers of the “Katrina Declaration,” issued on this 20th anniversary of the New Orleans disaster. It warned that the US emergency-response system as a whole was being dismantled, risking another Katrina-like catastrophe. Despite civil-service laws supposedly protecting FEMA employees, Trump placed around 30 FEMA staffers who signed, on leave. A whistleblower reported that Doge staffers had uploaded to the cloud the names, addresses, and birth dates for everyone who has received a Social Security number—potentially an enormous privacy breach. A Trump crony with access to millions of personal mortgage records has weaponized them with “investigations” of Trump’s foes. These include a sitting US Senator and the only Black woman ever to serve as a Governor of the Federal Reserve. Trump told that Fed governor, Lisa Cook, via social media that she was fired—based on concocted seemingly highly-selective charges, for which there has been no advance word nor any legal procedure¹. [Important update: I don’t know for sure whether these charges are false. Thus the strike-out of “concocted.”] Firing a board member is a move no president has made before. Trump fired, without announced cause, a board member of the federal agency that supervises railroad mergers. This board member, who like Cook said that he would fight an illegal dismissal and meanwhile stay in his job, is also Black. ICE agents continue to grab people off the street—and in Washington State seized two fire fighters who were at that time deployed against a spreading wildfire. Most of the countries in Europe, plus Japan, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico, and many others, have suspended parcel delivery to the US, because of Trump-decreed tariff chaos. The government of Denmark has formally protested MAGA-inspired influence operations in Greenland. America’s public-health infrastructure, starting with the Centers for Disease Control, is in active collapse as I type—through a series of firings and resignations far more consequential than the original “Saturday Night Massacre.” All this and much more, in what is for politics and government usually the sleepiest time of the year.

And yesterday the latest mass gun-slaying, this time of little children as they prayed.

-Meanwhile Republican members of Congress go along, a group portrait that stands as the opposite of what John F. Kennedy famously called “Profiles in Courage.”

-Meanwhile members of Trump’s cabinet grovel to him in a televised marathon Cabinet meeting worthy of North Korea, or Caligula’s Rome. Or the famed, chilling Twilight Zone episode from 1961, “It’s a Good Life.”

-Meanwhile business leaders fawn over Trump.

-Meanwhile, for now, the markets go up.

From the Oval Office, Trump says, before TV cameras, “I have the right to do anything I want. I am the president of the United States.” It barely registers in the news.

This is just from the week we are still living through.

But who, this week, has set an example of standing up?

What follows are some illustrations, pointing to lessons that can give hope, guidance, and courage to the rest of us. They come from four institutions that are vital to our democracy, and in which people are fighting for that democracy’s survival. They are: The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, indispensable to the US role at the center of the world economy. The professional leadership of the Centers for Disease Control, doing their best to avert a public-health catastrophe. The 800-plus members of the federal judiciary who serve as judges in district courts or appeals courts, and who have nearly all stood solidly for Constitutional values. And governors of many states, doing their best to defend their people and their values.

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1) Lisa Cook, PhD, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

As a Black child in newly desegregated Georgia, Lisa Cook withstood verbal and even physical harassment from some white schoolmates. Later she graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta and was a Truman Scholar; went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar; got a PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley; and was a professor at Michigan State. Yesterday on The Daily from the NYT, Ben Casselman and Michael Barbaro had a very good discussion about Cook’s background, and the academic and personal qualities she brought to the Fed.

The example she set this week: When Trump engineered a pretext for firing her, she said No. She called this out as an “unprecedented and illegal” power-grab; she was ready with prominent lawyers to file an immediate counter-suit; and, most importantly, she has stayed on the job.

At a press conference just after last fall’s election, the Fed’s Jerome Powell was asked what would happen if Trump fired him. Powell’s answer, in its entirety, was “that is not permitted under law.” When a reporter asked him to clarify, Powell said exactly the same six words, more slowly and emphatically. Powell has also been among the very few people who dare call out Trump’s fantasies and falsehoods to his face.

Lisa Cook is putting herself on the line, for her own reputation and the larger independence and credibility of the US financial system. She has refused to “obey in advance.” She is making them fight every inch of the way.

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2) Susan Monarez, PhD, and her colleagues at the CDC.

The epic meltdown in public health is happening in real time, as I write. The essential civic point is that Susan Monarez—longtime public-health scientist, confirmed as CDC director by a Republican Senate last month—has refused to accept an illegal “you’re fired” message from the calamitous RFK Jr., and getting lawyers to defend her rights as long as they can. (Only a president can fire a Senate-confirmed official like Monarez. A Cabinet secretary cannot legally do so.)

This situation is complex and fast changing, so I will get to the “setting an example” point. Last night, on BlueSky, the Minnesota political writer Will Stancil summed the situation up the lessons very well:

Monarez is playing her weak hand perfectly, and should be a model for institutional resistance for the next four years:

1. Make them fire you

2. Don’t go along to get along

3. Don’t apologize, have confidence in your own integrity and the importance of your role

4. Always escalate the conflict

So much of their power flows from the way people quietly bow out of their way, forcing them to expend essentially no political capital to shred vital and popular institutions. And then, having done so, they look even stronger, and it’s even easier next time.

Forcing them to fight for every inch - and escalating every conflict to the utmost - spends their time, their legal resources, and makes each subsequent battle RISKIER for them rather than SAFER, as you’re constantly testing public acquiescence and you never know when popular opposition might emerge

On his Inside Medicine Substack site, Jeremy Faust MD broke news last night of the resignations-in-protest of several CDC officials, and carried their full, fiery texts.² Including this from Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. His office windows had been shattered during the gun attack on the CDC headquarters just a few weeks ago:

The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud. I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that HIS and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.

Update: I see that there has been a mass walkout of CDC employees this afternoon.

This is our version of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, but worse. We remember the people who stood up for principle in that event—Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus. They followed essentially the playbook Stancil outlines above. And we remember the one who knuckled under on that weekend long ago, Robert Bork.

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3) The ‘lower’ federal judiciary, most recently Thomas Cullen, JD.

John Roberts and the five other Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have fiddled (or gone on donor-paid fishing trips) while the Republic burns.

By contrast, the members of the “lower” judiciary—judges in the 90-plus federal judicial districts, and on the appeals-court circuits—have in nearly all cases been rock-solid in defending rules, separation of powers, checks-and-balances, the Constitution itself. So far they are America’s most important institutional defenders.

The most recent, dramatic, and newsmaking example comes from a youngish, conservative judge appointed by Donald Trump. This is Judge Thomas Cullen, of the Western District of Virginia.