Trump's jump from demagogue to mob boss falters

Plus, the battle for workers' rights heats up across the country

Welcome to a Friday morning edition of Progress Report.

As crazy as things seem on a moment-to-moment basis, sometimes it requires taking a step back to really appreciate how demented this nation is becoming. The fact that 1.2 million Americans died from a viral pandemic and the country reacted by putting an anti-vaxxer — a guy who drinks fish bowl cleaner to “strengthen” his immunity — in charge of public health is the stuff of crumbling empires. No other way of saying it.

It’s important context for all of what we’ll discuss today, because we’re living in an era of self-defeating idiocy imposed upon us by big monied interests controlled by idiot babies. This can make progress feel like a Sisyphean challenge, but what else are we gonna do? Give up? Frankly, I’m at the point where I want to continue this work simply because I refuse to let such mean, obnoxious morons control society and feel good about themselves. Helping people is the ultimate goal, but I think pettiness is a good motivator, too.

Lots to talk about today, both on the state and federal level, with some insight from a constitutional expert and inside track on what’s going on in legislative negotiations. Let’s get to it.

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Donald Trump and Elon Musk ramped up their assault on workers’ rights in a big way this week, as the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court that it will no longer defend the independence of the NLRB and other critical agencies. That leaves it up to states to try to advance laws that help workers secure their fair share, or at the very least, prevent further erosion.

Washington: A number of Democratic legislatures have proposed an expansive minimum wage and paid time off bill that would build on what are already some of the nation’s highest remunerative requirements.

The new proposal would raise the state minimum wage to $25 by 2031. Currently, Washington’s workers are owed at least $16.61 per hour, with some cities and towns already boasting minimums of over $20. Such high rates are more necessity and luxury in one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets. The bill would also seemingly phase out the tipped minimum wage for hospitality workers.

The other major section of the bill focuses on paid time off. Employers would be required to give workers 2.3 paid vacation hours per 40 hours worked. Somebody who averages a 40-hour workweek would accrue just over a day of paid leave per month. Employees would also be granted at least five paid bereavement days per year.

Michigan: The battle over the impending minimum wage increase and paid leave requirement took several new twists on Thursday.

Instead of passing one big bill that adjusts every aspect of the court-ordered upgrades, which are due to take effect on February 21, the Democratic state Senate is taking a piecemeal approach to negotiating that addresses one element at a time.

On Thursday evening, the Senate passed a bill that scales back the phase out of the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. Instead of phasing it out and making it the same as the regular minimum wage in 2030, this bill would cap it at 50% of the state’s overarching minimum. A majority of Senate Democrats voted against it, but it still had enough support to pass in the tight chamber.

The GOP-controlled House’s bill, which was passed last month, removed the phase out of the tipped wage entirely, so this one better, but only nominally so. The question is whether Senate Democrats plan to be aggressive and leverage this minimal change from the GOP bill for legitimate improvements to the other two major items.

The Senate’s initial proposal would have brought the $15 minimum wage up a year earlier, and I’m hearing that they could also wind up winning a higher minimum wage end game altogether, perhaps as high as $20. The chamber’s bill also initially proposed giving employers with fewer than 25 workers a break on paid sick time, requiring them to provide employees with four days paid and three days unpaid. That number will likely have to come down to get any Democratic holdouts on board.

It’s a lot of calculus to hammer out in the week remaining before the court-ordered pay and benefit improvements go into effect. Plus, the whole thing was complicated even further by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s suggestion on Thursday that the implementation of the new pay and benefits be delayed until July if they can’t come up with a deal, a proposal that undoubtedly benefits Republicans and business lobbyists. Cmon, Big Gretch.

Minnesota: Republican legislators in the House held a hearing on a bill that would push the implementation of the state’s upcoming paid leave fund back a full year, from January 2026 to January 2027. The law, passed in 2023, provides workers with up to 20 weeks of paid leave to deal with a health issue or family concern. Employers pay into the fund and the state provides the compensation.

This is a different scenario than what’s playing out in Michigan, where the Supreme Court imposed the boost to the minimum wage and paid sick day requirement. In Minnesota, the paid sick leave fund was a signature achievement for Gov. Tim Walz and the Democratic state Senate, so it’s unlikely that they’d be willing to delay its long-awaited impact any further.

Colorado: Democrats in the state Senate moved forward with the Colorado Labor Protection Act, a top priority bill that would finally end the state’s bizarre modified “right to work” act law. Gov. Jared Polis is still threatening to veto it, so we’ll have to make that very politically painful for the delusional presidential aspirant.

New Hampshire: Labor activists scored a big win in Concord yesterday, where the Republican-controlled state House voted to indefinitely shelve the proposed “right to work” law that would have eviscerated organized labor. Unions and their supporters spent weeks crowding the capital and demanding that the bill get dropped.

While New Hampshire has become increasingly libertarian, some GOP legislators there noted that the party has become more infused with working class voters and warned about alienating them in a relatively union-heavy state.

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In case you needed any further confirmation that Donald Trump has gone mad with power, several of his own appointees at the Department of Justice resigned yesterady instead of facilitating his latest brazen act of corruption.

The headliner was Danielle Sassoon, the acting US Attorney for Manhattan, who stepped down from the prestigious position after days of resisting orders to drop the corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. In her resignation letter, Sassoon, a Federalist Society member who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, eviscerated the administration’s justifications for stepping in on Adams’s behalf.

“I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful,” Sassoon wrote. “Federal prosecutors may not consider a potential defendant's ‘political associations, activities, or beliefs.’ If a criminal prosecution cannot be used to punish political activity, it likewise cannot be used to induce or coerce such activity. Threatening criminal prosecution even to gain an advantage in civil litigation is considered misconduct for an attorney.”

Emil Bove, Trump’s associate deputy AG, had instructed Sassoon to drop the charges without prejudice, which would amount to a stay of execution and put Adams in thrall to the White House. Bove’s letter made it clear that the mayor’s fate going forward would hinge on his cooperation with Trump’s draconian immigration policy, an arrangement that Sassoon alleged was proposed by Adams himself during several secretive meetings.

According to constitutional scholar Kimberly Wehle, that explicit quid pro quo is a textbook example of the kleptocratic regime that Trump has sought to establish with his pardons and rhetoric.

I spoke with Wehle, a former assistant US Attorney and the author of Pardon Power: How The Pardon System Works—And Why, about the message sent by Trump’s deal with Adams as well as some of the pardons he’s issued, including the one this week to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. We spoke for a piece at More Perfect Union, which will be up soon, but I want to share some additional quotes.

“After Watergate, there was an agreement and understanding that the Justice Department would operate completely independently of the White House,” she said. “But this is Donald Trump's Justice Department. This is Donald Trump's rule of law. Donald Trump is setting things up so he personally is the law. And if you are favored by him, you will get grace. If you're disfavored by him, you will not.”

One way to get in Trump’s good graces: do his bidding, legal or otherwise, a new twist provided by the Supreme Court’s decision last summer to grant the president the right to break the law.

“The president can commit crimes willy-nilly using the power of the Justice Department, the power of the military, the power of the FBI, the power of the CIA,” Wehle said. “People who are willing to commit crimes at Donald Trump's behest undoubtedly now can feel comfortable that they can do it with impunity so long as they stay in his favor because he can pardon them.”

In his initial letter ordering that the charges be dropped for now, Bove also suggested that the decision to indict Adams was politically charged, echoing the argument that Trump has made time and again to delegitimize the many indictments that he faced for his blatantly illegal behavior.

Wehle posted that these arguments are designed to shake the public faith in the law and public officials who uphold it, something that Sassoon suggested in her letter to Bove. “Dismissing the case will amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department,” she wrote.

For his part, Bove responded in precisely the way one would expect Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney to respond: forcing the resignation of two high-ranking Department of Justice prosecutors, including the acting head of the Public Integrity Section, who refused to take on the case in DC, and sidelining the assistant US attorneys who have been working on the case.

Hagan Scotten, the lead federal prosecutor on the case, tended his resignation on Friday morning in a brief but scalding letter to Bove.

“Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” he wrote. “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Trump has long railed against laws, judges, and bureaucrats that have limited him in any way, not just as inconvenient or ill-conceived, but as evil conspirators who want to destroy the country and all the true Americans who support him. It’s classic demagogue stuff, and now he’s being joined by people like JD Vance and various conservative legal “scholars” who have suggested that he just ignore judges altogether whenever they’ve slowed down his destruction of the federal government.

It’s been a decade of Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” rhetoric, which is only at all credible when the swamp wasn’t filled with his own people.

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