It's Time to Step Up Our Game

Somewhere in Trump and the Republicans’ minds, they’ve got it confused. They work for us, not the “Top 5%,” no matter what anyone thinks or says.

May 20, 2025

Today’s theme of the Adverse Action daily is to reach as many of you as possible with a straightforward message: Your voice, your presence, your pressure, and your actions are your weapons against these guys in government.

As someone who provides you with facts and data, yet reads a great deal of Mainstream Media every day to stay informed about everything from economics to employment, I notice excessive use of unhelpful, overly complicated words. We throw around “oligarchs,” “dictators,” and “the ruling party” like those terms do some good, and the more I read, the more I’m convinced we need to ditch their use entirely.

Here’s why.

First, Let’s Stop Giving These Clowns Credit

Every time we give Trump credit for being anything other than his lowest common denominator, which is a convicted felon – an old dude with a felony– we’re giving him undue credit. He’s not an oligarch. He’s a con man. His rich buddies are just that: Lucky Dudes, who had mommy and daddy’s money at the right moment, and made a few lucky decisions along the way. They are not specially gifted at anything but the art of bullshit.

These people are not invincible. Unless the laws of nature that have been in place for billions of years suddenly change, in a hundred years, they will be pushing up daisies. So will we. Nature will take care of killing off Trump one way or another, and when he’s gone, most of us will celebrate. Who wants to have that kind of distinction hanging over their head?

Let’s look at the House and Senate. Those clowns aren’t out rallying support behind Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill because they know we’d eat them alive in public. They’re wringing their hands trying to come up with “marketing points” to tell us about this awful piece of legislation so we don’t unseat them from their threadbare connection to power next year.

They know this bill is bad. A few of them are delusional enough to want to cut more benefits from the basics of a social safety net we’ve fought to put in place for decades. Healthcare, inflation, recession, food security, and numerous other issues are addressed in this bill that needs TO FAIL.

Where are your Representatives? Where are your Senators? What mode of hiding are they assuming today? Do they think you won’t remember all of this next November?

It’s time to do what we can: Apply maximum pressure, everywhere, all at once.

I’m going to make that easy in today’s Daily.

No More Vaca for the Felon

Trump’s fixation on non-job-related shiny objects needs to end. His ass should be in the White House working every weekend, not playing golf with his pals at his gilded-shit golf motel. If his accomplishments were more than propaganda that puts the thickest coat of lipstick on a pig I’ve ever witnessed, I’d let a few vacations slide – maybe once every two months. But by the time we wave goodbye to this felon, he’ll have racked up over $100 million in expenses flying between his designated home (the White House) and his little cockroach motel. It’s offensive to everyone, and he's not apologizing. I think it’s time to ram this presidency down this “President’s” throat.

Accepting a $400 million jet that Qatar couldn’t sell? How about “WTF? No way. Forget it. See the emoluments clause. Case Closed.” Why are we letting him even talk about this? He can go buy himself a jet in 2029 when he’s either dead, gone, or both from the White House – on his nickel, that he made scamming people on his big crypto farce.

Yet it’s easy for us to get distracted by this con artist felon’s fascination with traveling in more style. His style is sickeningly gold, which almost certainly won’t be the style the next guy who has his job wants around everywhere. It’s sick. It’s overkill. And it doesn’t pass the common-sense test.

It’s time we do a roundhouse kick to the con artist felon and his pals over at the Capitol and stop enabling them with terms that evoke fear in us. Instead, they should be afraid of what good old-fashion asshole Americans are going to do to them.

Let’s move on to some other meaty topics of the day.

Jobs Nobody Wants

In case you missed it, Trump and his incredibly lame advisors Peter Navarro, Howard Lutnick, and Scott Bessent think you are a sucker dying to put on overalls and hop in a long line for 8+ hours a day putting lids on bottles or fastening bolts onto cars. Not that there’s a single thing wrong with doing that for a living, but it sure is arrogant of them to think all of us are scrambling to sign up for that kind of work.

Especially without checking in with the facts.

First, let’s address the fact that there are almost half a million unfilled factory jobs in the United States. Clearly, suppose Trump’s economic geniuses would sniff a newspaper, magazine, or trade journal once in a while and get their heads out of badly flawed spreadsheets. In that case, they’d know that factory work is demanding, it’s repetitive, in some cases it’s dangerous, and for some people, the repetition would drive them insane.

Just look at someone with a bad spot on the autism spectrum. Do you think they’d want to show up for eight-plus grueling hours a day to put a seal on a vial of medicine in an assembly line?

Here is the actual data, dating back to 2002:

There’s no question that some critical elements of our supply chains for consumer goods need to be sourced in the United States if possible. However, the idea that tariffs will force factories and their owners to relocate here in the U.S. is ridiculous. Plants require years of planning, considerable market certainty, and easy access to capital to build.

Sorry to say, Felon Trump and his crack team strike out on all three. A tariff is a sledgehammer that causes immediate pain for consumers, but not much else, especially when it’s imposed on shaky legal ground like an Executive Order based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 to pull it off.

Shaky Legal Ground

Currently, there are at least seven legal challenges to these tariffs working their way through the courts. Unlike immigration cases, such as Albrego Garcia, the lawyers representing the plaintiffs are being extremely thorough, checking every procedural and legal box. They are out to win.

*** You can check out just one of the seven here, which is Gavin Newsom in California. Read Politico’s latest take (LINK*** https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/18/doj-newsom-trump-tariff-lawsuit-california-court-00299333 ***LINK) on the antics Trump’s team of lawyers is pulling to avoid a killer judgment against these tariffs.

So, imagine you’re a business owner trying to figure out what to make of Trump’s Schizo Tariff Tantrum. You’d be out of your mind to go get a loan from the bank, put up your assets as collateral, and start building a new factory, pronto. Before the bank would even blink at you, they’d start laughing. (Believe me, on a smaller scale and in a different business, I’ve been laughed out of banks for a lot less in 35 years.)

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving on. I can’t overstate the importance of this. JD, the con man in training, effectively told Europe to go to hell. Trump didn’t even blink to correct him, so now we have the continent where most of our greedy, self-interested, business-minded capitalists (who are vastly white) are irritated with us.

Great job, JD! They’re now busy making alliances with other countries while our Top Felon plays tiddlywinks in a puddle of his shit at the Resolute desk 1.5 hours daily, rain or shine. Except Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and half of Monday. Well done!

I’ll wrap up this section of the Daily with one more reference chart to put in your back pocket. This, you’ll notice, is the total number of manufacturing jobs in the United States (regardless of unfilled positions). Given the hesitancy and temporary nature of Felon’s tariff scheme, combined with the current low unemployment rate, any sane business owner would say we’ve hit a plateau around 2010, following the Great Recession, and stayed there.

The Big Beautiful Pile of Legislative Crap

There is a concerted effort by Republicans to ram a bill through Congress that fulfills Trump’s America First agenda.

Please take a look at how I phrased that. This is the exact phrasing used by most Republicans in Congress, as well as by the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. It is not “the taxpayer-first agenda,” or the “American people’s tax bill,” or the “Working-class tax bill.” No, it is “Trump’s America-First Agenda.”

Everything Trump wants is embodied and continuously repeated with that phrase. It’s time we took it back and told everyone who gets a paycheck from the government that they work for us, not the other way around. Trump and Congress have gotten things backward and are way out of line.

My dad, whom I love dearly, once heard and repeated a phrase to me when I got cocky and too big for my britches: “Son, I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.” I knew he wasn’t kidding. Not only had I pushed way too far, but I had it coming.

We need some of that old-fashioned love-or-death mentality to fight the wheelbarrow full of crap we’re being asked to smile while we swallow. None of it is what we want, and the louder and more certain, confident, and assertive we are as we yell, the more those spineless Republicans will do the math and see the writing on the wall for their chances of re-election dwindle next year.

Add to that, Johnson is a little man in more ways than I can expound upon. He is Trump’s little mouthpiece, albeit a younger, mildly better-groomed one. But he is the man you can count on to stand up to exactly zero of his principles and adopt Trump’s just because he has very little else going on between those ears of his.

Why do I point this out? Because sometimes the cause at hand, like stopping this Frankenstein Tax Bill from decimating Medicaid and other services, while:

Growing the national debt by $4 trillion
Stripping Medicaid benefits partially or fully away from the 72 million Americans who rely on it,
Cutting most food assistance to the needy, ($330B)
Giving $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, with nearly 50% of those going to the top 5% of earners (households making over $450,000).

It’s revolting. To make it more easily digestible, I made a quick chart you can refer to for the biggest impacts this bill would bring to you personally. Feel free to redistribute.

In this version, I kept it personal. Big problems like raising the debt from our already sky-high $36.56 trillion aren’t in that chart, because the first things we care about are those that can hit us directly.

The only thing I want to be clear on is this: All of the destructive effects of this bill get exponentially worse under an economic situation where inflation rises, unemployment goes up, and a recession hits. It’s worth thinking about, especially in light of the cliff we’re heading off of with Trump’s tariff scheme.

Take Action

The message needs to be clear and simple today: take action. I’ll try to provide a variety of ways to reach your elected officials, plus some bonus info, in this section.

Don’t discount contacting your State officials, such as the governor’s office, and expressing your concerns. They stand to lose, or more accurately, pass the losses directly onto you, the taxpayer, if this bill makes it to Trump’s desk. If the Felon is allowed to sign it into law, many states already have “trigger laws” that go into effect, cutting the available amount for key services in Medicaid and SNAP.

Elected Officials

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials - has Federal (President, Senators, Reps), State (Governors, territorial legislators), Local (mayors, county executives, town officials)

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

https://www.congress.gov/contact-us

Protests to Join

You may want to join in a live protest near you. Here are some excellent resources to help you get started. Here are resources to find a protest near you:

https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/

https://www.findaprotest.info/

https://usprotests.liveuamap.com/

Globally: https://carnegieendowment.org/features/global-protest-tracker?lang=en

Don’t Rule Out Running Yourself!

I’ve had an unusual number of people lately tell me they’re interested in running for office, because they see the urgent need to repopulate our government with a whole new level of involved, activist leaders. I encourage you to think about it, even if you’ve never considered it!

It’s always a pleasure to help anyone who wants to run for office and also happens to view people as human beings, understanding that we all face difficult times. I’ll support anyone here who has questions or wants to be connected to someone who can help. Just DM me and I’ll get back to you soon.

https://blogs.lawrence.edu/careercenter/2024/10/how-to-run-for-public-office-a-step-by-step-guide.html

https://wherecanirun.org/

https://runforsomething.net/run/

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/15/770332855/how-to-run-for-office

Put Pressure on the Media

Lastly, there are a multitude of media outlets, and we often don’t think to contact them to express our opinions and interests in topic coverage. Especially when they have limited resources, they will prioritize the “easier” story over the more costly one unless they’re getting pressure from you! It takes a call, but more than once I’ve been able to make a difference by clearly stating what I want to a local or national outlet. It can also be a tool you use.

Here is a list of just a few to contact. If you have specific interests and don’t see how to contact them here, please let me know.

Associated Press: https://www.ap.org/contact-us/contact-the-newsroom/

The Atlantic (email to): tips@proton.theatlantic.com

MSNBC: rachel@msnbc.com (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/send-it-rachel-n946786)

Daily Beast (emails): editorial@thedailybeast.com, tips@thedailybeast.com

ABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/US/tip-share-abc-news/story?id=61304290

Axios: news@axios.com, podcasts@axios.com

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/tips/ , tips@cnn.com

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/tips (see form)

NPR: https://help.npr.org/contact/s/

USA Today: https://help.usatoday.com/contact-us

The Washington Post: https://helpcenter.washingtonpost.com/hc/en-us/sections/207384087-Contact-the-Newsroom

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesstaff/article/tips-and-confidential-sources/

The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/tips

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Wrap Up

We’re at a point in the Trumpian cycle to know what he is, what his grifts and grafts are, and be duly fed up with him and his pals. It takes a mindset shift to go from being overwhelmed by the onslaught of propaganda being pushed down our throats. We must move to a stark, black-and-white clarity: this Felon is just one guy with half a thought.

With that, we can take back the power that’s been stripped from our psyche over the last several months.

Hopefully, today you sense hope and optimism along with a loud “enough is enough!” My optimistic belief is that we are starting to see the national pushback, and it’s time to press forward with full force to get back what has been taken from us.

I’ll wrap up today with a reminder about your mental health. As I go through periods of highs and lows, I can often get “stuck” in a low with little ability to see it as just a momentary setback. Everything looks more overwhelming, more pessimistic, and less joyful. If you get into those situations too, I find it helpful to plant “reminders” in the places I often go, like post-it notes, to jog my mind and spirit out of a rut.

I hope you’ll tend to your mental health today, and perhaps consider unplugging from your digital devices for half an hour. You might find it helpful to go outside (if it’s nice) or find a quiet place indoors (if it’s not). Doing nothing except absorbing the world around you can be very restorative.

I hope your Tuesday starts on a positive note. As always,

Be Well

Rick Herbst

May 18, 2025