‘Seismic shift’ / ‘We just fired the person who may have saved your life’ / Gotta go?

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Welcome back. A lot happened as Chicago Public Square took Wednesday off for a local news media summit. Catch up by scrolling back through the more than 50 links posted since Tuesday morning to the Square Bluesky account.

‘Seismic shift.’ In formerly reliably Republican DuPage County, Tuesday’s township elections—you know, the ones almost no one normally pays any attention to?—will bring Democratic control to boards that never before elected a single Democrat.*
■ Public library champion Kelly Jensen says Election Night was mostly good for Illinois.
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, which saw “sad little rich boy” Elon Musk and his million-dollar voter bribes dispatched by a liberal Democratic judge, “reminded us that the bad guys can still lose.”
■ Columnist Eric Zorn notes that Wisconsin, aptly, has two towns named Waterloo.
■ Traditionally conservative Wisconsonite Charlie Sykes: “WI to Elon: Womp womp.”
■ Satirist Andy Borowitz: “Democratic Candidates Beg Musk to Visit Their States.”

‘A tool to collapse our democracy.’ That’s how Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy sees President Trump’s long-threatened global tariffs …
■ … which target, along with most of the rest of the world, an island with a population of no people and lots of penguins …
■ … although—surprise!—Russia gets a pass.
■ Stephen Colbert: “America is finally free from the tyranny of being able to buy stuff from other countries.”
■ Economist Paul Krugman: “Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.”
■ Media watcher Brian Stelter: “Business reporters, hedge fund managers and Wall Street analysts are all looking at President Trump’s sweeping tariffs and saying: Make it make sense.”
■ Wonkette’s Doktor Zoom: “Welcome to Trumpville, Population You! It’ll be the Greatest, Most Beautiful Depression!”
■ Hey, take it from a group founded by Trump’s former No. 2, Mike Pence: Trump’s tariffs will cost the average American family more than $3,500 a year.
■ Columnist Mark Jacob sees the tariffs as setting the stage for Republican bribery: “Exemptions will be based on whether MAGA likes or doesn’t like certain people. And MAGA likes people who give them money.”
■ Author and economic skeptic Cory Doctorow: “Trump’s genius was … tricking white workers into blaming their decline on women, brown and Black people, and queers—and not on the billionaires who had grown so much richer even as workers got poorer. But Trump couldn’t have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment’s total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies.”

‘I’m not sure who this Cory is—
You say he stole my thunder?
He stood up on the Senate floor
Condemned my grift and plunder?
— Columnist Mary Schmich channels the president in another TrumPoem, this time marking Sen. Cory Booker’s record filibuster. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Schmich’s former Trib colleague, Charlie Madigan: “Booker’s address was … the embodiment of good.”

‘Mr. President, we just fired the person who may have saved your life.’ Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler tells Rachel Maddow someone needs to tell Trump what his Health and Human Services layoffs have done—and how those affected helped keep him alive when he caught COVID-19.
■ Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s temporarily granted a reprieve to a Venezuelan man who hopes to donate a kidney to his brother in Cicero.

Rule of law? Hah. CBS News surveys experts’ alarm about Trump’s broadsides against major law firms.
■ ProPublica: A lawyer who helped Trump’s in-laws, the Kushners, crack down on poor tenants now helps renters fight big landlords.
■ The Intercept: In what may be a first, Trump’s pardoned a corporation.

‘Their capacity to produce knowledge that improves lives shouldn’t be sacrificed for short-term political goals.’ A Northwestern University professor writes in the Tribune: America can’t afford to silence its universities.
■ Former WGN weather icon Tom Skilling: Trump’s layoffs at the National Weather Service show “a level of scientific ignorance.”
■ Public Notice columnist Noah Berlatsky: “Trump’s third term threats are … another authoritarian attack on the Constitution.”


Gotta go? City Cast Chicago flushes out the city’s best free public restrooms …
■ … and seeks your suggestions for others.
■ Microsoft’s reportedly taking a dump on negotiations for data center space near Chicago.
■ Acknowledging that his work often “skews toward the negative,” Neil Steinberg celebrates a good day in the city.

A Square public service announcement

* One of those seats—in once solidly conservative Wheaton—will go to your Square columnist’s brother-in-law.

Most. Expensive. Judicial. Race. Ever. / Disaster’s ‘only a matter of time’ / Fools: Old

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Retreat, yes. Surrender, no. Chicago Public Square will take Wednesday off to join the Chicago Independent Media Alliance retreat, “Together in Action.”
■ Meanwhile, follow the Square Bluesky account for results of today’s elections, including this …

Most. Expensive. Judicial. Race. Ever. All political eyes are on the Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin …
■ … where Elon Musk’s been tossing around millions while wearing a cheesehead hat …
■ … prompting a reprimand from Daily Show host Jon Stewart: “Their culture is not your costume, Musk. … Do not appropriate their dairy chapeaux.”

‘An indicator of the national landscape.’ Politico’s Shia Kapos says a handful of suburban mayoral elections today could indicate how the Trump-Musk administration’s faring among voters so far.
■ Ready to vote? The polls are open: Get smart first—with the Square guide to voter guides.
■ Delivering what he dubbed “good trouble,” New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker was, at Square’s deadline, still holding the chamber hostage with a filibuster he began at dinnertime last night to protest what he calls the “crisis” Trump and Musk have precipitated.

Not so healthy, not so much service. Layoffs of up to 10,000 employees at the U.S. Health and Human Services Department began today.
■ Inside Medicine takes stock of “what we’ve lost and what we are about to lose.”
■ Wired: Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is trying to gift itself a $500 million federal building.

Disaster’s ‘only a matter of time.’ ProPublica talks to flight attendants working for the airline that has become the dominant player in a network of deportation contractors known as “ICE Air.”
■ Chicagoans are pressing the feds to release a man who was set to donate a kidney to his immigrant brother here.
■ Nieman Lab: ProPublica wanted to find more sources in the federal government. So it got a billboard truck.

Third termite. Columnist Eric Zorn explains how Donald Trump really could nab a third term as president. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Humorist Andy Borowitz: “Trump’s Arteries Unlikely to Serve Third Term.”

Kids’ chaos. Count the guardian of a 15-year-old boy shot during teenagers’ “takeover” of Streeterville Friday night among those favoring an earlier curfew for minors downtown.
■ Police say a Saturday night gathering of about 70 teens in downtown Oak Park resulted in “no concerning incidents.”
■ Columnist Andy Shaw: Chicago’s The City That Works—until it doesn’t.

Wildcat call. A congressional committee is investigating Northwestern University’s legal clinics on charges they’ve used taxpayer cash to “engage in progressive-left political advocacy.”
■ Ohio’s governor has signed a bill aimed at stamping out diversity initiatives, banning faculty strikes and threatening academic freedom at that state’s public colleges and universities.

Sun-Times, WBEZ shakeup. Among changes in the leadership at the parent organization, Chicago Public Media, Sun-Times executive editor Jenn Kho will take over as interim editor-in-chief for both organizations—and be a candidate for the job permanently.
■ Here she was in 2022, interviewed in a Chicago Public Square podcast.
■ Chicago news veteran Jennifer Schulze appeals to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: Please stay on the air five nights a week beyond the end of a pledge to do it just through Trump’s first 100 days.

‘I would have been so terrifically mean.’ Comedian and Late Show writer Amber Ruffin joined Seth Meyers last night to defend(?) the White House Correspondents Association for axing her gig at their annual gala later this month.
■ Daring Fireball columnist John Gruber blasts the association’s president as an “obsequious bootlicker.”
■ Former AP White House correspondent Ron Fournier: “Dear White House Reporters: WTF?”
■ A.V. Club: “The admin continues to undermine the WHCA wherever possible.”
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones on the White House usurping one of the association’s most prominent roles: “Media outlets that … Trump and his administration don’t like could be pushed to the back of the room, while those who give more favorable coverage to Trump will get prime positions.”
■ Worried about news media freedoms? Here are some things you can do.

‘A powerhouse celebration.’ Critic Catey Sullivan says Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Sunny Afternoon “delivers a white-hot musical take on The Kinks.”
■ The Tribune’s Chris Jones gives it 3 1/2 stars.

A Square public service announcement

Square alumni gathering. Coming Wednesday night: Authors Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal in conversation at Chicago’s Exile in Bookville bookstore.
■ Coincidentally, each of them has guested on the Chicago Public Square podcast: Sagal in 2017 and Doctorow twice—in 2019 and last year.
■ Tickets are free here.

‘All hail Donald J. Trump, president of the United States. … I’m only sorry it took me this long.’ Check the calendar before reading Neil Steinberg’s latest.
■ Steinberg on this date in 2020, as the pandemic dawned: “When this is over—assuming it ever ends—I don’t want to look back at myself yukking it up as the death toll mounts.”

Fools: Old. Updating coverage: As April Fools’ Day pranks proliferate across the world, let’s look back:
■ Chicago Public Square, 2022: “Guess how / Guess which / Guess what.”
■ Square, 2017: “Doughnuts / Doughnuts / Doughnuts.”
■ WXRT alumnus Ryan Arnold: This “used to be the one time a year we questioned what we read online. Now, it’s just Tuesday with slightly better branding.”

Thanks. Jim Parks and Mark Wukas made this edition better.

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