‘Hands off!’ / Security insecurity / ‘A plug for DEI?’ / Quiz!

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‘Hands off!’ More than 1,000 events have been scheduled for tomorrow by organizers resisting the Trump administration’s gutting of government programs …
■ … including these in the Chicago area …
■ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch reflects on the message of Sen. Chris Cory Booker’s epic speech: “Just do something. Now it’s your turn.”
■ Inspired by President Trump’s disapproval of his official portrait in Colorado, filmmaker Michael Moore’s readers submitted more than a thousand others, including this one:

‘I’ve never done something that was so universally well received in my entire life.’ A third-year associate at Chicago’s Skadden law firm is quitting to protest her employer’s deal with the Trump administration.
■ Illinois is among 19 states filing suit against Trump’s attempt to overhaul election law.

‘The age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.’ That’s Jonathan Last’s assessment at The Bulwark of the financial chaos triggered by Trump’s global tariffs …
■ … which a Tribune editorial says set the U.S. economy back centuries.
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson is incredulous: “The White House was able to arrive at its numbers with a nonsensical formula that appears to have been reached by asking AI how to impose tariffs.”
■ Reviewing Trump’s observations on the stock market over the last year, The Associated Press finds no shortage of hypocrisy.
■ Stephen Colbert: “Worst day for our economy since COVID. Just a little reminder: This time, he’s the disease.”
■ Updating coverage: The markets’ plunge continued early today.

‘Yes, actually eating poor Irish babies is a great solution to the potato famine.’ Columnist Lyz Lenz’s Dingus of the Week: CNBC host Jim Cramer, “supporting tariffs because he hates free trade.”
■ Press Watch critic Dan Froomkin: Mainstream media swallowed Trump’s hooey whole.
■ Columnist Jamison Foser: The New York Times helped sell those tariffs.
■ Fox News came under fire yesterday for yanking the stock ticker off its broadcasts.
■ Pulitzer-winning columnist Eugene Robinson’s leaving The Washington Post, spurred by the paper’s Trump-friendly “‘significant shift’ in our section’s mission.”
■ Former Russian World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov has launched a new column focused on freedom of speech.

Security insecurity. A day after far-right activist Laura Loomer complained about staff loyalty, Trump fired National Security Council officials. …
■ … a move that the House Intelligence Committee chair says “makes all of us less safe.”
■ The Atlantic: Trump “managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.”

‘Can I put in a plug for DEI?’ As the Organization of American Historians meets in Chicago this weekend, columnist Neil Steinberg explains how diversity, equity and inclusion shape his work.
■ Chicago Public Schools face the potential loss of $400 million in federal funding if they don’t stop championing … well … you know … fairness …
■ … and they have just 10 days to do it.
■ The University of Illinois at Chicago’s considering shrinking its School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Languages programs.
■ Add Brown University to the list of Ivy League colleges facing the loss of federal cash for not hewing to the administration’s take on “antisemitism.”
■ In the face of Trump’s order to eliminate “anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian, its leader—Lonnie Bunch, former president of the Chicago History Museum—is in the hot seat.

‘OK, yes: tariffs. (Sigh.) But also juicy bankruptcies, Wiccans, embezzlement and some exceptional women from Philadelphia!’ Past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel invites you to this week’s news quiz.
■ Your Chicago Public Square columnist fell one question short of perfect.

‘Treat insects more humanely … since they may be able to feel pain.’ A Texas State University ethics professor: “The emerging field of insect welfare seems increasingly important.”

‘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 speech. (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.

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

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