On Sunday, November 9, eight Democrats voted with Republicans on a procedural measure to move ahead on funding the government, separating that from continuing tax credits on the Affordable Care Act, which are scheduled to expire January 1. Until this vote, extending the Affordable Care Act credits had been a key condition to Democrats voting to end the 40-day government shutdown. The Democrats voting to begin the process of ending the shutdown were Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.

Democratic social media posters vented frustration, calling for various senators to resign, be replaced, etc. Some went so far as to advocate blatantly counterproductive actions such as changing voter registration from Democrat to independent. But as Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse put it, “… the answer isn’t to abandon the [Democratic] party …. The answer is to take it over and transform it.”

In 2018 two nurses in Samoa prepared what should have been routine measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccines with an expired anesthetic instead of water, and administered them to two infants, who died. The Samoan government suspended vaccinations for 10 months, and the nation was bombarded with anti-vaccination messages, including from RFK Jr. and his nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. That year only 31% of Samoan children received the MMR vaccine, leading to nearly 3,000 infections in the nation of 200,000, and 39 deaths by November 2019. Kate O’Brien, head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) immunization department at the time, told the Guardian that the effect of misinformation about vaccine safety was “being measured in the lives of children who had died” in the course of the outbreak. By January 2020 5,700 people had been infected, resulting in 83 deaths, with most of the victims under 5 years old.

Kennedy was an independent candidate for the presidency in 2024, but suspended his campaign August 23 throwing his support behind Donald Trump. On November 14, 2024 Trump announced that RFK Jr. would serve as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, contradicting then-Trump-spokesman Howard Lutnick’s denial to CNN that Kennedy would have a role in a Trump HHS department.

On Tuesday, August 5, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department for files from the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates.. The committee also issued subpoenas to former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and eight former law enforcement officials. Trump has denied knowing about Epstein’s crimes; when Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019 Trump declared himself “not a fan” and claimed he had not spoken to Epstein since 2004.

Reporting by the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal suggests that the supposed falling out may have occurred not in 2004, but three years later. A Mar-a-Lago member told reporters that Trump shut Epstein out of the club after he “harassed the daughter of a member.” According to this account Trump was concerned that the prevalence of such behavior at his property would damage the Trump brand.

Up until a few days ago when the Court of International Trade ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose broad tariffs on US trading partners¹, one of the noisiest news stories was the release of the book titled Original Sin, by CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and British journalist Alex Thomson. As its subtitle conveniently informs us, the book claims to document “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.” The “original sin,” in the authors’ view, Axios’s Mike Allen tells us, was Biden’s decision to run again. Setting aside Democratic party insiders such as Jaime Harrison and Jake Sullivan disputing key claims made in the book, and setting aside the sloppy and unclear appropriation of a term that theologians have debated since at least the time of St. Augustine, I would assert that the bigger story is Trump’s very public cognitive deterioration and its effect on what passes for policy in the current administration.

The firehosing and resilience targeting continue. Though not always strictly disinformation, the barrage of sometimes contradictory news and announcements about changes to government services and regulations that people rely on has comparable effects. If you haven’t read disinformation researcher Brooke Binkowski’s series on How to Fight Disinformation do yourself a favor and set aside some time to read it. It was written between 2020 and 2022 and its focus is primarily climate-change related, but many of the players and certainly the same techniques make an appearance, and the parallels to the current situation are extensive.

One reason I mention firehosing and resilience targeting is that it is a challenge to choose a topic to focus on in the current information environment. This week the events that probably received the most media attention (news, social, etc.) were the machinations in Congress surrounding the budget.

As the first post after Trump II inauguration this will be a little different from our recent articles. It’s a bit of patchwork rather than a true narrative thread – partly because of the firehose of executive actions and other activities, which were intended to be disorienting (and were). First we address the disinformation that there is no resistance to the administration’s anti-democratic behavior. In fact, resistance has taken the form of virtual and in-person rallies, communications to Congress, numerous lawsuits, etc. Then we recap some recommendations for coping with these “Tryin’ Times.”