Democrat Politics

Usha Vance might be the most accomplished second lady to ever grace the White House halls. From her law degree at Yale to her time working as a law clerk for several senior judges such as Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, Usha is much more than just Vice President JD Vance’s wife. 

But when her college sweetheart was chosen as Donald Trump’s vice president, Usha’s accomplishments didn’t just go to the wayside—they were completely placed on hold. 

“The day before JD was selected—I did not know he was going to be selected—I was working as a lawyer, and I had the wardrobe of a person with three children who likes to do things outdoors, who has a dog, who doesn’t like things to be too precious,” Usha told the Free Press in an interview published Monday. 

“And then, a switch flipped, and it’s not like it came with a whole new wardrobe and stylist and everything.”

However, it wasn’t just Usha’s fashion that suddenly changed. America’s first Hindu second lady went from an accomplished, practicing lawyer to a woman behind the scenes as her husband played ball in the big leagues. 

Aside from some public speaking appearances on her husband’s behalf and the occasional media appearance, Usha’s once power-move-filled life looks a little more like that of a trad wife—a term that is popular online for a married woman who focuses on traditional gender roles—nowadays. 

Vice President JD Vance, right, and second lady Usha Vance arrive at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, on March 28.

One of her more notable, and stranger, media moves was a visit to Greenland last month where the second lady was invited—by an American—to wave a flag at the opening ceremony of a dogsled race. 

However, right after SignalGate was leaked, where military plans were shared in an unsecure group chat, JD Vance decided he needed a vacation amidst the scandal. So, instead of Usha traveling to the icy island with one of her sons, the trip was taken over by her husband. 

Stolen media valor aside, Usha has been described as someone who was destined to be the “boss.”

“By age 5 or 6, she had assumed a leadership role,” Vikram Rao, a close family friend of Usha, told The New York Times. “She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss.”

But now, her role as boss looks a little different. Coming back to her most recent interview, the accomplished lawyer was asked by the Free Press this week how she feels about fitting in with a world of blonde, botoxed MAGA women. Usha’s accomplishments have been diminished to how she plans to deal with her gray hairs and her fashion choices now that she is a part of MAGA’s army of plastics. 

“I’m laughing, because it would be really hard for me to be blonde,” she told the outlet. “That color would look totally absurd.”

However, MAGA as a whole hasn’t been very kind to Usha’s entrance on the scene either. A lot of conservative talking heads, such as known racist Nick Fuentes, have attacked the second lady for her skin color and nationality. 

And while Usha has come to her husband’s defense when he placed his foot in his mouth over “childless cat lady” comments, the vice president was accused of falling flat when asked to respond about racist attacks against his wife. 

“Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is,” Vance said on Megyn Kelly’s podcast. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused—attacked—by some white supremacists over that.”

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President Donald Trump claimed victory last month in his so-called war on egg prices, boasting that his administration brought costs way down. But new data released Thursday shows that’s just not true.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of eggs in March was around $6.23, up from $5.90 the month before. Despite Trump’s chest-thumping about some supposed dramatic drop, shoppers are still paying through the nose, and any real relief is likely still weeks away.

“All indications are that there’s some relief coming for consumers. Even then, there are a lot of other factors that determine the price of eggs,” David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University, told The New York Times.

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The increase in egg prices aligns with earlier warnings that “eggflation” was coming for consumers’ wallets. In February, the Department of Agriculture predicted egg prices would swell by 41.1% in 2025, alongside a 3.4% increase in overall food costs. 

The latest spike comes as retailers brace for the effects of Trump’s global tariffs—which are still wreaking havoc, despite his last-minute lowering of tariffs for 90 days.

And while overall inflation cooled slightly in March, that could soon be erased by Trump’s tariffs, which threaten to undo any short-term gains.

Industry experts told The Associated Press that they expected retail egg prices to dip since wholesale prices began dropping in March. But these drops didn’t kick in until mid-month, and with Easter boosting demand, it’ll take time for shoppers to see any real impact.

The 5.9% spike in just one month is the opposite of what Trump claimed—and a blow to the White House as it keeps pretending that it solved a crisis that was never really theirs to fix. 

“A dozen eggs are now $3.10 cheaper since January 24. That’s a 47 percent decrease overall. So I think the American people do have great reason to be optimistic about this economy,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in March.

Sure.

Then came Trump’s chaotic “Liberation Day” speech, where he pulled a 59% price drop out of thin air. And this week he doubled won, claiming that prices fell 79%—again with zero evidence. 

Trump has become weirdly obsessed with egg prices, using them to score cheap political points while real people continue to watch their grocery bills climb. He’s used the spike to bash the Biden administration, even though prices rose during the early months of his own presidency. In February alone, the average cost of a dozen eggs hit $5.90—nearly a full dollar more than it was in January.

And prices are still sky-high, depending on where you live. The Associated Press found a dozen cage-free eggs going for $9.99 in San Francisco, $6.69 in Denver, and under $5 in Omaha, Nebraska. There’s certainly a range, but no one’s feeling great about it.

Even if wholesale prices are inching down, the fact that everyday shoppers haven’t caught a break says a lot about how little Trump has actually accomplished.

One expert told Bloomberg that egg prices could hover between $2 and $6 per dozen for the next few months, but they also warned that it’s “difficult to predict” where things will land.

But one thing is clear: While consumers are still getting squeezed, egg producers are doing just fine. 

Despite a devastating bird flu outbreak that led to the slaughter of millions of hens, Cal-Maine Foods, the country’s largest egg producer, just posted a quarterly profit of $509 million. That’s three times what it made in the same period last year. The Justice Department’s antitrust division is now investigating the company.

So, yes, someone’s doing fine. It’s just not you. But that part won’t be making it into any of Trump’s speeches.

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett.

Related | Donald Trump folds on tariffs—kinda

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President Donald Trump reignited his strange obsession with water, specifically water pressure, on Wednesday and the result is likely to cost consumers millions on their utility bills.

Trump signed an executive order titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure In Showerheads” which will repeal regulations put in place by the Biden administration limiting how much water can be used in showerheads.

At a White House signing of the order Trump ranted, “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair. I have to stand in the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. … It’s ridiculous.”

A fact sheet sent out by the White House said Trump was going to end “the Obama-Biden war on water pressure and make America’s showers great again.”

But there was no “war” on water pressure. An explainer from the Appliance Standards Awareness Project released last June explained that efficient showerheads cut water usage, helping the environment, and they saved families money on their utility bills.

Consumer Reports examined the showerheads on the market in January and determined that despite Trump’s complaints to the contrary, modern showerheads are not affected by water flow.

“Our testing found that water flow really doesn’t predict performance,” Bernie Deitrick, Consumer Reports’ test engineer in charge of showerhead testing, said. In fact the outlet determined that the highest-rated showerheads used even less water than the federal standards require.

Manufacturers didn’t even want this. Trump reversed water pressure standards in his first administration over their objections.

What is at play here is Trump and his obsessions. Trump is fixated to a disturbing degree on water pressure issues. He has gone on and on about the topic multiple times over the last five years, as the Guardian noted in 2019. 

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In 2019, he ordered the EPA to investigate the topic.

“We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet—you don’t get any water. They take a shower, and water comes dripping out, it’s dripping out very quietly, dripping out,” Trump said.

The next year, in 2020, he was back on it again. Appearing at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio, Trump said, “You turn on the shower—if you’re like me, you can’t wash your beautiful hair properly.”

Perhaps Trump has been having an issue with his water because he doesn’t pay contractors, like plumbers, when his companies contract them to do work. But the water crisis he keeps describing isn’t one that most Americans experience.

Related  |Trump thinks he invaded California and turned on a magic water faucet

Or perhaps Trump simply doesn’t know how water and water delivery systems work. Early in his second term, Trump claimed that he ordered forces into California and that they turned on some sort of magical faucet to open up the flow of water to firefighters dealing with the fires in Los Angeles.

It is unclear if this is the same faucet that he claimed during last year’s election was being used to hold back water from Canada, much to the exasperation of actual water experts from Canada.

What is clear about water was that the standards put in place by Biden were helping consumers and the environment, but now Trump’s water obsession has thrown out all of the common sense.

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On Thursday, House Republicans passed a budget blueprint that moves them one step closer to cutting taxes for the rich while at the same time slashing Medicaid and food stamps.

Republicans passed the budget by a vote of 216-214, with all Democrats and two Republicans—Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana—voting against it. 

The fate of the budget blueprint was in doubt, as Republican hardliners wanted assurances that the budget would require the steep cuts to federal expenditures—which will most likely come from Medicaid and food stamps. But they all fell in line under pressure from House Speaker Mike Johnson and Dear Leader Donald Trump.

Ultimately, the vote was the critical first step in the budget reconciliation process Republicans are using to pass Trump’s agenda without the need for any Democratic votes. 

But now comes the even harder part: The blueprint merely instructs House committees to find $1.5 trillion in cuts to the federal budget, which the GOP will use to only partly pay for extending the tax cuts Republicans passed and Trump signed into law in 2017.

Related | Shocker! Democrats were right about GOP plan to destroy Medicaid

The vast majority of those cuts—$880 billion—are likely to come from Medicaid, the program that provides health insurance to 83 million low-income Americans. Another $230 billion will come from the House Agriculture Committee, which is likely to slash food stamps to meet that goal.

Until now, Republicans lied by saying that their budget wouldn’t slash Medicaid and food stamps—something they could do because the budget only included topline numbers each committee was instructed to cut. But now GOP lawmakers will have to actually put pen to paper and lay out the specific cuts they will make. 

And when Medicaid is on that list, Republicans could find themselves in a world of political hurt.

Cutting Medicaid and food stamps in order to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the rich is deeply unpopular. A Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos in March found that 63% of registered voters were against making cuts to Medicaid and food stamps to pay for tax cuts.

Even Trump’s own pollster conducted a survey that found cutting Medicaid is a political loser. That survey, released April 2, found that 74% of voters have a favorable view of Medicaid—including 61% of Trump voters. That same poll found just 23% of voters support cutting Medicaid in order to pay for tax cuts. 

Democrats are hammering Republicans for voting for the budget.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

“The budget passed by House Republicans today steals $880 billion from Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a post on X. “By voting for this cruel bill, Republicans have betrayed hardworking Americans by raising costs for those already struggling to make ends meet.”

“House Republicans just passed their pro-billionaire anti-middle-class budget blueprint,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, wrote in a post on X. “While Trump’s tariffs raise costs for families, Republicans are full steam ahead on their plan to cut programs like Medicaid & SNAP to hand out more tax cuts to billionaires.”

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In yet another dictatorial move, President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed two executive orders targeting former Trump administration officials who dared to speak out against Dear Leader, weaponizing the federal government to go after his perceived enemies.

The orders direct the Department of Justice to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor—two men who worked in the first Trump administration and who have since criticized Trump. 

Former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor, right, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, March 5, 2019.

Krebs, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Trump, correctly said the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. And Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff under Trump, wrote an infamous op-ed for The New York Times and later a book saying that there was a resistance within the first Trump administration trying to stop his worst whims.

The executive orders Trump signed are absurd.

Trump accused Krebs of “falsely and baselessly” denying “that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”

And he accused Taylor of having “stoked dissension by manufacturing sensationalist reports on the existence of a supposed ‘resistance’ within the federal government that ‘vowed’ to undermine and render effective a sitting President.”

While signing the authoritarian orders in the Oval Office, Trump accused Taylor of committing treason—an insane statement that should send chills down everyone’s spines.

“I think it’s like a traitor,” Trump said of Taylor. “It’s like spying.”

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By directing the DOJ to go after Krebs and Taylor, Trump is doing what he accused his predecessor of: weaponizing the federal government.

“I said this would happen,” Taylor wrote in a post on X. “Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

Democrats slammed Trump’s authoritarian orders.

“Trump’s direction to DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor because he doesn’t like what they said is an unprecedented abuse of power by a President of the United States,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) wrote in a post on X. “I call on all Congressional Republicans to condemn this egregious weaponization of the government.”

Weaponizing the federal government to go after two former staffers is far from the only dictatorial move Trump has made since taking office.

Trump has similarly targeted law firms who employ his perceived enemies and who have sued to block his unlawful actions. 

He’s said it’s illegal for news organizations to publish content he disagrees with. 

He’s tried to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, and is deporting people without due process—sending them to a gulag in Central America despite a court order to bring them back. 

Trump is also reportedly holding a military parade in Washington, D.C., on his birthday, something he’s wanted for years but which has been blocked because it is incredibly expensive and will destroy roads across the city.  

“A steady stream of lies & still living in the past while he destroys the economy,” Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee wrote in a post on X. “Chris Krebs did the job Trump appointed him to do & Miles Taylor spoke the truth. Weaponizing the gov’t against those who failed to cow to him won’t make us forget that his Presidency is a disaster.”

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Wednesday that it will be scrubbing through immigrants’ social media accounts in search of “antisemitic activity” as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. 

“This will immediately affect aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity,” the statement said.

The announcement comes less than a month after the Department of Homeland Security used a similar excuse to shred the constitutional rights of legal immigrants, who were arrested and threatened with deportation for participating in Pro-Palestinian protests.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has terrified people across the country, disappearing student activists like Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD candidate at Tufts University who was arrested in front of her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, by ICE officers. 

Students protest at Columbia University following ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement in pro-Palestinian actions.

And President Donald Trump has been attacking higher education institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton as part of the ongoing “Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” investigations. Trump has threatened to withhold billions in federal grants unless they comply in restricting First Amendment rights on campus. 

Of course, if the Trump administration had any real interest in combatting antisemitism, it would start with Trump and co-president Elon Musk. 

Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it as X, and then promoted wildly antisemitic content and various conspiracy theories, many of which involve a Jewish cabal pulling the global strings of power.

And Trump reportedly kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, preemptively blamed liberal Jews for any future election losses, and called Jewish Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, ”a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned.” 

This is the latest cynical move by the Trump administration to hide behind its phony concern about antisemitism to carry out what journalist Yair Rosenberg recently described in The Atlantic as “a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.”

None of the Trump administration’s recent actions have anything to do with protecting Jews—who overwhelmingly voted against Trump—or combatting antisemitism. 

Instead, they’re just the latest ugly justification for Dear Leader’s trampling of the Constitution while advancing his xenophobic crusade against immigrants.

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Two House Democrats are introducing legislation that would force Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to report directly to Congress about its decisions and internal operations—including any overhauls or dismantling of federal agencies.

The proposed DOGE Accountability and Transparency Act, introduced by Democratic Reps. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Brad Schneider of Illinois, would require DOGE to submit to Congress weekly “impact reports,” including building relocations or renovations, budget cuts, data access, the legal basis for all actions, policy changes, and staff firings.

Of course, in a GOP-controlled House with MAGA loyalist Mike Johnson as speaker, the bill isn’t likely to move. But Democrats may be laying a political trap, since the GOP loves to brag about transparency—until it’s time to practice it. 

Voting down this bill would make one thing clear: Republicans care more about shielding President Donald Trump and Musk than informing the public on how DOGE is reshaping the government.

The move seems to be part of a broader Democratic effort to push back harder against Trump amid mounting pressure from their base. A February Blueprint survey found that 40% of voters think Democrats have “no strategy at all” to respond to Trump, while only 10% say they have a successful one. That criticism seems to be landing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson

Recently, Democrats have stepped up their messaging, delivering marathon floor speeches and helping organize peaceful protests against Musk and Trump. Some lawmakers are using every opportunity—including congressional committee hearings—to spotlight the damage caused by Trump’s policies, like his escalating trade war. This new legislation fits neatly into that offensive.

“We should not allow Elon Musk to recklessly take a chainsaw to our federal government; he must answer to Congress and provide real, regular updates on DOGE’s actions,” Schneider told Axios.

“We cannot let President Trump’s version of ‘Wreck-it-Ralph’ distract us while Elon Musk continues to gut agencies that are responsible for providing American families with essential needs and services,” Lynch added.

Since the inception of DOGE, it has done little beyond issuing vague boasts about saving taxpayers money—claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, DOGE has already lied about its savings and made it more difficult to verify what the agency is actually doing.

That’s especially troubling given the scope of the damage it’s caused. DOGE has slashed—or announced plans to slash—funding for cancer research, food aid, Social Security, veterans’ health care, and more. And as the economy teeters on the edge of a recession, Musk has threatened to eliminate thousands of more federal jobs.

It might actually be smart for Republicans to distance themselves from Musk, whose approval ratings have taken a nosedive since he started at DOGE. According to an April Morning Consult survey, Musk’s unfavorability has jumped from 45% in November to 54%. His favorability, meanwhile, has remained flat—42% then and 40% now.

And it also makes sense that Democrats are tying Musk to the GOP ahead of what’s expected to be a brutal 2026 midterm cycle. Morning Consult found that Musk is almost as unpopular among Democrats as Trump: Just 10% of Democrats view Musk favorably—compared to 11% for Trump—while 83% and 86%, respectively, hold unfavorable views.

Even among Republicans, Musk is less popular than Trump—though that doesn’t make the bill to hold him accountable any more likely to pass. Still, it sends a clear message that Democrats are finally going on offense.

And if the GOP blocks this push for accountability, Democrats may have a sharp new campaign message heading into 2026: Democrats tried to stop the chaos, and Republicans ran from it.

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Related | Donald Trump folds on tariffs—kinda

The one thing that conservatives are excellent at is grabbing hold of the Overton Window and yanking it so hard to the right that we end up in the ditch. 

But it’s not just right-wing politicians and activists who find ways to get their most unhinged and unacceptable ideas to the mainstream—some conservative attorneys and legal scholars are in on it, too, creating legal justifications for all of President Donald Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional moves. 

The current project is to scrape up some historical and legal support for Trump’s increasing musings about serving a third term despite the 22nd Amendment clearly forbidding it. 

But this is exactly what happened when Trump wanted to ignore the 14th Amendment and eliminate birthright citizenship, and when he wanted to ignore the Electoral College and stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election.

Since the effort to deform the 22nd Amendment to create a loophole for Trump to slide through in 2028 is relatively new, it doesn’t have as much fake support yet. Mostly, conservatives are stuck with a single Minnesota Law Review article by Professor Bruce Peabody, originally from 1999 and updated in 2016, that examines how a president could circumvent the 22nd Amendment’s bar on a third term. 

To be scrupulously fair, this particular article predates Trump’s ambition to occupy the White House until death do us part, and it’s far more of a thought experiment than a political polemic. But it’s precisely those types of thought experiments that get laundered into conservative discourse as articles of faith. 

It’s Peabody’s article, really, that launched the possibility for Trump to slide into a third term, thanks to a tortured and hyper-literal reading of the 22nd Amendment. 

Cartoon by Clay Bennett

The language of the 22nd Amendment forbids anyone from being “elected to the office of the president more than twice.” It does not, however, say that someone could not serve in the office more than twice, leading to complicated possibilities for Trump to remain in the White House.

But this is nonsense. The 22nd Amendment was literally pushed by Republicans in the wake of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s three full terms and part of a fourth. There’s no credible way to say that what was really intended by the 22nd Amendment was to generally bar more than two terms—unless someone really, really wants a third term. 

But now conservatives have Peabody’s hypothetical explanation of how to slither through loopholes in the Constitution to help them make their case. 

This is also playing out right now with birthright citizenship. As recently as a couple of decades ago, the idea that the 14th Amendment excludes children from citizenship if their parents were not permanent U.S. residents or were undocumented immigrants at the time of their birth would have been met with laughter. 

In fact, one of the only people who was pushing the idea was fringe lawyer extraordinaire and election denier John Eastman, who, in 2008, wrote a breathtakingly racist law review article arguing that the United States should rethink birthright citizenship because of 9/11.  

While Eastman was somewhat alone on this issue for a while, once it became a fixation for Trump, it couldn’t just rest on Eastman’s shoulders, especially since he is now facing both state and federal criminal charges for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. 

Fortunately for Trump, there are other soulless ghouls with better credentials who were happy to step up. Kurt Lash, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, rushed out an incomplete 8-page draft in late February, and he fleshed that out to a tedious 92 pages late last month. 

University of Minnesota Law School Professor Ilan Wurman and Georgetown University Professor Randy Barnett took a different route, penning an op-ed for The New York Times to help launder these hard-right ideas into the mainstream. 

But both of their arguments boil down to the same thing: The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment means that “allegiance” to the United States is required, and undocumented immigrants can’t show allegiance because they broke the law by entering improperly. Therefore, their U.S.-born children are not U.S. citizens. 

Lash, Barnett, and Wurman might be dressing up their theories in fancier ways, but they’re following the same tawdry playbook that Eastman used after the 2020 election, when he and Wisconsin attorney Kenneth Chesebro arranged to submit slates of fake electors to vote for Trump in states won by Biden. 

The flimsy legal and historical support was dissimilar from the 1960 scheme when Hawaii sent electors for both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which only happened because a statewide recount stretched past the date for electors to cast their votes. 

Michael Rosin, the author of a paper about the 1960 dispute cited by Chesebro, explained that his paper did not suggest that names of competing electors should be sent to Congress without any certification from a state’s governor. But that’s precisely what Eastman and Chesebro did. 

These fevered attempts to find even a speck of history or law to hang an argument on have a very important—and very small—audience. No, not Trump. He doesn’t care if he has any legal support for his vicious whims. 

The audience here is the six conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court. In particular, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who seem to consider themselves historical experts—hence Alito’s spelunking through obviously incorrect history to justify overturning Roe v. Wade, and Thomas’ engaging in “the quest for Goldilocks history” to stretch the 2nd Amendment well past its breaking point. 

It doesn’t matter how thin or incorrect these types of analyses are, because they aren’t intended to stand on their own. They exist as a fig leaf—a way to pretend that Trump’s most outrageous stances are grounded in law. 

And it’s downright embarrassing to see so many lawyers jump on board. 

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