On cornering that slippery eel ...

Jay Kuo is a lawyer, a besotted father, a playwright, and chair of the Human Rights Campaign. He's also an acute observer of these distressed disUnited States and of our rogue pseudo-king. 

And Kuo, correctly in my view, suggests we step back as we prepare to say NO KINGS on March 28 and notice the dents we are making in the regime.

The Shit Hits the Fan ...

There is a tendency to dismiss any forward progress against the Trump regime, with many on the left asserting (even before they’ve understood the facts fully) that nothing ever matters and that Trump and his allies will never face accountability.

That gut reaction is understandable given how often we have gotten close only to see Teflon Don skate free. He is a very slippery eel, to be certain. But it is factually inaccurate and counterproductive to our aims.

It’s sometimes helpful to zoom out and ask what it is we have been demanding and to compare that against what has been achieved so far. When we go through this exercise, we can more easily identify areas of laudable progress.

With the Department of Homeland Security, we have been demanding Kristi Noem’s firing, along with Greg Bovino’s. We have been insisting that Noem’s corruption and grift, her exploitative and racially charged ads, and her brutal overseeing of mass detention centers and the illegal, warrantless seizure of immigrants and U.S. citizens come to an end.

On each of these questions, we have scored significant gains. Federal judges have ruled on the illegality of the warrantless seizures, and Democrats have held firm on shutting down DHS entirely until their demands on ICE reforms are met. 

Bovino was sent packing after Minneapolis, and now Noem herself is also gone. Shady contract awards to Noem’s political cronies are now under intense congressional scrutiny, and Noem is on notice that she will face charges if the evidence shows she committed crimes.

On the bloody and illegal war against Iran, which is now several days old, there is a steep political cost that Trump, Hegseth and the GOP must now bear on top of the hundreds of lives lost and billions of dollars already spent. ... the America First wing of the Republican Party is now in open revolt against the war. This will only deepen the electoral woes of the GOP in November should the war drag on.

And while the press concededly has often disappointed us in its coverage of Trump, with respect to the Iran war there has already been stellar reporting, without which we wouldn’t know who is to blame for the killing of scores of Iranian schoolgirls.

The latest Epstein files are a story that won’t go away for Trump, despite his best efforts to distract us from them. The latest disclosures are less than a day old, but already they are ricocheting across the internet, including with the president’s QAnon base. The Justice Department apparently tried to hide these files from the public, which has led many people to ask why. Now we know, and it’s truly bad for Trump.

It’s one thing to focus on a host of anonymous tips from a national hotline. It’s entirely another for the FBI itself to have conducted four interviews of the same witness, as well as spoken to other witnesses about the claims. It found the allegations credible enough to feature them as the lead on an internal PowerPoint slide.

The story over the cover-up isn’t yet over. While the DOJ finally produced the Form 302s themselves, they still failed to produce the FBI’s notes taken in conjunction with those reports. This only adds to the suspicion that there is even more they are trying to hide.

It is no small matter that Congress voted nearly unanimously last year to release the Epstein files. Nor is it a small matter that five GOP members of the Oversight Committee crossed party lines this week to vote with the Democrats to subpoena the U.S. Attorney General. This is only happening because there are some in the GOP, such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) who decided to put principle over party.

As Trump’s approval ratings sink further and his power dwindles, look for more Republicans to suddenly find the courage to defy his wishes. We aren’t fully there yet, as the failed War Powers Resolution demonstrates, but there are now major cracks in the Trump wall. These cracks are growing bigger, not smaller.

That’s why it’s vital to keep encouraging, rather than dismissing, the tireless efforts of certain reporters and lawmakers to press forward. We should recognize and celebrate important progress when it happens, even while remembering that getting the goods on Trump and his cronies has never been easy.

Each of us has the power to decide whether we are part of that effort, or whether we’d rather fold up our tents and give up just as our long efforts are finally starting to pay off.

Boldface added for readability. 

I think Kuo is right. Hard as it seems with every atrocity, with every cruelty, with every unnecessary death at the hands of this murderous regime, more and more of us are throwing sand in their gears. Nothing else to do if we're to retain our self-respect and regain a country.