Taking Down Trump 2.0 - We need STORIES

Rule 9 concerns the need for a powerful narrative for the media and public when fighting Trump. We're failing: we need to hear the REAL stories of how the CFPB, Medicaid, and USAID have helped people.

To fight a relentlessly loud and lying figure like Donald Trump requires much more than the dry legalese of a court brief or a policy paper or a snoozefest of a speech to an empty congressional chamber.

There must be a powerful narrative ready to go, for the media and for the public — this is the lesson of Rule 9 from Taking Down Trump, and we need to learn and apply it immediately.

Trump easily provides the first element, of a clearly identifiable antagonist — but there must be victims, and heroes, and a clear story of who did what to whom and how it can be fixed, how the victims can be vindicated.

Done well, this can create a magnetically compelling plot. And it’s not necessarily rocket science: it is the formula for every legal TV show or movie or novel — as well as all the other law enforcement or spy shows or movies or novels — and it’s why those genres are all so successful.

We managed to pull this off in the Trump University case, and it is a large part of why we won and why the case still maintains notoriety to this day.

But we need more help to do this in the current battles against Trump — because right now we are only telling a fraction of the necessary story, and it is hurting our cause.

Here’s the problem. Yes, we clearly have an antagonist. Two, actually. Elon Musk seemed like Tony Stark at first but actually has turned out to be Lex Luthor. No problem satisfying the need for a baddie — we have a baddie surplus. And we can show that the baddies are in it for themselves: Musk seems to be targeting precisely those federal agencies that have either investigated him or that have regulatory authority over him.

• USAID — Musk’s Starlink partnered with USAID to provide 5000 of its satellite internet terminals to Ukraine in 2022. Reports vary, but it appears that Starlink donated some of the terminals, while USAID provided funding for some of them. In April 2024, USAID’s Inspector General launched an investigation into “how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals.” Meanwhile, thousands of Starlink terminals ended up in the hands of the Russian military (exactly how is unknown), and we also know that Elon Musk has been having secret conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Musk has now moved to shut down USAID.

• FAA — The Federal Aviation Administration has authority over not only airplanes but also rockets, and thus it oversees Musk’s SpaceX, including its checkered safety record. For example, in September 2024, the FAA recommended a civil penalty of $633,009 for failing to follow safety license requirements, and after a SpaceX had a rocket explode on January 16, 2025, the FAA launched a “mishap investigation” the next day, as it would for any other similar incident. Only a week later, Musk reportedly pushed out the head of the FAA, one year into the normal five-year term.

• CFPB — The Consumer Financial Protection Board protects consumers from fraudulent and predatory practices from banks, credit card companies, and other lenders. This includes auto lenders, such as Tesla’s financing arm. And since buying Twitter, Musk has been aiming to turn it into an unwieldy ‘everything app’ — including making it into a payment app — striking a partnership with Visa to do just that. Getting rid of the CFPB basically allows Musk to eliminate the police officers who would be watching over him, just as he’s doing elsewhere in the government.

So we’re all set with the part of the story of how the bad guys are doing bad things — we just need to amplify these depravities and hypocrisies as much as possible.

But we’re not all set with telling everyone how the good guys were helping — and how the victims are now getting hurt.

Bread and milk being distributed in Ukraine. But who are these people? What are their stories? We need to hear from them.

How does USAID help people? We know in the abstract: it provides funds for help in war zones and in developing countries. But abstractions are never enough. We need to hear the deeper, detailed human stories, directly from the people affected — or at the very least, from some of the workers who have been on the ground in these various countries. For starters: Ukraine, which has been the #1 recipient of USAID funding for the last 3 years since the Russian invasion (and this alone should make us deeply skeptical of the efforts to kill USAID, given Musk’s and Trump’s coziness with Putin). How did USAID-funded programs help Ukrainians survive and get back on their feet? What would happen if that support evaporated?

How does Medicaid help people? What was the human impact when it appeared Medicaid funding might be frozen? What would happen to people, to families, to children, if Medicaid was cut off entirely?

How does the CFPB help people? Could we hear from people who were ripped off by banks, by credit card companies, by other lenders — people who lost their savings, who were forced out of their homes, who were forced into personal bankruptcy? And could we hear about how the CFPB fought those predatory practices and got people their money back?

Given the faithlessness of much of the mainstream media now — more worried about their precarious businesses than they are about illuminating the truth — we are going to have to rely on individual reporters and independent journalists to fight to tell these stories.

But we have to go further than that — we need to roll up our sleeves and help.

Do you have these stories to tell? Do your friends, your family members, your colleagues? I am happy to hear from them, to help tell their stories, and to connect them with others in the pro-democracy media. Tell me in the comments below. Or DM me on Bluesky or Twitter.

Let’s get to work.