The Great American Pushback Has Begun

Patriotic citizens are only beginning to battle against Trump's extreme agenda.

Just six days after he retired from his post as director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins issued a plea to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions at the Department of Government Efficiency. Remember the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.”

The man who spent decades heading up the Human Genome Project and leading the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic, then picked up his guitar and started singing. See below.

The performance may not harken back to the days of The Beach Boys playing on the Mall on Independence Day. But pretty good for a federal retiree. All kidding aside, Doctor Collins’s subtle but stirring address commanded the attention of thousands of government scientists who gathered on the National Mall Friday to defend their lifesaving work.

One woman carried a sign that read: “Literally just trying to cure Multiple Sclerosis but okay.” Another quipped: “Got measles? No? Thank Science!”

Their messages, delivered near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, served as yet another powerful chord, warning the White House that an increasingly loud, though still coalescing campaign against the extreme Trump/Musk agenda is finally mobilizing - a broad, ideologically diverse and growing political movement in America. Don’t want to call it the #resistance? Fine. I’ll refer to it as, “The Great American Pushback.” Or the GAP.

Over the past couple of weeks, the GAP appeared to include hundreds of Americans streaming into Republican town halls to lambaste GOP House members in ruby red strongholds. Trump and his allies attempted to brush off the raucous events as astroturfing from the left. But Republican leaders in Congress knew better and began instructing their side of the aisle to avoid such encounters with their constituents.

The clean-up on aisle DOGE is just one example that democracy can be slippery when wet. Just about every action taken by Trump and Musk has fallen flat in the latest public approval polls. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post neatly assembled some recent numbers in one damning post. Trump Agenda Unpopular

Blake found the following:

• 83 percent opposed Trump’s pardons of violent Jan. 6 defendants (Washington Post-Ipsos)

• Around 70 percent of Americans opposed the administration’s move to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” (Ipsos and Marquette University Law School)

• 70 percent opposed dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Ipsos)

• 62 percent in one poll and 74 percent in another opposed Trump’s plan to take control of Gaza (Quinnipiac University and Ipsos)

• 67 percent opposed freezing funds for public health agencies (Ipsos)

• As many as 65 percent opposed trying to take the Panama Canal (Marquette)

• 64 percent opposed his 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada (Post-Ipsos)

• 60 percent in one poll and 64 percent in another opposed trying to make Canada the 51st state (Economist-YouGov and Reuters-Ipsos)

• 59 percent opposed his 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico (Post-Ipsos)

• 58 percent and 59 percent in two polls opposed dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (Ipsos and Washington Post-Ipsos)

• 58 percent opposed laying off large numbers of government workers (Post-Ipsos)

It’s not just Democrats and independent voters who are incensed by Trump’s policies. His own supporters have soured on his return to office as well. Reporters with Reuters recently visited Parkersburg, West Virginia, where they spoke with residents whose jobs were cut at the Treasury Department's Bureau of Fiscal Service. Dissatisfied Trump Supporters

Here’s just one quote from that Reuters report:

"‘Nobody that I've talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives," Piggott, 47, told Reuters in an interview, saying she would not have supported Trump if she knew then what she knows now.”

Of course, the Trump/Musk blitzkrieg, slashing the federal workforce to make way for a bureaucracy of loyalists, was previewed during the 2024 campaign. Press reports, including from yours truly, repeatedly warned voters that Trump would almost certainly follow the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint, “Project 2025,” to achieve a MAGA American makeover. You’ll recall Trump repeatedly lied, denying he had anything to do with it. But Musk and Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, have since put that conservative manifesto into action. Vought led OMB during Trump’s first administration and was a “Project 2025” architect.

Last week, green shoots in the “Great American Pushback” began to break through, presenting a few notable indicators that the building backlash against Trump’s agenda could be felt inside the White House. Press reports surfaced noting friction between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump also reportedly told his cabinet secretaries they were ultimately the deciders on federal workforce cuts, not Musk. The comment, of course, contradicted Trump’s own words uttered only days earlier during his speech before a joint session of Congress, where he proclaimed the richest man in the world was in charge of DOGE, a statement that undercut his own administration’s claims in court. Trump’s spin was spiraling.

MAGA’s keeper of the populist flame, Steve Bannon has all but mounted billboards in Lafayette Square calling for Musk’s ouster from Trump world. The New York Times noted Bannon’s fierce criticism of the tech tycoon included a warning on his “War Room” podcast. Bannon on Musk

‘“I don’t want to say an anchor or lodestone,” Mr. Bannon said on Friday of Mr. Musk on his show “War Room,” which is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself. “It’s not that yet, but it’s trending — that is starting to affect everybody.”’

It doesn’t take a blowhard to tell which way the wind is blowing.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did provide the Times with a statement insisting “Trump is thrilled with DOGE’s historic work under Elon Musk, and he will continue to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in our federal government on behalf of the American people.”

Trump is thrilled, the White House said. File that comment for later.

Beyond the staggering reductions in the federal workforce and the GOP’s massive budget cuts that are likely to devastate such popular programs as Medicaid, widespread anxiety over inflation, a problem Trump promised to tackle, is now poised to fuel the Great American Pushback. Administration officials are cautioning Americans to be patient as Trump’s policies may exacerbate price increases and rattle global financial markets. Wall Street would like more stability from Trump even after he quickly backed off his threats to impose tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports. Turns out, big business is wary of the return of the Trump chaos loop. The Federal Reserve has hinted it may hold back on lowering interest rates due to what The Financial Times and others have dubbed, “Trumpflation.” Trumpflation

“We do not need to be in a hurry,” Fed chairman Jerome Powell said Friday about future rate cuts.

It’s unlikely Powell will dash down to the National Mall to join the chorus of Trump’s critics and the likes of folk-singer, Francis Collins. Scientists, Collins argues, are very much “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” when it comes to the work that they do, from curing cancer to combatting climate change. The doctor’s plea to the Trump administration to “do no harm” is admirable. Sadly, harm is already being done.

I briefly caught up with Collins following his remarks by the Lincoln Memorial. While he reiterated his concerns about DOGE’s threat to public health, Collins told me he was concerned he was saying too much. His family still faces threats from far-right activists, who have also targeted other renowned government scientists, such as Doctor Anthony Fauci.

This is life in Trump’s America. He and his allies can bully and intimidate individual Americans, even revered public servants. Silencing a movement is another matter, especially if it includes his own supporters.

Dr. Collins can strum his guitar into retirement, and perhaps rest a little easier, knowing Trump’s political comeback is running straight into the “Great American Pushback.”

Time to mind the GAP.