Edition · March 31, 2025
March 31, 2025 — Trump’s Election Power Grab Runs Straight Into Court
A backfill edition on the day Trump’s new elections order triggered immediate lawsuits, while the administration kept widening the legal war over his agenda.
March 31 was one of those days when the Trump operation managed to make itself the defendant and the headline at the same time. The biggest screwup was the fresh push to impose federal control over election rules, which immediately drew court challenges from Democrats and voting-rights groups. The day also featured more evidence that the White House was still using raw power to punish critics and force through a political project that keeps generating litigation, backlash, and institutional resistance.
Closing take
Trump-world spent March 31 acting like the courts were a nuisance and the Constitution was a suggestion. The result was the usual modern Republican governance model: sign first, sue later, pretend the backlash is proof of strength. The bigger the power grab, the more it looks like panic dressed up as authority.
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Election power grab
Confidence 5/5
★★★★★Fuckup rating 5/5
Five-alarm fuckup
President Donald Trump’s March 25, 2025 elections executive order directs federal agencies to require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship on the federal voter registration form, presses officials to treat ballots received after Election Day as late in federal races, and ties funding and enforcement priorities to compliance. Civil-rights groups sued on April 1, and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed a separate challenge on April 3.
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Immigration setback
Confidence 4/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
A federal judge on March 31, 2025 temporarily blocked DHS from ending the 2023 Venezuela TPS designation while the case continues. The order paused the administration’s February termination effort, which had been set to take effect on April 7, 2025.
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Union crackdown
Confidence 5/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
The Justice Department said Friday, March 28, 2025, that it filed a declaratory judgment action in federal court in Texas on behalf of eight agencies against affiliates of the American Federation of Government Employees. The agencies say their collective bargaining agreements interfere with national-security work and want to be declared legally entitled to end them.
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Crypto favoritism
Confidence 3/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
A White House official confirmed Trump pardoned the BitMEX co-founders, a move that immediately renewed questions about favoritism, crypto influence, and the administration’s habit of treating legal consequences like a networking inconvenience. The pardons fit a broader pattern of Trump-world rewarding the politically useful while pretending there is nothing to see here.
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