‘Make these goons as frustrated as possible.’ President Trump’s offer/threat to federal employees—quit by next week and get about eight months’ salary—is fueling resistance on a Reddit message board for government workers: “I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up.”
■ The Onion CEO Ben Collins on Bluesky: “This comments section is the first time I’ve felt even a shred of hope in eight days.”
■ If the offer sounds familiar, it’s because it closely mirrors a thing Elon Musk did when he bought Twitter.
■ The Washington Post: What federal workers should know about the “deferred resignation” offer.
■ Project Democracy advises federal employees “how to plan for what happens next.”
■ The U.S. Agency for International Development laid off nearly 400 people yesterday under Trump’s stop-work order for foreign assistance.
■ The Project on Government Oversight: Trump’s top human resources guy is “a self-described ‘raging misogynist’ with a public history of racist comments.”
■ A coalition of public interest groups is suing Trump over his plans to coopt the civil service.
Freeze froze. In what the AP dubs “the most chaotic day for the U.S. government since Trump returned to office,” a judge has at least temporarily blocked Trump’s order freezing almost all federal funding …
■ … but not before it triggered “chaos, confusion and fear” in Chicago and across the country.
■ And the judge’s block expires next week …
■ … leaving organizations and government agencies at all levels and across the nation in the lurch…
■ … including the nearly fifth of all Americans covered by Medicaid health insurance.
■ Gov. Pritzker Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul calls the freeze “blatantly unlawful.”
■ Here’s Gov. Pritzker’s list of the freeze’s most significant threats to Illinoisans.
■ Illinois Rep. Sean Casten was more blunt: “This is a 5 alarm f-ing fire.”
■ USA Today’s Chicago-based columnist, Rex Huppke: “Trump’s funding freeze was probably illegal, but do laws even matter anymore?”
■ Inside Medicine columnist Jeremy Faust on a reprieve for federal grants to medical and research institutions: “ The lawyers did their thing. Chaos temporarily mitigated.”
■ Stephen Colbert: “Hey, remember when Donald Trump said he was gonna be a dictator only on Day One? Well evidently his first act as dictator was proclaiming that Day One never ends.”
Thank you, sir. Trump’s “border czar” says immigration advocates’ educational efforts have been “making it very difficult” to arrest people in Chicago.
■ He made clear, though, that it wasn’t really a compliment: “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘How to Escape Arrest.’”
■ The Bulwark: Trump’s turned Chicago schools into an immigration battleground.
■ Block Club: Seven ways you can help Chicago immigrants targeted by Trump.
■ Chicago news veteran Jennifer Schulze: Dr. Phil’s presence during Chicago’s arrests is “a clown show designed to … spread Trump propaganda.”
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg on why Trump’s targeting Chicago: “We’re being punished for seeing a situation clearly—we need residents—and acting upon it.”
■ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch: “Good people cowering in their attics” is what we get in Trump’s America.
■ Columnist Charlie Madigan: “Borrow one thing from the Trump playbook. Take names!”
■ Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer: “How Democrats can start fighting back right now.”
A ‘predator’ who ‘preys on the desperation of parents of sick children.’ That’s President John F. Kennedy’s daughter and former U.S. Ambassador to Australia and Japan Caroline Kennedy, describing her cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a letter to senators …
■ … who (continual updates) were to hold RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing today.
■ Watch here.
■ Mother Jones has obtained a cache of audio recordings in which Kennedy secretly—and possibly illegally— recorded his wife during an ugly divorce that ended with her suicide.
‘ Trump appears to be trying to gain control over the military and turn it into a political instrument.’ Historian Heather Cox Richardson sees the president moving to strengthen his hand across the board.
■ Daily Beast: Scandal-scarred Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has cut security for a “general Trump hates.”
Doomsday declaration. The University of Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has advanced its symbolic Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight …
■ … the closest it’s ever perceived the odds of an apocalypse triggered by climate change, nuclear threats or biological hazards.
■ Jimmy Kimmel says time’s run out on that iconography: “Why is the end of the world being measured on a mom clock they got on the clearance table at Marshall’s?”
■ Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper reviews end-of-the-world bunkers as portrayed in the movies and on TV.
The mayor has a ‘gift room.’ But Chicago’s inspector general says Brandon Johnson’s administration has declined to make it available for inspection …
■ … and failed to make public his acceptance of “gifts like whiskey, jewelry, handbags and size 14 men’s shoes.”
‘We are all distracted by another, very real crisis.’ Columnist and cartoonist Jack Ohman regrets that yesterday’s anniversary of the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle got lost in the churn of 2025 news.
‘Disastrously feeble.’ Press Watch columnist Dan Froomkin says traditional media are botching coverage of Trump— failing “to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into authoritarianism, racism and cruelty.”
■ Columnist Paul Krugman explains why he quit The New York Times after a quarter century: “I felt … a push toward … avoiding saying anything … that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up.”
■ Veteran White House reporter and Trump antagonist Jim Acosta, who quit CNN as it attempted to marginalize him, has launched an independent email newsletter of his own.
■ Mother Jones on the Trump administration’s everything-everywhere-all-at-once assault on reason and tradition: “The chaos is the point.”
Flashback, 2017. As Square this week enters its ninth year as an independent news briefing, here’s the first edition to have gone public—after a few trial runs.
■ To mark completion of our eighth year, a contribution of $80 will get you a free Square T-shirt.
■ $100 will land you a hoodie (a perk usually reserved for those who pitch in $250).
■ You’ll get a notification of how to order within 24 hours of your commitment.
Thanks. Rosemary Caruk, Mike Braden and Ted Cox made this edition better.