Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued over 200 executive actions, introduced over 10 major immigration policy changes, and adopted over 100 economic and trade-related directives. Keeping track of all these changes can be an overwhelming process for co-operative members and leaders.
To address this, US non-profit the Democracy Collaborative (TDC) has launched Tracking the Crisis, a news aggregator and round-up, which tracks the Trump administration’s administrative, legislative, and other actions, as well as a broad array of movement responses.
The newsletter came from a strategy meeting organised by the People’s Network for Land and Liberation (PNLL), which includes Cooperation Jackson, Wellspring Cooperative, and Cooperation Vermont. During the meeting, PNLL tasked TDC to anticipate actions by the Trump administration.
“I think we did a relatively good job of anticipating what those early weeks would be like,” says TDC’s president, Joe Guinan.
“In the course of that conversation, it was clear that what we were facing, alongside all the individual actions being done, a communication strategy aimed at what Steve Bannon has called ‘flooding the zone’.
“This is the idea of doing a lot, all at once, through a shock and awe strategy across many fronts; this would, in part, produce a feeling of being overwhelmed and a dizzying sense of paralysis, of powerlessness, of being pushed onto the back foot, of reactivity, including to the news cycle itself. And Bannon was explicit, ‘hit them with three things each day. They’ll bite on one, and meanwhile, we’ll get all our stuff through.”
The idea of the weekly newsletter is to curate and manage the flow of information to make it more digestible for co-ops and their members.
“Taking a weekly approach allows us to step back and to digest – and means that if people are going to be overwhelmed, then they can just be overwhelmed for one 20-minute read a week, rather than feeling overwhelmed the whole time,” says Guinan.
The newsletter’s editor, Mel Figueroa, has worked in conservation, was active in PNLL during its creation, and was involved in campus Anti Fascist work while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
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“In many ways, the newsletter is an extension of some of the work that I was doing; in other ways, it was exactly what I needed to reorient myself within movement work,” she says.
Doing the newsletter is also making her feel empowered. As a younger Gen X who does not own property and lacks financial security, she feels the only options available are the alternatives being developed by groups like TDC and PNLL. “Doing the tracker for me personally is important,” she adds. “Being able to know what the terrain is, but also being aligned with folks like TDC, like PNLL, and these organisations that are building these alternatives is personally quite crucial for me in terms of my own survival.
“It is one way I can both contribute and also have some hope for myself in the future.”
As a non-profit, TDC does not engage in electoral politics, says Guinan, adding that the tracker is a purely informational one. “The service digests the vast array of what’s happening from publicly available media and news sources. It makes carefully curated choices about what’s actually important, what’s real, what’s not, and directing people’s attention there.”
News aggregators are now a common feature of mainstream US publications like the New York Times – but what Tracking the Crisis does differently is to focus on the administration’s actions, as well as responses to them from state attorneys, protest movements, social movements, labour movements, federal workers, and other campaigns.
“Without advocating any of the content, we demonstrate that people are responding and that there is action and activity taking place,” says Guinan.
“We’re less interested in chasing the ideological battles and the clash of ideas and much more interested in what is being done by whom to whom, with what outcomes, and what are some of the underlying implications in material terms of what’s happening.”
While the tracker was initially aimed at members of PNLL, it can be a way for those outside the movement to stay informed.
“If the tracker merely served ourselves, PLL and a few close allies and funders and friends with the information management tool, it would have served its purpose. But we also decided that it may be useful to a wider array of audiences,” adds Guinan.
He does not exclude the possibility of including links to comment articles as things progress, to help subscribers access a range of opinions and analyses.
“What we’re going to be facing in the future are questions about manageability,” he warns. “First of all, will the administration be able to keep up the pace that they’ve been keeping up? But also, what do we do as things become more complex and perplexing, as we’ve just seen with the tariffs?
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“And so the question there is, what’s the balance between maintaining a strictly news aggregator versus pointing people to useful pieces of analysis that aren’t ours, that may or may not be what we agree with, but that help people understand some of the forces?”
TDC’s stakeholders’ response to the tracker has so far been positive.
“We got a lot of gratitude and thanks for helping people to navigate what is an extremely stressful, intense and difficult time, a pressure cooker of information, and this is a sort of a release valve that allows people to use it in a constructive way,” says Guinan.
As the effects of Trump’s tariffs and funding cuts start impacting the US economy, this will also demand a response. One possibility is for communities to set up more co-ops and community wealth-building initiatives. Guinan says TDC has been approached by several groups interested in the community wealth-building model in recent months. He expects this trend to continue as federal resources dry up.
“For us at TDC, community wealth-building was born out of necessity, in situations of scarcity and austerity,” he says. “The original model in Cleveland [known as the Cleveland Model] grew out of a lack of external resources coming to save us, and therefore a need to look at what we can we do with existing resources, institutions and economic power.
“I expect that we’re going to see the need for these tools and approaches increase as we look to … advance a progressive economic development strategy. That’s the strange counter-cyclical aspect of this moment; because things have gotten so much worse so quickly, more and more people are willing to hear what it is that we have to say, and reach for more unconventional and more radical tools to respond.”
On the other hand, non-profits and co-ops could be perceived as being progressive organisations, which, Guinan thinks, will lead to “an assault on the nonprofit sector, on charitable status, and maybe on the funders of a lot of community-based and bottom-up activity.”
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Furthermore, co-ops and community wealth-builders may find it difficult to replace the scale of resources that was available through the federal government.
“In some ways,” adds Guinan, “it is about crafting a new survival strategy that allows us fill the gap, but also bridge to future possibilities.” And this could also mean the sector will have to work together more. “We can’t afford to be bickering and squabbling and taking a competitive neoliberal approach to funding and other resources, when the need is so great and the questions of survival are increasingly existential. We are starting to see networks really pulling together.”
The US Solidarity Economy Network is one of several organisations trying to pull people together by organising a meeting in Atlanta in May.
Guinan thinks this sector of new economic thinking “is going to be all the more important, since we’re not in a redistribute and regulate environment, but rather one in which even the capacity of the state to perform some of those functions is being degraded, destroyed and demolished before our eyes”.
He adds: “The kinds of strategies, co-operators and community wealth builders and others are pursuing, which produce better economic outcomes, are going to be all the more important, because we’re not going to have the policy leverage and the redistributive state mechanisms that have been used in the past to control the excesses of capitalism and create the conditions of survival for people. So I think it necessitates that kind of activity.”
Guinan also believes that maintaining open channels of communication will enable US organisations to draw upon international support and solidarity around what’s happening.
“We’re at a very precarious moment in the USA and we don’t know how far the political changes that we’re seeing at the moment are going to call into question the continuation of democratic politics itself.”
“Part of what’s important for the US progressive and co-operative community to survive into the future is to make sure we maintain open channels of communications and we are able to draw upon international support and solidarity around what’s happening.
“Keep up the scrutiny, keep up the pressure, keep up the understanding because we don’t quite know where this is going to go but we haven’t seen anything like it, certainly that I can remember.”
Despite all the challenges faced by the sector, Guinan thinks the current situation could draw attention to models that address failures.
“Hopefully we emerge from the other side with new models and strategies that mean that we can get people the economic security that prevents the political backlash that we’re seeing against a system that hasn’t worked for Americans for many decades. Now finally the chickens are coming home to roost,” he says.
