Grounded
Week of October 31-November 6, 2025
Welcome to TRACKING THE CRISIS, a weekly round-up from The Democracy Collaborative tracking the administrative, legislative, and other actions of the Trump Administration as well as the many forms of legal and movement response from across a broad range of social, political, and economic actors. TDC is providing this service for collective informational purposes, as a tool for understanding the times during a period of disorientingly rapid flux and change in the U.S. political economy. TDC should not be understood as endorsing or otherwise any of the specific content of the information round-up.
TRUMP TRACKER: Administration actions
Government shutdown now the longest in U.S. history as millions go without essential federal aid and services, FAA curtails flights. As of Wednesday, November 5, the government shutdown officially became the longest in U.S. history as the Senate remained deadlocked over the fate of ACA subsidies in the Republicans’ proposed spending bill. The over 750,000 federal workers idled during the shutdown were given renewed furlough notices at the beginning of November, but without the guarantee of back pay they had received in the past month, adding to their mounting financial struggles. As the November 1 deadline for SNAP benefits loomed, the Trump Administration had indicated its intention to suspend payments for 42 million people on the program. However, on Friday, October 31, two federal judges issued back-to-back rulings ordering the Trump Administration to fully fund SNAP in November, tapping into the USDA’s contingency fund to disburse benefits as soon as possible. The Trump Administration appeared to drag its feet, saying it needed more court guidance on ‘legally’ repurposing federal funds, as Trump continued to blame Democrats for the lapse. The Administration announced Monday, November 3 that it would only fund half of the usual benefits. At the same time, just days after House Speaker Johnson let slip in a CNN interview that the GOP intended to withhold SNAP funding as political leverage to force a reopening of the government, the USDA sent letters to grocery stores prohibiting the retailers from offering discounts to SNAP recipients. Critics slammed Trump for dissembling on food aid for millions of low-income families at the same time as he unveiled expensive renovations to the Lincoln Bathroom and hosted a lavish Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend. An event reportedly titled: “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.”
Trump caused further confusion on Tuesday when he angrily posted on Truth Social that SNAP benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open the government,” seemingly reversing his earlier agreement in defiance of court orders, and forcing Karoline Leavitt to undermine him when she confirmed to the press that the government will be complying with the order to disburse funds. The delay in payments has already forced millions of families to go hungry, as the partial benefit still leaves many working families without any assistance for the month. While some states have capacity to cover at least part of the gap, other SNAP recipients, particularly Tribal Nations and Black families disproportionately affected by the lapse, have had to rely on overwhelmed local food banks that have already seen extra demand in the last month from furloughed federal workers. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the Trump Administration to fund SNAP in full; the Justice Department signaled it would appeal, leading to further delays. The prolonged shutdown has also halted federal assistance for energy and heating bills for nearly 6 million families right when it is needed as cold weather sets in. And lapses in Education Department funding have now forced many schools to suspend federally-funded afterschool programs, staff development and building improvement projects. On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the FAA may be forced to close parts of U.S. airspace due to critical staffing shortages of air traffic controllers who have been working through the shutdown without pay; the FAA announced on Thursday that it will begin reducing flights by as much as 10% across 40 major airports starting Friday if the shutdown persists.
After 36 days, the shutdown’s widespread impacts have also become the most damaging in history, making millions of Americans unwilling pawns in the high-stakes political showdown between Senate Democrats and Republicans. At stake for Democratic lawmakers is the preservation of critical ACA healthcare subsidies for millions of Americans who face potentially ‘devastating’ spikes in their monthly premiums if credits are not extended. For the GOP and Trump, who said Sunday in a 60 Minutes interview that he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats holding out for a healthcare deal, the stakes of the shutdown took on a new dimension after Democrats’ sweeping state election victories on Tuesday. Pundits claim that Republicans, whom public opinion has consistently blamed most for the shutdown, have lost much ground politically and are likely to lose their majority in the midterms unless something is done. On Wednesday, Trump ramped up pressure on Republicans to ‘go nuclear’ and eliminate the filibuster entirely, which would allow them to bypass the Democrats, reopen the government and pass their spending bill on a simple majority. While some GOP Senators seemed open to the idea, others including Majority Leader John Thune pushed back on Trump’s demand, saying the filibuster was too important as a political tool to get rid of; and other GOP moderates admitted they wouldn’t have enough votes to force the rule change. Leading Democrats, who had shown signs of softening their stance as bipartisan negotiations inched forward earlier in the week, dug in further on their demands after House Democrats warned Schumer and other moderates that there would be ‘hell to pay’ if they folded on a ‘weak’ deal in the wake of Tuesday’s victories for the party. A small bipartisan group released a tentative framework for negotiation on the ACA subsidies, which represents a small step forward toward an acceptable compromise as lawmakers prepare for another vote on Friday.Global stock markets plunge in downward spiral as job losses hit 20-year high, sell-off triggered by prominent warnings about the AI bubble’s potential to induce a 1929-level crash. After months of surprisingly robust growth in financial markets that had kept investor confidence high despite Trump’s volatile economic policy turns, global stock markets began plunging this week after hedge fund manager Michael Burry, famous for his ‘Big Short’ bet that foresaw the 2008 financial crisis, disclosed that he had bought over $1 billion in put options on tech giants Nvidia and Palantir, essentially betting on the collapse of the AI bubble. NASDAQ and the S&P 500 sank even lower on Tuesday, posting their biggest one-day losses in a month after Wall Street investment giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley issued warnings that the AI bubble had become overheated and a potentially devastating correction of up to 20% was imminent. Asian markets followed on Wednesday, posting their biggest crash in seven months as concerns about tech stocks spread, driving U.S. markets even lower after Barclays issued a warning that valuation of equities had passed the “Buffett Indicator,” a signal of impending crisis. Buffett himself began cashing out on nearly $382 million of stock holdings. The head of the World Economic Forum also issued a statement Wednesday warning of three potential bubbles - AI, crypto, and debt - that posed imminent threats to the global economy. Thursday saw the sharpest downturn in global markets after a jobs report from private-sector workforce intelligence firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. found that U.S. companies announced more than 153,000 job cuts in October, a 183% increase from the same period last year and the biggest one-month wave of layoffs since 2003. Last week, amid mass layoffs from corporate giants such as Amazon, UPS, and Target, Fed chair Jerome Powell discussed the perils of the current ‘bifurcated’ economy, where a high volume of investment keeps stock markets strong, masking a weak real economy in terms of stagnating jobs, wages and consumption. The economy appears to have broken out of its ‘Great Freeze’ as the labor market took a decisive turn for the worse this week. While the government shutdown has prevented the release of official BLS data, the private-sector report shows that the U.S. labor market has shed over 1.1 million jobs in 2025 to date, with Powell noting ‘almost zero’ growth in new jobs.
Analysts attribute the recent wave of layoffs shedding jobs primarily in the tech sector to companies rushing to integrate AI in a bid to lower labor costs and generate elusive returns on the massive AI investment and infrastructure boom which, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman, has accounted for nearly all U.S. GDP growth in 2025. Capital expenditures for AI infrastructure among the ‘Magnificent Seven’ tech companies is set to reach over $375 billion this year; analysts have noted that an increasing proportion of this expenditure, especially since September, has come from borrowed funds raised through leveraged bond sales, putting increased pressure on firms to generate future revenues that have not substantially materialized to date. The price-to-earnings ratio for these companies now stands above 40%, well above the ratio reached at the peak of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. At the same time, the market as a whole has become ever more reliant on this small group of Magnificent Seven tech stocks, whose combined capitalization now accounts for over 37% of the S&P 500’s total weighting and stretching their valuations beyond their share of total earnings. Investment-grade bond sales reached an all-time record of $5.95 trillion this year, fueled by the AI boom as well as a wave of merger & acquisition deals which are also nearing record highs this year. Margin debt in the stock market as a whole hit a record $1.13 trillion in September, setting off alarm bells of an impending correction.
Outside of the AI bubble, nearly all other sectors of the economy are experiencing considerable strain as ordinary Americans struggle with an affordability crisis exacerbated by the shutdown, tariff-induced inflation, and rising job insecurity. U.S. manufacturing has contracted for eight straight months as Trump’s tariffs have constrained rather than stimulated domestic factory production. The U.S. housing market has stalled at its lowest turnover rate in decades as potential homebuyers struggle with an affordability crisis, with worker shortages and high building costs leaving the construction industry in its most protracted period of decline since the 2008 financial crisis. An international panel headed by Joseph Stiglitz released a report this week warning of an “inequality emergency”, as it found the richest 1% has captured 41% of all the wealth generated since 2000. In the United States, the top 10% of households are carrying more than half of consumer spending, as previously comfortable middle-class earners pull back due to uncertainty around job security, rent, food and healthcare costs. CNBC reported on Monday that the core middle-class consumer base has pulled back on discretionary spending by as much as 40% due to economic uncertainty, and Fortune reported this week that the percentage of American consumers taking out risky subprime loans has climbed to its highest peak in a decade, a clear sign of growing financial distress. Auto loans are seeing record levels of default, with the number of repossessed vehicles reaching a 14-year high. Wired traces the contours and potential consequences of the looming bust in AI; and the Economist’s charts show that up to 8% of average U.S, household wealth could be wiped out by a generalized market correction.Supreme Court takes up tariffs case in test of Trump’s executive power over economic policy. On Wednesday, November 5, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in a key set of cases that will test the limits of Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to bypass Congress and unilaterally impose tariffs on over 100 countries, which he has wielded over the past several months as his signature foreign policy tool. In a rare departure from previous cases where the conservative majority largely lined up to support Trump’s position, this time several conservative justices joined the liberal dissenters. Expresses was their deep skepticism of the Trump Administration’s argument, presented by U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, that the IEEPA’s text granting the President emergency powers to “regulate importation” extended to his ability to impose tariffs at will. Most justices noted that Trump’s use of tariffs, which would ultimately be absorbed by domestic consumers, amounted to a ‘tax’ on U.S. citizens, which only Congress has the power to authorize. Sauer rebutted by attempting to argue that Trump’s tariffs were strictly ‘regulatory’ and ‘not revenue-raising tariffs’, and that revenue generated was merely incidental. It did not appear to hold much water given the many statements Trump has made boasting of the money raised from the tariffs. Justice Gorsuch appeared most concerned about the separation of powers, noting that giving away one of Congress’s core authorities would be difficult to take back, resulting in a “one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch.” Chief Justice John Roberts was inclined to apply the Court’s ‘major questions’ doctrine to the case; the Court used it to strike down some of Biden’s executive orders and could be used against Trump since IEEPA does not explicitly include the word ‘tariff’. Judge Jackson Brown pointed out that the 1977 law was implemented by Congress explicitly to narrow, not broaden, emergency presidential powers. The three Trump-appointed judges - Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett - appeared open to alternative interpretations such as ‘licensing fees’ to preserve parts of Trump’s current tariff scheme. Politico notes how the case puts the conservative justices in a bind between two pillars of conservative ideology that have now come into conflict: deference to the President on foreign affairs versus a laissez-faire approach to commerce. The Court did not set a date for its ruling, which casts some uncertainty over upcoming negotiations with China and other trade partners.
Trump escalates Venezuela ‘drug war’ standoff, threatens military intervention in Mexico and Nigeria. Trump stepped up his aggressive ‘gunboat diplomacy’ campaign against countries of the Global South this week, expanding the massive U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean. The military re-opened and began upgrading a long-abandoned naval base in Puerto Rico to serve as a staging ground for attacks against ‘narcoterrorists’ in Venezuela and possibly other Latin American countries. Reuters obtained satellite images and other visual evidence of the sheer scale of the buildout, which includes several warships, advanced weaponry, air power including several F-35 fighter jets, and landing base facilities in Puerto Rico and nearby St. Croix with the capability of supporting 10,000 troops and expanded airstrikes in Venezuela. On Tuesday, November 4, the day after a 60-day time window allowing congressionally unauthorized ‘hostilities’ expired, Secretary Hegseth announced that the military conducted a strike on another alleged ‘drug boat’ in the eastern Pacific - the 16th such strike since early September. It brings the total death toll to 66 people. The Justice Department continued to insist that the Congressional War Powers Resolution is not applicable in the case of the boat strikes, even as a consensus is emerging among experts that the strikes are illegal and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk condemned the killings as a violation of international law.
The New York Times also reported on how Venezuela is preparing to respond to a possible incursion, utilizing an ‘unusual arsenal’ of weapons, planes and equipment from Iran, China, and Russia, as well as mobilizing one of the largest standing armies in the region along with specialized militias trained for guerilla defense. Semafor reports that major investors are eyeing “major opportunities” that could be realized after a possible ouster of Maduro, as Trump Administration officials have developed a ‘range of options’ for military action within Venezuela, including direct attacks on Maduro’s personal guard and seizing oil fields. Hegseth and Rubio conducted briefings with a bipartisan group of Senators that left leading Democrats with “more questions than answers”; Chuck Schumer has requested a briefing involving the entire Senate before considering any authorization votes. Leading Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are reportedly pressing to call for testimony from Admiral Alvin Holsey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command who abruptly resigned his position shortly after Hegseth began conducting the boat strikes; although several retired and/or ousted senior military officers are reportedly reluctant to speak out in fear that Hegseth will use an obscure military law that allows officers to be court-martialed for ‘contemptuous’ statements against the president or administration officials.NBC News reported on Monday, November 3 that the Trump Administration has begun detailed planning for a secretive mission that would reportedly send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to conduct drone strikes and ‘ground operations’ against drug cartels. Personnel involved in the mission would be authorized as ‘covert intelligence operators’ under U.S. Code and would open a new front in Trump’s campaign of ‘non-international armed conflict’ against drug cartels. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum dismissed the reports, saying such an operation “will not happen” on Mexican soil, and she “will not agree to it.” In Nigeria, citizens reacted with a mixture of confusion and fear over the weekend after Trump leveled threats to stop all aid to the country and prepare the military to “go in guns a-blazing” in order to stop the alleged killing of “very large numbers” of Christians he claimed was taking place under the Nigerian government’s watch. The Nigerian government, which has not had a formal diplomatic presence in Washington for the last two years, was reportedly caught off-guard by the threats. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu responded to Trump with a statement asserting that “religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity” and “Nigeria is a country with constitutional guarantees to protect citizens of all faiths.” Nigeria’s information minister suggested that Trump’s narrative of Christian mass killings appears to be based on ‘misinformation and faulty data’. Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton traces the origins of the ‘Christian genocide’ narrative to conspiracy theories circulating among far-right white evangelical and Christian nationalist circles in the U.S., including figures close to Trump such as Ted Cruz, Pete Hegseth, and Laura Loomer, who had apparently posted about the issue the day before Trump made his threat. CNN reports that Trump had apparently been set off by a Fox News segment he saw while traveling to Florida for the weekend. A press representative for President Tinubu explained that while Nigerians have suffered attacks from the Islamic fundamentalist group Boko Haram in recent years, accounts of a “Christian genocide” are “a gross exaggeration of the Nigerian situation,” adding that “Christians, Muslims, churches and mosques are attacked randomly”.
MOVEMENT TRACKER
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani sails to victory in New York City on record voter turnout, sending a message to Trump and the Democratic establishment. On Tuesday, November 4, Zohran Mamdani secured a decisive victory over Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, clearing 50% of the vote to be elected New York City’s 111th mayor. 34-year-old Mamdani is also New York City’s first Muslim and South Asian to be elected to the office, and its youngest mayor in over a century. Virtually unknown just nine months ago, Mamdani and New York City’s DSA chapter built a remarkable grassroots campaign that began as an experiment in focused messaging around affordable housing; and by Election Day had swelled into a 100,000-strong volunteer-powered juggernaut that the Guardian characterized as the “greatest field operation by any political campaign in New York history.” Commentators have focused on the various factors that contributed to the campaign’s success, including a masterful social media strategy that tapped into the enthusiasm of youth fan culture, support from public funding through New York’s clean-money elections system, the communal nature of the campaign’s “kitchen table” organizing strategy that brought a sense of connection and purpose to lonely, disaffected Gen Z youth, being unapologetically anti-establishment and projecting moral courage in the face of threats and accusations, eschewing conventional ‘wisdom’ about ‘voters’ in favor of thoughtful, sincere engagement that brought new voters to the polls in historic numbers; and, above all, the campaign’s relentless focus on addressing the affordability crisis and articulating radical yet entirely practical and sensible solutions to better the lives of working-class New Yorkers. Soon after the election, Mamdani announced an all-female transition team headed by former FTC commissioner and antitrust advocate Lina Khan. Left parties across Europe are hailing Mamdani’s victory as a hopeful bellwether for an unapologetically progressive/socialist politics as an effective counter to the global surge of the far right, even as his incoming administration continues to face a host of threats from capital strikes to the fury of Trump and his MAGA adherents.
Democrats sweep state and local elections in off-year contests seen as a referendum on the Trump regime. Elections held across the U.S. on Tuesday, November 4 marked the first major electoral test of Trump’s second term; and voters appeared to deliver a definitive rebuke of the Trump/MAGA agenda, electing Democrats to major seats in New York, New Jersey and Virginia by double-digit margins. In addition to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in NYC, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race by a 15-point margin as fellow Democrats swept all other statewide downballot races, and New Jersey’s former Rep. Mikie Sherill beat her Republican challenger for the gubernatorial seat by 13 points. In California, Governor Newsom’s retaliatory gerrymandering effort, Prop 50, nearly won a supermajority with 64% of the vote. The Trump resistance also racked up victories in a host of smaller races, including: Bucks County, PA voters ousting a Republican sheriff who collaborated with ICE; a progressive slate won all three open seats in a Texas school board race, ousting members who had voted to censor books; two Democratic utility regulator candidates in Georgia won seats on the statewide Public Service Commission for the first time since 2007; in the Mississippi state legislature, Democrats flipped three seats to break a Republican supermajority for the first time in 13 years; Maine voters rejected a Voter ID ballot initiative by over 60%; in Colorado, voters approved a pair of statewide ballot initiatives that will raise taxes on the wealthy to fund free school meals and supplement the state’s SNAP program; and embattled Boston sanctuary city mayor Michelle Wu sailed to re-election and secured a City Council majority with whom she can pursue ambitious plans for climate and housing policy in the city.
According to AP’s exit polls, voters’ economic concerns over the cost of living were crucial to this year’s ‘blue wave’; and while both governors-elect Spanberger and Sherill are more moderate than Mamdani, both also ran strong campaigns focused on an affordability agenda. In all three states, exit poll data suggests that voters both increased turnout and swung to the left as candidates flipped enough voters to comfortably beat Kamala Harris’ share of the 2024 vote in the same area. GOP pollster Scott Luntz noted that Spanberger flipped every county in Virginia that went for Trump in 2024, and in Passaic County, Sherill won back a significant portion of Latino voters who had clipped for Trump. Democratic candidates also flipped red districts in local races across the country, sending a message of economic discontent to the GOP and Trump. Both Mamdani and California’s Prop 50 ballot initiative made big inroads with Black and Latino working-class voters that had gone for Trump. Trump himself railed at the results, threatening California’s mail-in ballot system and attributing the losses to the absence of his name on the ballot. While it is clear that anti-Trumpism clearly carried the day, Democrats will still face an internal reckoning between its centrist and progressive/democratic socialist factions on which message will best represent the party going into midterms, though voters clearly embraced a fresh, more confrontational approach to opposing the Trump regime. On the other hand, Republicans ‘shaken’ by the results find themselves split on both strategy and tactics as they lay blame and search for ways to turn the 2026 contest in their favor; Steve Bannon apparently felt the urgency as he admitted to his fellow party members that “If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included.”This week in community defense. On Friday, November 7, a federal judge permanently blocked the Trump Administration, DHS, and the Pentagon from sending the National Guard into Portland. U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, ruled in a 106-page opinion that she found “no credible evidence” of a ‘rebellion or threat of rebellion’ in the city prior to Trump’s decision to deploy troops, and that the Administration’s rationale failed to meet the sufficient legal requirements for federal intervention. ProPublica details the events at Portland’s nightly ICE protests up until the deployment, finding that only three people had been detained on charges over the course of one hundred days. Oregon’s Attorney General praised the courts for “holding this administration accountable to the truth and the rule of law.” The decision keeps the state National Guard permanently under the governor’s control and bars Trump from sending any other federalized Guard units into the city. In Chicago, Reuters profiles the remarkable ‘zone defense’ system that has been built, block-by-block, throughout the city by tens of thousands of Chicago residents over months of daily mobilizations against ICE. On Thursday, a federal judge in Chicago issued an extensive injunction restricting federal agents’ use of force against protestors, stating that Border Patrol official Greg Bovino lied about his own use of force after video evidence of certain incidents contradicted his statements. CNN profiles several Chicago residents who have been violently treated or detained by federal agents; a judge on Tuesday heard testimony from several ex-detainees who described inhumane conditions, including overcrowded cells and overflowing toilets, inside a Chicago-area building being used as an ICE detention center. Pope Leo XIV called for “deep reflection” in the U.S. about the treatment of migrants held in detention, saying “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what is going on right now.”
Mutual aid for SNAP recipients. Local mutual aid initiatives continue to proliferate in cities and towns across the country as millions face food insecurity due to SNAP delays during the shutdown. In Los Angeles, fresh off his own recent run-in with the Trump Administration, late night host Jimmy Kimmel is leading fellow celebrities in establishing a food bank at his show’s Hollywood studio. The efforts of a Pittsburgh man who set up a food pantry in his front yard have gone viral as TikTok viewers pitched in to donate money and goods to his effort. Go Magazine profiles the NYC-based Okra Project, a mutual aid organization supporting Black transgender people through meals, funding, and therapy resources; NYC residents can also use the Fridge Finder website to locate dozens of community fridges that have been installed throughout the five boroughs. Next City covers several mutual aid groups in Kentucky that have organized to fill in critical gaps in services exacerbated by the shutdown. Furloughed CDC workers in Atlanta have organized a mutual aid hub to help fellow feds in need of help during the shutdown. In Oregon and Washington, public agencies, nonprofits, and community organizations are coming together to pool resources and rapidly build a scaled-up mutual aid network to help the over 1 million people going without SNAP in the two states. The Tuscon, AZ City Council voted to drop its permit requirement for distributing food in city parks after various groups set up and maintained unauthorized mutual aid distributions. The LA Times reports on the ‘small army’ of over 1,600 historians, librarians and volunteers who have been visiting national parks and museums throughout the country, racing against time and the Trump Administration to document and preserve as many exhibits as possible before the Trump Administration completes its ‘whitewashing’ of U.S. history at the Smithsonian and other federal properties.
Upcoming Protests.
Sunday, November 9: Black Rose Anarchist Federation will be holding an online webinar and training session on How to Keep ICE Out of Your Workplace. More information and a Zoom registration link can be found on their website.
Monday, November 10: Activists at UC Berkeley are calling for the community to protest the return of Turning Point USA to the Berkeley campus as part of its national tour, scheduled for 5pm at Zellerbach Hall. More information can be found on Indybay.
November 20 - 22: The Removal Coalition is hosting a three-day event and action in Washington DC to lobby Congress en masse for the impeachment of Donald Trump.
November 25 - December 2: Blackout The System has called for a nationwide economic boycottscheduled around the Thanksgiving holiday and extending through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The initiative aims to become the most significant economic blackout in recent history; participants are encouraged to refrain from working or spending money, and organize for the action in advance by joining the pressure campaign, sticker teams, or building power in the local community. More information on the action and ongoing campaign can be found at BlackoutTheSystem.com.
