Dear Progressive Reader,

Former President Donald Trump was indicted on Thursday by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. It is only one of several indictments that Trump may face in the coming weeks and months. Democratic Congressmember Mark Pocan took to Twitter on Thursday afternoon to state, “No one is above the law, not even a former President. That's a good thing. It means our democracy is strong.” Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence seemed to almost quote Pocan’s remarks when he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer later that evening, “no one is above the law, including former Presidents.” Pence did, however, echo the words of his Republican colleagues calling the charges a “political persecution” and an “outrage,” but he fell short of endorsing the nationwide protests urged by his former boss saying, “the harsh language on either side of this is outrageous, including [Trump’s warning that there would be ‘death and destruction’ if he were indicted],” Pence went on to tell Blitzer that “no one should be protesting” over this.

Shortly after the indictment was announced, Trump took to his platform of choice “Truth Social” to misstate to his supporters that he had been “indicated” by the New York AG. “These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican Candidate, by far, for the 2024 Nomination for President,” he wrote. Trump went on to tell his followers, in all caps, “THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE.” However, while the indictment of a former President is unprecedented in U.S. history, there was another occasion when a President was arrested—in 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was arrested in Washington, D.C., for driving his buggy too fast and endangering pedestrians. Also, as Axios points out, it is not only “Third World” countries where leaders face justice for their crimes. “In reality, leaders who left office since 2000 have been jailed or prosecuted in at least seventy-eight countries—including in democracies like France, Israel, and South Korea,” the site reports. “Since 1980, around half of the world's countries have had at least one such case, and that's not counting impeachments or coups.” Trump, in his continued quest for superlatives, was also the only U.S. President ever to be impeached twice.

This week on our website, Jeff Abbott reports on the announcement that Honduras would break diplomatic relations with Taiwan, just as the Taiwanese president travels to the region for meetings in Guatemala and Belize. Sam Stein describes a new project that brings together Jewish and Palestinian activists; Ed Rampell reviews a new documentary film on Pope Francis that opened yesterday; and Bill Blum examines the recent U.S. Supreme Court arguments about President Biden’s student-debt-relief plan. Plus V. Jo Hsu looks at Republican attacks on higher education curricula; and Ankur Singh comments on the recent testimony of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz before the U.S. Senate about his company’s anti-labor actions.

March 31 marks the ninety-fifth anniversary of the birth of Cesar Chavez. Chavez was co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, which would later become the United Farm Workers union. The story is chronicled in two films reviewed by Ed Rampell. The first, A Song for Cesar, from 2022, the second, Dolores, tells the story the co-founder of this important movement, Dolores Huerta. Today a bust of the likeness of Chavez sits in the Oval Office of President Joe Biden, and powerful images from Chavez’s April 1993 funeral are part of a collection by photographer and labor journalist David Bacon. Los Angeles writer Randy Jurado Ertll commemorated the lives of Chavez and Salvadoran Archbishop Òscar Romero (who was killed by a death squad on March 24, 1980). “But both men made a huge difference. They showed all of us how powerful we can be if we stand up for our beliefs, even if it means breaking the rules, even if it means risking our lives,” he wrote for our Progressive Perspectives project in 2014.

And, Randall Robinson, anti-Apartheid and human rights activist, passed away on March 24 at the age of eighty-one. Robinson was interviewed by The Progressive in 2005 by Amitabh Pal (the interview was quoted in obituaries in The New York Times and on NPR). In 2001, Robinson had moved to the Caribbean island of St. Kitt’s, and in the interview, Robinson explained, “I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied. . . . . Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it.” As Robinson, a strong advocate for reparations for the crime of slavery, told Pal nearly two decades ago, “We’ve got a country that never takes any responsibility for anything. It forgets its role and makes everybody else forget what happened, too. And that is not just dangerous for the victim, but also for the perpetrator.”

At 7:00 p.m. on April 10, The Progressive will host a screening of the new film Ithaka, about the imprisonment of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Assange is currently sitting in Britain's Belmarsh prison awaiting possible extradition to the United States for the WikiLeaks publication of documents showing many of the untold horrors of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The film seeks to raise awareness about the cases, and the principles of press freedom that are under threat should Assange be prosecuted for the publication of this information. The film will be shown at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, and will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Assange’s father John Shipton and film producer Gabriel Shipton, along with journalist John Nichols. Tickets are available in advance at barrymorelive.com or by calling 608-241-8864.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - The new 2023 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now available. You can order one online.

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