Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor in San Francisco, is co-counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
March 1 was a good day. We learned that Asteroid 2022 AE1, a heavenly body large enough to do real damage and thought to hit Earth on Independence Day 2023, will miss us.
Of course, the climate apocalypse, symbolized by the meteor hurtling toward Earth in the recent pop film “Don’t Look Up,” is still before us. But if you scan the headlines from the past week, some positive light shone through, but time will tell its duration.
Internationally, in Ukraine, for the moment at least, David has Goliath stumbling.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has established himself as a global hero, inspiring resistance in his country, world-wide demonstrations, and a rebirth of the European Union as a powerful, unified force.
Autocratic leaders in Hungary and Poland, whose knee-jerk response is usually to back Russian President Vladimir Putin, have opposed the invasion. Neutral countries that usually stay silent have taken sides against Putin, Finland even contemplating aligning with NATO.
The Russians, supposedly masters of propaganda, are losing the battle for the narrative day after day. On March 1, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter lambasted Putin.
The world has unified in applying severe sanctions against Putin, and, while not likely to stop his mad and illegal assault, will soon take a deep bite out of the Russian economy and build a foundation for national opposition to the war and potentially to him. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 1 that traders will not buy Russian oil for fear they will get stuck with it.
On March 2, Russian oil, gas and bank stocks collapsed on the world market. You can’t run a war on economic fumes. Television cameras captured Russian citizens standing in impossibly long bank lines to withdraw cash.
In Washington, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection reported new activity. On March 1, it subpoenaed six Trump lawyers. That list included Cleta Mitchell, who was on Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during which Trump asked him to find 11,780 votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, and Kenneth Chesebro, who reportedly played a role in the forged electoral slates that the Trump campaign arranged to have sent to Congress for the electoral vote count.
The same day, momentum built toward Republican support in the Senate for Biden’s Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman with a stellar resume. The highly regarded Republican lawyer William Burck, who represented Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn, followed two esteemed conservative former federal judges in endorsing her nomination.
On March 1, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that it was “ unacceptable ” for fellow GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to have stood on a podium with neo-Nazi Nicholas Fuentes on Feb. 25. The day before, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had also excoriated Greene. These actions show shared American values still working in party leadership amidst the damage done to them by disinformation and political fear over the past five years.
Those shared values showed themselves again on March 1 in the unusual fact that 201 House Republicans and 221 Democrats joined together to pass the Emmett Tillett Anti-Lynching Act. Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy whom Mississippi Delta racists murdered in 1955, after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. They weighted his lifeless, beaten body and threw it in the river.
Social media companies have gotten more aggressive about hateful speech and disinformation. On March 1, Twitter suspended the account of U.S. Senate candidate Vicky Hartzler for an anti-transgender tweet attacking “men pretending to be women.” On the same day, YouTube took a similar aggressive approach by blocking channels linked to Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik.
All these are good things. It’s okay to look up.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.