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Sunday Morning Wrap Up by Joyce Vance
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This week, as I noted last night when I wrote to you, a lot was going on. Really, too much, which seems to be a definite feature and not a bug of this second Trump administration. They don’t want us to be able to take in everything that’s going on. So I’m starting a Sunday morning wrap-up feature to help you keep up with anything you may have missed during the week.

• I’m going to cheat by a day and start with the column from Saturday, August 2nd, It’s 1984, which is the perfect lead in for starting the conversation about our Book Club book, George Orwell’s 1984, now that we’ve had some time to start reading. If you haven’t started, we’ll have a Substack Live discussion about it later this week, so now is a great time to get started. In the column, following Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Ericka McEntarfer because he didn’t like the jobs numbers, I wrote, “In the novel 1984, facts are not a barrier. Rewriting history is a central tenet of the totalitarian regime, carried out by the Ministry of Truth.” We need to take note as this becomes a feature of the Trump administration. We live in a post-truth society now.

• In The Week Ahead last Sunday, we kicked off a conversation about the Voting Rights Act, which had its 60th anniversary last week. The irony of the Supreme Court’s announcement late on the Friday night ahead of that anniversary, that it would hear a case with an issue designed to gut much of what remains of it, was far too measured to be coincidence. Here’s your essential refresher on the Act, and the way the Supreme Court has eroded it. Most importantly, this is not hopeless! Electing majorities in the Senate and the House at the midterms would almost certainly make restoring the Act, which the Supreme Court invited Congress to do, a top priority. We took that issue up in conversations later in the week, which you’ll want to see if you missed them during the week.
• On Monday, Marc Elias and I discussed the Voting Rights Act. There is no sugar coating here, but realism about where we are, and also what the path forward could look like if we don’t give up.
• There’s no nice way to put it. I’m heartsick about what’s happening at DOJ and the FBI. Discussed in this post, Desecrating DOJ. Pam Bondi is proving to be exactly the Attorney General we expected—someone with loyalty to Donald Trump instead of to the Constitution. But even here, there are guardrails—even if DOJ tries to indict its revenge cases, grand juries may refuse to go along. If they indict, trial judges and juries must be persuaded of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Make sure you read this piece to the end, because part of Trump’s shtick is persuading people to give up because he’s already won, already taken the system apart, and he has not. There is still some play in the joints, and every reason for us to persist.
• We had no chicken pictures this week, but the Turkeys that were roaming around in the woods while I finished proofreading my book were pretty engaging. I appreciated all the people who wrote to tell me this was a pack of males roaming around in the pre-mating season. The things you can learn here at Civil Discourse!
• If you missed my conversation with Alabama Congressman Shomari Figures, do yourself a favor and go listen now. Shomari was elected out of Alabama 2, the new district created last term after the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s legislature engaged in racial discrimination when it drew new maps after the decennial census and ordered them redrawn. I’m a little biased here, Shomari was my Obama-era colleague working on criminal justice reform and other issues, and his parents are civil rights icons in Alabama, but he makes you feel proud to be a Democrat. This is a conversation filled with hope but tempered with realism. Shomari is part of the new generation of leaders we need.
• This week’s Five Questions column featured Maine’s Secretary of State (and gubernatorial candidate) Shenna Bellows, who recently told the administration to “Go Jump in the Gulf of Maine,” when it asked her to give them information on Maine’s voters. This is someone who knows what it takes to run an election, but in addition to being smart, she also reminds us that elections are about us and about grassroots American patriotism. We’ll follow up with a Substack Live with her soon.
• Finally, last night’s, A Tough Week for the Rule of Law, catches us up on more of the difficult legal news from last week. “In order to resist what Trump is doing in our country, you need to be informed; you need to know what’s at stake.” It can be awfully tempting to look away right now, but don’t. This is our generation’s fight for democracy, and this week confirmed my sense that I landed on the right title for my book, when I called it “Giving Up is Unforgivable.” Get mad. Get angry. Feel the sadness of the moment. But don’t give up.

I hope you’ll use the week’s posts to stay up to speed and that you’ll share them widely—it’s going to take every last one of us to reset guardrails in Congress in the 2026 election. There will be nothing more important, and the time to start educating people around you is now. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse, as we take on the challenges ahead!

We’re in this together,

Joyce