New US watchdog briefing tracks Trump’s crisis, week by week

Keeping up with the pace of the second Trump administration has become close to a full-time job. Executive orders, court rulings, mass firings, foreign policy escalations and grassroots resistance all move faster than most newsrooms can track, let alone explain in context.

That’s the gap that Tracking the Crisis is trying to fill. Published weekly by the Democracy Collaborative (TDC), a US-based think-and-do tank focused on community wealth building and the democratic economy, in conjunction with The Nation magazine, the briefing does exactly what it says – it tracks the administrative, legislative and other actions of the US administration, alongside the legal and movement responses to them, from unions and campaigners to courts and international bodies.

TDC is candid about what it’s up against, invoking the strategy once described by Trump adviser Steve Bannon of trying to “flood the zone” with news. Tracking the Crisis exists, in effect, to work against that strategy and to hold the flood in one place, sourced and dated, so it can be understood rather than simply endured.

Recent editions have covered ground familiar to anyone following international politics from the UK, including a leadership crisis at the top of the US Army, a bond market sell-off tied to the reignited conflict with Iran, a whistleblower’s warning that the US Postal Service’s new mail-ballot system risks disenfranchising voters ahead of the midterms and a wave of protest and legal challenge, from striking nurses to the Tohono O’odham Nation’s stand against border wall construction on tribal land.

Each issue runs to several thousand words, is written by named authors rather than generated by AI, and links out extensively to original reporting – making it as useful as a research tool as it is a news digest. TDC is explicit that it doesn’t endorse everything it rounds up; the point is comprehension, not commentary.

Left Field doesn’t run much US domestic coverage day to day, but the trends that Tracking the Crisis documents – democratic backsliding, corporate power, the erosion of checks on executive authority – are very relevant to us and the movement response it tracks is exactly the kind of organising this publication exists to cover.

Tracking the Crisis is free to read at democracycollaborative.org/tracking-the-crisis, with a weekly sign-up for readers who want it delivered straight to their inbox.