I know Stonewall was active about 10 years ago in delivering a program in Kenya, with funding from what was then CIDA through an entity called the Global Equality Fund. USAID was also a GEF funder. A number of positions plus overhead would have been funded.
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‘Not helping’: Governor details Trump ‘hour-long diatribe’ after ‘off the rails meeting’
Story by Byran P. Sears, Maryland Matters
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore appears to have dismissed any possibility of working with President Donald Trump after a meeting at the White House with the National Governors Association.
In a meeting with reporters Monday, Moore said an interaction between Trump and the roughly four dozen governors in attendance ended any thoughts he may have harbored about working with the president. The first-term Democrat said Maryland and other states must rise to the threat of massive layoffs and slash-and-burn federal budgeting coming from the administration.
“I come back from Washington with no illusion about what kind of partnership that this administration is trying to forge with our nation’s governors,” Moore told reporters, “and … with a clear understanding that that if this first month is any indication of where things are going, we as lawmakers had better take this moment seriously and make sure that we’re moving forward.”
Moore said he believes that Trump’s efforts over the last month are just the beginning, noting that we are “18 days away from a government shutdown — a full federal government shutdown that this administration seems to not only be fine with, but actually seems to relish in its prospects.”
“This is going to have a massive impact on our state, massive impacts on our budgets, massive impacts on our well-being,” he said. “I have come back more determined than ever to say that it’s time for all of us to take this moment seriously. It’s time for all of us as lawmakers to be able to understand the crisis that is at hand.”
Moore said he intends to challenge Trump using his own executive orders and authority, as well as continuing to work with Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who has joined a number of lawsuits with other states aimed at blocking Trump initiatives.
Monday’s comments represent a change in direction for Moore, who signalled a willingness in November to “find common ground” with Trump where he could, but to push back when needed.
Earlier this month, Moore used his State of the State address to criticize Trump’s budget and workforce cuts as “chaos.”
By Monday, Moore was using words like “crisis” and “disheartening” and “arbitrary” to describe the encounter with Trump during the governors association meeting.
Trump last week named Moore to a bipartisan group of 10 governors tasked with strengthening state-federal relationships related to security, disaster response and military coordination.
“It was really good to be able to have a chance to express with the Cabinet secretaries … the things we want to be able to prioritize and focus on in our individual states,” Moore said. “Where the meeting went off the rails was when the president of the United States walked in. That’s when you just realized that this was not going to be a substantive conversation. This was going to be an hour-long diatribe of conspiracy theories and attacks on my colleagues. And that’s when you realize that it was when the president of the United States walked into the room that things went off the rails.”
During that meeting, Trump engaged in a tense public exchange with Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D). Trump threatened to strip her state of federal funding if Mills refused to comply with his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
“See you in court,” Mills fired back.
Moore said Trump missed an opportunity to build a working relationship with governors from around the country.
“This was the first time that the new president had a chance to be around … us and hopefully build that type of relationship,” said Moore.” I think for all of us, we were not just deeply underwhelmed, but I think we were troubled.”
Moore described Trump’s remarks to the governors as a “diatribe” chockablock with “conspiracy theories.”
“I heard grievances — personal grievances. I heard a person stand there and say that I won the election. I’m now a three-time elected president of the United States,” Moore said. “That’s not helping anybody. It’s definitely not helping any Maryland families right now.”
Moore said he was more concerned with what Trump did not address.
“I didn’t hear anything about what is being done to be able to address the rising cost of goods,” Moore said. “I didn’t hear anything about what we’re going to do to give middle class families…tax relief. And I didn’t hear anything about we’re going to increase housing inventory. I didn’t hear anything about what we’re going to do to address the cost of prescription drugs.”
Republicans in the State House said Moore has much to lose by picking a fight with Trump in public.
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Stephen S. Hershey Jr. (R-Upper Shore) said Moore’s comments add fuel to a fire started by Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s decision to maintain the city’s policies on immigrants and the attorney general’s involvement in numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Moore ramping up his public criticism is akin to biting the hand that feeds you, Hershey said. Maryland is not only home to 160,000 federal employees, but Moore also is seeking federal funding to replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the state is looking to nail down a new FBI headquarters in Greenbelt.
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The problem with that is that over the past 12 years or so, the Democrats have also become less sane and reasonable than they were before. They’ve become obsessed with divisive identitarianism, unpopular culture wars, and paralyzing proceduralism. They’ve let an out-of-touch extremely-online educated class dictate their attitudes and language, and they’ve let some of the big cities they run fall into disorder and decay. Their drubbing at the hands of Trump in 2024 was no accident.
Bit of both, really, with all the immigration 
Thought I’d try a bad joke.
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One of the biggest causes of the working class shift to Trump was his opposition to mass uncontrolled immigration.
https://x.com/narrenhut/status/1894206880165016028?s=46&t=o3XUPKxiqJH7KZYdWMCtqg
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As many of your know I’m a soccer coach here in Maine for a high school girls’ team. Trump is now threatening to cut all our funding because Gov. Janet Mills has taken the unprecedented step of checks notes complying with the law and not blindly agreeing to do everything Trump farts out of his mouth.
They’ve also launched a bullshit Title IX investigation against the state basically because there is apparently one student in the entire state who was born male and is playing in female sports.
Obviously I support the Governor and I’m glad she’s standing up for the law.
Everything Musk/Trump are threatening against Maine seems completely illegal but I’m not sure what that even means in this country anymore.
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Or said differently, one of the biggest causes of the working class shift to Trump was opposition to shit that was not happening regarding immigration and a broad lack of understanding of what administrations are required to do under law with asylum seekers, law that congress refuses to update to reflect that the immigration patterns of the past 10 years are meaningfully different than those the laws were written to address.
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Return to the Liberalism of 1992 - back when you were allowed to be gay as long as you hid it from the world.
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I’ve seen that particular video. Horrible. I do think that sports as such should be restricted to the biological sex. But that’s just me. But the way Trump went about it. Just horrible.
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That’s another reason why there was a big shift towards Trump - the inability of institutions to fix a massive problem, and progressives talking down to the working class that they have a “lack of understanding.” That last part comes up over and over again.
It’s one of life’s great paradoxes that people say they want the truth, but don’t like when you give it to them.
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Yet it was Trump who tanked the new legislation last year. That would have been first update in a generation to a critically out of date legal framework and the first ever to address the OTM issue that has so beset our system.
I agree that telling people they are stupid is probably not a winning political strategy, but I am not a politician and I am not in the business of winning your vote.
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Weird developments on Capitol Hill today - the House GOP is charging ahead with their budget, despite very few people thinking they have the votes to get it through the House and it being significantly different if not incompatible with what the Senate GOP is working on. Reconciliation is a process that is supposed to tweak the numbers to make two aligned processes fit together, not bridge a chasm. Merely the threat of that is making some House and Senate GOP votes nervous - seems self-defeating, but there are at least some people who think the Administration actually wants to see a shutdown in March.
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There are more working class people in America than college educated. Yet Democrats seem hell bent on losing them.
They believe that the Democratic Party is dominated by elites whose privileges do not serve the common good and whose cultural views are far outside the mainstream and lack common sense. They believe that educated professionals look down on them and that the professional class favors policies that give immigrants and minorities unfair advantages at their expense. They believe that educational institutions preach a set of liberal values that are out of the mainstream and that parents, not schools, should be teaching values.
From an Indian point of view, That simply kills the Nijjar case for Canada.
Look, this isn’t the truth I wanted. I wanted the truth.
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So does this mean we pretend that things that arent true are true just because voters you want think they are? And does that apply to just politicians or even to people talking on here? What actually is the point of this post?
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After Biden became president, one of his first actswas to freeze all deportations and rescind Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum-seekers attempting to cross the southern border to wait in Mexico until they secured a court hearing in America. These actions were widely panned as contributing to the subsequently record-high levelsof illegal border crossings that occurred under his presidency. …
This episode embodied the broader concerns people had about the Democrats: they didn’t take the problem seriously until it looked like it might be a political liability for them. Moreover, their clear leftward drift on immigration issues and lack of willingness to take more proactive measures to secure the southern border left the party vulnerable at a time when majorities of Americans were becoming more skeptical of immigration and looking to curb it.
If that weren’t damning enough evidence of how the Democrats lost their way on the immigration issue, the results of the 2024 election made it eminently clear that it had helped power Trump back to the Oval Office. One-in-five voters (21 percent) identified it as the top issue facing the country, and they broke overwhelmingly for Trump over Harris, 88–10. Post-election polling reinforced just how detrimental the issue had been for Democrats:
- A November 2024 Blueprint survey gauged 25 possible reasons why voters had chosen not to support Harris. Among the top 2–3 issues cited across all major demographic groups—all swing voters, swing voters who backed Trump, black voters, and even Hispanics—was the belief that “too many immigrants illegally crossed the border during the Biden-Harris administration.”
- A January New York Times poll found that Americans were highly receptive to policies that cracked down on immigration levels. This included support for deporting people who crossed the southern border illegally over the past four years (66 percent); deporting all immigrants who are here illegally and have a criminal record (88 percent); and deporting all immigrants who are here illegally, period (55 percent). Even large shares of Democrats supported deporting those that had committed crimes (83 percent) and expelling those who had illegally crossed over during the past four years (44 percent).
- A February Times poll showed that tackling illegal immigration was a top priority for Americans, and while they believed Republicans shared their concerns, they didn’t think Democrats did.