Rising This Week: A milestone

All Rise News celebrates its first anniversary on Tuesday! A note of appreciation and a vision for the path ahead.

Do you feel more informed, empowered and energized than when we started?

Let’s keep rising.

When this newsletter launched last year, All Rise News championed a form of journalism that rejects despair and recognizes that people power can beat back authoritarian assaults on our democracy.

As the past year showed, that faith was warranted, and that approach was needed.

Since the first day of his second term, Donald Trump has been on a relentless campaign to use the government he controls as an instrument to enrich himself, reward his allies and bludgeon his critics. The damage cannot be minimized, and it will take generations to repair the blow to U.S. institutions, standing, and reputation. From his dismantling of USAID alone, hundreds of thousands of people have died globally, and his federal agents have killed two people on the streets of Minneapolis.

But this is also undeniable: Trump’s most brazen second-term ambitions lie in shambles.

Far from filling the jails with his enemies, Trump suffered humiliating defeats before putting the Justice Department under new leadership. The U.S. Federal Reserve remains independent. Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have been disbanded after being ruled illegal. Historic protests against him keep shattering records in their size and global reach. More of Trump’s contracts for immigration warehouses have been cancelled than completed, and that aspect of his mass deportation scheme is now on pause. Viktor Orbán, his strongman ally in Hungary, suffered a landslide defeat, even after a last-minute PR blitz from Trump and J.D. Vance to bail out the crumbling regime. Elections keep showing Trump’s Republican party losing support by the double digits, and his prospects for the midterms are looking grim.

To put a spin on an old political slogan, are you more hopeful today than you were one year ago?

If so, I hope you will keep supporting this newsletter into its second year. All Rise News celebrates its one-year anniversary on Tuesday, and we have so much more work to do together.

None of this was inevitable

If you have been a subscriber from the beginning, you learned about these events in real time, and you probably haven’t been surprised by Trump’s reversal of fortune.

You have sent me to courthouses in Georgia, Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to cover cases critically important to our democracy. You have seen Trump’s retaliatory prosecutions collapse in real time. You understand that the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James were never about candor to Congress or accuracy on mortgage applications. They were about retribution and intimidation. You recognize that the Trump Justice Department’s crusade against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Governor Lisa Cook aimed at control of the nation’s central bank, a key ambition of all budding autocrats.

You have watched these and other power grabs fall short and fall apart, including his attempt to ban birthright citizenship, unilaterally impose tariffs, seize sensitive voter data, and punish blue states with military occupation.

You know that none of these outcomes were inevitable, and all of them required the investment of time, resources and attention to pull the democratic levers of power. Institutions aren’t abstractions that preserve themselves. They require people protecting our ideals, often at great personal danger and expense.

There was a time when the Epstein Files Transparency Act was widely considered a dead letter in a Republican-controlled Congress. Press attention and organizing by survivors changed that. Who knows what else Trump’s government would have swept under the rug if people, institutions and civil society didn’t stand up?

Some media conglomerates and major law firms capitulated to Trump’s pressure to enter into settlements for tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-bono services. Those that refused to bend to extortionate litigation prevailed, and an independent and insubordinate press is growing in its power, reach and diversity.

Forget about trying to control a vast, vibrant and unruly democracy in the United States. Even using the full weight and force of the U.S. government, Trump keeps losing legal battles to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a vilified, powerless, undocumented immigrant who has been on an unbroken winning streak since being illegally abducted to a foreign gulag.

What we’ve accomplished

If All Rise News did nothing more than make readers feel more empowered, energized and encouraged, I would regard this project as a success.

One year ago, I recognized that going independent was a risk. I didn’t know whether I would be able to make a living by abandoning a steady paycheck from legacy news organizations, and I didn’t know whether I would be able to invest any of my income in the news-gathering required to continue shoe-leather reporting. With your support, I’ve been able to meet those goals and dream bigger.

In its first year, All Rise News cracked the Top 30 bestsellers on Substack in the news category, leapfrogging past newsletters that have been on this platform for years. That’s a humbling achievement: Substack has more than 50,000 revenue-earning publications. This newsletter goes out nearly every day to tens of thousands of people in every U.S. state and more than 100 countries around the world. Subscribers sent me to courthouses across the country to record history unfolding — and allow me to access the transcripts, court records, and other tools that I need to complete my work.

Through a strategic partnership with Legal AF, All Rise News regularly features professionally edited video dispatches with some of the top news-makers, including state attorneys general, U.S. senators, and everyday people who stood up to the Trump administration in court and won.

All Rise News reporting has been featured internally on scores of major news organizations — among them, CNN, the BBC, The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and an Australian documentary titled “Diabolical: The Epstein Files” that aired on that country’s esteemed “60 Minutes” program. We’re just getting started, and your continued support means more now than ever.

If you started your annual subscription last year, your continued support will help determine the longevity of this newsletter, and your decision to upgrade a membership to paid could be the push needed to upscale this editorial mission. That means more verified information from the courts, more reporting on your rights and powers in our democracy, and deeper insights into opportunities for high-impact civic engagement and peaceful protest.

Recently, I was the only reporter who attended a pretrial hearing in Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s false arrest and malicious prosecution lawsuit against disqualified former U.S. Attorney Alina Habba. Without your support, the hearing would have had no public witness. Scaling up this newsletter means more national attention to the important and overlooked cases.

That goal is now more attainable than ever.

Whether or not you can afford a paid subscription at this time, I want to take this moment to express gratitude to everyone who has followed this newsletter’s journey over the past year.

We’ve risen together.