THE STATE OF THE UNION IS “GOLDEN,” Donald Trump boasted last week. He must have meant to say gilded, as in robber barons, corruption, and gaping economic inequality.
But let’s not argue. We can all agree at least on this: The state of America today is litigious.
Lawsuits are one of the only ways to hold the line against a regime bent on frog-marching our country back to the late nineteenth century—the actual Gilded Age, before women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement—or even further into the past, perhaps to the 1700s, when Edward Jenner discovered that a cowpox injection could prevent smallpox, and we were literally a nation of immigrants. Hundreds of lawsuits have been piling up since Trump’s executive-order dump on the first day of his second term.
