Good morning readers. This week’s AMA would get unruly very fast if I tried to list every big, newsworthy thing that’s happened since last time. So let’s try to categorize.
There were goings-on around inauguration per se—the sleepy ceremony, moved indoors for what seems like really embarrassing reasons, the post-inauguration rally where Elon Musk did his Nazi salute, etc.
There have been numerous executive actions, many of which have been symbolic-but-dickheaded orders and proclamations, some of which come straight out of Project 2025, some of which have already introduced chaos, and some of which are downright lawless. The whole batch seems hastily and clumsily drafted, but I do think it’s telling that they avoided doing anything like the first-term Muslim ban that would invite the opposition to mobilize nationally. The cruelest things Trump’s done so far have been diffuse and largely within bureaucracies, not at airports or meatpacking plants or wherever else. So far, at least…
Pardons and commutations are executive action of a sort, but I put the mass January 6 clemency in a different, five-alarm fire category. That’s in part because a violent, private Trump militia has been loosed on society, and in part because the action is permanent. If Trump’s decision to freeze all NIH processes, or suppress all public-health communication creates too much heat and too many problems, he can just reverse those decisions. But he can’t unpardon insurrectionists, or put the seditionists he freed back in jail. (And of course there’s no reason he’d want to.)
Generously speaking, Democrats have been backfooted and disoriented. Clearly some word has gone out from the leadership to “pivot to costs” whenever possible, presumably under the assumption that costs were the real motive force in the election, and will now be a millstone around the GOP’s neck. I think this is crazy and dumb for several reasons, but it’s the only consistency I see. Beyond that, the party seems basically leaderless, but there have been a few happy surprises mixed in there.
This was a happy surprise, too, though not from an elected Democrat.
Confirmation hearings (particularly Pete Hegseth’s) aren’t going as smoothly as Republicans hoped.
Mark Zuckerberg (this Mark Zuckerberg) has started throttling accounts that help people obtain abortion medication. (Still throttled as of this morning.)
Prior to all that, Joe Biden left office in… I don’t really know how to describe it. Denial? He put on a happy face (too happy, given the circumstances) but everything else about it screamed total demoralization. He preemptively pardoned several public servants who really did seem to be in harms way, and in some cases they probably welcomed or requested the protection. But some of them definitely did not want to be pardoned; the pardons won’t protect any of them from other forms of harassment; and without a robust communications apparatus (which the Biden White House never had) the whole thing will scan to many Americans as proof that the outgoing establishment had a bunch of stuff to hide. And that’s before we get to the preemptive pardons Biden gave to several obscure members of his family.
TikTok went dark in the U.S., and then came back online, in a planned outage designed to deliver Trump invaluable propaganda; more generally, the final days of the transition were a festival of corruption unlike any in the country’s history.
I’ll take member questions in comments and during this afternoon’s live chat. Subscribers can expect the chat invitation, around 2 p.m.
UPDATE: First live chat of the second Trump presidency, go!