First of all for today, this handy timeline.
NY Times, updated 9 Feb 2025: All of the Trump Administration’s Major Moves in the First 20 Days
I assume this will continue to be updated daily. The top of the page has buttons to filter by category, and by type of action or announcement.
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Here’s a fun imagine floating around on Facebook.
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Here’s another item being passed around on Facebook. I’ll quote some, but here’s a link to the full piece.
Facebook, We the People Under Siege, 16 Jan 2025: Written by the highly respected Canadian journalist, Andrew Coyne
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rap.ist and serial sex.ual preda.tor, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Pvtin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trvmp and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
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And here’s another image from Facebook.
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Just as Trump fired Inspectors Generals who had investigated *him*, now he’s shutting down the agency fighting financial abuse. Do his fans not realize what’s going on?? How is this not obvious??
CNN, 9 Feb 2025: Consumer watchdog ordered to stop fighting financial abuse and to work from home as HQ temporarily shuts down
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The essence of conservative selfish, short-term, irresponsible thinking.
Washing Post, Cass R. Sunstein, 5 Feb 2025: The high price of scrapping the social cost of carbon, subtitled “On climate policy, the new administration is entitled to recalculate this metric — but it cannot act arbitrarily.”
(Sunstein is the author of numerous books, including Nudge with Richard H. Thaler.)
With the deluge of executive orders in the initial weeks of the second Trump administration, an important directive flew under the radar. It requires the federal government to consider abandoning “the social cost of carbon,” potentially undercutting all climate policymaking.
That is a technical way of signaling something simple and false: Climate change is not real. If the social cost of carbon is treated as zero, then greenhouse gas emissions inflict no damage. Regulations that reduce those emissions have no benefits, which suggests that those regulations should be eliminated.
The social cost of carbon has often been described as the most important number you’ve never heard of. The metric is meant to capture the harm caused by a ton of carbon emissions, making it a foundation of national climate change policy. A lower value would justify weaker regulations, while a higher one would warrant more aggressive policies.
This is one of those long-term costs that you’d think a government, especially if run like a business, would keep track of. Unless the government/business realizes it’s going to be around for only four years.
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Many of us understand ‘populism’ much better than populists understand anyone besides themselves.
NY Times, David French, 9 Feb 2025: The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease
Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.
I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”
I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.
If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the “man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.
Because the populists do not read books or watch documentaries or listen to podcasts. They listen to each other, in town halls, at bars, in churches.
And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.
So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.
And that’s exactly where we are today.
French goes about the rural South, Andrew Jackson, the Farmers’ Alliance, and so on. Long piece. A few more bits:
In fact, populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.
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Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. Lots of people have lived rather messy lives, and they can see themselves in the politician who doesn’t hide his warts — and sometimes even in the politician who revels in his transgressions.They’re seen as real, while even the most honest politician can seem fake for coming across as too polished.
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If you watch populist media or listen to populist politicians, there is very little ambiguity or nuance. Stories are mapped out in terms of good versus evil (or friend versus enemy). “They” are always wrong. “They” are worse than wrong — “they” are callous, uncaring, even evil.A well-informed population is less vulnerable to the demagogue. Even if informed voters are not political obsessives, they’re aware enough of the limits of the president’s power to know that he or she can’t truly fix anything alone. If they’re even somewhat aware of the complexity of the economy, or of health care, or of foreign policy, they know that the political savior narrative is suspect.
