"Where Were the Lawyers?"

 The bizarre episode this past week, in which the Trump administration briefly appeared to shut down all federal domestic spending, seems—increasingly—to have all come down to confusion over a comma. The incident began, we may recall, with an internal memo from the acting director of Trump's Office of Management and Budget. The memo contained one crucial—yet opaque—operative provision: it ordered everyone in the executive branch to freeze "all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by [Trump's recent] executive orders."

Read that sentence again, and tell me: does the phrase "that may be implicated by" modify the phrase "all Federal financial assistance"? The administration swore that it did. In a "clarification" issued the next day—which really only took one "from darkness to darkness," to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde—OMB insisted that the original memo had only required a pause on that assistance which was implicated by the executive orders (though no one knows what that may have been either—since there are no federal grants that go by the proscribed names of "green new deal," "transgenderism," etc.)

Saturday Night Massacre

 Trump is doubling down this week on his attempts to purge the federal workforce of nonpolitical civil servants and anyone else who doesn't embrace his personality cult. Obviously, the whole effort is disturbing. But I think the move that stands out above the rest as even more chilling than the others is his decision to revoke federal Secret Service protection for John Bolton and other former officials who are facing credible death threats from malign actors. 

This move strikes me as the creepiest of all, because it is Trump's first flirtation with outright violence against people whom he sees as dissidents. His various other moves to force out civil servants take aim at people's livelihoods, to be sure. But this is the first move he has made that seems to strike at people's lives. That is the aspect of the decision that makes it less Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre—and more Hitlerian Night of the Long Knives. 

A Joyless Experiment

 A New York Times article yesterday reminded me that one of the various schemes Kash Patel has proposed over the years—in order to punish the Justice Department for maintaining its political independence vis-a-vis Trump—is to hollow out the FBI building and turn it into a "museum of the 'deep state'." Obviously, this is absurd. But I had to think for a minute about why it struck me too as so distinctly totalitarian and creepy. Why did it all feel so eerily familiar? 

Then I remembered: of course! That scene in Eimi! In E.E. Cummings's experimental modernist travelogue of that title—which takes its author through the bowels of the 1930s Soviet Union in a manner analogous to Dante's tour of hell—Cummings recounts one episode in which he stops by the famous cathedral in Moscow. The church building has survived into the new regime, you see; but it has been repurposed. It now serves as an "anti-religious museum" to propagandize against the old faith. 

Refusal of Aid Between Nations

 Well, the second Trump administration is shaping up to be just as horrible as advertised. That certainly didn't take long. Shall we count the ways? The man's full cabinet is not even installed yet—and already, they've pardoned insurrectionists and signaled a willingness to work with the same. They've suspended the entire U.S. refugee admissions program—leaving hundreds of allies stranded in Afghanistan, for instance, who helped the U.S. war effort and had already been approved to travel. 

They've banned DEIA and tried to stir up an internal witch hunt against any government employee espousing even a disguised form of the forbidden "ideology." The "A" in DEIA—by the way—stands for "accessibility." I guess even people helping disabled veterans access benefits could be barred under the new regime? (Well, that would certainly be in character—Trump has never seen a wounded or captured soldier whom he wasn't immediately tempted to mock and disrespect.) 

A Gulf of Ignorance

 The news last week was hard to stomach. One can take one's pick of Trump's travesties from his first week back in the Oval Office—but one event stands out in my mind as emblematic of all the others. It is the fact that Trump's Interior Department really did go ahead and legally rename the Gulf of Mexico. A formal press release declares it is now known as the "Gulf of America." 

One hardly knows where to begin, with that one. There is the mindless chauvinism, obviously—mindless because, among other reasons, Mexico is as much a part of the "Americas" as we are, if it comes to that. We are operating at the mental level here of the narrator of Randy Newman's "Political Science"—except this is our actual president and our actual Interior Department speaking. 

The Ceasefire

 Over the past week, people across the political spectrum have been joining their voices to sing the praises of Trump, for the supposed diplomatic masterstroke of negotiating the short-term Gaza ceasefire. Progressives and the far "Left" lined up to declare that the pause in fighting just before the inauguration proved that Biden had never really wanted to to achieve a ceasefire deal in the first place, and that Trump was showing himself to be the true man of peace. Conservatives declared it yet another vindication of Trump's mythic "negotiating skills," his "madman theory" of diplomacy, etc. 

Everyone seems to be at one, therefore, in ignoring the obvious unsavory aspects of what's happening here. One is that, when the ceasefire deal finally came—the only thing that made the difference was that Trump finally told the Israelis he was in favor of it. Of course, he could have told them the same thing at any time over the past year and saved potentially thousands of lives. But it was in his political interest not to do so (credit due here to Matt Yglesias for the insight). The fighting made Biden look bad, so Trump had every reason to prolong it. He therefore led the Israelis to believe he would back them, until it was no longer expedient to do so.

God and Mammon

 Yesterday, Donald Trump got up before the world's business elite gathered for their annual summit at Davos, Switzerland, and told them for the hundredth time: yes, he does indeed plan to impose universal tariffs aimed at decoupling the U.S. economy from global supply chains. Alarming stuff. And yet meanwhile—over on Wall Street—the stock market ticked upward for the third day in a row. "Everything is fine; nothing to see here" seemed to be the collective takeaway. How is this possible? 

Part of what's happening here must be sheer wishful thinking. Trump keeps saying he is going to do this, but he still hasn't actually done it yet—so people will keep hoping that maybe he never will. But I can't think of any other time in financial history when merely the dim hope that someone might be slightly less bad than feared was enough on its own to actually send markets higher. So, something else must be happening here...

Remonstrations

 It's not every day that you get to see someone enact one of your personal fantasies. But yesterday, it happened. Bishop Budde of the Episcopal Church had the unique privilege of having Trump's ear as a captive audience for a morning worship service. And she did not let the opportunity go to waste. She gently but unmistakably chided Trump for the cruelty of his policies. She reminded him of all the people who are living in fear right now—LGBTQ people and immigrants especially—because of his threats. And she pleaded with him to show mercy. 

You may recall that I fantasized about exactly this moment eight years ago. Back in the fall of 2017, I was attending a DACA protest in front of the White House, when the police ushered us out to make way for the president's motorcade. When we asked why, they told us he was going to church. As I recall, it was a national day of prayer for the victims of the hurricane that September—so Trump had to put in a pro forma visit to a Protestant house of worship—Episcopalian, in this case. 

Et Tu, Rational Security?

 I was listening to last week's Rational Security episode, which contained a long-awaited segment on Trump's recent threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland/Denmark. I was looking forward to this one. Finally—I thought—people who will do justice to just how bananas these threats really are. 

But no. To a person, everyone on the show concurred in downplaying the seriousness of the threats. "I don't really understand why everyone is making such a big deal about this," they said. "I don't know why foreign leaders felt the need to issue statements. Why did France and Germany respond, etc.?" 

The Speech

 Okay, I just finished watching Trump's inauguration speech. Once again, he benefitted from low expectations. He didn't immediately ignite a civil war, after all. Indeed, by his usual rally standards (and this should tell you a lot about his usual standards) this came across as almost normal. 

To be sure, there was some right-wing bomb-throwing sprinkled throughout. He promised to end diversity and inclusion efforts in the federal workforce—on Martin Luther King Day, of all times. He declared that there were only two genders (I guess intersex people also don't exist, by MAGA's lights?)

The Enemies List

 At the stroke of 12 today, Trump takes the oath of office. Talk about darkness at noon. 

One of the things he may immediately start doing, after being sworn in, is to lay the groundwork for his long-threatened "retribution" against his various critics (many of them members of his own party and even of his own prior administration, viz. Mike Pence and Bill Barr). Many observers fear that, if Kash Patel is actually confirmed as FBI director, he may quickly work his way down his notorious "enemies list" of former officials—including former Trump administration officials—whom he regards as obstacles to Trump's personal authority. 

Year Zero

 Eight years ago, I posted a far-from ebullient "Toast for Inauguration Day 2017." It featured a quote from the poems of Anna Akhmatova that I thought was particularly apropos for the occasion of Trump's first installation as president. I drink to our demolished house,/ the poem reads, To all this wickedness/ The coarse, brutal world, the fact/ That God has not saved us. (D.M. Thomas trans.)

At the time, I hoped there would never be an occasion to quote the poem a second time—at least not on the day of a second Trump inauguration. And when Trump went on to lose the next election, it seemed we would indeed be spared that fate. Yet, eight years later, here we are. Trump Inauguration 2.0. So, I offer the same toast again—to the wickedness, the brutality, and the repeat failure of divine intervention. 

Paper Prosperity

 In the two remaining days before he becomes president once again, Trump is devoting himself to—what else?—creating yet another financial pyramid scheme by which to gull the American people. This one is so blatant that it puts even his social media meme stock craze to shame. Now, Trump has unveiled a crypto token with his blood-spattered face on it. Prices apparently took off overnight, and people were already having trouble buying the tokens by late Saturday, because demand had so far outstripped supply. 

Why do people want these digital tokens? Do they generate income? No. Are they backed by the full faith and credit of any government? No. Do they exist anywhere outside of a stream of digital zeros and ones? No. So why—then—do they have any value at all? Because people say they do. And if you can convince enough other people that they have value for long enough, they can retain or even gain in value. To that extent, the value proposition works. But—the same is true of any Ponzi or pyramid scheme. 

Another Prisoner of Chillon

 There is no shortage of things to celebrate about the fall of Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime in Syria a couple weeks ago. When it comes to things to praise about the end of a dictator's reign, you can take your pick. But surely, one of the best aspects was seeing Assad's underground dungeons at last thrown open. People who had been immured for years in these dismal caverns could finally emerge blinking into the sun and reunite with their families: a thousand real-life versions of Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon" freed from bondage. Whose heart would not swell at their long-overdue liberation? 

But our joy and relief at seeing these captives set free should be tempered with heartache: not least because our own government was in some ways complicit in their doom. On a recent episode of the podcast "Rational Security," the human rights lawyer Michel Paradis reminded us of the fate of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen whom U.S. authorities detained and deported to Syria—on false suspicions of Al-Qaeda ties—where agents of Assad's government imprisoned and tortured him for nearly a year. It was one of the worst of many gross human rights violations in the early post-9/11 era. 

The Global Order Didn't Die; It Was Murdered

 The spiritual rot of our time is nowhere so evident as in the number of people—across both parties—who are rushing to normalize Trump's threats to invade Greenland (a neo-colonial assault that would—let us recall—also constitute a direct attack on a NATO ally, and thereby trigger Article 5 against... ourselves? I don't think the designers of the treaty ever contemplated that one). 

The punditry's response to Trump's bizarre and unprovoked saber-rattling (against, I repeat, countries that are already allied to us, at least until Trump succeeds in completely and permanently poisoning those relationships) has been all-too typical. In the immediate wake of Trump's comments, people mocked those who took him seriously. "He's just kidding," they said; or "it's a negotiating tactic." 

A Poem

 They say Moses wrote the Torah

There's just one small problem

He dies part-way through it

"Well, he

"Was gifted with foresight!"

They say. But—

Hebdomads

 On this day I complete my thirty-fifth year. I wasn't really sure how to feel about 35. I suppose I am now unambiguously in my mid-thirties. Adulthood is no longer a thing that can be procrastinated. It is already here. But other than that, I didn't have any particularly strong associations with this birthday. 

33 was a bigger milestone. The year of the crucifixion. 36 is the age at which Byron died in Greece—so I have that to look forward to. But I didn't have much to work with for 35. 

Fire and Ice

 The news this week presented quite the apocalyptic split-screen. Over in California, Los Angeles is in flames. An inferno has engulfed the city, and as of this writing, it has still not been contained. The cause of the fire was complex, but it was almost certainly exacerbated by dry conditions linked to climate change. 

Meanwhile, Trump is making headlines by fantasizing about an unprovoked war of aggression to seize U.S. control of Greenland—an ice-bound Arctic island nominally controlled by Denmark. An invasion of the island would be a direct attack on a NATO member, and thereby might trigger World War III. 

Left Populism

 Ever since the Democratic loss in the 2024 election (and, really, long before), we've heard periodic calls for a revitalized left-wing populism as an antidote to the right-wing racist and nationalist populism of Donald Trump. In the most simplistic form of the argument, people point to the resentment that right-wing populists currently try to foment against immigrants and minorities. They argue that, instead of seeking to counteract or subdue these political passions outright, the Left should instead seek to channel and redirect them against the working class's "true enemies": namely, the rich, and big corporations. 

Well, in the progressive social media reaction to the murder of United Health CEO Brian Thompson, the proponents of this argument essentially got what they wanted. The politics of rage, hatred, and envy were indeed stirred up and redirected against a left-wing–approved target: the CEO of a major corporation. And the results, I fear, are not pretty. Random strangers on X and Instagram celebrated the shooting death of a defenseless man—a father of two—in a public street. They heaped schadenfreude on the victim and his family before the body was cold. 

Change Elections

 Amidst the endless attempts to explain the unthinkable results of the presidential election last November, one persistent theme keeps emerging: the Democrats, we are told, lost because they were perceived as the party of the establishment. They had become the party of the status quo. Whereas Trump, bizarrely (since he was in office just four years ago) was once again perceived as the "change candidate." And Americans love change. 

So long as the Democrats had been perceived, by contrast, as the party of radical renovation—so this argument goes—they could still win elections. Obama was able to sail to victory twice because he had a message of "hope and change." But after eight years in office, Democrats had become the Powers That Be. Innumerable people said things like: "I voted for Obama, but then everything stayed the same." Or, eight years later, they said the same thing about Biden and Harris. So, out of vengeful disappointment, they voted for Trump the next time around. 

Ill Fares the Land

 The New York Times ran a piece on Saturday about how the Democratic Party lost the support of working class voters. The story is a familiar one from recent commentary, but probably has more than a kernel of truth in it, for all that. Basically, the author's contention is that the fundamental bargain at the heart of neoliberalism didn't work. Why? Because it failed to take account of people's deeper needs.

When Democratic politicians changed tack on issues like trade protection and globalization in the Clinton era, after all—it was clear to everyone that these policies would impose some highly-concentrated costs on blue collar workers in manufacturing industries. Some would lose their jobs; others would have to see their wages and benefits slashed in order to compete with cheap, nonunion labor overseas. 

The Self-Own of Censorship

 The New York Times ran a story yesterday about some inside drama at their long-time peer in legacy media, The Washington Post. Reportedly, one of the Post's cartoonists just quit due to concerns about editorial interference. Specifically, she alleged that one of her recent cartoons was killed for being overly critical of the paper's billionaire owner (and newly-minted Trump brownnoser) Jeff Bezos. (The paper disputes this narrative of events, and says the cartoon was axed for other reasons.)

If true, this story is interesting because it illustrates quite well the self-defeating nature of censorship. After all, the satirical point of the cartoon was that Bezos, Disney, and other big corporations and billionaire CEOs are enabling Trump's authoritarian rise (the cartoon also implicitly references Disney's recent decision to settle a lawsuit with Trump). So, by practicing censorship against the cartoon, the paper isn't exactly allaying the artist's concerns that it is abetting an autocratic turn in U.S. politics. 

The Yguduhs Won

 Well, it happened. Biden axed the Nippon Steel acquisition of U.S. Steel—likely dealing a death blow to the agreement (barring a successful legal challenge). I hope this doesn't simply doom U.S. Steel and lead to even more job loss in the industry, but there is a real danger that it will. The U.S. manufacturing giant agreed to this merger in the first place, let us recall, because it is struggling to stay competitive. Its current leadership has warned that it may have to close plants entirely; whereas the Japanese company that offered to buy them has committed to keep staffing levels the same. Biden's decision to block the deal, supposedly out of a desire to preserve union jobs, therefore seems completely misguided. 

I've been complaining for weeks now about how Trump is willfully squandering our political capital with our allies abroad—threatening tariffs and trade wars with Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, and our other close neighbors and friends. I've been warning that Trump can only strain these relationships so far without damaging them irreparably. And yet, I have to say—Biden is also not helping things much when he delivers a needless slap in the face of this sort to Japan. One of the most insulting aspects of the whole situation is that the administration ended up citing "national security" grounds as an excuse to block the deal; as if Japan—a close ally and liberal democracy—posed a threat to our interests. 

The Silver Payroll

 When Donald Trump launched his Christmas Day neo-colonial tirade against Panama, one of his arguments in favor of retaking the Canal (in violation of U.S. treaties) was that thousands of Americans had ostensibly given their lives to build it. (38,000, specifically, in Trump's telling.) 

Yet, as the New York Times notes—by way of correction—in fact, the vast majority of those deaths were of workers from Latin America and the Caribbean: migrant laborers who, we can imagine, were brought in to contribute to the U.S. construction effort under less than salubrious conditions. 

Rewatching Frozen

 I can never think back to that review of Disney's Frozen I wrote on this blog more than ten years ago without wincing. It strikes me now as unbearably pretentious. And the fact that my writing has not become any less pretentious in the decade since only makes it worse. Did we really—I think with a cringe of pain—need references to Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Martin Luther in that post? 

But when we re-watched the movie this past week with my nephew and niece (the first time I had seen it in the last ten years)—I had to admit that many of the same thoughts irresistibly occurred to me again. When Elsa stamps her foot during the "Let It Go" number and cries, "Here I'll stand/ And here I'll stay," I once again felt an overpowering urge to compare it to Martin Luther's historic foot-stomp: "Here I stand; I can do no other."