Well, that was weird, wasn’t it? The first week of the new Trump Administration really popped off. I have thoughts.
Immigration, pardons, tariffs, and Nazi salutes.
The first 24 hours of the new Trump Administration were truly a whirlwind, and I don’t think most people were ready for it. They certainly weren’t ready for this:
Remember when Kamala’s Campaign kept calling Trump’s team “weird” and it was really effective and then they just stopped? Fun times. But yeah, Elon went full Nazi on Trump’s first official day in Office. Wild and WEIRD.
And I have to say: As a proud Volkswagen owner, I am glad the CEO of Tesla is throwing around the Nazi symbols now; it takes the heat off of us for a while. But that thing really did happen and then other things continued to go downhill.
Before we get into all the stuff Trump did in his opening week, let me start off with this: Calma. I have had several people message, email, and text me in varying degrees of panic. You have four years1 of this, so it’s best to buckle up. It is going to get much worse and then we are going to find out about even more crazy things that happened behind the scenes years after Trump leaves office.2 If you don’t pace yourself, you are going to lose your mind.
There are going to be things that are substantive that you should get mad about and then there are things without substance that are specifically designed to get you angry. This is where I want to bring up Elmo’s Nazi salute:
Did he really do a Nazi salute? Yes.
Did he mean to do a Nazi salute? Yes.
Did he mostly do it just to get a reaction? Yes.3
I do not think the businessman Elon Musk is an actual Nazi,4 which has generally been bad for business since 1945. But he does love attention and he loves to see liberals get angry, so he thought of the easiest way to do that and his mind went to, “I’ll do a Hitler salute!” And it worked: People are angry and scared, which is what Musk wanted. Will it have a negative effect on his car sales? I would imagine so, but that’s also been happening on its own.
Rather than heavily focusing on Musk’s brain problems, the substantive critique of what is happening is that he is a billionaire and Donald Trump’s largest political donor. He owns one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and has fine-tuned it to be overtly pro-Trump. He has direct access to the White House and works in the Administration (with his own office!). He also has several government contracts, which is an obvious conflict of interest. If this were happening in the Biden White House, Republicans would be screaming about corruption! They previously lost their minds about the Biden Administration sending emails to Mark Zuckerberg to try and get Facebook to take down anti-vaccine content. This is infinitely worse! That should be the focus of the criticism, rather than falling for Musk’s (pretty obvious) trolling.
OK, but the Administration is trying to get rid of birthright citizenship!
Again, like the Musk Nazi salute, I have to say calma. For one, it took about six whole minutes for Trump’s executive order to get struck down. Moreover, the (Ronald Reagan-appointed) judge who issued the decision savaged the Trump Administration and called the order blatantly unconstitutional.
I will do a longer post about birthright citizenship, but the judge is right. The drafters of the 14th Amendment knew exactly what birthright citizenship meant and what it would do at the time. It is not a mystery, and there is no serious legal debate about what it means. And, Trump’s order will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court and get struck down.5
You can recognize Trump’s actions for what they are (odious) and also recognize that he is not operating without a formidable resistance. In addition, some of the things he’s doing now were actually being done under the Biden Administration. This has even tricked a few conservatives:
BOOM! 308 arrests of undocumented immigrants is…below the daily average arrests during the Biden Administration, which was 310. They are merely celebrating ICE continuing to do their job.
Earlier this week there was a major MAGA celebration over an ICE raid conducted in Massachusetts that resulted in multiple arrests. Likewise, there was a liberal freakout about ICE potentially targeting a vulnerable community.
But ICE does raids all the time, and did a huge chunk in Boston last year under the Biden Administration. In fact, the one currently being celebrated by MAGA people was probably organized under the Biden Administration.
So, keep that in mind when you see MAGA celebrating (or liberals freaking out) about some new initiative that they believe started recently. It likely is just a continuation of policies that have been in place for a while.
Fine, but Trump is still doing real damage.
There was a Jackal saying throughout Trump’s first term: “Never lose the capacity for outrage just because the Trump Administration is outrageous.” It is OK to get angry about things.
But you also have limited time and emotional bandwidth. Not everything is worth freaking out over. I have gotten texts about Google search results changing things, Apple reverting back to old names for mountains, and the Gulf of America being added to Wikipedia. None of it is true, but all of it is designed to freak you out and exhaust you. Again: Calma. You can join The Resistance,™ but you can also try to be joyful about it.6
A thing that has given me joy over the past week is watching Trump people defend Musk’s Nazi salute. People actually believe that Musk meant, “My heart goes out to you,” when he did his obvious Hitler salute. To be clear, even Neo-Nazis (whose average IQ is somewhere around 19) could see it for what it was, which means Musk’s defenders have embarrassed themselves more than the incels posting from the bathroom stall of an Arby’s in rural Missouri. It is OK to laugh at that.
Trump’s actions are going to cause people a lot of pain, but the pain felt goes in this order:
Vulnerable people directly affected by Trump’s actions (immigrants, refugees, and the poor).
Trump’s supporters.
Everyone else.
Trump supporters forgot about this the first time around: His Presidency was a miserable four years for them. They had to defend all of his nuttiest actions, because that is what happens when you join a cult.
You see, it wasn’t really a Muslim ban, because it didn’t say Muslim in the wording.
You see, he wasn’t referring to all the Neo-Nazis when he said there were “good people on both sides,” just the Neo-Nazis who were protesting the removal of a statue.
You see, he wasn’t trying to blackmail Ukraine into starting an investigation into Joe Biden; he was trying to extort them into doing it, which is not as bad.
You see, it was ANTIFA who secretly dressed up as Trump supporters and stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the Election…because they wanted Joe Biden to be President. So they tried to secretly keep him from being President. This makes perfect sense. Why are you measuring my head?
All of this makes them look silly, and deep down they know it and hate it.
Years later, they are still triggered by the Russia investigation, which probably would have been over in five minutes if Trump had just said, “Yes, my Campaign had multiple contacts with Russian intelligence and accepted their assistance in the Election, but in our defense we were inexperienced at the time and did not understand that some of the actions may have been illegal. Next time we will be more careful.”
Instead, we got a nearly four-year investigation and lots of whining from both Trump and his supporters. They are going to hate defending Trump every day, probably even more than you hate reading your push notifications from the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN.
Sit back and let them fail.
Obviously, maybe Trump’s most horrific action was his (essentially) blanket pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists. People who assaulted cops with flagpoles, tasers, and bear spray are all walking free thanks to Trump. Back the Blue.7
Trump probably doesn’t realize it, but this will be a defining moment of his Presidency and will likely tarnish him forever. I ultimately suspect that Trump is going to do other things that will lead to his second term being viewed as a failure, but this alone cements him as the worst president to occupy the office. For the first time in our history, a president who lost an election refused to engage in the peaceful transition of power, and then later pardoned the people responsible for that lack of peace. Horrible.
I think people across the political spectrum are focused on how Trump won the election when they should be focused on why Trump won the election.
How: He built a coalition of MAGA supporters (who would not turn on him even if he shot a person on 5th Avenue) and traditional Republicans who will not vote for Democrats.
Why: He picked up support from low-propensity voters who were angry about inflation and blamed the Biden Administration.
Trump won the election by 1.5%. The margins in some of the swing states was even less than that. It was not a resounding victory, so you can bet that the why voters did not sign up for January 6th pardons or the end of birthright citizenship. They certainly didn’t sign up for one of Trump’s nominees saying they were going to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They didn’t even sign up for the end of DEI initiatives!
They signed up for cheaper eggs. And when it becomes clear that Trump will not be able to deliver on those promises, those voters will either turn on him outright or stay home in 2026.
So, I want this to penetrate your brain so that you can remember it the next time a push notification gives you anxiety: He has less than two years before he is a lame duck (and likely gets impeached again). Yes, he will do damage and his Administration is going to hurt people. But he arguably just had the worst opening week in Presidential history, and it’s not even over yet. Political gravity is still a thing.
One day he will go back to the Shadow, even if we couldn’t send him there ourselves. Yes, it is all downhill from here, but we have the tools to stay alive.
I’ll do a long post on birthright citizenship in the Spirit of Calma.™ Until then, take care of yourselves.
This assumes Trump doesn’t die in office.
🙏
I appreciate that even some conservative podcast bros were like, “OK, Republicans cannot defend this,” but they also cited to Musk’s (alleged) Asperger’s diagnosis as an excuse. I personally don’t buy it.
Some writers make the case that he is, although I am personally convinced by the more benign explanations (he is a troll who doesn’t understand social cues). However, let’s put a pin in this and revisit if the duck starts walking and talking as opposed to just strolling and mumbling.
Reserving space for a, “I don’t know what this SCOTUS will do,” post, but it is hard to see 5 votes for it. There is even a possibility it is unanimous.
You also do not have to engage in “silent agreement” during Trump 2.0. It is not divisive to like a social media post that criticizes Trump for going after refugees.
A final criticism of Joe Biden: His commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence is really unforgivable. Peltier’s innocence has been irrationally argued for years by progressive activities and it is sad that Biden gave in. And it is doubly frustrating because it neuters some of the arguments people have against Trump’s pardons of the January 6th rioters.