Open thread on Trump

Looking at the first few executive orders, this will be bad, but also once more perhaps not quite as bad as it could be if they were more competent.

Two thoughts occur to me today.

The next few years will be quite frustrating on social media, as large numbers of liberal/centrist Americans greet every new outrage with some variant of “that is illegal”, “this will be struck down by the courts”, or “they can’t do that, it goes against the constitution”. I have seen one post on BlueSky purporting to explain to immigrants that they don’t have to open the door to ICE agents if they only have an administrative warrant, no matter what the agents claim.

I am begging liberals to understand that the law and constitution are what the armed uniformed guy with the power to punch your teeth out thinks they are, especially if a judge appointed by an authoritarian strongman backs him up. (Also, when my high school history teacher told us the Weimar Republic failed because of its weak institutions, and the same could never happen in the USA because of its well-designed Checks And Balances, he lied, including to himself.) It really doesn’t matter what rights you have on paper or how well designed your institutions are if parliament, the executive, the judiciary, the police, and the press all fall in line behind the strongman. If 40% of your countrymen want the rule of law gone, the rule of law is gone. You have to accept that instead of being surprised by the obvious every new day.

The second revolves around seeing (1) the quality of the executive orders even at the level of writing, (2) the new doge dot gov website (“An official website of the United States government”), which alternatively appears to show the DOGE meme dog or a bad AI-generated image of a happy dog or fox or hybrid of the two, (3) the many social media posts to the effect of you lost get over it, I drink your liberal tears, are you triggered, etc., and (4) my memory of, again, high school, when a bunch of adolescent boys decided to systematically vote for the least suitable classmates as class representatives, because it was such a lark. This ensured that we did not have competent and interested representation of our interests, but well, it was only a class rep who didn’t have access to the launch codes or the power to deport our neighbours, so the stakes were low.

What is happening in the USA right now is the same as what happened in our class rep elections, only now what appears to be such a lark to a bunch of right-wing trolls will affect the prosperity, the rights and freedoms, the safety of hundreds of millions of people. As one person posted in response to the doge website, clown country run by clowns. Many of the voters know that Trump is a clown, but they hope electing him upsets liberal academics and hurts foreigners. What they don’t know is that a clown having power over their lives is a bad idea, because they have been very insulated from adversity for the last few decades by the protective cocoon of the rule of law, the welfare system (such as there is), and prosperity built on unsustainable use of resources. When they feel the consequences of their actions, there will be a rude awakening; but humans being humans, it is likely that they will only get angrier at minorities and immigrants, because clearly it can’t be the result of their own decisions.

The executive orders are predictably terrible, but some will face court challenges that should either delay or, in some cases, prevent implementation. The ludicrous blanket pardons (and/or commutations) for the Jan. 6 people will not be good in the medium to long term for the Republican “brand,” I suspect. Withdrawing from WHO is absurd. One runs out of adjectives.

In his pardoning of drug trafficker Ross Ulbright, Trump has just said: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me.”
Those two words, “the scum”, may be among the most chilling ever uttered by a US president. This is the language of fascism, in plain sight.
Like many others, I have been conflicted about how bad Trump’s second term might be. I am beginning to think, very, very bad.

“At least Trump hasn’t said he’d change the name of New Mexico.”

Dollars to dimes it’s because

Trump isn’t sure where New Mexico is, or
Trump doesn’t know New Mexico exists, or
Both.

As a resident of Oregon, I take comfort in the federal structure of the US political system. It won’t limit the damage as such, but it will protect, to some extent, the core political freedoms that people have lost in other autocrat-ruled ex-democracies. In order to overcome this barrier, Trump would have to go over to extreme illegality and use of force. That’s not impossible, but it’s a lot further than he’s indicated up to this point. I still think the preservation-of-democracy question comes down to whether we get a full-blown right wing paramilitary, and whether, if we do, it coordinates with right wing police and sheriff departments.

Trump appealed to voters in his rallies using these “culture war” and “retribution” issues, but the voters who provided the margin of victory, as I understand it, did so on the basis of seeking relief for economic difficulties (even though the Republican party doesn’t have a good history of being concerned with alleviating the economic burden of the working class). So why are they doing all this culture war and retribution stuff? Won’t people start checking their pockets to see if there’s anything in them at some point? E.g., it seemed to me that anger about immigration was something that was mainly stoked by their media; how is mass deportation supposed to help grocery prices?

Alex SL, @1, starts off by saying almost all of what I would say, except the adolescent boys vote story would be from a week-long mock-government exercise.

Earlier today, I was just casually wondering if Trump’s request to eliminate the US Debt Ceiling is meant to make us more like the Weimar Republic, in order to pave the way to become whatever-comes-after-the-Weimar-Republic.

I’ll remind Mr_Spoon @10 that an administration full of idiots is allowed to turn in someone else’s work as their own – there’s no rule against plagiarising the reactionary think tanks’ proposals.

@4, 7
Gulf of Mexico -> Gulf of America
New Mexico -> New America
There’s just one state named after a president. Louisiana, Georgia and Virginia are named after foreign royals. Lots of scope for patriotic renaming.

I wonder if the US being lost to fascism will do anything to stop the stream of liberal professionals, academics, “creatives” from UK/Anglosphere/Europe moving there in pursuit of higher salaries?

(Full disclosure: I haven’t set foot there since 2016.)

A ray of sanity.

“Former ‘Maga Granny’ refuses to accept Trump’s pardon for actions on January 6
…
“Alongside her attorney, Hemphill told the Idaho Statesman that she has plans to file a letter of rejection. The outlet notes that the US supreme court ruled in 1833, then later upheld that ruling in 1915, that a recipient has the power to turn down a presidential pardo…
…
“When asked if she had a message for Trump, Hemphill said: “Other people around you told you the election had not been stolen. You went out anyway, and lied to the world that the election was stolen. But we know it wasn’t and you know it wasn’t.

“Still, you want to continue with your narrative, but we’re going to keep bringing the facts to prove you wrong.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/23/maga-granny-trump-pardon

Trump has made me, personally, a worse person. I don’t want to see current news, or contribute to more than a few causes, feeling at some level that the ones that are actually worthwhile are doomed to fail, and that some of them may be money-making fronts. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush couldn’t quite bring me to this level, but Trump has.

mjfgates – re climate change, it is no use the UK and EU abandoning coal, oil and gas if the rest of the world carries on burning them at record levels – 2023 and 2024 were record years for “yesterday’s fuels” and there’s no sign of that stopping. Given that background, Trump’s energy policies aren’t the be-all and end-all.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to-reach-new-peak-and-remain-at-near-record-levels-for-years

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/14/oil-coal-gas-demand-forecasts-net-zero-dead/

While I can see the effects of global warming in much milder UK winters, worse Scottish skiing and retreating glaciers, places like China are burning fossil fuels at huge rates to make the wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars which Europeans are going to buy – in order not to burn any fossil fuels.

Our original coal, oil and gas infrastructure and all the supporting industries was built up over three centuries in coal’s case, a century in oil’s, and fifty years in gas. Now in maybe twenty or thirty years this is all due to change, and I don’t think we have the industrial capacity to do it, while China does. So we will de-industrialise even more. Strange way to run a country.

Trump’s threats to various countries, but most particularly Greenland seem to herald a new global order, with the western alliance fracturing, and the EU (hopefully) becoming a more coherent and independent actor. The assumption the US seems to operate under is that it can change its behavior while the behavior of others remains static. This is probably false.

Assuming Trump keeps with this line, as he seems inclined to do, US defense assurances to Europe are no longer credible. European countries will need a defense infrastructure of their own, and a credible collectively controlled nuclear deterrent (the alternative is everybody gets their own deterrent and that won’t end well – might happen, but this is an even darker future than the already dark one I optimistically protray). Europe will need new allies. Obvious ones include Canada and Mexico, if the US doesn’t annex them first, but generally anyone else the US is bullying. And China – if ideological objections can be overruled by pure Morgenthauian realism; there are also economic links which would favour this later. The enemy of my enemy.

This, taken together with the coming ecological collapse, is a bleak future indeed, but it seems to be the one the US voters have chosen for us.

In four years the U.S. can reverse Trump’s policies. The Danes, Europeans and indeed the rest of U.S. allies should understand that well over half the U.S. population is on the side of sanity, not Trump.

Look at this deplorable election: Trump beat Harris by a small margin of 2.3 million votes (1.5%). But Harris received 6.3 million LESS votes than Biden 2020. Where are the other 4 million votes? Even if some Biden 2020 voters switched to Trump 2024, it looks like the big story is that many Democrats stayed home. Indeed there were 3.2 million FEWER voters in 2024 than in 2020 (2024–152.3 million, 2020–155.5 million). We haven’t seen the deep analyses of why this happened; maybe in another month or two.

But we should not read this election as an abandonment of allies, or capitulation to imperialist landgrabbing, on the part of MOST Americans. Certainly Europe would be wise to shore up its defenses, no matter what. But it is not in evidence that a majority of Americans want to abandon Europe and NATO. The global battle for sanity isn’t over, it is just beginning. There will be lots of opportunities for cross-Atlantic advice, education, alliance and collaboration among all affected parties. Only trouble is, at the same time we must wait out the next 4 years of shortsightedness and insanity.

Domestically Trump could have a few popular successes, such as trying to control the southern border and trying to reduce the size of government. But these successes are not guaranteed. Some Americans may start seeing the cruelty, anti-Americanism and economic harm in real deportations. (Indeed somebody should be compelled to explain why the U.S. should allow educated immigrants who want to work hard and achieve the American Dream, but should NOT allow people who came to the U.S. in fear and desperation, who ALSO want to work hard and achieve the American Dream — but became unregistered illegals because the far right Republicans have thwarted for nearly three goddamn decades the sort of comprehensive immigration reform that would have processed them properly, to begin with.)

On reducing the size of government, the Congressional Democrats should be willing to play along and put their own agenda on the table, because this opens political opportunities. The Democrats’ main problem is that they have no functioning alternative view of the economy, so they default to neoliberalism instead of generating a simple response to populism that programs the economic changes immediately instead of shoving the benefits two to five years into the future. (One of Biden’s downfalls.) Of course some of Trump’s government reductions won’t be addressable from Congress, because they will be unilateral executive actions engineered by OMB director Russell Vought (ready to proceed with plans from Project 2025, a Christian nationalist tome detailing government reforms), which may not require Congressional legislation. But it still won’t be so easy for Trump–this is going to elicit a gushing cataract of opposing lawsuits that could tie up the courts for years.

Trump’s pardon of the Jan 6 suckers, that is to say, fools whom he tricked, (because that is surely how he secretly thinks of them), is not going to sit well with a majority of Americans. They beat on cops and broke windows. Consequently his approval rating could drop right away by 5-10 points. This matters, because the GOP’s minuscule majority in the House includes jumpy Republicans from swing districts. And Congress is about to get into complicated issues of the budget, tax cuts, debt ceiling. Put it all together and it looks like they want to make seniors pay more for prescription drugs, in order to fund Musk’s expedition to Mars. (Which is a good place to send him, don’t get me wrong. It would almost be worth the money.) So I just don’t see the GOP increasing its favorability with the public either.

In reality this all sets up dozens of targets for Democrats to attack. A wealth of targets. Part of their apparent quiescence at the moment is doubtless to wait until things shake out and to see what remains salient. Practically, they must speak to legislation as it is presented.

Certainly the Dems could help more people wake up to the fact that Trump 1) fomented the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot, in order to pressure Congress to accept 2) his fake electors scheme. Thus it was a two-part assault on the Capitol. (And some Senators and Representatives were in on the deal.) I don’t think this connection has been put clearly before the American public yet, maybe in expectation that a trial of the federal indictment would have proven it. Perhaps some of it will come out inadvertently, if the Trumpian House investigates the Jan. 6 investigators, to avenge Trump.

This whole episode is a terrible moral stain on the history of the U.S., an unusual country in which the only belief shared by everyone is fidelity to a constitution, (at least heretofore). So there may be additional moral fallout.

For all of these things, Trump could start looking like a “lame duck” pretty quickly. Certainly there are Senate Republicans who secretly wouldn’t mind it. Some of them hate him and others want to take his place. And Trump has more troubles to come.

Lee A. Arnold,

You are seeing a glass half full, but in this case I really think it is half empty: about half of the US population is on the side of insanity, and that insanity isn’t going away. That means that, for the foreseeable future, after every new US election the nominal US allies can expect to deal with being blackmailed, sold out to Russia, or engaged in trade wars. They need to prepare accordingly. Which, as an aside, they won’t, because they have their own choice of political parties between those who want to emulate Trump and those who don’t but are too hapless. As my mother said in a call a few days ago, we urgently need to invest, but the politicians are only concerned with the Schuldenbremse (= “debt brake”, a German euphemism for letting infrastructure and education collapse while being proud of having slightly reduced the national debt).

Not sure what you mean with ‘deep’ analysis, as all that is required is polling of 2020 Dem voters who decided to stay home in 2024 on “why did you stay home this time?”. But we have seen numerous analyses of the election. As you point out, support for Dems crashed, so it was a failure to motivate their base. It is unlikely to be a single factor for all 6.3 million, but factors to consider are their: support for ethnic cleansing in Gaza; a perceived failure to act aggressively enough on inflation; general disappointment with a failure to enact any reforms that would solve grave societal problems or help their supporters, see e.g. the drama around student loans a few years ago; and, to add one that I hope is not a big factor but have to include because it may have been, nomination of a woman instead of a man, simple sexism.

What is certain is that it isn’t the Dems being too woke, and they should throw transgender people under a bus and immigrants under more buses than they already did, because the only voters who care about that will always vote Rep anyway, regardless of how far Dems shift to the right. It was a failure to mobilise their own base.

As for advice for Dems, playing along with reducing the size of the government will disappoint Dem supporters further and make Dems complicit when voters realise that the services they rely on or their own jobs have just been gutted. Many Americans are very uninformed, and others simply reject what they hear of the Jan 6 pardons as “that must be liberal propaganda, Trump wouldn’t do that”, so that issue will never be as salient as seeing one’s nice neighbours hauled off to a camp or having the economy crash when the genAI and/or crypto bubbles pop.

Finally, the Dem leadership are not cleverly waiting for their moment. They are happy to be in opposition and fund-raise on “Trump is the worst” because privately they assume that Trump isn’t so bad that he actually needs to be thwarted. They would be strategically and tactically hapless if their strategy wasn’t defrauding their own voters, which they are as good at as conservatives are. The traditional conservative con is, “donate and vote for us, and we will deport all the foreigners”, and then to pilfer the family silver. The centre-left con for the last few decades is, “donate and vote for us, because we aren’t quite as bad as the conservatives”, and then to pilfer the family silver. They are still in that mode and will continue to be so until a completely new generation of leaders has replaced them.

Laban @27
Almost nothing of Trump’s 2016 agenda was actually accomplished.

Disagree. E.g., “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran; increasing sanctions; US withdrawal from JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal); killing of Soleimani. Moved US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; facilitated so-called Abraham Accords; recognized Netanyahu’s annexation of Golan Heights; looked the other way (even more than other administrations) at Netanyahu’s greenlighting of more illegal settlements in West Bank; pretty much completely shelved any talk of 2-state solution (J. Kushner’s so-called I/P peace plan was DOA); prob. reduced already not that large amount of US funding flowing through UN or other channels to the PA. Cozied up to Erdogan. Withdrew from Paris climate accords. Tariffs on S. Korea and China. Etc.

Btw, what is your evidence that Pentagon lied to Trump re reductions of US soldiers in n.e. Syria?

Alex 29: “As you point out, support for Dems crashed, so it was a failure to motivate their base.”

Crashed is an overstatement. I think an overlooked aspect of Trump’s electoral performance is that fhe attracted a bunch of voters who are so far out on the fascist fringe that they normally don’t vote, people who see representatives of the state, including on the Republican side, as enemies and don’t usually bother to vote but did see Trump as the one leader crazy enough to be their man. This explains how Trump was able to increase his vote number both in 2020 and 2024. Remember that 2020 had a record turnout of 67%, whereas the former record was 62% in 2008 (due to Obama mobilizing the African American vote). This also explains why traditional polls have consistently underestimated Trump’s support.

Biden won in 2020 because he too was able to mobilize new voters out of disdain for Trump. But in 2024 marginal Dem voters stayed home maybe out of fatigue, maybe because the memory of Trump had faded sufficiently. This may be hard to believe for people who follow the news but we are talking about marginal voters who don’t pay attention to politics and who rarely voted before.

This analysis, if correct, doesn’t change the political outcome. But I think it helps explain what really happened.

Trump’s increased extremism mobilized new voters for him but why didn’t it turn off more centrist voters? Here that blame falls squarely on the media. Most legacy media are controlled by oligarchs and they either fully supported Trump or went out of their way to make sure that Trump was portrayed as a normal, electable candidate while successfully appealing to the most fascist fringe.

“Btw, what is your evidence that Pentagon lied to Trump re reductions of US soldiers in n.e. Syria?”

https://nypost.com/2020/11/17/leaks-and-lies-as-the-military-tries-to-undermine-president-trump/

“After the defeat of ISIS, the president gave orders to withdraw our troops — but the likes of Jeffrey simply defied them. Twice, in fact: in 2018 and 2019. “What Syria withdrawal?” There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey told reporter Katie Bo Williams. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times.” The president was led to believe only a skeleton force remained. In fact, there were hundreds more troops that Deep State officials like Jeffrey never disclosed: not to President Trump nor to any other elected official.”

This deception, certainly of the public, continued under Biden, I’m not sure if he was aware of the true number.

https://apnews.com/article/syria-us-troops-assad-tice-israel-35ac28d9c95a568828986da011bc02f1

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has more than doubled the number of its forces in Syria to fight the Islamic State group — a dramatic increase that the Pentagon revealed Thursday, acknowledging that the added troops have been there for months or even more than a year. The U.S. had said for years that there were about 900 troops in Syria, but Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, acknowledged there were roughly 2,000 there now. The Pentagon was asked repeatedly about the U.S. presence in Syria in the wake of the chaotic overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad on Dec. 8. It did not disclose the increase and instead kept repeating the 900 figure.

@somebody 35

Sure (in part), but this is again is about “program”, it is different from the idea that some people won’t vote person X because she is a woman and they, consciously or unconsciously, expect women to be less competent than men.
Which is what “they will not vote a woman” means, I suppose.

Further to 33: Nothing illustrates the dynamic I explained more starkly than Musk’s Nazi salute. He telegraphed his ideology in the clearest way to a huge audience, convincing every Nazi in the world that he’s on their side. And the broken media continue to treat him and Trump as respectable figures, laughing or shrugging his Nazism off as mere antics.

This is a remarkable political accomploshment. Imagine a left wing leader who earns the loyalty of all the leftwing radical factions up to Communist revolutionaries and terrorists – and still gets treated by the media as an ordinary center left politician.

In the meantime, some truly shocking statements have been quoted of Dem leaders that illustrate just how unprepared they are even on their own terms. “Give us more time, this is new”? Not it isn’t. They just apparently never thought to consider that Harris could lose and to listen to Trump’s election promises. They had months to prepare a strategy that would at least make them look good, even if not hinder Trump, but they have nothing. I am not in the USA, but I am afraid most allegedly centre-left parties are like that today.

MisterMr,

I fail to see any inconsistencies, only multi-parameter scenarios that you model as having a single parameter. Enough righties can vote for a woman to give her a majority (see also somebody at 36) at the same time that, say, 2% fewer lefties vote for a woman in another country, contributing to her failure to achieve a majority. There is no contradiction between those two observations. Sexism is only one factor in voters’ decisions, and your implied logic that it must either be the only factor or not be a factor isn’t sound. What is more, leftists can be unconsciously sexist to some degree, justifying not voting for Harris with some behaviour or stance that they would not have criticised in a male candidate*, while still consciously perceiving an open betrayal of women’s rights, of transgender people, of immigrants, or of Palestinians as a red line.

*) xkcd.com/385, but with social justice instead of math

I am not an economist, but to my understanding, inflation can be caused by several different events or problems: money printer go brrr; price shock; expectation spiral of wage increases and price increases (not really an issue these days with unions so weak); and overheating economy. Your argument appears to be that any time a government decides to invest in infrastructure and defense, it overheats the economy. But that is not sound, as not all economies are always at full employment and capacity. What is more, even at capacity, a government could increase taxes on high earners to direct resources away from unproductive spending on luxury and status markers and towards the public good. Finally, I assume people will be accepting of 3% inflation instead of 1.5% if they see their life getting better, even if they aren’t accepting of the landlord jacking the rent up by 10% while their wage stagnates.

Blowing up an essential multi-billion-dollar piece of German infrastructure and ruining European economy, is nothing, really. But saying ‘I want to buy Greenland’ is positively horrible, unbearable. I love this.

@Alex Sl 41

In strict sense, you are right, but if you are speaking of “general strategy” you can’t keep such a strict sense. E.G. in terms of economic policy, many leftists wanted Biden to have an expansive one, he did, and that policy had also very good results (lower inequality, lower unemployment).
This kind of policy can have a tradeoff in terms of inflation (though I read somewhere that wages increased more than inflation, but I can’t confirm it now).
If this policy, that in many way should be a “win” for the left, is instead perceived as a “loss”, then logically all other expansionary leftish policies might be perceived as a “loss”, at least from a large enough slice of the voters that it’s not a neat electoral strategy to act this way.

I’m speaking of electoral strategy, not of what I think should be a correct policy: I think for the USA and most EU countries an expansive fiscal policy would be the right choice.
But if then the right can weaponize it VS the left, either in terms of inflation or increased public debt, while for some reason the left can’t equally weaponize the expansive fiscal policies that the right is gonna do by slashing taxes, then we are in this bad situation.

” at the advantage of Ukraine” — Are you serious? What does it mean?

“On the other hand proposing to “buy” or acquire through force Greenland is an aggression of sovereignity of a EU country”

Right. That’s exactly what I said (and miraculously, and completely unexpectedly, it passed “moderation”): Proposing to buy is aggression. And blowing up a multi-billion piece of essential industrial European infrastructure is “move along, nothing to see here”. I love it.

Add on to my previous comment: according to wikipedia[it], the German government identified an ucrainian citizen as the culprit of the sabotage and actually issued an arrest warrant for him, but he fled back to Ukraine.

Aside from making the shutdown of direct gas deliveries from Russia to Germany effectively permanent (the German government had already put on hold use of the pipeline), the Nordstream bombing left Ukraine as one of the remaining transit routes for Russian gas to Europe. Ukraine evidently no longer cares for the arrangement:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-halts-gas-exports-europe-via-ukraine-2025-01-01/

While we are lamenting the murder of utopia by the oligarchic class, huge mass protests are or have recently been going on in countries like Serbia, Georgia, Iran, to name a few, Assad’s regime has finally been toppled. In recent years, progressive opposition parties won elections in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Senegal, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil, to name a few.

People will not give up fighting for freedom and justice. We must not give up hope and concede defeat. The oligarchic fascists are a joke, they are insecure toddlers with no grasp of reality. This will not end well but it will end. We must not give up working for a better future.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/Denmark-to-allow-preservation-work-on-damaged-Nord-Stream-2-pipeline-48890138/

In a remarkable coincidence, Denmark is suddenly allowing Gazprom to carry out repairs on NS2, I’m sure this is totally not Greenland-related.