Some days, you feel assertive and directed. We’re going to fight against the forces of ignorance and evil. The tide will turn if we spend enough time informing people about what’s happening.
There are other days when you feel exhausted. I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a poster, not the one above, but a picture with dialogue from the movie A Face In The Crowd with Andy Griffith. It’s an excellent film, by the way, and you should see it. I didn’t know until I started Googling that there was a 2024 London production story involving Elvis Costello.
“Stop me if you think you have heard this one before: A man gains television fame on the strength of his purported connection to everyday Americans and their resentment of elites, and before long he converts that fame into political influence in a right-wing presidential campaign…”
Of course, we’ve been here before: January 20, 2017, and the months preceding and following. Not incidentally, TCM aired A Face in the Crowd on rump’s first Inauguration Day. In 2015, CNN asked if the film predicted his rise.
Version 2
This time, it’s more complicated because so much stuff is coming. Here’s a list of the Executive Orders. Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness contains a certain amount of gonzo entertainment. Is he going to have a whole bunch of trees chopped down? More or less.
What’s going on at Social Security? Even career officials are unclear, but expect “‘DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,’ the acting SSA commissioner, Lelan Dudek, told senior staff” and others.
Are the tariffs on or off? It depends on the day of the week. The tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China would cost the typical US household over $1,200 annually. But they become functionally a tax on the poor, with the people with the least income disproportionally harmed, but the top 20% are faring well.
DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings. “Why it matters: One of the buildings is the nerve center for generating national weather forecasts. It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency. It houses telecommunications equipment to send weather data and forecasts across the U.S. and abroad.” On this last topic, I’ve read online, “Oh, private forecasters will provide this for us!” And where do you think they are getting the bulk of their data?
Meanwhile, FOTUS and Juvie Vance Pulled an Old Hollywood Trick on Zelensky. “By letting his vice president instigate the Oval Office blowup with the Ukrainian leader, [he] resorted to a time-worn industry technique veteran screenwriter calls ‘A Stranger In The Room.'”
It’s not the individual acts but the tsunami of actions that are impossible to track. The answer is yes when people ask whether we could run our government more efficiently. But this isn’t efficient; this is taking a hacksaw to it.
And yet
This story from Axios gave me a modicum of hope.
In a chaotic and unpredictable world, the federal government normally acts as a stabilizing force. Under Trump, it has become the primary driver of the chaos.
The big picture: Across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada — two of America’s three largest trading partners — have been on and then off and then on and then off. Colombia knows the feeling.
- The government put 80 million square feet of its real estate up for sale, only to then take the “for sale” sign down.
- Trump has fired federal employees at the CDC, the FDA, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Department of Agriculture, only to then re-hire them.
- He touted the use of military aircraft to carry out high-profile deportations, only to suspend the flights after finding them costly and inefficient.
The Hamilton cancellation at the Kennedy Center, after FOTUS put himself in charge, is getting under his supporters’ skins. Some companies are NOT backing off from DEI initiatives. (
The pushback is starting against these mean-spirited and incompetent people doing, quoting Canada’s Trudeau quoting the Wall Street Journal, “very dumb things.” Those protests at town halls, especially with Republican members of Congress, are having an effect. A House Democrat is planning a ‘Bad DOGE Act’. Even GOP senators are telling Musk that DOGE actions will require their votes. This means Congress is waking up to the fact that they, per Article I of the Constitution, actually have a say in the process, that it is not an imperial presidency.