So here we are, the beginning of the second Trump administration in the United States, January 20, 2025. In a rather subdued inaugural address, Trump promised a new “golden age,” which, on the face of it, is hardly something anyone would object to.
I really like the calm, objective tone of this. I'm quite progressive, but also quite old (74) and I've seen numerous swings from more conservative to more progressive. Real, substantive change comes slow and often more at the bottom than the top. While we talk about the US Prez as the most powerful person in the world, much of what happens is out of his control (though unfortunately presidents often get blamed or lauded anyway). Thank you for your perspective.
Amen! We don't know what will happen, no matter how much the critics insist it's the end of the world and the proponents say it's the beginning of a new one. So let's just watch & see (and hope for -- and do what we can to make it -- the best).
Thank you for this article. I’m new to RCP. I really appreciate you taking the emotion out of your writing and acknowledging that rarely is anything as good or bad as the typical hyper-partisan viewpoints try to convince us otherwise.
Excellent "don't over react" post and I needed that!!!! I am hoping for a media outlet that will let me know which legislators are introducing which legislation and if I need to encourage support and why or why not (in my case that is difficult as my MOCs are among the most loyal musk/trumpists and know they do not need to appease anyone who does not support whatever trump says to do...if it's boycott Tiktok today and then tomorrow support tiktock, well, just do it, and they all do). I do not want to feel helpless/useless but I also want to know the best way to invest my very limited disposable income. Is supporting the DNC a waste of money? I get emails from 20-30 organizations every day saying they are the way to limit trump's ability to pass legislation of hate and divisiveness...they can't all be the most important one. Any feedback is very welcome!
Where I live the price of gas has gone up 25 cents a gallon since Trump took office. I have been told my medicines will go up, just not told yet by how much. Amazon has already started to increase prices. I am glad for you (and anyone for that matter) who does not need health care since deregulation will make getting care much harder. I wish you had included your economic background ( do you follow WSJ, Forbes, Fortune? or only get information about the economy from fox entertainment?) with a coherent explanation of how the tariffs are going to make things cheaper for me. And, regardless of any moral or concern for humanity, how is deporting millions of workers who pick our crops, build our buildings, slaughter our cows, clean our bed pans in nursing homes going to make things better (don't forget to clearly state how taking those taxes that they pay out of state, federal and local governments while adding in expenses for housing them until such time as some nation takes them back). Please be specific about what is glorious in your world? And be honest...fo ahead and say openly that you are glad no person of color or any women will have any rights, much like the south in pre civil war times. And please include how much you are paying for health insurance right now for you and you family. And for goodness sakes, please include if any of your friends/family are standing in line to get the jobs that will be freed up by deportation. The comment you posted showed very little thought and is therefore not constructive at all. Please expand.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the flurry of EOs and pardons.
Were these same authors spilling the same ink 4 years ago when whoever was pulling Biden's strings reversed everything that Trump had done via first-day EOs? Were these same authors spilling the same ink when whoever was pulling Biden's strings pardoned his entire family, the J6 committee members, and Tony "I am the science" Fauci when not a single one of them was even under indictment?
The answer to that is a resounding, "no".
For years we've heard about what a threat to democracy DJT is, and what an existential threat to the country he is. Yet those same people were silent when my primary vote was thrown away and a backroom deal was cut to elevate the least popular VP in the history of the country to my party's POTUS nominee, even though she hadn't run for the position, nor had she received a single electoral vote in the primary she ran 4 years prior. All in the name of keeping the money people like me had donated.....to a candidate that should never have run.
For everyone wringing their hands about DJT regaining the White House....If you bought into the above, you helped him win. If you were silent about Biden's obvious mental decline over the last 5 years, you personally helped DJT win. If you were silent about the censorship of the Hunter laptop story, you personally campaigned for Trump. If you supported the candidacy of Harris rather than a quick primary to democratically select a new candidate, then you personally helped suborn the democratic process.
My party has abandoned me, as has the vast majority of the media. DJT is far from my ideal POTUS, but given the choice we had, he was the only choice. It would be awfully nice if there was a serious reckoning in the party and in the media, but I doubt either are capable of that sort of self-reflection.
For what it's worth, I did write about the history and legacy of executive orders, and mentioned in the piece that Trump I or II are hardly out of sync with Obama and Biden.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait and see; I think we need to actively oppose MAGA like Yellow Jackets at a picnic. -
Support opposition, sue unconstitutional actions, delay unqualified cabinet nominees, write letters and postcards for down ballot races and governors who support and defend voting rights.
If you can’t personally take action, donate what you can to ACLU.
I fear the permissions his words seem to give to those who would do violence, as so many did on January 6. People here from other counties, those who identify by genders other than male or female and those who have crossed or spoken out against Donald Trump need our voice and protection.
The January 6th pardons were, in my view, mostly egregious, though there was also some real overzealous prosecutions in that mix of several thousand, and overzealous prosecutors of all political stripes is a major issue in the US as a whole. And yes, a Trump administration will zealously enforce immigration laws in an unkind, crass and perhaps abusive manner. And yes, those who identify differently will find a chilly, hostile federal government, not to mention several dozen state governments where that is already the case. That is the consequence of Trump winning an election which he won.
The danger of the pardons is that they empower the J6'ers to be Trump's brownshirts: to continue to commit extralegal violence on his behalf with impunity, up to and including murdering opposition politicians, activists, and journalists.
Lawlessness is also the danger of the worst of his EOs, the abrogation of birthright citizenship. There is a legitimate debate over whether birthright citizenship is a good idea; there is none over whether the 14th Amendment protects it. To blatantly ignore the plain language of the Constitution, on the assumption that the yes-men he appointed to the courts the first time around will make up excuses to let him do it, is the sort of thing dictators do, not the reasonable consequence of his winning an election.
They were prosecuted in a biased tribunal, they were incarcerated with far heavier sentences than those meted out to the Antifa/BLM rioters, and the DOJ made a point of excessive aggressive prosecution of these folks. Mr. Biden has pardoned those who have not yet been prosecuted or imprisoned.
They assaulted police officers in a deliberate attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States and install an unelected dictator. That's a much greater threat to our whole society than anything any BLM rioter ever did. We know from Weimar Germany what under-punishing people like that leads to.
"...a deliberate attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States and install an unelected dictator." By what method? Does occupying the Capitol building magically give a group control of the government, like a game of Risk? Every time I hear someone say this nonsense I wonder if they actually believe it themselves, and if so, what that says of their ability to think logically.
It seems, however, in this case, that things like removal of DEI from government agencies, the direction that our embassies will fly only the American flag, the limit of government sexual references to only two genders, the enforcement of our border laws, completion of the border wall....all have a powerful reflection of return of the country to something closer to normalcy. Yes, this wasn't generated by durable laws from Congress, but these are fundamental parts of our society's beliefs, and their recital and employment are very important to our country.
Quote: "Exxon does not “drill baby drill” because the president of the United States wants it to; it drills if the cost of exploration, extraction and refining are more than offset by the price of oil and the demand for it."
This is correct, but it also misses things. Trump wants to lower the price of energy, so how can he do that? One is to decrease the regulations that drive up the costs. Two, is to open up areas for drilling that were closed off - that are cheaper to extract from. Three, is to increase demand by allowing oil & NG to be sold to Europe and other markets. Four, is to allow pipelines to be built that lower the cost of transporting the oil. And so on.
You are correct that a president doesn't directly order a company like Exxon to drill. But he can change many things that change the market dynamics to make them want to.
Consider nuclear power. It was supposed to be really cheap when plants were first being built, but then the government regulated it to death driving up the cost significantly. Some of the regulations, of course, are needed. But if you could change things so that nuclear power was both very safe and cheap, it would indeed usher in that "Golden Age". The cheaper the power, the cheaper our products will be, and the more you can afford to do things like sequestering carbon under ground.
Look at Elon Musk. He wants to go to Mars but he couldn't do it at the current price per kg to put stuff into space. He says he wants to lower the cost to be a thousand times less. He might not be able to do that, but then again, he's well on his way.
Contrast this with Obama who said that we had to get used to around 1% growth in GDP per year for the next one hundred years. Obama was saying America needed to get used to stagnation. Trump is like Musk, we can do things for a lot cheaper than before and prosper in ways nobody thought was possible.
Maybe it won't work out. But I am certainly glad he's going to try.
It's a good point that the regulatory thicket affects price. That is certainly true with nuclear. But oil is a global marketplace, and even with cheaper US pipelines that overall price of a barrel of crude is unlikely to move appreciably. And many of the lands now being opened to drilling (Alaska wilderness) have been drilled in the past or are costly to exploit relative to oil elsewhere in the world.
I'm no expert on world oil markets, but it still is fundamentally supply and demand. Saudi Arabia can get the price to go up when they get OPEC nations to lower the supply. Like any market, oil futures can factor in when more oil is expected to flow into the market, causing prices to head down. If it heads down far enough, then places that cost too much to extract have to stop production, which of course can't be turned back on instantly, so that raises prices. But in general, having an administration that supports oil & NG production is going to put pressure on prices to head down, while one that is antagonistic to oil production will cause prices to head up.
Biden already brought prices down in his attempt to win the election, taping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and other moves he quietly made. But if Kamala would have won, those would likely have been reversed. So part of this is simply maintaining current prices. The current price is around $75 a barrel. I would bet it heads down towards the $60 range (which is where it was prior to Covid). If Kamala had been elected, I would have bet it would have begun heading up above $100 (which is where it was in the middle of Biden's term). Where do you think the price of oil is headed in the short term year or so?
I always feel so much better about our government and the people in power after reading your articles. I'm less anxious and angry and it gives me permission to tune out some of the noise and keep on track with my own work . Thank you for your writing's ,I read them all the time and pass them around to others in need!
I always appreciate the tone you strive for in your writing. It's a viewpoint that is very hard to find in our media right now. So many of the takes on this administration are emotional clickbait written by authors reveling (or despairing) in the fact that DJT is doing... more or less what he said he would do. We need to stick to the facts and take events into their proper context.
Still, when you say "pardoning 1600 people for crimes committed four years ago is a specific use of power that doesn’t translate into a systemic shift," I think you are missing a very important point about the nature of these Day 1 pardons. Unlike the self-interested (and yes, corrupt) pardons that have been given out by previous presidents, the January 6 pardons are for crimes committed on behalf of the president issuing the pardon. That's important, because it provides tacit approval, if not direct empowerment, to militarized supporters willing to break the law on this president's behalf.
We must consider these pardons in the context of the Supreme Court's ruling of broad presidential immunity for official acts, meaning that DJT can, if he so wishes, give any illegal or unconstitutional order without fear of prosecution, as long as it is in the pursuit of some "official" goal (such as overturning an election he believes to be fraudulent). Now with the pardons, he has demonstrated a mechanism by which his followers can carry out those orders extrajudicially.
I don't think it's alarmist to say that we are heading toward a reality where this president can ignore the rule of law at will, and that is most certainly a systemic shift.
If or when Trump blatantly ignores the courts, then perhaps we will be in dangerous territory, though of course there is the famous Andrew Jackson response to the Trail of Tears Supreme Court decision: "The court has made its ruling; now let it enforce it." I think was are a long way from what many people fear, even if the current administration looks to be at the very least disruptive and norm breaking
Thank you for helping me stay "balanced ". That's my goal- figuratively and literally at 83.
Thank you
I really like the calm, objective tone of this. I'm quite progressive, but also quite old (74) and I've seen numerous swings from more conservative to more progressive. Real, substantive change comes slow and often more at the bottom than the top. While we talk about the US Prez as the most powerful person in the world, much of what happens is out of his control (though unfortunately presidents often get blamed or lauded anyway). Thank you for your perspective.
Thank you
I so appreciate your measured perspective. Thank you.
Thank you, as always, for the sanity check. Please, keep writing. You are helping more than you know.
Amen! We don't know what will happen, no matter how much the critics insist it's the end of the world and the proponents say it's the beginning of a new one. So let's just watch & see (and hope for -- and do what we can to make it -- the best).
Thank you for this article. I’m new to RCP. I really appreciate you taking the emotion out of your writing and acknowledging that rarely is anything as good or bad as the typical hyper-partisan viewpoints try to convince us otherwise.
Thank you
Excellent "don't over react" post and I needed that!!!! I am hoping for a media outlet that will let me know which legislators are introducing which legislation and if I need to encourage support and why or why not (in my case that is difficult as my MOCs are among the most loyal musk/trumpists and know they do not need to appease anyone who does not support whatever trump says to do...if it's boycott Tiktok today and then tomorrow support tiktock, well, just do it, and they all do). I do not want to feel helpless/useless but I also want to know the best way to invest my very limited disposable income. Is supporting the DNC a waste of money? I get emails from 20-30 organizations every day saying they are the way to limit trump's ability to pass legislation of hate and divisiveness...they can't all be the most important one. Any feedback is very welcome!
Trump Won.
The Left has no power ...and it is Dying.
...folks are jumping ship in droves
The only thing the Left has now are words
...and they are meaningless.
WE are incontrol now.
Drill!
Deport!
Deregulate!
The future is now and it is glorious.
MAGA
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Where I live the price of gas has gone up 25 cents a gallon since Trump took office. I have been told my medicines will go up, just not told yet by how much. Amazon has already started to increase prices. I am glad for you (and anyone for that matter) who does not need health care since deregulation will make getting care much harder. I wish you had included your economic background ( do you follow WSJ, Forbes, Fortune? or only get information about the economy from fox entertainment?) with a coherent explanation of how the tariffs are going to make things cheaper for me. And, regardless of any moral or concern for humanity, how is deporting millions of workers who pick our crops, build our buildings, slaughter our cows, clean our bed pans in nursing homes going to make things better (don't forget to clearly state how taking those taxes that they pay out of state, federal and local governments while adding in expenses for housing them until such time as some nation takes them back). Please be specific about what is glorious in your world? And be honest...fo ahead and say openly that you are glad no person of color or any women will have any rights, much like the south in pre civil war times. And please include how much you are paying for health insurance right now for you and you family. And for goodness sakes, please include if any of your friends/family are standing in line to get the jobs that will be freed up by deportation. The comment you posted showed very little thought and is therefore not constructive at all. Please expand.
Sorry you invested all that time writing.
Thanks for this balance perspective. It is help on this Day 2 of Episode 47. Stay well.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the flurry of EOs and pardons.
Were these same authors spilling the same ink 4 years ago when whoever was pulling Biden's strings reversed everything that Trump had done via first-day EOs? Were these same authors spilling the same ink when whoever was pulling Biden's strings pardoned his entire family, the J6 committee members, and Tony "I am the science" Fauci when not a single one of them was even under indictment?
The answer to that is a resounding, "no".
For years we've heard about what a threat to democracy DJT is, and what an existential threat to the country he is. Yet those same people were silent when my primary vote was thrown away and a backroom deal was cut to elevate the least popular VP in the history of the country to my party's POTUS nominee, even though she hadn't run for the position, nor had she received a single electoral vote in the primary she ran 4 years prior. All in the name of keeping the money people like me had donated.....to a candidate that should never have run.
For everyone wringing their hands about DJT regaining the White House....If you bought into the above, you helped him win. If you were silent about Biden's obvious mental decline over the last 5 years, you personally helped DJT win. If you were silent about the censorship of the Hunter laptop story, you personally campaigned for Trump. If you supported the candidacy of Harris rather than a quick primary to democratically select a new candidate, then you personally helped suborn the democratic process.
My party has abandoned me, as has the vast majority of the media. DJT is far from my ideal POTUS, but given the choice we had, he was the only choice. It would be awfully nice if there was a serious reckoning in the party and in the media, but I doubt either are capable of that sort of self-reflection.
For what it's worth, I did write about the history and legacy of executive orders, and mentioned in the piece that Trump I or II are hardly out of sync with Obama and Biden.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait and see; I think we need to actively oppose MAGA like Yellow Jackets at a picnic. -
Support opposition, sue unconstitutional actions, delay unqualified cabinet nominees, write letters and postcards for down ballot races and governors who support and defend voting rights.
If you can’t personally take action, donate what you can to ACLU.
The sooner we face down the bullies, the better.
Drill
Deport
Deregulate
MAGA
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I fear the permissions his words seem to give to those who would do violence, as so many did on January 6. People here from other counties, those who identify by genders other than male or female and those who have crossed or spoken out against Donald Trump need our voice and protection.
The January 6th pardons were, in my view, mostly egregious, though there was also some real overzealous prosecutions in that mix of several thousand, and overzealous prosecutors of all political stripes is a major issue in the US as a whole. And yes, a Trump administration will zealously enforce immigration laws in an unkind, crass and perhaps abusive manner. And yes, those who identify differently will find a chilly, hostile federal government, not to mention several dozen state governments where that is already the case. That is the consequence of Trump winning an election which he won.
I was going to comment that your article was so nicely balanced. You just couldn't bear to maintain that, could you?
“…winning an election which he won.” Therein lies my fear.
The danger of the pardons is that they empower the J6'ers to be Trump's brownshirts: to continue to commit extralegal violence on his behalf with impunity, up to and including murdering opposition politicians, activists, and journalists.
Lawlessness is also the danger of the worst of his EOs, the abrogation of birthright citizenship. There is a legitimate debate over whether birthright citizenship is a good idea; there is none over whether the 14th Amendment protects it. To blatantly ignore the plain language of the Constitution, on the assumption that the yes-men he appointed to the courts the first time around will make up excuses to let him do it, is the sort of thing dictators do, not the reasonable consequence of his winning an election.
They were prosecuted in a biased tribunal, they were incarcerated with far heavier sentences than those meted out to the Antifa/BLM rioters, and the DOJ made a point of excessive aggressive prosecution of these folks. Mr. Biden has pardoned those who have not yet been prosecuted or imprisoned.
They assaulted police officers in a deliberate attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States and install an unelected dictator. That's a much greater threat to our whole society than anything any BLM rioter ever did. We know from Weimar Germany what under-punishing people like that leads to.
"...a deliberate attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States and install an unelected dictator." By what method? Does occupying the Capitol building magically give a group control of the government, like a game of Risk? Every time I hear someone say this nonsense I wonder if they actually believe it themselves, and if so, what that says of their ability to think logically.
It seems, however, in this case, that things like removal of DEI from government agencies, the direction that our embassies will fly only the American flag, the limit of government sexual references to only two genders, the enforcement of our border laws, completion of the border wall....all have a powerful reflection of return of the country to something closer to normalcy. Yes, this wasn't generated by durable laws from Congress, but these are fundamental parts of our society's beliefs, and their recital and employment are very important to our country.
Quote: "Exxon does not “drill baby drill” because the president of the United States wants it to; it drills if the cost of exploration, extraction and refining are more than offset by the price of oil and the demand for it."
This is correct, but it also misses things. Trump wants to lower the price of energy, so how can he do that? One is to decrease the regulations that drive up the costs. Two, is to open up areas for drilling that were closed off - that are cheaper to extract from. Three, is to increase demand by allowing oil & NG to be sold to Europe and other markets. Four, is to allow pipelines to be built that lower the cost of transporting the oil. And so on.
You are correct that a president doesn't directly order a company like Exxon to drill. But he can change many things that change the market dynamics to make them want to.
Consider nuclear power. It was supposed to be really cheap when plants were first being built, but then the government regulated it to death driving up the cost significantly. Some of the regulations, of course, are needed. But if you could change things so that nuclear power was both very safe and cheap, it would indeed usher in that "Golden Age". The cheaper the power, the cheaper our products will be, and the more you can afford to do things like sequestering carbon under ground.
Look at Elon Musk. He wants to go to Mars but he couldn't do it at the current price per kg to put stuff into space. He says he wants to lower the cost to be a thousand times less. He might not be able to do that, but then again, he's well on his way.
Contrast this with Obama who said that we had to get used to around 1% growth in GDP per year for the next one hundred years. Obama was saying America needed to get used to stagnation. Trump is like Musk, we can do things for a lot cheaper than before and prosper in ways nobody thought was possible.
Maybe it won't work out. But I am certainly glad he's going to try.
It's a good point that the regulatory thicket affects price. That is certainly true with nuclear. But oil is a global marketplace, and even with cheaper US pipelines that overall price of a barrel of crude is unlikely to move appreciably. And many of the lands now being opened to drilling (Alaska wilderness) have been drilled in the past or are costly to exploit relative to oil elsewhere in the world.
I'm no expert on world oil markets, but it still is fundamentally supply and demand. Saudi Arabia can get the price to go up when they get OPEC nations to lower the supply. Like any market, oil futures can factor in when more oil is expected to flow into the market, causing prices to head down. If it heads down far enough, then places that cost too much to extract have to stop production, which of course can't be turned back on instantly, so that raises prices. But in general, having an administration that supports oil & NG production is going to put pressure on prices to head down, while one that is antagonistic to oil production will cause prices to head up.
Biden already brought prices down in his attempt to win the election, taping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and other moves he quietly made. But if Kamala would have won, those would likely have been reversed. So part of this is simply maintaining current prices. The current price is around $75 a barrel. I would bet it heads down towards the $60 range (which is where it was prior to Covid). If Kamala had been elected, I would have bet it would have begun heading up above $100 (which is where it was in the middle of Biden's term). Where do you think the price of oil is headed in the short term year or so?
I always feel so much better about our government and the people in power after reading your articles. I'm less anxious and angry and it gives me permission to tune out some of the noise and keep on track with my own work . Thank you for your writing's ,I read them all the time and pass them around to others in need!
Thank you for the kind words.
I always appreciate the tone you strive for in your writing. It's a viewpoint that is very hard to find in our media right now. So many of the takes on this administration are emotional clickbait written by authors reveling (or despairing) in the fact that DJT is doing... more or less what he said he would do. We need to stick to the facts and take events into their proper context.
Still, when you say "pardoning 1600 people for crimes committed four years ago is a specific use of power that doesn’t translate into a systemic shift," I think you are missing a very important point about the nature of these Day 1 pardons. Unlike the self-interested (and yes, corrupt) pardons that have been given out by previous presidents, the January 6 pardons are for crimes committed on behalf of the president issuing the pardon. That's important, because it provides tacit approval, if not direct empowerment, to militarized supporters willing to break the law on this president's behalf.
We must consider these pardons in the context of the Supreme Court's ruling of broad presidential immunity for official acts, meaning that DJT can, if he so wishes, give any illegal or unconstitutional order without fear of prosecution, as long as it is in the pursuit of some "official" goal (such as overturning an election he believes to be fraudulent). Now with the pardons, he has demonstrated a mechanism by which his followers can carry out those orders extrajudicially.
I don't think it's alarmist to say that we are heading toward a reality where this president can ignore the rule of law at will, and that is most certainly a systemic shift.
If or when Trump blatantly ignores the courts, then perhaps we will be in dangerous territory, though of course there is the famous Andrew Jackson response to the Trail of Tears Supreme Court decision: "The court has made its ruling; now let it enforce it." I think was are a long way from what many people fear, even if the current administration looks to be at the very least disruptive and norm breaking
Trump Won.
The Left has no power ...and it is Dying.
...folks are jumping ship in droves
The only thing the Left has now are words
...and they are meaningless.
WE are incontrol now.
Drill!
Deport!
Deregulate!
The future is now and it is glorious.
MAGA
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸