Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 52
January 23, 2025
January 22, 2025
January 22, 2025
Marc Caputo of Axios reported today that Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes for that day’s events, including those who attacked police officers, was a spur of the moment decision by Trump apparently designed to get the issue behind him quickly. “Trump just said: ‘F*ck it: Release ‘em all,’” an advisor recalled.
Rather than putting the issue behind him, Trump’s new administration is already mired in controversy over it. NBC News profiled the men who threw Nazi salutes, posted that they intended to start a civil war, vowed “there will be blood,” and called for the lynching of Democratic lawmakers. These men, who attacked police with bear spray, flag poles, and a metal whip and choked officers with their bare hands, are now back on the streets.
That means they are also headed home to their communities. Jackson Reffitt, who reported his father Guy’s participation in the January 6 riot and was a key witness against him, told reporters he fears for his life now that his father is free. Jackson recorded his father’s threat against talking to the authorities. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,” his father said, “and traitors get shot.” “I’m honestly flabbergasted that we've gotten to this point," Jackson told CNN. “I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The country’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has spoken out against the pardons, as has the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote: “Law and order? Back the blue? What happened to that [Republican Party]?” “What happened [on January 6, 2021] is a stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy,” it wrote. “By setting free the cop beaters, the President adds another.”
Mark Jacob of Stop the Presses commented: “Republicans—the Jailbreak Party.”
One of the pardoned individuals is already back in prison on a gun charge, illustrating, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance said, why Trump should have evaluated “prior criminal history, behavior in prison, [and] risk of dangerousness to the community following release. Now,” she said, “we all pay the price for him using the pardon power as a political reward.” On social media, Heather Thomas wrote: “So when all was said and done, the only country that opened [its] prisons and sent crazy murderous criminals to prey upon innocent American citizens, was us.”
MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin reported that Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who was convicted of sedition and sentenced to 18 years in prison, met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill this afternoon.
For the past two days, the new Trump administration has been demonstrating that it is far easier to break things than it is to build them.
In his determination to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures, Trump has shut down all federal government DEI offices and has put all federal employees working in such programs on leave, telling agencies to plan for layoffs. He reached back to the American past to root out all possible traces of DEI, calling it “illegal discrimination in the federal government.” Trump revoked a series of executive orders from various presidents designed to address inequities among American populations.
Dramatically, he reached all the way back to Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in September 1965 to stop discriminatory practices in hiring in the federal government and in the businesses of those who were awarded federal contracts. Johnson put forward Executive Order 11246 shortly after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to protect minority voting and a year after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, both designed to level the playing field in the United States between white Americans, Black Americans and Americans of color.
In an even more dramatic reworking of American history, though, the Trump administration has frozen all civil rights cases currently being handled by the Department of Justice and has ordered Trump’s new supervisor of the civil rights division, Kathleen Wolfe, to make sure that none of the civil rights attorneys file any new complaints or other legal documents.
Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870…to prosecute civil rights cases.
Today, Erica L. Green reported for the New York Times that Trump’s team has threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they refuse to turn in colleagues who “defy orders to purge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from their agencies.” Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill commented: “Can’t wait until these guys have to define in court a ‘DEI hire’ and ‘DEI employees.’”
Trump’s team has told the staff at Department of Health and Human Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop issuing health advisories, scientific reports, and updates to their websites and social media posts. Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Roubein of the Washington Post report that the CDC was expected this week to publish reports on the avian influenza virus, which has shut down Georgia’s poultry industry.
Trump has also set out to make his mark on the Department of Homeland Security. Trump yesterday removed the U.S. Coast Guard commandant, Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, and ordered the Coast Guard to surge cutters, aircrafts, boats and personnel to waters around Florida and borders with Mexico and to “the maritime border around Alaska, Hawai’i, the U.S. territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,” to stop migrants. The service is already covering these areas as well as it can: last August, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday, told the Brookings Institution that the service was short of personnel and ships.
As Josh Funk reported in the Associated Press, Trump also fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), responsible for keeping the nation’s transportation systems safe. He also fired all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, mandated by Congress after the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to review safety in airports and airlines.
Hannah Rabinowitz, Evan Perez, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that Trump has pushed aside senior Department of Justice lawyers in the national security division, prosecutors who work on international affairs, and lawyers in the criminal division, all divisions that were involved in the prosecutions involving Trump.
Trump has also suspended all funding disbursements for projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, laws that invested billions of dollars in construction of clean energy manufacturing and the repair of roads, bridges, ports, and so on, primarily in Republican-dominated states.
Breaking things is easy, but it is harder to build them.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly teased the idea that he had a secret plan to end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day. This morning, in a social media post, he revealed it. He warned Russian president Vladimir Putin that he would “put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
In fact, President Barack Obama and then–secretary of state John Kerry hit Russia with sanctions after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and under President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the U.S. and its allies have maintained biting sanctions against Russia. At the same time, Russia’s trade with the U.S. has fallen to lows that echo those of the period immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Making a ridiculous post about tariffs on Truth Social was his secret plan to end the war in 24 hours?” wrote editor Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews. “What a ridiculous clown show. Idiocracy.”
Yesterday, Trump held an event with chief executive officer Sam Altman of OpenAI, chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison of Oracle, and chief executive officer Masayoshi Son of SoftBank to roll out a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence, although Ja’han Jones of MSNBC explained that it’s not clear how much of that investment was already in place. In any case, Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk promptly threw water on the announcement, posting on X, “They don’t actually have the money.” He added “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
Musk has his own plan for developing AI tools and is in a legal battle with OpenAI. Altman retorted: “this is great for the country. i realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.” As Jones noted, the fight took the shine off Trump’s big announcement.
As for turning his orders into reality, Trump has turned that responsibility over to others.
Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post noted today that Trump’s executive orders covered a wide range of topics and then simply told the incoming attorney general to handle them. A key theme of Trump’s campaign was his accusations that Biden was using the Justice Department against Trump and his loyalists; Berman and Roebuck point out that Trump “appears to want the Justice Department to act as both investigator and enforcer of his personal and policy wishes.”
This morning, Meryl Kornfield and Patrick Svitek of the Washington Post, with the help of researcher Alec Dent, reported on Trump’s first meeting with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD). Trump frequently repeated, “promises made, promises kept,” but offered no guidance for how he foresees getting his agenda through Congress, where the Republicans have tiny margins. Both Johnson and Thune pointed out that it will be difficult to get majorities behind some of his plans.
According to Kornfield and Svitek, Trump stressed “that he doesn’t care how his agenda becomes law, just that it must.”
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Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60671723
https://www.newsweek.com/jackson-reffitt-terrified-trump-january-6-pardons-2018041
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/police-union-trump-jan-6-pardons
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-pardons-jan-6-capitol-rioters-police-gop-258a4a6e
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/22/dei-federal-employees-trump/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/22/trump-jan-6-defendant-gun-charge-005863
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/executive-order-11246/as-amended
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/01/21/trump-hhs-cdc-fda-communication-pause/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/22/justice-civil-rights-freeze-shutdown/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/22/trump-johnson-thune-good-first-date/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/22/us/trump-news#trump-order-discrimination-federal-hiring
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/trump-elon-musk-ai-stargate-deal-rcna188807
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/politics/justice-department-shakeup/index.html
Bluesky:
kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3lgee7yfujc24
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lgdrmdy2ok2p
heatherthomasaf.bsky.social/post/3lgctmmqb7c26
sifill.bsky.social/post/3lgdzmufwa227
kenklippenstein.bsky.social/post/3lgej4q2g3s2j
joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3lgdyjgpnwk2u
January 21, 2025
January 21, 2025
“I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint at the January 6, 2021, riot inside the U.S. Capitol, posted on X shortly after President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of or pardoned all those convicted of crimes related to the events of that day.
“NOW I AM GONNA BY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!” he continued. “J6ers are getting released & JUSTICE HAS COME… EVERYTHING done in the dark WILL come to light!”
A Scripps News/Ipsos poll conducted in late November, after Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, found that only 30% of Americans supported pardoning the January 6th protesters. In early January, many Republican lawmakers suggested they would not support pardons for those who committed violence against police officers, and on January 12, 2025, then vice president–elect J.D. Vance told Fox News Sunday that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
This puts Republican leaders, who claim to defend law and order, on the back foot. When CNN’s chief congressional correspondent, Manu Raju, asked Republican senators what they thought of the blanket pardons, even MAGA senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said it was unacceptable to pardon people who assaulted police officers but claimed he “didn’t see it,” although the footage of the violence is widely available. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) both criticized the pardons.
Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) tried to blame Trump’s pardons on former president Joe Biden, saying he had opened the door to broad pardons, although Biden preemptively pardoned people who had not been convicted of crimes but were in Trump’s crosshairs: people like former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed but later accused of “treason” for being unwilling to execute an illegal order. In one of his first moves as president yesterday, Trump had the official portrait of Milley removed from the hall in the Pentagon where portraits of all previous chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are displayed—all, now, except Milley.
The D.C. Police Union expressed its “dismay over the recent pardons,” reiterating its stance that “anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, without exception.”
Trump’s blanket pardons signal to his MAGA base that the judicial system that tried to hold him—and them—accountable is corrupt and that he will protect those who fight for him in the streets. But those pardons do not appear to have popular support.
At the same time, Trump is demonstrating that he intends to create a country dominated by the right-wing, white men who supported him. It is not clear that that intent is any more popular than his pardons for the January 6 rioters.
In that Scripps poll, only 23% of Americans supported restricting women from military combat. But today, Trump fired the first uniformed woman to lead a branch of the armed forces, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan. A senior official for the newly-staffed Department of Homeland Security said she was fired for an “excessive” focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Demonstrating his determination to advance a particular kind of Americanism, Trump announced he would rename the Gulf of Mexico, calling it the Gulf of America, and that he would change the name of Denali in Alaska, the tallest peak in North America, back to the name it held between 1917 and 2015: Mt. McKinley, in honor of the nation’s twenty-fifth president, who was famous primarily because he was assassinated in 1901.
Trump has made McKinley a touchstone of his second administration, saying yesterday that he would “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”
Senator Murkowski strongly objected to the change. “Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial,” she said.
But it is in his executive order concerning birthright citizenship that Trump most clearly demonstrated his determination for white men to dominate the United States, and for Trump to dominate those men. In an executive order issued last night titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Trump sought to overturn the U.S. Constitution and its consistent interpretation. He wants the power to decide who can be considered a citizen, and he apparently wants to force the U.S. Supreme Court to give him that power.
In 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern states were passing laws that relegated Black Americans to subservience, Americans added the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enable the federal government to override those discriminatory state laws. The Fourteenth Amendment provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and then it charged the federal government with guaranteeing that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that being born in the United States made someone a United States citizen.
That clarity meant that the Supreme Court reinforced the amendment’s intent, even in the late nineteenth century during a period of anti-immigrant sentiment that was most virulent against the Chinese who made their way to American shores.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of workers from China. Thirteen years later, in 1895, Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. He sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and he won. In the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the Supreme Court determined that the children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and that no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.
Trump would like the Supreme Court to award him the power to override the Constitution that a previous Supreme Court denied to Congress, but his attempt to overturn our foundational law has already launched lawsuits. Twenty-two Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration for violating the U.S. Constitution. Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—fittingly, the city where Wong Kim Ark was born—have joined the lawsuits. So have the American Civil Liberties Union and an expectant mother.
Trump’s administration is facing lawsuits not only on his attacks on birthright citizenship, but also on the executive order that would enable Trump to fire nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with loyalists. And, within minutes of Trump taking office, at least three lawsuits were filed in Washington, D.C., against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk—Vivek Ramaswamy has been pushed out—charging that it was breaking transparency laws.
The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”
Even before he took office, Trump began to walk back his campaign promises—on lowering food prices, for example—and the administration is continuing to move the goalposts now that he’s in office. Last night the Senate confirmed former senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) 99–0 for secretary of state. Today, when CBS asked Rubio about Trump’s repeated promise to end the war in Ukraine on Day 1, Rubio said that what Trump really meant was that the war in Ukraine needs to come to an end.
But Trump is not helping those trying to defend his presidency. Tonight he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold with cryptocurrency. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.
In May 2024, during his presidential campaign, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht in order to court the votes of libertarians, who support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices. They saw Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach.
Tonight, Trump posted that he had pardoned Ulbricht (although Trump spelled his name wrong), saying: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/vance-trump-pardons-capitol-riot-31308a54ebac4ef6783662f595262dec
https://apnews.com/article/trump-denali-mckinley-alaska-57b2a44d878aa7ac927d346fcdf824b8
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/20/trump-birthright-citizenship-immigrants/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/20/doge-lawsuits-musk-trump-00199384
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/20/doge-musk-helped-eject-ramaswamy-00199487
https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/trump-day-one-inauguration-20250121.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/technology/trump-ross-ulbricht-silk-road.html
Bluesky:
joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3lgb2xojsac2o
macfarlanenews.bsky.social/post/3lgccqvz4is2v
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lgc333rbds2g
atrupar.com/post/3lgbdbhxukc2x
X:
mkraju/status/1881521720345129397
January 20, 2025
January 20, 2025
The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon today was set on Friday, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By Sunday morning it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.”
As Salmon noted, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution,” which prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any gift or title from a foreign leader or government, “written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.” Salmon also pointed out that there is no way to track the purchases of this coin, meaning it will be a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him.
Former Trump official Anthony Scaramucci posted that “anyone in the world can essentially deposit money” into the bank account of the president of the United States.
On Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own coin. It took the wind out of the sales of Trump’s coin, although both coins have disclaimers saying that the coins are “an expression of support for and engagement with the values embodied by” the Trumps, and are not intended to be “an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” Her cryptocurrency was worth more than $5 billion within two hours.
CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”
Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics under Trump in his first administration, who left after criticizing Trump’s unwillingness to divest himself of his businesses, wrote to CNN: “America voted for corruption, and that’s what Trump is delivering…. Trump’s corruption and naked profiteering is so open, extreme and pervasive this time around that to comment on any one aspect of it would be to lose the forest for the trees. The very idea of government ethics is now a smoldering crater.”
At a rally Sunday night at the Capital One Arena in Washington, Trump highlighted the performance side of his public persona. He teased the next day’s events and let his audience in on a secret that echoed the “neokayfabe” of professional wrestling by leaving people wondering if it was true or a lie. After praising Elon Musk, he told the crowd “He was very effective. He knows those computers better than anybody. Those vote counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So it was pretty good…. Thank you to Elon.”
This morning, hours before he left office, President Joe Biden pardoned several of the targets of MAGA Republicans, including "General Mark A. Milley, Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee.” Biden clarified that the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” He noted, “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”
But, he said, "These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances." He later pardoned his siblings and their spouses to protect them from persecution by the incoming president.
Before he left office, Biden posted on social media: Scripture says: “I have been young and now I’m old yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken.” After all these years serving you, the American people, I have not seen the righteous forsaken. I love you all. May you keep the faith. And may God bless you all.”
This morning, members of the far-right paramilitary organization the Proud Boys marched through the capital carrying a banner that read “Congratulations President Trump” and chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
Two days ago, Trump moved his inauguration into the Capitol Rotunda, where his supporters had rioted on January 6, 2021, because of cold temperatures expected in Washington, D.C. Even with his supporters excluded, the space was cramped, but prime spots went to billionaires: Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook, Google chief Sundar Pichai, TikTok chief executive officer Shou Zi Chew, and Tesla and SpaceX chief executive owner Elon Musk, who appeared to be stoned.
Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, was there, as were popular podcaster Joe Rogan and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk.
Although foreign leaders are not normally invited to presidential inaugurations, far-right foreign leaders President Javier Milei of Argentina and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni were there, along with a close ally of Chinese president Xi Jinping.
The streets were largely empty as Trump traveled to the U.S. Capitol. Supporters watched from Capital One Arena as Trump took the oath of office, apparently forgetting to put his hand on the Bibles his wife held. After Vice President–elect J.D. Vance had taken the oath of office, sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had sworn in Trump, the new president delivered his inaugural address.
While inaugural addresses are traditionally an attempt to put the harsh rhetoric of campaigns behind and to emphasize national unity, Trump’s inaugural address rehashed the themes of his campaign rallies. Speaking in the low monotone he uses when he reads from a teleprompter, he delivered an address that repeated the lies on which he built his 2024 presidential campaign.
He said that the Justice Department has been “weaponized,” that Biden’s administration “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” that the U.S. has provided “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals,” that the government has “treated so badly” the storm victims in North Carolina,” and so on.
Fact-checkers at The Guardian noted the speech was full of “false and misleading claims.”
Trump went on to promise a series of executive orders to address the crises he claimed during his campaign. He would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” he said, and “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” (Border crossings are lower now than they were at the end of Trump’s last term.) He promised to tell his cabinet members to bring down inflation (it peaked in 2022 and is now close to the Fed’s target of 2%), bring back manufacturing (the Biden administration brought more than 700,000 new manufacturing jobs to the U.S.), end investments in green energy (which has attracted significant private investment, especially in Republican-dominated states), and make foreign countries fund the U.S. government through tariffs (which are, in fact, paid by American consumers).
He also vowed to take the Panama Canal back from Panama, prompting Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino to “fully reject the statements made by” Trump, and Panamanian protesters to burn the American flag.
With a declaration about the Pennsylvania shooting that bloodied his ear, Trump declared that he believes he is on a divine mission. “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
After his inaugural address, former president Biden and former first lady Dr. Jill Biden left, and Trump delivered a much more animated speech to prominent supporters in which CNN’s Daniel Dale said he returned to his “lie-a-minute style.” He rehashed the events of January 6, 2021, and claimed that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell…that’s a criminal offense.”
But the bigger story came in the afternoon, when Trump held a rally at the Capitol One Arena in place of the traditional presidential parade. Supporters there had watched the inauguration on a jumbotron screen, booing Biden and jumping to their feet to cheer at Trump’s declaration that he had been saved by God. In the afternoon, Elon Musk spoke to the crowd, throwing two salutes that right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, interpreted as Nazi salutes.
Trump and his family arrived after 5:00 for the inaugural parade. The new president spoke again in rally mode after six, and then staged a demonstration that he was changing the country by holding a public signing of executive orders. Those appeared to be designed, as he promised, to retaliate against those he feels have wronged him. Among other executive orders, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, drawing approving roars from the crowd.
As Jonathan Swan of the New York Times noted, “Signing executive orders and pardons are two of the parts of the job that Trump loves most. They are unilateral, instantaneous displays of power and authority.” After signing a few executive orders for the crowd, Trump threw the signing sharpies into the crowd, and then he and his family left abruptly.
Back at the White House, retaliation continued. Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of the January 6 rioters who had been convicted of crimes related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, including Enrico Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who was serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.
His pardon also included Daniel Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to tasing Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who suffered cardiac arrest and a traumatic brain injury. “Omg I did so much f---ing s--- r[ight] n[ow] and got away,” he texted to his gang. “Tazzed the f--- out of the blue[.]”
Trump signed an executive order that withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization, another that tries to establish that there are only two sexes in the United States, and yet another that seeks to end the birthright citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment. He signed one intending to strip the security clearances from 51 people whom he accuses of election interference related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, and has ordered that an undisclosed list of Trump appointees immediately be granted the highest levels of security clearance without undergoing background checks. He also signed one ordering officials “to deliver emergency price relief.”
Behind the scenes today, officials in the Trump administration fired the acting head of the U.S. immigration court system as well as other leaders of that system, and cancelled the CBP One app, an online lottery system through which asylum seekers could schedule appointments with border agents, leaving asylum seekers who had scheduled appointments three weeks ago stranded. Trump officials have also taken down a government website that helped women find health care and understand their rights. They have also removed the official portrait of former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley from the hallway with the portraits of all the former chairs…now all minus one.
But for all their claims to be hitting the ground running, lawyers noted that some of the executive orders were poorly crafted to accomplish what they claimed—an observer called one “bizarre legal fanfic not really intended for judicial interpretation”—and lawsuits challenging them are already being filed. Others are purely performative, like ordering officials to lower prices.
Further, CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand reported that almost an hour after Trump became president, “current and former Pentagon officials say they don’t know who is currently in charge of the Defense Department,” a key position to maintain U.S. security against adversaries who might take advantage of transition moments to push against American defenses.
Bertrand reported that the Trump transition team had trouble finding someone to serve as acting secretary until the Senate confirms a replacement for Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Trump’s nominee, former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth has had trouble getting the votes he needs, although tonight the Senate Armed Services Committee approved him by a straight party line vote.
Bertrand notes that two senior department officials declined to take on the position. The Trump administration swore in Robert Salesses, deputy director of the branch of the Pentagon that focuses on human resources, facilities, and resource management—who has already been confirmed by the Senate in that position—as acting Defense Secretary.
Beginning tomorrow, the Republicans will have to deal with the fact that the Treasury will hit the debt ceiling and will have to use extraordinary measures to pay the obligations of the United States government.
—
Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/18/trump-meme-coin-25-billion
https://apnews.com/article/trump-pentagon-defense-secretary-hegseth-7bf18dfaaa53e3e75a76e3fd768a7fdd
https://time.com/7208371/trump-inauguration-2025-photos/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/20/us/trump-executive-orders
https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/06/news/walter-shaub-office-of-government-ethics-resignation/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/20/tech/meme-coins-donald-melania-trump-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/19/politics/key-lines-trump-rally-dc-inauguration-eve/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/trump-inauguration-attendees/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-inaugural-address-factcheck
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/19/trump-immigration-agenda-second-term/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/us/politics/border-immigration-drop-biden.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-trump-inauguration-speech-2025/
https://giia.net/insights/two-years-inflation-reduction-act-transforming-us-clean-energy
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-trump-inauguration-speech-2025/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/president-trump-speech-inauguration
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-inaugural-address-factcheck
https://apnews.com/article/biden-pardons-family-trump-white-hous-caee326c4723a4ba6d972f7daf750a0b
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-self-soothes-in-better-speech-right-after-first-one/
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/20/nx-s1-5169190/biden-voter-registration-executive-order
https://www.newsweek.com/inauguration-day-2025-donald-trump-schedule-live-updates-2017568
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.229256/gov.uscourts.dcd.229256.160.0_1.pdf
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January 19, 2025
January 19, 2025
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.
—
Notes:
Dr. King’s final speech:
January 18, 2025
January 18, 2025
Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.
The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.
“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”
The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.
FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.
Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”
Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”
It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”
The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”
“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.
Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”
Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”
Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.
Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.
Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”
Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.
Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.
Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.
There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.
The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.
Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.
Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.
But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/10/andrew-ferguson-ftc-chair-trump-00193517
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FTC-2025-0007
BIG by Matt StollerOut With a Bang: Enforcers Go After John Deere, Private Equity BillionairesIt’s less than a week until this era of antitrust ends. And while much of the news has been focused elsewhere, enforcers have engaged in a flurry of action, which will by legal necessity continue into the next administration. One case in particular angered some of the most powerful people on Wall Street, the partners of a $600 billion private equity fir…Read more3 days ago · 260 likes · 14 comments · Matt Stollerhttps://www.axios.com/2025/01/18/trump-meme-coin-25-billion
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/trump-meme-coin-crypto.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-gather-washington-protest-trump-inauguration-2025-01-18/
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-transition-inauguration-news-01-18-25/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/treasury-debt-limit-janet-yellen-7e598f2811d75ad5159f9338f7cdce16
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2798
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-to-begin-large-scale-deportations-tuesday-e1bd89bd
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/18/chicago-immigration-raids/
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/bird-flu-is-raising-red-flags-among-health-officials
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/18/nx-s1-5266868/bird-flu-vaccine-moderna
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