Kevin Drum

I'm sure I'll have plenty of updates to this, but here's what's happening in Washington DC after Trump's inauguration. First off, Trump has already ordered the Pentagon to remove its portrait of Gen. Mark Milley, which was hung ten days ago next to all the previous chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

Here's Elon Musk entertaining a MAGA crowd with a vigorous Nazi salute:

In his "second" inaugural speech to a crowd of fans, Trump says that "some" wives who have husbands in the ER spend their time checking their watches because they just want to go home:

Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, shortly after giving a sermon at the inauguration, has launched his own cryptocoin:

More to come, without doubt.

This tattered flag flies over the shoe garden near Rice, California. You've seen the shoe garden and shoe fence before, but not the flag. So here it is.

Donald Trump's inaugural address was surprisingly low key and consisted mostly of a laundry list of the executive orders he plans to sign later today. Some highlights:

• Trump declares an emergency at the southern border even though there's patently no emergency at the moment.
• Trump reinstates "Remain in Mexico," but can he do that without Mexico's cooperation?
• He's going to tell everyone in his administration to bring down prices. Um, sure.
• He's declaring a national energy emergency. What emergency?
• The Green New Deal is dead.
  
• Trump lies yet again that tariffs are a tax on foreign nations.
• No more government censorship! Not that there ever was.
• Law and order! But crime is at a historic low already.
  
• No more pronoun nonsense. We have men, women, and nothing in between.
• He's seriously planning to change "Gulf of Mexico" to "Gulf of America." Also, Denali will be renamed back to Mt. McKinley. And Panama is treating us unfairly so we're going to take the canal back. This comes minutes after saying his deepest wish is to be known as a unifier and peacemaker.
• From this day forward America will be a free and sovereign nation. What?

At the last minute, Joe Biden:

• Pardoned the J6 committee members and the Capitol police officers who testified before them.
• Pardoned Anthony Fauci and Gen. Mark Milley.
• Pardoned five close family members.
• Commuted the remaining sentence of native American activist Leonard Peltier.
• Posthumously pardoned civil rights leader Marcus Garvey.
• On Sunday he pardoned Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate; Virginia House Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), who was convicted of a nonviolent drug offense in 1994; immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir; and criminal justice reform advocate Kemba Smith Pradia.

Busy morning! Later today I assume Trump will pardon all or most of the J6 insurrectionists.

It's Inauguration Day, so it seems like a good time to set down for the record the state of the country that Donald Trump is inheriting. All the ending numbers for Joe Biden are below.

Some are ordinary economic stats like inflation and unemployment, while others are here only because Trump has made a big deal of them, like immigration and imports. Most are quarterly for consistency, and almost all of them go through the final quarter of 2024. There are only a few laggards.

Here's a summary:

And here are the charts, in no particular order:

Donald Trump is looking forward to being president again:

An exultant Donald Trump has promised to act with “historic speed and strength” when he returns to the White House on Monday.... “Starting tomorrow, I will act with historic speed of strength and fix every single crisis facing our country,” he said.

....Trump said he would instruct the military to construct an “iron dome” missile defence system.

That sounds pretty good. But I have a question: Does Trump even know what Iron Dome is, aside from having a cool name?

The short answer is that it's an Israeli system for shooting down short-range rockets. The United States (a) already has layered missile defense systems (Patriot, THAAD, C-RAM, NASAMS, Aegis) that do much the same thing, (b) is already developing a long-term, more integrated missile defense system called IFPC, and (c) doesn't use any of these things to protect the US itself because, unlike Israel, we're under no threat from short-range missiles.¹

An "Iron Dome" for the US would be a system that protects against long-range ICBMs. As even Trump should know, he doesn't need to order anyone to construct this because we've been working on it since the Reagan era.² It just doesn't work yet. Nevertheless, we spend about $10 billion per year just on the Missile Defense Agency, which accounts for roughly half of all missile defense spending:

I suppose eventually somebody will tell him this. Or else they'll just salute and then keep doing whatever they're already doing now.

¹There's an exception: we have missile defense batteries that defend the airspace around Washington DC.

²Or well before that if you count Nike-Zeus, Sentinel, and other early ABM systems.

Yesterday's New York Times poll got some attention for showing that even Democrats are pretty skeptical of puberty blockers for trans kids and trans women competing in women's sports. But this is really the most interesting part of the poll:

Pretty much everyone is convinced that Donald Trump will use presidential power to go after his political opponents, though Democrats are more convinced.

But check out the follow-up question: 40% of Republicans think this is fine. Is this just how Republicans roll? Is it revenge because they think Biden sicced prosecutors on Trump? Do they not really understand that this is wrong?

I suppose the good news is that at least 40% is still a minority. But it's close.

Democrats voted last year to shut down TikTok, but when the deadline became imminent they got cold feet and tried to backtrack.

On the other hand, Democrat Joe Biden let it die. It's Republican Donald Trump promising to keep it open.

On the third hand, Republicans in Congress are still gung ho to shut it down.

So who's to blame for shutting it down or keeping it open? I'm confused.

Or does none of this matter because Donald Trump is all that matters and he has heroically changed his mind and saved TikTok? Pay no attention to why he changed his mind, of course. He's a hero. Donald Trump is always the hero.

I've been wondering for a while how Obamacare is doing, and KFF has finally produced new favorable/unfavorable numbers from its tracking poll:

Favorability is up among Democrats and Independents, but after years of rising it's down among Republicans—from 33% last April to 28% now:

That 64% overall approval number is close the level that would make Obamacare politically untouchable. But not quite. There's still some danger that Trump and congressional Republicans could do it some damage this year.

Last night TikTok went dark. They were not subtle about whose fault it was:

Donald Trump, the hero of TikTok! This morning he announced his plan:

This is all wildly illegal. Trump has no authority to simply ignore a law passed by Congress. The law does have a provision for a 90-day extension, but only if TikTok's owners have found a buyer—which they patently haven't. In fact, they've been vocal in their refusal to even consider it.

And then there's the dealmaker-in-chief's suggestion that the federal government buy a 50% share in TikTok. I'm at a loss for words here. He thinks the United States—CEO: Donald Trump—should own the most popular social media app on the planet? And be in control of content moderation? Maybe the government should nationalize a bunch of other pesky media sites while it's at it? The mind boggles.

I'd try to say more, but I really am at a loss for words. You'll have to make up some of your own.