Kevin Drum

Bitcoin is mined. The amount of Bitcoin increases steadily over time according to the dictates of an algorithm, and new coins go to the lucky folks who successfully solve a difficult problem on their computer. You don't have to pay anyone for the coins.

But Donald Trump's meme coins are different, something I didn't fully appreciate when I wrote about them yesterday. New coins are created by Trump (or, more accurately, his agents) and then sold to the public on a set schedule over 36 months:

Note that although Trump companies will eventually own 80% of the coin supply, currently they own nothing. The initial 200 million coins are split between public distribution and liquidity. I assume that "public distribution" refers to the coins being sold on the website and "liquidity" refers to coins owned by the initial investors. But who are these investors?

The initial investors were given 10 million coins for about $40 million, or $4 per coin. Were these investors Binance and Gate.io? That's not clear. But whoever it is, they've already made a paper fortune since those coins have no lockup and are currently worth about $650 million (as of this writing $TRUMP is trading around $65).

As for "public distribution," who gets the money for selling this initial supply? That's not clear either. However:

Grogan also reports that about $500 million in coins has been sold so far; $20 million was sent to Bybit, an offshore exchange; and the liquidity wallet is withdrawing liquidity. This is mysterious, and it seems to be mysterious to Grogan as well—and he's an expert.

Because this is cryptocurrency and isn't regulated by the SEC, everything is private by design and it's hard to suss out what's really going on. In other words, it's a perfect vehicle for essentially bribing Trump without anyone ever being able to know it. It's no wonder Trump did a U-turn and became a big fan of cryptocurrency last year. Someone must have explained the personal wealth possibilities to him.

I'm sure there's more to come. It will just take some sleuthing.

Donald Trump is bragging that he plans to unleash ICE with a big raid in Chicago next week. This is typical Trump grandstanding, but it's worth keeping in mind that ICE arrests illegal immigrants all the time. Here's their weekly average over the past decade:

Under both Trump and Biden ICE has averaged about 2,500 arrests per week. Unless that goes up substantially, the Chicago raids are just theater for the rubes.

UPDATE: The chart originally had a small error. It's fixed now.

Oh come on. Is this never going to end?

Yes, this is $TRUMP, Donald Trump's personal cryptocurrency, launched last night at 6 pm. As of this writing, it's trading at about $27.

There are currently 200 million TrumpCoins in circulation, with plans to grow that to one billion within three years. Out of the total supply, 80% are owned by CIC Digital, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and a CIC co-owned entity called Fight Fight Fight LLC. At the current market value Trump's holdings would be worth $22 billion in 2028. There's more here.

The coins won't keep their $27 value, but even if they go down to $1 Trump's holdings would be worth nearly a billion dollars. Not bad for zero work.

I'm running out of things to say about Trump. I mean, how often can you ponder aloud that this time he's really gone too far? There is no bottom.

Why did Israel and Hamas finally agree to a ceasefire after months of fruitless negotiations? I don't think this is a hard question. It has to do with facts on the ground, not any weakness on Joe Biden's part.

On the Hamas side, the past few months have been disastrous. In addition to continued bombing and unrestrained slaughter from Israel, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed; Hezbollah has been neutered; Syria suddenly collapsed; and Iran was forced to pull out its troops. Iran has also suffered from Israeli bombing, continued sanctions, and rolling blackouts across the country. It's now weaker than any time in recent memory.

In short, since Israel's October invasion of Lebanon Hamas has lost both its allies and its sponsors. Hamas wasn't moved by Trump's threat that "all hell" would break out if no ceasefire was reached, since they knew the threat was hollow. But they were moved by the catastrophic evolution of the war.

On the Israeli side, Benjamin Netanyahu was moved by Trump's pressure. He's well aware that Trump's support of Israel is strong but transactional, like most of Trump's dealings.¹ It could go away overnight if he feels he's getting nothing in return, and what Trump wanted was to get the war off his plate before he took office so he could concentrate on higher priorities (immigration, tariffs, energy) without worrying about war protesters provoking chaos and undermining his popularity the way they did Biden's.

Beyond this, the IDF is tired and stretched thin. Sixteen months of high-intensity war will do that to a small country, and they need a break to rest, regroup, and re-arm. A ceasefire is in their interest at the moment.

Nothing about the ceasefire deal has changed in the past half year, but six months ago neither side was willing to accept it no matter how much Joe Biden begged them. Today, Hamas is in ruins; Israel has gotten most of what it wants; and Netanyahu wants to appease Trump. That's why a ceasefire is possible now that hasn't been for the past year.

¹Netanyahu hasn't forgotten Trump's initial dithering after Hamas's October 7 attack:

Trump at a rally Wednesday night said Netanyahu “let us down” just before the U.S. killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020.... In an interview that aired Thursday, he added to his criticism, saying Netanyahu “was not prepared” for the deadly weekend incursion from Gaza.

More recently Trump added that "Bibi Netanyahu rightfully has been criticized for what took place on Oct. 7. Also: “I had a bad experience with Bibi. And I was not happy about that. That was something I never forgot. And it showed me something.” And: there are “some very good people” who could take Netanyahu’s job. Trump also holds a grudge over Netanyahu congratulating Biden after the 2020 election while Trump was still fighting it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that workers have left Florida since it passed a Trump-like law a couple of years ago that cracked down on illegal immigrants:

Still, the law hasn’t resulted in huge disruptions to the state’s labor market, as some predicted.

Huh. Maybe the jobs they took were ones Americans were willing to do after all. Or—

Oh, wait. The Journal explains:

Certain provisions were watered down before the bill passed or in its implementation, and the state has done little to enforce the law.

Why does the Journal say that Florida "cracked down" on undocumented workers if they actually didn't? And why do they say the state’s experience is "instructive" when, in fact, it's meaningless?

Who knows? But in the end, maybe the law has worked as intended:

Anxiety among immigrants and their families has climbed.... “The distress levels were off the charts,” said the study’s lead author.

....Former Republican state Rep. Rick Roth, who voted for the law and operates a family farm in Belle Glade...said he believes the law has functioned as intended—sending a message that unauthorized migrants aren’t welcome in Florida and should stay away.

It's a win-win-win. Ron DeSantis gets something to brag about; Republican business owners aren't much affected; and undocumented workers are even more scared and docile. What's not to like?

Maybe that's instructive after all. My apologies to the Journal.

China senses weakness and is going in for the kill:

TikTok said the app will have to “go dark” in the United States on Sunday barring a last-minute intervention from the Biden administration to halt enforcement of a federal ban.

....“Unless the Biden administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring nonenforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on Jan. 19,” the company said in a statement posted on X.

TikTok doesn't need to go dark. US-based hosting services and CDNs have to stop supporting TikTok on Sunday, and both Apple and Google have to remove the app from their app stores. But TikTok has plenty of hosting capacity outside the US, and anyone who already has the app can keep using it. This isn't a long-term solution, but it does mean that TikTok has the option of delaying the shutdown for many months while it works on getting a reprieve.

So why the threat to shut down instantly on the 19th? I have two guesses:

• It's just a garden variety power play against Biden. They're hoping that the prospect of an imminent revolt among 170 million TikTok users will coerce Biden into caving in and extending the deadline.
• It's some kind of weird 4D chess maneuver. They want everyone to know that it was Biden who shut them down and Donald Trump who saved the day when he reverses the shutdown a day later. Why? Just to cozy up to their new buddy. Their CEO has an invitation to the inauguration, after all.

Well, maybe. Who knows for sure. We'll see how it all plays out.

POSTSCRIPT: There is one thing I'm not sure about. TikTok's user data is hosted by Oracle in Texas, and Oracle will have to shut that down. I think. If they do, would that prevent TikTok from operating? Do they have backups of that data outside the US or has the transfer to Oracle been fully completed? I'm not sure.

I swear I'm eventually going to be driven around the bend by doomsayers. The culprit this time is unexpected: Kelsey Piper at Vox, who says the LA fires "were the product of gross mismanagement by the city and state governments." I don't have the energy to take this on yet again, so I'll just say that her bill of particulars is unfounded except for the insurance commissioner's ineptitude, which really was substantial.

Instead I'm going to comment about her claim that this is just like COVID, which the CDC screwed up: they blew it on testing; they blew it on masks; and they blew it on vaccine distribution. But this isn't true. Only the testing stumble was a botched job, not any of the others. The CDC did change its advice on masks, but for chrissake people, it was only for one month and it happened because we learned that COVID could be asymptomatic. What were they supposed to do? It's time to get over it. As for this:

There were plenty of individuals who did plenty of heroics to try to see what was coming and do something about it, but there weren’t any institutions waiting behind the scenes to save the day. When we got vaccines, it was a bunch of well-meaning private actors organized on Discord who did much of the legwork to make them accessible to the public, often by systematically calling every pharmacy to put in a spreadsheet whether they had availability.

Say what? There were arguments early on about who should get priority, but here's how we did overall compared to peer countries in Europe:

We distributed 13 million vaccine doses in the first 30 days and 56 million in the first 60 days—far more than any other country. That's pretty good performance.

But wait. The US is a big country. Of course we distributed more doses than medium-sized France or tiny Sweden. How do things look on a per capita basis?

The UK was best, but we were second. Eventually we lost our lead, but that was due to vaccine resistance in red states, not distribution problems.

I'm sure the Discord group did good work, but it's just not true that vaccine distribution was some kind of epic horror show. We did a pretty good job.

You want to know what our biggest problem really is? It's the frenzy, whenever something goes wrong, to pronounce it the downfall of western civ. Some of this is deliberate partisan nonsense, but more of it is due to our habit of overreacting wildly to every imaginable setback. That's how we get polycrises; the end of global supply chains; CDC ineptitude; a "chaotic" withdrawal from Afghanistan; and "gross mismanagement" as the cause of fires that couldn't have been contained by any firefighting force on earth.¹ We are a panic prone people, and that's our biggest problem of all.

¹We don't have any more crises than usual; the global logistics network did pretty well during COVID and is decidedly still around; the CDC actually performed admirably; the Afghanistan withdrawal was remarkably efficient under impossible circumstances; and sure, California could do better, but the LA fires were the result of a perfect storm (climate change, warm weather in January, 300 days of drought, 80 mph winds), not mismanagement of any kind.

Oh come on:

Paramount Global executives have held internal discussions about settling a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump over a CBS News interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, according to people familiar with the situation, a sign of larger efforts to dial down tensions with the incoming president.

Paramount, owner of CBS, its namesake studio and several cable channels, has a major piece of business in front of the new administration: its planned merger with Skydance Media. It’s become clear to executives at both companies that Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval, people familiar with the situation said.

This is ridiculous. When ABC settled its lawsuit against Trump there was at least a colorable argument that they had libeled him. In this case there's nothing. Trump argues that CBS edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her look good, which is nothing actionable even if it's true. This case was never going anywhere.

Settling would be a bribe in all but name—or maybe extortion if Trump tried to follow through in his official capacity. This is like being ruled by the Corleone family.

Andrew Prokop at Vox writes today that Joe Biden's "political disaster" on immigration was due to infighting among his aides, not because Biden himself was soft on border enforcement:

All the way back in March 2021, the New York Times reported, Biden was furious about the border crisis, demanding to know whom he needed to fire to fix it.

The problem was that, for three full years, Biden’s team proved unable to fix it.

Until, in 2024, they suddenly did.

During Biden’s first three years in office, the number of arriving migrants skyrocketed.... Then, starting early in 2024, and continuing throughout the year, border arrivals plummeted. In August, border encounters had dropped to about 58,000 — 77 percent lower than the previous December’s level. By the end of the year, they’d dropped even further.

....If it was possible all along to get the border much more under control, why didn’t Biden do it years ago? If this was what Biden hoped to achieve all along, what went wrong in the administration’s decision-making that it only materialized after years of political pain?

Prokop falls victim to the common idea that policy is everything and the crisis continued until Biden finally adopted some decisive policy changes. But there's no mention of the most obvious explanation: jobs.

The usual policy explanation for the drop in border crossings is (a) increased enforcement from Mexico in early 2024 and (b) Biden's June 2024 asylum order. But this is backward.

Take a close look at the chart. Border crossings started to skyrocket under Trump as job demand skyrocketed, and this continued under Biden. In early 2022 job demand softened, and shortly thereafter border crossings began softening too—before any policy changes of any kind—and kept dropping through mid-2023. This would have continued except that Mexico suddenly loosened its border policies. When they went back to normal, border crossings returned to their previous downward trend. Then they started another plunge that went through May 2024, before Biden signed his order. June brought only a small additional increase.

Unless you believe in time machines, the immigration story is clear: the fundamental driver was jobs. Mexico interrupted that briefly and Biden later gave it a push, but that's all. When job demand was high, so was illegal immigration. When job demand dropped, illegal immigration dropped right alongside it.

None of this is to say that a more cohesive White House couldn't have done more. Perhaps they could have. But they were fighting strong headwinds—unlike Donald Trump in 2019, who had the tailwind of slowing job demand at his back.

It's the jobs, stupid. Nothing else made more than a small difference.

Hilbert has things to do and places to go. Don't get in his way.