Don’t Be Shocked. Don’t Be Awed.
Trumpism is beatable.
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Happy Monday.
So It Begins
by William Kristol
Okay, so I lied.
I wrote on Friday that I was going to take a break this weekend from Trump.
I couldn’t pull it off.
I did watch some of the NFL playoff games. I enjoyed Jayden Daniels’s heroics. But I’ve got to admit, as soon as the game was over—even during halftime—there I was, breaking my resolution to stay away from all things Trump. News organizations were delivering alerts about planned Trump executive orders to my inbox. Colleagues were marveling about the shamelessness of the Trumpist grift. Friends were forwarding articles quoting Trump’s billionaire allies and authoritarian apologists. How could I not take a look?
So I did. Foolish promises are made to be broken. Immanuel Kant was a lot smarter than I am, but he couldn’t have been right that the duty to keep promises is a categorical imperative.
So I broke my promise. I read the articles, and exchanged thoughts with friends, and discussed plans with allies. I even took some notes for future Morning Shots.
But I’m going to stick to one aspect of my resolution. Trump’s not yet president, as I write, so I’m holding off for just a few hours on commenting on all that could be commented on. There’ll be plenty of time after noon today to discuss Trump’s speech and his executive orders and everything else that lies in store.
Instead, I want to focus on something else now: Seeing all the reports of Trump’s ambitious plans, with all the eager beaver apparatchiks ready and willing to implement them, has felt a bit intimidating. Seeing the scale and scope of it all over this past weekend could sap one’s will to resist.
But of course that’s part of the point of all the boasting and big talk. Don’t fall for it. Don’t be cowed. Don’t be demoralized. Trump and Trumpism aren’t as strong as they look. In fact, it could well be all downhill from noon today for Trump and Trumpism.
After all, it’s striking that even today, more Americans still have an unfavorable view of Trump than a favorable one. Buried in a Washington Post article over the weekend trumpeting the fact that “Trump has already conquered D.C. even before taking office” was the fact that in the most recent CNN poll, 46 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Trump while 48 percent were unfavorable.
A glance at the FiveThirtyEight poll aggregator confirms that Trump remains underwater. This is pretty remarkable. The American public has an understandable wish to believe that a plurality of them made the right decision last November. All they’ve seen in the last couple of months is widespread elite capitulation to Trump. There has also been an apparently broad if not tacit agreement in the media not to mention during the transition how irresponsible and dangerous his plans are. And the Biden administration hasn’t, in my opinion, been going out in a blaze of glory.
Despite all of this, Trump has only gained about three points in favorability since Election Day. And this is probably his high water mark. He is not as strong as everyone seems to think. As former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama can tell President Trump today, second terms are difficult even for presidents who seemed stronger, and actually won majorities and claimed mandates, after their reelection. Given how foolish many of his policies will be, I very much doubt Trump will be exempt from this pattern of second terms going south.
Especially because Trump and his apparatchiks are overconfident and overreaching. All the talk of shock and awe? That works for a day or two. But as retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling points out in a fine article for The Bulwark, “shock and awe” doesn’t have a very good track record over the medium and longer term.
So don’t be shocked. Don’t be awed. Trumpism is formidable. But it’s surely beatable.
Quick Hits
A SLEW OF ORDERS: It is going to be a whirlwind day, with Trump’s team previewing some 200 executive orders, according to multiple reports published Sunday. There are, generally, three buckets of EOs to expect: (1) immigration and border, (2) economic and energy, and (3) cultural. The border ones will involve wall construction, reinstituting the remain-in-Mexico policy, laying the groundwork for the military to help with enforcement, and more. The economic ones will involve rolling back regulations that prevent some oil drilling, terminating Biden-era rules promoting electric vehicles, and other various energy policy initiatives. The cultural ones will include things like ending DEI programs across the federal government and requiring federal workers to return to in-person work. The big unknowns are what Trump will do on tariffs and how widely he will grant clemency to the J6 rioters.
And then there are the decidedly Trumpian executive orders. Per Fox News Digital, Trump “will also suspend the security clearances for the 51 national security officials who ‘lied’ about Hunter BIden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election. He is also expected to establish biological sex definitions; rename places like the Gulf of Mexico, which will become the ‘Gulf of America.’”
About ten days ago, I asked Bill Raskin, a Yale professor who specializes in physical and earth sciences and authored the book After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, whether Trump could just change the gulf’s name. He offered the following:
The Gulf of Mexico does appear as a “domestic name,” since it appears on U.S. government-issued maps, but of course it’s also an international name, maintained by longstanding consensus and convention among all the peoples and countries of the world. Every five years there are meetings of the United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names (UNCSGN), and there’s a standing United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). But there are definitely examples of bodies of water that different countries want to name differently (one of the most contentious today is the sea west of Japan), so it’s not like the UN can magically create consensus. The multilateral International Hydrographic Organization also publishes official “Limits of Oceans and Seas” (including the Gulf of Mexico), but they’re not really in the business of standardizing names.
So, short answer: I suppose anything is possible, but even if the U.S. president pushes the “rename major feature of the world” button on the Resolute Desk, other countries (or individuals) are under no obligation to go along. (Whether private mapping companies like Google, Apple, or National Geographic can be compelled to change names on maps that appear in the U.S., I’m not sure but I doubt it.)
THE WAR RAGES ON: One thing Trump will not do on Day One is end the war in Ukraine. That’s not actually a broken promise on his part because the promise he made was that he would end the war before he stepped foot in the Oval.
“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” he vowed in a June rally.
Of course, the idea that he’d be able to do that was ridiculous at the time. But Trump, unlike virtually any other politician, is rarely punished for his bombast. Don’t expect a resolution terribly soon though. As noted in The New York Times, his special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, told Fox News that he hoped to resolve it within 100 days.
BIDEN’S LAST MINUTE PARDONS: In the last few hours of his presidency, Joe Biden isn’t exactly running towards the exit. Much-discussed preemptive pardons, fodder for weeks on cable, are here, the Associated Press reports. Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the members and staff of the House January 6th Committee plus the Capitol and D.C. police officers who testified before the committee are all on the list.
The morning is young, and Biden has until noon to pardon more people. If history is any guide, the more controversial pardons are coming.
A FEW QUICK READS: On the page this morning we have Sen. Chris Coon (D-Del.) with a letter of sorts to Trump, saying that Democrats will work with him, but warning that his stated plans won’t achieve his core promises. Also, do read Jill Lawrence on the remarkable 180 Trump has done on TikTok and what it means to see the tech oligarchy rush to his side.
Cheap Shots
This site needs a media critic. Talk about what they write and say. Hold the media accountable. They have given a pass to his words for too long.
List out what he said he was going to do with a clicker of days gone by in not getting it done.
RE: Gulf of America
As is to be expected, Trump doesn't know jack shit about geography.
Everyone knows that The Gulf of America is that sea between red and blue, right and left, illiberal and liberal America. The one in which I and other radically moderate, hair-on-fire non-partisan freedom and democracy-loving Americans have been treading water in our non-tribal political homelessness for years.
All the while watching the opposing shorelines growing ever more distant.
Oh, come on. You know... The one that now makes the Gulf of Mexico look like a f**kin' mud puddle.