Don’t Despair Just Yet

Save it for Monday.

Enjoy your last weekend before four years of Trump’s America. Happy Friday.

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

One Last Weekend Without Trump

by William Kristol

A couple of days ago, responding to my piece “We Had a Good 50-Year Run, Folks,” a colleague told me, “Bill, you’ve really outdone yourself with the gloom this morning.”

I took this, of course, as a high compliment.

But the truth is, there is reason for gloom galore.

I could follow up on yesterday’s post by reflecting on the fact that, having purged Mike Turner as Intelligence Committee chair, Speaker Mike Johnson replaced him with an anti-Ukraine, pro-election-overturning Trump loyalist.

I could look over to the other side of the Capitol and lament the lack of Republican opposition in the Senate to the manifestly unqualified secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth. I could observe the willingness of GOP Senators to accept—even to praise!—the non-responsive and evasive answers from our next attorney general, Pam Bondi.

I could mock newly MAGA-fied Mark Zuckerberg for his encomium to “masculine energy,” the true meaning of which was immediately demonstrated by a New York Times story quoting him denigrating his longtime colleague, Sheryl Sandberg.

Above all, with Trump’s inauguration imminent, I could rail at the spectacle of authoritarians assembling and plutocrats partying and grifters gamboling here in our nation’s capital. I could detail all the factors in our politics and society that have brought us to this lamentable point. I could go on about the insufficient alarm in many quarters about what’s to come over the next four years, at home and abroad.

And at that point, after all that gloom, I could quote Lincoln or Churchill or Victorian poetry to rally our spirits.

Nah.

God knows, there’ll be many occasions over the next four years to lament the lamentable and deplore the deplorable, and to try to oppose the objectionable.

Trump will (sadly!) become president once again at noon Monday. Before that happens, I need a break. And you probably need a break.

This weekend, I look forward to watching some of the four NFL playoff games on offer. I’ll be rooting for the Detroit Lions to make it to the next round—en route, one hopes, to their first (!) Super Bowl. (Maybe their secondary can come up with a couple of key interceptions in honor of one of my favorite players as a kid, the great Lions cornerback, Dick ‘Night Train’ Lane.)

I look forward to watching the final episode of Season 9 of Shetland—and also the new (and, alas, final) season of Vera. BritBox, ftw.

Maybe I’ll get started on Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, the new assignment in a reading group in which I’m an occasional participant. I’ve never read Trollope, and many people I know and respect are huge fans.

And of course Monday isn’t Trump’s day. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So I hope again to watch King’s great 1963 I Have a Dream address, and also his very moving final speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, delivered on April 3, 1968, to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, the day before his assassination. And I’ll also try to watch Robert F. Kennedy’s remarkable impromptu remarks the next day in Indianapolis on learning that Rev. King had been shot.

Those are my non-Trump and actually better-than-Trump plans for the weekend. Of course everyone should do what suits them. It’s (still!) a free country. Then, after this weekend, we can turn our attention back to keeping it that way.

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Promises Made, Promises Pre-Kept

by Benjamin Parker

Donald Trump isn’t even president yet and he’s already backtracking on some of his campaign promises. End the Ukraine war before the inauguration? Not gonna happen. Bringing down grocery prices? That might be difficult. Deport millions of illegal immigrants? Well, maybe we can get them to, ya know, deport themselves!

Remember, this is the same Trump who said about a month into his first term: “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

Repealing and replacing Obamacare wasn’t his only broken promise from Trump’s first term. He didn’t build a wall along the southern border. He didn’t ban White House officials from lobbying for foreign governments. We never did have an Infrastructure Week (except, of course, for when Joe Biden was president).

So this time, Trump played it safe by making some campaign promises that—get this!—he’s already fulfilled. Or, at least, someone has.

When Trump was a candidate, he promised to end Biden’s Green New Deal—which he dubbed the “Green New Scam”—though it’s a piece of non-binding legislation that never passed either chamber of Congress. There was some overlap between what was in the Green New Deal and what was in the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, but the specific thing Trump promised to end never actually, ya know, started.

Trump has done this other times, too. “For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),” he lamented on Tuesday. “I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources.”

You might want to sit down for this news but collecting tariffs is one of the oldest jobs of the federal government. Before the 16th Amendment and the advent of income taxes, the government mostly funded itself through tariffs, which is why they were such a hot-button issue for the first century and a bit of U.S. history. Trump ought to be familiar with the people who collect import duties today—it’s Customs and Border Protection, the same people who police the border. The name gives it away.

Another example comes from Adrian Carrasquillo’s Huddled Masses newsletter yesterday. (If you haven’t subscribed to Huddled Masses, you’re really missing out.)

Tom Homan, Trump’s incoming border czar, separately told NBC he plans to bring a “fresh” idea to the table—a hotline for Americans to report undocumented immigrants they suspect of having committing crimes, which is of course ripe for abuse. . . .

[W]ell, there is already an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tipline where you can report crimes like document and benefit fraud, illegal immigration, human trafficking, and many other offenses. It has existed for more than twenty years, and it takes 15,000 calls a month.

Next Trump will probably promise that, by the end of his administration, immigrants will have to pass a test on American history and culture in English if they want to become citizens. Brilliant idea. Why did we have to wait for Trump to come around and think of it?

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The ‘The Apprentice’ Presidency

by Sonny Bunch

Donald Trump’s second official presidential photo was released yesterday:

Compare that with the presidential photo released in 2017:

There are several striking things about the shift in portraits from Trump I to Trump II. The first is kind of a standard presidential headshot: He’s smiling, he’s here to help, we’re all having a good time, aren’t we? Contrast that to the second: He’s lit from below, the camera is in tighter, and gone is that grin. This is a man getting down to business, he’s super-serial you guys, Vigo the Carpathian in the White House ready to lay waste to the bureaucracy. No smile, but his eyebrow is arched slightly like The Rock.

Or, perhaps, an evolved version of his viral mugshot:

There’s something to be said for brand awareness, though one is often hesitant to associate one’s brand so nakedly with criminality. But then, this is the whole case for Trump II isn’t it? It’s that he’s not a criminal, he’s just the guy “They” needed to punish for daring to flout “The System.” He’s not an aggressor, he’s the victim. He bears no responsibility for January 6th or hoarding classified documents or campaign finance shenanigans. It was all lawfare! Remember when they tried to get me? Little innocent old me? Here, let me remind you with this portrait.

But he’s still tough. Look at that glower! Look at the uplighting. We’ve seen Trump in this position before and not just as he was being hauled into the hoosegow. This is the face of the man who starred as Mr. Trump on NBC for a decade-plus. He’s the man in the middle of the table, getting ready to utter “You’re fired.” We all thought Trump I was silly. With Trump II we get Fox News hosts injected into the organs of government. We have Elon as our guest judge. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

If Trump I was The Apprentice: Presidency, then this is The Apprentice: Celebrity Presidency Edition. Have fun, America.

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QUICK HITS

DEPORTATION DECEPTION?: If, like us, you’re trying to get smart on immigration law and policy in preparation for the new administration, then of course you’re already reading Huddled Masses. But also check out this Conversations with Bill Kristol episode with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council and one of the top immigration experts out there. Here’s a taste:

I do think that they are already internally tempering expectations. Crucially, however, they also operate in a world of propaganda where a lot of these nuances can simply be ignored. And if they can say, “Every year we’re rounding up. . .”—if they can send a Fox News camera crew to every arrest of an undocumented sex offender, and every time they get that, they’ve got somebody on the ground saying, “Here’s President Trump protecting your communities.” Even if those arrests are the exact same kind of arrests that occurred under the last five administrations, even if they’ve only managed to ramp up enforcement 20 percent year over year. Nevertheless, they’ll still be able to use that propaganda to say, “We are protecting Americans.”

And to emphasize, I think a few other points, of course, the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are not criminals. The undocumented population is less likely to commit crimes than the native-born American citizens. Same is true for legal immigrants because people of course, sensibly, do not want to show up on a government radar and generally don’t like to stick their heads up. And the undocumented population is really part of every community. And if they actually did manage to round everybody up, it could have really devastating impacts on the United States economy in particular with massive spikes in inflation, a drop overall of the economy.

We estimated if 11 million people are deported, we estimated GDP could drop 4.2 to 6.8 percent, which is as high or higher than the percentage drop during the Great Recession. And the economic implications could be dramatic. But we are in a world right now, days before Trump takes office where we can predict a number of different scenarios, but we can’t say which one of them will come true. We can say it’s probably unlikely—almost impossible—that 11 million are deported. But given this new world we are in right now, and with the possibility of this massive influx of funding, saying how much they’re going to get and how quickly they can ramp up this enforcement, it’s still tricky.

Watch or listen to the full episode here.

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NO QUALIFICATIONS? NOEM MATTER: “Trump nominee isn’t up to the job” is becoming an old story fast. But a distinction has also been drawn between classes of the unqualified. There are those Trump nominees—Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr.—who lack actual experience. And there are those who have some governing experience but appear to be odd fits for their posts. Kristi Noem is in that latter camp. The South Dakota governor will face a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee today to be the next secretary of homeland security. So it’s worth remembering all the ways that she isn’t prepared to do that job. Paul Rosenzwweig, who was a senior official at DHS in the George W. Bush administration, reminded us back in November:

In any other administration (even Trump’s first) she would be an unserious candidate. This time around, her nomination got barely fifteen seconds of news, as it was buried in the landslide of even more absurd nominees.

Eight years ago, when Trump nominated Gen. John Kelly to be secretary of homeland security, I surveyed the types of expertise that the job required, identifying sixteen different types of experience and competence that one might reasonably look for in a qualified candidate. Gov. Noem does not seem to check many of these boxes.

He really does enumerate sixteen criteria—and no, shooting dogs is not on the list. Read the whole thing.

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RUDY CAN’T FAIL: Donald Trump may have skirted jail on his way to a second term, but that doesn’t mean all his minions got off Scot-free. Last month, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay two Georgia election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, $148 million for defamation after he accused them of helping to steal the 2020 presidential election.

Since then, Giuliani has continued to defame them and avoided handing over money and assets to make them whole. As a result, two different judges have held him in contempt of court in the last week, one in D.C. and another in New York.

As if that’s not enough, Giuliani was about to face another trial in which, per CNN, he faced losing “the Florida condo in which he says he lives and several New York Yankees World Series rings. He had been in litigation with [Moss and Freeman] over whether his $3.5 million Florida condo is his primary residence and can be exempt from the women’s debt collection efforts.”

Giuliani didn’t show up at the trial on Thursday morning, prompting mass confusion as to what exactly was happening. Hours later, it was announced that he had reached a confidential settlement with Moss and Freeman. He explained, “This resolution does not involve an admission of liability or wrongdoing by any of the Parties.” Uh-huh.

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