[ Posted Friday, February 21st, 2025 – 18:54 UTC ]
The first month of the second presidency of Donald Trump is now over. Only forty-seven more to go!
That, of course, is a daunting prospect, but we can at least open with some good news this week: Trump is already wearing out his welcome with the public. The presidential "honeymoon" period is apparently over (almost before it began). Trump started off his second term with historically dismal ratings, although they did best one previous president -- himself, in his first term. His job approval numbers were actually at 50 percent or just above when he was sworn in this time around (which, as mentioned, every other modern president has beaten), so he could at least claim a majority of the public was behind him. Not any more.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 20th, 2025 – 16:52 UTC ]
Donald Trump is now officially one month into his second term as president. And already, his "honeymoon" period seems to be ending. Most incoming presidents get at least a few months where the public essentially gives them the benefit of the doubt and approves of the job they're doing. But then at some point, this wears off and their job approval polling noticeably falls back. And some of the polls released recently show that this may already be happening with Trump.
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[ Posted Friday, February 14th, 2025 – 18:59 UTC ]
It's hard, as each new week goes by, not to get distracted by all of the chaos emanating from Washington. This week, we're going to begin by connecting a few dots that really need connecting, and (so far) haven't gotten enough attention (in our humble opinion).
Before Donald Trump became president again, both he and his MAGA choir spent a lot of time decrying "censorship" and wailing about their "free speech" being somehow suppressed. This was largely due to social media sites policing their allowable content, and occasionally removing objectionable or flat-out false posts and even kicking people off their platforms.
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[ Posted Monday, February 10th, 2025 – 16:57 UTC ]
How close are we to a constitutional crisis? Has one already begun? Is it imminent? Or does it merely loom somewhere out on the horizon? Welcome to Week 4 of the Trump administration, folks!
President Donald Trump and his team of henchmen certainly hit the ground running, issuing an absolute flood of executive orders and new policy announcements, which has now led to a resulting flood of lawsuits against them. Federal judges, some of them acting with impressive speed, have already blocked (temporarily, at least -- none of these cases has been fully heard yet) a number of Trump's actions, including the ban on birthright citizenship, a freeze on federal spending, the resignation offer Elon Musk sent to federal workers, dismantling U.S.A.I.D., and the transfer of transgender prisoners. Many of Trump's other actions are still being considered by judges who haven't ruled or issued injunctions yet.
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[ Posted Friday, February 7th, 2025 – 18:27 UTC ]
We aren't even three weeks in to the administration of President Elon Musk, and already he has instituted an ideological purge the likes of which America has not seen since the time of Senator Joe McCarthy. Except this time they're not rooting out communists (or suspected communists, or communist sympathizers) but instead just "people they don't like." Or maybe "people who have pissed off Elon" -- that's probably closer to the reality of it.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 6th, 2025 – 17:01 UTC ]
President Donald Trump and his "first buddy" Elon Musk have moved swiftly to precipitate more than one constitutional crisis during the first few weeks of the new administration. The two are running roughshod over the basic separation of powers in American government, aided and abetted by the Republicans in control of Congress. Which leads to a serious question -- how long will it be before they just wash their hands of all pretense of power and formally hand it all directly to Trump?
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[ Posted Friday, January 31st, 2025 – 18:05 UTC ]
We begin today with an apology and a solicitation for donations. Our apology is for perhaps not doing as thorough a job of reviewing the past week as we normally do, because last night instead of doing our homework we instead watched the FireAid benefit concert for the victims of the recent Los Angeles fires. If you missed it, at least check out the fireaidla.org site, where you can donate to the cause if you wish. It was quite a show, and well worth watching (note: this review contains only a partial list of the performers...):
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 – 16:07 UTC ]
The last time he was president, Donald Trump faced a big crisis. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic was erratic at best (and even that's being charitable). Later, he and his followers demonized the doctors and medical experts who were desperately trying to save lives with their advice and recommendations -- so threateningly that President Joe Biden felt the need to pre-emptively pardon Dr. Anthony Fauci right before he left office. Biden feared that Trump would harass Fauci via the Justice Department, so he precluded it from happening.
This time around, President Trump is pre-emptively taking a wrecking ball to the federal government's medical establishment, in what can only be called a war on medical science. It was telling, during the early months of the COVID crisis, that Trump kept complaining that we were doing "too much testing." The numbers of people infected and hospitalized and dying were shooting up dramatically, after Trump had promised the country that they wouldn't. The solution, as far as Trump was concerned, was to just stop testing everyone. That way, there wouldn't be any big numbers to alarm everyone. Hey presto! Problem solved!
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 28th, 2025 – 17:18 UTC ]
President Donald Trump is fast making a warning many Democrats made before his election come true: that he would prove to be an utterly lawless president. Trump's disdain for not only federal law but the entire federal judiciary is becoming more and more apparent, and he's barely begun his second week back in office. He hasn't taken the final step in creating a completely unfettered and lawless executive branch, but at this point it seems only a matter of time before he does so.
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[ Posted Friday, January 24th, 2025 – 18:45 UTC ]
In just about every presidential election, the political punditry tries to frame what happened in it in the easiest possible way, sometimes pinning a win or loss on a certain demographic slice of the electorate (remember "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads"?) and sometimes putting the focus on a single oversimplified issue. One of the big themes in this regard for the last election was the price of eggs. True to form, they even slapped a cutesy label on it: voters were angry about "eggflation."
Which is why we sincerely hope that Donald Trump is asked about it as often as possible -- say, once a week, at a minimum -- now that he is president again. Because for all his promises, eggflation is going to be a very tough problem for him to solve.
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