We took Pascal in Library School (aka the Masters of Library and Information Science program, as it was then)
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Office Space is only really funny when you don’t watch it as a comedy.
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You’re right, of course - it should be greybeard.
Also:
a) Even if you chose Pascal over FORTRAN back then, you’re officially old now.
b) FORTRAN is still da bomb, so to speak.
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January 2, 2025 (Thursday)
This evening, President Joe Biden awarded twenty Americans the Presidential Citizens Medal, which is given to those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.” Biden chose these particular individuals because he “believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others” and that “[t]he country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
Those twenty included civil rights leaders who fought to end racial segregation, promote Black voting, restore rights for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, legalize same-sex marriage, and defend women’s rights to equality, and reformers who advanced tax reform and the reform of financial markets, moved forward childcare policies, advanced common-sense gun-safety regulations, and promoted women’s health.
They included military personnel who perfected trauma care, ensured that female service members received the recognition they deserve, and worked to repair the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam; a war correspondent who recorded the experience of battle; a photographer and philanthropist who has advanced teacher training and micro-enterprise in developing countries; and an educator who has guided students toward the arts.
The recipients included both Democrats and Republicans, with Biden honoring Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) for example, for supporting abortion rights. “[S]he stood up for what she believed in even if it meant standing alone,” he said, “and she reached across the aisle to do what she believed was right.”
And the recipients included the chair and vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, informally known as the January 6th Committee, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). Biden praised Thompson for “defending the rule of law with unwavering integrity and a steadfast commitment to truth.” He praised Cheney for raising her voice and reaching across the aisle “to defend our Nation and the ideals we stand for: Freedom. Dignity. And decency.” He added: “Her integrity and intrepidness remind us all what is possible if we work together.”
Biden also offered a public message today in response to the horrific New Year’s Eve attack in New Orleans in which Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen and Army veteran from Texas, drove a truck into a crowd in the French Quarter, killing 14 people and wounding 30 others.
Before today’s Sugar Bowl playoff between Georgia and Notre Dame in New Orleans, Biden addressed the nation: “Today all America stands with the people of New Orleans. We pray for those killed and injured in yesterday’s attack. We are grateful… for the brave first responders who raced to save lives. We’re glad the game is back on for today, but I’m not surprised, because the spirit of New Orleans can never be kept down. That’s also true of the spirit of America. We just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing, nothing, beyond our capacity if we do it together. God bless New Orleans, and God protect our troops.”
While Biden focuses on protecting civil rights and making progress together in a unified America, Trump and Elon Musk are doubling down on dividing Americans. Over the holiday, the fight between the original MAGA and the new tech billionaires taking over the Trump White House continued, and Trump and Musk appear to be trying to heal that rift by returning to culture war themes.
The fight began over immigration, which MAGA opposes and Musk champions for skilled workers, but spread as the Musk faction attacked the American culture MAGA celebrates. After rising to prominence by attacking immigrants, Trump sided with the Musk faction.
On New Year’s Eve, as President-elect Trump set out for a party at Mar-a-Lago, a reporter asked him why he had changed his mind on the H-1B visas that enable employers to bring skilled workers to the U.S. “I didn’t change my mind,” Trump answered. “I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in.”
This is a dramatic change from Trump’s previous positions. On March 4, 2016, for example, Trump’s social media account posted: “The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay…. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first…. No exceptions.” It is this stand on immigration that Trump’s MAGA base supports.
For his part, last Friday Musk told those opposed to H-1B visas to “[t]ake a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face.” He said: “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” But MAGA news sites Breitbart and Newsmax didn’t back down, reporting a story by Fred Lambert of Electrek, a site that follows the changeover from fossil-fuel to green vehicles, pointing out that Musk’s Tesla is a major user of H-1B visa workers and that it requested more than 2,400 such workers at the same time it was laying off U.S. workers early in 2024.
On New Year’s Eve, Musk changed his name on X to the name of a meme coin, a cryptocurrency based on an online meme, and changed his avatar to one using symbols favored by the far right. Some of his supporters saw the changes as a signal of his true beliefs, especially as he is strongly supporting the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
Trump also seemed to swing back to his MAGA base when he returned to his attacks on immigrants by echoing a mistaken report by the Fox News Channel. Trump falsely linked the New Orleans attack to “criminals coming in” from other countries and claimed that the U.S. has “open borders,” although in fact, encounters at the border have fallen to a four-year low, lower now than when Trump left office.
The abrupt elevation of culture wars echoes the formula Republicans have used for the past forty years to distract from the reality that between 1981 and 2021 their embrace of so-called supply-side economics moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Distracting voters with outrage over “welfare queens,” “Libtards,” and so on, kept the country focused on cultural issues rather than economic ones.
As Musk and Trump appear to be making up for their defense of immigration by courting the far right again, Anthony Adragna of Politico reported today that incoming House Republicans are also relying on culture wars to hold their coalition together. Adragna reports they are planning to make trans rights their “marquee fight” of 2025.
That focus is likely intended to distract Republican voters from the reality that Trump has promised to swing the country away from Biden’s investment in rebuilding the middle class. Biden’s focus on employment meant that unemployment dropped dramatically during his term, more people got access to affordable health care, labor unions showed historic growth, and real wages went up so much that according to economist David Doney, workers now have the highest real hourly wages since the 1960s.
Good news for workers was good news for everyone: the country’s economic growth was more than double that of any other country in the Group of 7 (G7) economically advanced democracies.
But Trump has been very clear that he rejects this system and intends to take the country back to supply-side economics, in which the government encourages the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Those who embrace this theory argue that wealthy investors will use their money more efficiently than they could under government regulation.
Trump has promised to fill his cabinet with billionaires, and top donors have been donating as much as $2 million to his inauguration fund (those at that level can get up to six tickets to events of the inaugural weekend). According to Jeanna Smialek and Ana Swanson of the New York Times, Trump’s promise to back Wall Street investors and corporate boardrooms has given them high hopes for the Trump administration.
And, of course, Musk, the world’s richest man, has eclipsed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance and sometimes even Trump himself as the face of the incoming administration.
Trump’s very public embrace of billionaires comes just weeks after the December 4, 2024, shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson revealed a large American population that is desperately angry at wealthy and powerful executives. Across social media, posts have been defending and even praising Thompson’s alleged murderer since the shooting. Even those who avoided championing the shooter took exception to the fact that those defending Thompson’s industry and deploring his murder had little to say about those people who died after insurance companies denied their claims.
For decades now, Republicans have been able to keep class tensions at bay by hammering constantly on culture wars, and they appear to be trying that again to smooth over the fight between MAGA and the billionaires. But it is possible that the rumbling anger that flashed to the surface over the killing of an insurance CEO will reinforce the MAGA wing and keep class, rather than culture, uppermost.
If Trump does not bring down prices, as he promised and now has downplayed, if he imposes tariffs that will force poorer and middle-class Americans to pay for the tax cuts he has promised to the wealthy and corporations, if Republicans cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to balance the budget; all while Musk continues to pull down billions of dollars in taxpayer money, the rhetorical formula that worked for so long might finally break.
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Cheney receives a prestigious award for doing the bare minimum that we should expect from all lawmakers, regardless of affiliation. Wow.
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Yep… that’s… kind of where we’re at right now. 
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The sad fact is that putting the good of the country above the naked acquisition and exercise of power is notable these days. And it sucks 10 ways from Tuesday.
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The outgoing administration (rightfully) praises the values and goals that we strive for when the USA is at its best, things that the incoming administration has attacked and promised to destroy. 
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January 3, 2025 (Friday)
Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.
Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. All eyes were on the House, where Republicans will hold 219 seats. Initially, though, that number will be 218: The seat to which Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was elected will be empty since he resigned from the previous Congress and, after the House Ethics Committee released a report saying there was “substantial evidence” that Gaetz had broken state and federal laws, apparently decided to focus on his new media show rather than return to the House. When the clerk announced that Gaetz would not take a seat in the 119th Congress, applause broke out.
The Democrats hold 215 seats, and everyone showed up to opening day, including Dwight Evans (D-PA), who has been absent since suffering a stroke last May, and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who fell and broke her hip on a congressional trip to Luxembourg in mid-December. Scott MacFarlane reported that Pelosi, who received a hip replacement at the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, entered the chamber smiling. C-SPAN reported that she had replaced her trademark high heels with flats.
Notably, there are fewer women in the 119th Congress than in the previous one, and there will be no women chairing committees in the Republican-dominated House.
The first problem for the Republicans to solve was the election of a House speaker. It took 15 ballots to elect Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) when the Republicans took control of the House in 2023, and McCarthy had made so many concessions to the far right that they were able to remove him from office just ten months later, the first time in history that a party removed its own speaker in the middle of a session. Then they cycled through four candidates and four votes before settling on backbencher Mike Johnson (R-LA) for speaker. But while Johnson’s evangelical Christianity and support for Trump’s Big Lie about having won the 2020 presidential election indicated he was an extremist, Johnson immediately infuriated the far-right wing of the Republican Party by agreeing to fund the government without incorporating their extreme demands.
Far-right members want to use the need to fund government operations as leverage to get what they want. In a memo before today’s vote, they claimed that Trump and the Republicans hold a “historic mandate,” although in fact Trump won less than 50% of the vote in one of the smallest margins in U.S. history. They have said publicly they would not vote for Johnson as speaker again, likely to extract concessions that give them more power, but Johnson vowed not to make any concessions to them.
Trump was mad at Johnson for backing the passage just before Christmas of a continuing resolution to fund the government without getting rid of the debt ceiling as Trump demanded. But, likely recognizing that the House needs to be organized before it can count the electoral votes that will make him president, Trump endorsed Johnson on social media and worked the phones to support him before today’s vote.
In the first ballot today, all 215 Democrats voted for Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), with him and former House speaker Pelosi sharing a hug when she voted for him. A number of Republicans declined to vote initially, then 216 voted for Johnson while three others voted for someone else, leaving Johnson two votes short of the 218 he needed to be elected.
It was a dramatic rejection not only of Johnson, but also of Trump, who had posted that “[a] win for Mike today will be a big win for the Republican Party, and yet another acknowledgment of our 129 year most consequential Presidential Election!!—A BIG AFFIRMATION, INDEED. MAGA!” But his candidate still could not get the votes he needed from within his own party to run the House.
Scenes like this explain why I remain astonished by the persistence of the narrative that the Democrats are divided while the Republicans are in lockstep.
After the initial vote but before it was gaveled to a close, Johnson went into his office with eight members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, while Trump and incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles called the holdouts. When they emerged, two of the members who had voted for people other than Johnson switched their vote to him, giving him the votes he needed to become the speaker of the 119th Congress. One of the holdouts, Ralph Norman (R-SC) was the man who urged Trump to declare “Marshall Law” on January 17, 2021, to keep President-elect Joe Biden from taking over the presidency.
As soon as they had voted for Johnson, eleven far-right representatives sent a letter to their colleagues saying they had voted for Johnson because they wanted to make sure they didn’t mess up the January 6 counting of Trump’s electoral votes. But they warned that if Johnson didn’t reduce the deficit by enacting “real” spending cuts, stop working with Democrats, and only entertain measures supported by a majority of Republicans, they would challenge his speakership.
For his part, Democratic leader Jeffries said to the House: “Our position is that it is not acceptable to cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut veterans’ benefits, or cut nutritional assistance from children and families in order to pay for massive tax breaks for billionaires and wealthy corporations.”
So Johnson is speaker again, but he’s already caught between the MAGAs demanding significant budget cuts and the Democrats’ promise to call attention to every one of those cuts. And popular anger at billionaires seems to be increasing daily: today Pulitzer-Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes left the Washington Post after her editor killed a cartoon criticizing the tech and media leaders who have been currying favor with Trump. “[E]ditorial cartoonists are vital for civic debate,” she wrote, and after watching colleagues overseas “risk their livelihoods and sometimes even their lives to…hold their countries’ leaders accountable,” she chose to leave so she could continue to speak truth to power.
This afternoon, Judge Juan Merchan ordered Trump to report in person or virtually for sentencing in the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies related to payments he made to film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public with the story of their sexual encounter before the 2016 election. Trump had tried to get the case dismissed because he had been elected president. His spokesperson called the sentencing order a “witch hunt.”
Merchan indicated he would not sentence Trump to serve time in jail.
Meanwhile, at the White House today, President Joe Biden awarded the Medal of Honor to five Korean War veterans who may have been denied the nation’s highest award for military valor because of their race or ethnicity, and upgraded awards of the Distinguished Service Cross to the Medal of Honor for two veterans of the Vietnam War. Specialist Fourth Class Kenneth J. David was the only one of the men who could receive the honor personally. Biden also awarded fourteen individuals with the National Medal of Science and nine people and two organizations with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He also awarded the Medal of Valor to eight public safety officers for acting above and beyond the call of duty. The awards went to officers who ran toward gunfire to save children during the Nashville Covenant School shooting, swam through freezing water to save a drowning woman, and rushed into burning buildings to rescue women and children.
Biden honored the military personnel for their bravery, and the scientists for their “discoveries that are helping us meet the climate crisis, treat crippling disease, create lifesaving vaccines, pioneer the way we communicate, and significantly improve our understanding of the universe and our place within it.” But it was his remarks about the eight public safety officers awarded the Medal of Valor for acting above and beyond the call of duty that stood out.
He called in the press and said: “Folks, I wanted you to come in because…I think it’s very important that the public see them and know who they are…. There’s a lot fewer empty chairs around the kitchen table and dining room table because of what these guys did.” Biden thanked their families, “because if you’re the spouse of a firefighter or a police officer, you always worry about that phone call,” and told the award recipients: “You’re the best America has to offer.”
Yesterday, Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, given to those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens,” to twenty Americans including former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served on the January 6 committee. Today, Trump attacked Cheney and others who investigated the events of January 6, 2021, as “dishonest Thugs.”
Cheney responded: “Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic—to protect the America we love from you.”
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January 4, 2025 (Saturday)
Let’s take the night off.
We can come back to it all tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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January 5, 2025 (Sunday)
Investigators found two letters on a phone inside the remains of the rented Tesla Cybertruck that active-duty Green Beret Master Sergeant Matthew Alan Livelsberger exploded outside the Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump hotel on New Year’s Day. It appears that Livelsberger wrote them to explain why he was performing what he called “a stunt with fireworks and explosives.” Aside from his personal need to forget about the violence of his military career, he wrote, he wanted to “WAKE UP” servicemembers, veterans, and all Americans.
He wrote that the U.S. is “headed toward collapse,” and he listed as reasons Americans’ moral failings and boredom, diversity programs, an economy that has permitted the top 1% to leave everyone else behind, and a weak and corrupt government.
His solution was to “[f]ocus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” he wrote. “Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He called for “[w]eed[ing] out those in our government and military who do not idealize” that masculinity and strength, and urged military personnel, veterans, and militias to “move on DC starting now.”
“Occupy every major road along fed[eral] buildings and the campus of fed[eral] buildings by the hundreds of thousands. Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete. Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dem[ocrat]s out of the fed[eral] government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.”
The vision of the U.S. as a hellscape that can only be fixed by purging the government of Democrats does not reflect reality. As Peter Baker recorded in the New York Times today, the country that President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration will leave behind when they leave office is in the best shape it’s been in since at least 2000.
No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars, murders have plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply, undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office, stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing, real wages are rising, inflation has fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment is at near-historic lows, and energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.
Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”
Livelsberger’s notes reflect not reality but rather the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends.
Ronald Reagan made that argument central to American political debate in the 1980s. Joining those who claimed that the modern American state was creeping toward communism, he warned that the federal government was the current problem in the nation. He championed a mythological American cowboy who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone.
That cowboy myth arose after the Civil War, when former Confederates complained that federal protection of Black rights cost white tax dollars. They contrasted the “socialism” in Washington, D.C., with the western cowboys in the cattle industry, portraying the cowboys as hardworking white men who dominated the land and the peoples of the West and enforced the law themselves with principles and guns.
The cowboy image of the post–World War II years served a similar function: to undermine a government that, in the process of regulating business and providing a social safety net, defended the rights of minorities and women. After 1980, Republicans increasingly insisted that regulations, taxation, and a social safety net were socialism, and they attracted white male voters by warning that the real beneficiaries of the government were racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities and women.
In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the National Rifle Association endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.
As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from grasping minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.
What in the 1980s was a rhetorical image of individuals destroying the federal government was turning into action by the 1990s. “Taxes are a joke,” a former Army gunner, Timothy McVeigh, wrote to a newspaper in 1992. “Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.” On April 19, 1995, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children younger than six, and wounded more than 800.
When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” the same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. They mean “thus always to tyrants” and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Julius Caesar.
As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land. Democrat Harry Reid, also of Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, warned, “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it.”
But the idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew stronger. In 2016, Trump insisted that his Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Winning the election through the electoral college, he first attacked the government over the FBI’s investigation of the ties between his campaign and Russian operatives, and then, after his first impeachment, went after any official who tried to hold him accountable to the law. Although many of his critics were Republicans, including his own appointees, he called anyone who crossed him a Democrat.
Republican lawmakers began to pose their families for Christmas cards with everyone holding a semi-automatic weapon. As Joshua Kaplan reported in ProPublica yesterday in a deep dive into the world of a mole who embedded himself in the world of today’s right-wing paramilitaries, leaders in that system now include “doctors, career cops and government attorneys.” “Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling,” Kaplan wrote, but “always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.”
But voters kept protesting cuts to the social safety net, and in November 2020 they elected a Democratic president, Joe Biden, by a popular majority of more than 7 million votes and an electoral college win of 306 votes to 232. Trump supporters believed that Democrats could not possibly have won fairly and that if they had won, it simply meant the vote was illegitimate.
Trump told his supporters that “emboldened radical-left Democrats” had stolen the election and that Democratic policies “chipped away our jobs, weakened our military, threw open our borders, and put America last.” Biden would be an “illegitimate president,” “voted on by a bunch of stupid people.” “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump told them. “You have to show strength and you have to be strong…. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Radicalized individuals fantasized that they were imitating the American Founders, about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6 she wrote: “Today is 1776.”
In fact, it was not 1776 but 1861, when insurrectionists tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule. They wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy—our right to determine our own destiny—in order to make sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.
And now voters have reelected Trump, who last night held a party at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate those who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has called the January 6 rioters “patriots” and promised to pardon those who have been convicted of crimes in relation to the event as soon as he takes office.
But this would be a deeply unpopular move. More than 60% of Americans oppose such pardons.
In the late nineteenth century, former Confederates regained control of their states as Americans across the country accepted the argument that a government that protected civil rights would usher in socialism. Today’s Americans have heard the same argument since at least the 1980s, but rather than a redistribution of wealth downward, between 1981 and 2021 $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Now the incoming president has openly tied himself to billionaires
Trump continues to vow that he will dismantle the federal government, but the four years from 2021 to 2025 challenged Reagan’s claim that the government is the problem. Those years demonstrated that the federal government could work for all Americans, although not quickly enough to undo damage of the previous forty years and satisfy those left behind, many of whom voted for Trump and some of whom have resorted to violence.
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January 6, 2025 (Monday)
In less than 40 minutes today in snow-covered Washington, D.C., a joint session of Congress counted the certified electoral votes that will make Republican Donald Trump president of the United States at noon on January 20. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the session in her role as president of the Senate, announcing to Congress the ballot totals. The ceremony went smoothly, without challenges to any of the certified state ballots. Trump won 312 electoral votes; Harris, who was the Democratic nominee for president, won 226.
The Democrats emphasized routine process and acceptance of election results to reinforce that the key element of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. Before the session, Harris released a video on social media reminding people that “[t]he peaceful transfer of power is one of the most fundamental principles of American democracy. As much as any other principle, it is what distinguishes our system of government from monarchy or tyranny.”
But at the session, the tableau on the dais itself illustrated that Republicans have elevated lawmakers who reject that principle. Behind the vice president sat the newly reelected speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (R-LA), who was a key player in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election: he lied about fraud; recruited colleagues to join a lawsuit challenging the election results from the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia; and, after the January 6 riot, challenged the counting of certified votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania.
After the session concluded, Harris told reporters: “Well, today was…obviously, a very important day, and it was about what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted, which is that one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.
“And today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which included, today, performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America, the voters of America will have their votes counted, that those votes matter, and that they will determine, then, the outcome of an election.
“I do believe very strongly that America’s democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it—every single person, their willingness to fight for and respect the importance of our democracy. Otherwise, it is very fragile and it will not be able to withstand moments of crisis.
“And today, America’s democracy stood.”
Democracy stood in the sense that its norms were honored today as they were not four years ago, which is no small thing. But it is a blow indeed that the man who shattered those norms by trying to overturn the will of the American voters and seize the government will soon be leading it again.
It did not seem initially as if any such a resurrection was possible. While MAGA lawmakers and influencers tried to insist that “Antifa” or FBI plants had launched the riot that made congress members hide in fear for their lives while Secret Service agents rushed Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, to a secure location, that left at least seven people dead and at least 140 police officers wounded, and that did about $3 million of damage to the Capitol as rioters broke windows and doors, looted offices, smeared feces on the walls, and tore down an American flag to replace it with a Trump flag, there was little doubt, even among Trump loyalists, as to who was to blame.
All four living presidents condemned Trump and his supporters; Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all suspended him; members of his cabinet resigned in protest; corporations and institutions dropped their support for Trump.
Indeed, it seemed that the whole Trump ship was foundering. Trump advisor Hope Hicks texted Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff that the Trump family was now “royally fcked.” “In one day he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boy’s chapter,” Hicks wrote. “And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed. I’m so mad & upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.” “Not being dramatic, but we are all fcked.”
Even then–Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered a blistering account of Trump’s behavior and said: “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.”
But McConnell appeared reluctant to see Trump impeached. He delayed the Senate trial of the House’s charge of “incitement of insurrection” until Biden was president, then pressed for Trump’s acquittal on the grounds that he was no longer president. Even before that February 2021 acquittal, then–House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)—who had had a shouting match with Trump on January 6 in which he allegedly begged Trump to call off his supporters and yelled that the rioters were “trying to f*cking kill me!”—traveled to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago to get him to support Republican candidates in the 2022 election.
Their hunger to keep Trump’s voters began the process of whitewashing Trump’s attempt to overturn our democracy. At the same time, those Republicans who had either participated in the scheme or gone along with it continued to defend their behavior. As time passed, they downplayed the violence of January 6. As early as May 2021, some began to claim it was less a deadly attack than a “normal tourist visit.”
When the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol began to collect testimony and evidence, Trump and fellow Republicans did all they could to discredit it. As it became clear that Trump would win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, they worked to exonerate him from wrongdoing and accused the Democrats of misleading Americans about the events of that day.
In February 2021, McConnell defended his vote to acquit Trump of inciting insurrection by promising the courts would take care of him. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen,” he said, “still liable for everything he did while in office, [and] didn’t get away with anything yet…. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
But while more than 1,500 people have been charged with federal crimes associated with the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and many of Trump’s lawyers and advisors have been disbarred or faced charges, Trump has managed to avoid legal accountability by using every possible means to delay the federal case brought against him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
And now, with the help of a compliant Supreme Court stacked with three of his own appointees, he has gained the immunity McConnell said he did not have. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court handed down the aptly named Donald Trump v. United States decision, establishing that sitting presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within the scope of their official duties. Before the new, slimmer set of charges brought after this decision could go forward, voters reelected Trump to the presidency, triggering the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
As Republicans whitewashed January 6 and the legal system failed to hold Trump to account, the importance of Trump’s attack on our democracy seemed to fade. Even the Trump v. U.S. Supreme Court decision, which undermined the key principle that all Americans are equal before the law by declaring Trump above it, got less attention than its astonishingly revolutionary position warranted, coming as it did just four days after President Joe Biden looked and sounded old in a televised presidential debate.
As the 2024 election approached, Trump rewrote the events of January 6 so completely that he began calling it “a day of love.” He said those found guilty of crimes related to January 6 were “political prisoners” and vowed to pardon them on his first day in office. Dan Barry and Alan Feuer noted in the New York Times today that Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, referring to “the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th,” claims that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.”
And yet, today, Trump’s lawyers wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding he prevent the public release of the final report written by special counsel Jack Smith about Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. They say it would disrupt the presidential transition by “giving rise to a media storm of false and unfair criticism” and interfere with presidential immunity by diverting Trump’s time and energy.
Having reviewed the two-volume report, the lawyers objected to its claim that Trump and others “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort,” that Trump was “the head of the criminal conspiracies,” that he hatched a “criminal design,” and that he “violated multiple federal criminal laws.” They also took issue with the “baseless attacks on other anticipated members of President Trump’s incoming administration, which are an obvious effort to interfere with upcoming confirmation hearings.”
They conclude that releasing Smith’s report “would not ‘be in the public interest.’”
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January 7, 2025 (Tuesday)
Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”
Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.
The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.
While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.
Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.
Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.
Those eager to get their hands on the land use the words “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”
But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.
Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.
Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.
In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.
In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.
Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.
Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.
Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.
But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.
Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.
But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.
Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”
The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.
It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.
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Glad I’m not the only person who noted the timing of this presser… What a monumental baby.
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Waiting to see the “You can’t fly that half-staff flag at my inauguration!” tantrum. Expecting him to order the customary period of mourning to be cut short. So we can all focus on him, of course.
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You’re 5 days late for that rant.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-complains-that-us-flags-will-be-half-staff-his-inauguration-day-2025-01-03/
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Wait, I thought it was loyal patriots, Antifa, BLM, or just another tourist visit? (Depending on which of the three brain cells are firing on a given day, of course.)
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There’s something really open, curious, “learning mode” about Dr. Richardson’s interview here, and I now have a glimpse of potential light in the darkness I am anticipating…
She has the historian’s well-founded long view.
And she has some excellent examples of how history can surprise us, for better or for worse.
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We’ll see what SCOTUS says since Trump just asked them to intervene.
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