Kevin Drum 🕸

I'm sure I'll have plenty of updates to this, but here's what's happening in Washington DC after Trump's inauguration. First off, Trump has already ordered the Pentagon to remove its portrait of Gen. Mark Milley, which was hung ten days ago next to all the previous chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Milley's portrait ...continue reading "After the inauguration . . ."

This tattered flag flies over the shoe garden near Rice, California. You've seen the shoe garden and shoe fence before, but not the flag. So here it is.

Donald Trump's inaugural address was surprisingly low key and consisted mostly of a laundry list of the executive orders he plans to sign later today. Some highlights: Trump declares an emergency at the southern border even though there's patently no emergency at the moment. Trump reinstates "Remain in Mexico," but can he do that without ...continue reading "The shortest possible recap of Donald Trump’s inauguration speech"

At the last minute, Joe Biden: Pardoned the J6 committee members and the Capitol police officers who testified before them. Pardoned Anthony Fauci and Gen. Mark Milley. Pardoned five close family members. Commuted the remaining sentence of native American activist Leonard Peltier. Posthumously pardoned civil rights leader Marcus Garvey. On Sunday he pardoned Darryl Chambers, ...continue reading "Today is pardon day"

It's Inauguration Day, so it seems like a good time to set down for the record the state of the country that Donald Trump is inheriting. All the ending numbers for Joe Biden are below. Some are ordinary economic stats like inflation and unemployment, while others are here only because Trump has made a big ...continue reading "Here’s what Donald Trump is inheriting today"

Donald Trump is looking forward to being president again: An exultant Donald Trump has promised to act with “historic speed and strength” when he returns to the White House on Monday.... “Starting tomorrow, I will act with historic speed of strength and fix every single crisis facing our country,” he said. ....Trump said he would ...continue reading "Trump wants an American Iron Dome"

Yesterday's New York Times poll got some attention for showing that even Democrats are pretty skeptical of puberty blockers for trans kids and trans women competing in women's sports. But this is really the most interesting part of the poll: Pretty much everyone is convinced that Donald Trump will use presidential power to go after ...continue reading "40% of Republicans support Trump corruption"

Democrats voted last year to shut down TikTok, but when the deadline became imminent they got cold feet and tried to backtrack. On the other hand, Democrat Joe Biden let it die. It's Republican Donald Trump promising to keep it open. On the third hand, Republicans in Congress are still gung ho to shut it ...continue reading "It’s crucial that we allocate blame for shutting down TikTok"

I've been wondering for a while how Obamacare is doing, and KFF has finally produced new favorable/unfavorable numbers from its tracking poll: Favorability is up among Democrats and Independents, but after years of rising it's down among Republicans—from 33% last April to 28% now: That 64% overall approval number is close the level that would ...continue reading "Obamacare keeps on getting more popular"

Last night TikTok went dark. They were not subtle about whose fault it was: Donald Trump, the hero of TikTok! This morning he announced his plan: This is all wildly illegal. Trump has no authority to simply ignore a law passed by Congress. The law does have a provision for a 90-day extension, but only ...continue reading "Donald Trump wants to buy TikTok"

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 ...continue reading "Donald Trump plans to get rich selling crypto coins"

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 ...continue reading "Next week’s ICE raid is just theater"

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 $27. There are currently 200 million TrumpCoins in circulation, with plans to grow that to one billion within three years. Out of the total ...continue reading "$TRUMP is now trading at a smartphone near you"

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 ...continue reading "Why a ceasefire now? It’s not hard."

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 ...continue reading "Florida “cracked down” on illegal immigrants. Here’s a progress report."

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 ...continue reading "TikTok is playing hardball with Joe Biden"

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 ...continue reading "Stop panicking, people"

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 ...continue reading "CBS is mulling over how much to bribe Donald Trump"

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 ...continue reading "Illegal immigration is all about jobs"

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