A Little over a Week

 

It has been a little over a week since Trump’s inauguration. He has done some good things such as his executive orders on the border, DEI, pausing hiring and new regulations until his people are in place in the agencies, free speech, and ending the de facto EV mandate. He has done some bad things such as pardoning all the participants in the riots of January 6^th 2021. He has done some plain nutty things such as proposing renaming the Gulf of Mexico and threatening to take back the Panama Canal and annex Greenland.

The worst thing he has done is break the law. The order on birthright citizenship is clearly unconstitutional. The only people in the United States not subject to its laws are foreign diplomats and their families. Everyone else in the country is subject to them. (If illegal aliens weren’t, they would not be under the laws defining them as illegal.) Firing the inspectors general without notifying congress in advance is illegal. The order on TikTok requires an awfully strained interpretation of the ninety day grace period for a pending sale not to be illegal. There was no legal authority for offering federal employees a buy out and no appropriation to pay those who would accept it.

His conservative fans ought to care about this. It is not only a violation of principles they claim to embrace, it is a dangerous precedent. I doubt if they would like the country’s next Democrat president defying the law and trying to rule by decree. If many of them have spoken up, I haven’t heard about it. In the meantime the rest of us surely should care about it and speak up.

Trump's First Day

 

Trump’s inauguration and first day went about as I expected. The speech was too boastful political, and rude. The executive orders on the border, DEI, pausing hiring and new regulations until his people are in place in the agencies, free speech, and ending the de facto EV mandate are good. (The last one may take a while and may need to be done with finesse rather than directly, but it will be good when it happens.) The order on birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, and the one on TikTok requires an awfully strained interpretation of the ninety day grace period for a pending sale not to be illegal. The stuff about taking back the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico is just nutty.

I think giving pardons to the participants in the riots of January 6^th 2021 is mainly wrong. (Exceptions would be for any innocent people who were convicted unjustly, for any who were denied a fair trial, for those who have been jailed for years without trial, and for those who were convicted of offenses worse than ones they committed.) However, I do think that commutations for most of the rioters would have been appropriate. They deserved punishment, but it should have been condign punishment based on what the did and their prior records, not vindictive and excessive punishment because of their politics.

I think we are better off with Trump than we would have been with Harris and a fourth and farther left Obama term. Some bad trends have to be reversed. That does not mean we will be as well off as we could have been if voters in Republican primaries had shown better sense.

Laughing at the Jefe

 

I know many people are worried about the state of the republic. There are things to worry about - from Trump and company, from their opponents, and especially from authoritarian left and right wing enemies of the liberal order and liberal principles of individual rights. People who care about that order and those principles should expect to have to stand up and promote and defend them.

However, they should not let worry get the best of them or become too fearful. I agree with those who have pointed out how lucky we in America are to live in a country where the maximum jefe, in command of the armed forces and the federal secret police and prosecutors, announces he is altering the fundamental law of the nation by decree, and people just laugh at him, and nothing happens. It is still a great country. It would be a better one if we could create a political environment in which even a demented big chief and his gang would know better than to try such a stunt. But we should recognize and appreciate how well off we are.

DEI in LA

 

Besides the obvious direct diminution of quality in organizations that hire and promote based on diversity and equity rather that ability, performance, and effectiveness, there are important, sometimes subtle, secondary harmful effects.

Esprit matters in groups or organizations, especially when working on something tough or difficult. So does a hard, masculine ethos (which women certainly can and do adopt) of competence and getting the job done. The sort of things that have gone on in California damage the first and reject the second. Preaching the hardcore DEI/leftist stuff of condemning logical thinking, objectivity, can do attitudes, and urgency as evil attributes of white supremacy would make things  even worse. I think there has been some of that in California as well.

None of this caused the fires, but it is a good guess that it may have made them worse.

Carter

 

Since Jimmy Carter died very few people have said he he was a good or even an adequate president. That would be a hard sell. Instead there has been a consensus from people in the traditional media (much like the years long consensus that Joe Biden was mentally competent) that after leaving office he had a great post-presidential life and career, perhaps the greatest of any American president.

That would be wrong even if people restricted their consideration only to the benign or beneficial things Carter did. To cite three obvious examples, John Quincy Adams served several terms in the house of representatives after leaving the presidency, consistently opposed slavery in those years, and in the Amistad case successfully defended the kidnapped Africans who had taken over a Spanish slave ship. William Howard Taft served years as chief justice of the United States supreme court after losing reelection. Herbert Hoover worked to provide food and other relief to people in devastated areas of Europe after World War II and served the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as the head of commissions on reorganizing the administrative branch of the federal government.

However, a lot of what Carter after did after 1980 was neither benign nor beneficial. He meddled consistently in foreign policy, often excusing or even defending anti-American tyrants and terrorists. People who accused him of being an antisemite had evidence for doing so. He supported the anti-Israeli BDS movement, likened Israel to an apartheid state, and defended terrorist violence against Jews in Israel. While not as bad  an ex-president as he had been a president, he was bad enough.