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.