The New Yorker:

A guide to the Week One distractions, late-night devilry, executive overreach, and the Administration’s early infighting.

By Susan B. Glasser

Exhausted yet? It’s been three full days since Donald Trump returned to the Presidency, and so far he has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization; announced the unilateral cancellation of the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship; reversed an order lowering prescription-drug prices for seniors; threatened a trade war with Canada and Mexico starting February 1st and an actual war with Panama if it doesn’t hand over the Panama Canal; declared an emergency at the southern border and moved to order thousands of U.S. military personnel there; eliminated federal government programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and demanded that employees snitch on anyone inside the bureaucracy who might be tempted to continue doing such work anyway; and pardoned the vast majority of the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, at his behest. And that was in between sword-dancing onstage to the Village People at an inaugural ball; cashing in on the Presidency by marketing the $trump cryptocoin, currently worth billions of dollars; and getting in a pissing match with an Episcopalian bishop who dared to question him to his face.

Eight years after the first Trump Inauguration, we know the drill. He loves to drown us in outrage. The overwhelming volume is the point—too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus. It can’t fight back. The distractions are just too damn distracting. Who has time to point out that Trump also promised to end the war in Ukraine and bring down inflation on his first day back in the Oval Office? And yet drones are still firing on Kyiv and eggs are still crazy expensive. In the days leading up to the Inauguration, Trump’s allies promised “shock and awe”—fast, decisive, transformational action to seize control of the government and rewrite its rules before stunned opponents, “the enemies within,” as Trump calls them, have a chance to react. But, speaking as one who was in Iraq in those early days after the 2003 U.S. invasion, I’d caution against planning an assault on Washington that is based too closely on Donald Rumsfeld’s playbook. The insurgents may have hardly begun to regroup. But regroup they will. On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s birthright-citizenship decree, calling it a “blatantly unconstitutional order,” and, later in the afternoon, the Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski announced their opposition to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s controversial nominee for Secretary of Defense.
 

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