Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

We Are, In Fact, Going Back

 The Trump Administration has been a firehose of awfulness in its first week. That is entirely be design to overwhelm people. The problem is that eventually people start to catalogue everything and plan to fight some of this stuff in courts. We've already seen that with birthright citizenship and the firing of the IGs. I think people worry about the courts for good reason, but the idea that Trumpists have cleared all this with John Roberts misreads their plans, I think. Flood the zone with outrage and then hope some other stuff sneaks through.

The recent order to ban trans people from the military seems like it falls along those lines. It sure seems like a violation of civil rights law and precedent. Maybe it sticks, maybe not. However, let's say it does. How permanent is it? Presumably not until there's another Democrat in the White House. (Or even a humane Republican, if they exist.)

It's bad, it's cruel, it shouldn't have happened, but it's not irreversible. 

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