Freddy Gray on the new reality in Washington.
At Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, I witnessed the smashing of windows, rioting and tens of thousands of angry women in “pussy hats” clamoring against his ascent. There was none of that rage for the 2025 sequel. In Farragut Square, two days before the ceremony, I ran into the small “People’s March” — fringey leftists, angry about Palestine, climate change and bodily autonomy. But it was not really an anti-Trump protest, per se. The Resistance, as it was known, proved futile. Now it’s almost dead.
The energy is on the radical right. On the eve of the inauguration, at the Watergate hotel, I attended the Passage “Coronation Ball,” an intriguing gathering of New Right thinkers, the Trumpist avant-garde. I overheard Dasha, the softer-faced one from that trendy Red Scare podcast, needling America’s foremost monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, for not believing that Jesus Christ was our Lord and Savior. Steve Bannon gave an extraordinary dinner speech, akin to a commander addressing his men before battle. He called his audience “the tip of the spear.” He called Trump “America’s Cincinnatus” and Mark Zuckerberg “a criminal who deserves to be in prison. I don’t care how many $1 million checks he writes.” “The Democrats created the oligarchs and it worked for them until it didn’t. And you, the Pepes, broke them,” he said.
“I want you to get drunk tonight. I want it to be raw tomorrow, OK? I want you hitting a little something when the ceremony is going on to take the edge off. But in the afternoon, when the first executive orders start hitting… when the External Revenue Service hits tariffs on our good buddies in Canada… OK, I love you men and women but I gotta tell you we are in for a tough fight. The hardest fight is ahead of us. They’re not going just sit there and just toss you the keys tomorrow. [For] the Deep State, the administrative state, this is Götterdämmerung. This is where we fight to the end. If we don’t take care of them in the next four years, they can’t be taken care of… You guys, every day: pounding, pounding, pounding, every day and being relentless. No mercy, no quarter, no prisoners. Are you ready for a fight?” The crowd, in black tie, stopped consuming their rather lovely scallops, stood up and roared.
Democrats search for a guiding principle.
After a rudderless post-election run, Democrats are suddenly showing some fight against President Donald Trump.
Yet unlike the progressive ascendance of eight years ago, it’s not clear who is leading the charge.
“I can’t answer that. Give us a little time,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Semafor. “This is brand new.”
It’s not clear how much time they’ll get, however, as the fight to define Democrats’ future plays out in real time with unavoidable tests of clout for the party’s disparate wings. There’s a DNC chairmanship election around the corner, Senate Democrats are wrestling with how much resistance to mount to Trump’s Cabinet and House Democrats are gaming out how to use their significant leverage.
At this time in 2017, their base was literally marching in the streets and veteran Democrats responded by racing to airports to protest Trump’s travel ban. That’s not happening this time — yet this week’s sweeping Trump pardon of Jan. 6 defendants clearly reawakened the party’s moribund activist impulses.
“We’re obviously in a bit of disarray,” one Democratic senator told Semafor. “I don’t think people are really completely sure about what lesson is to be learned in this election.”
Not only that, but the party is clearly divided over tactics. Many Democrats were willing to accommodate a quick approval of Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency this week. But Sen. Chris Murphy put a stop to that and made clear he’s not interested in playing nice.
“Personally, I don’t want to give Republicans an inch on their claims they care about national security after their pardons,” said Murphy, D-Conn. “My hope is that we’re going to be down on the floor and on TV and back in our states talking about the danger of these pardons.”
Ratcliffe was still confirmed Thursday, 74-25, with significant Democratic support.
Chip Roy vs. Donald Trump
Over the course of an hour, Roy and Trump engaged in what one Trump insider described as a “reset.” They talked about Trump’s agenda, Roy’s fight with cancer and their shared love of golf. Trump ribbed him over his poor political judgment in supporting DeSantis, and later, with the two standing in front of a crowd, Trump jokingly called Roy “a nasty son of a bitch.”
He had no idea.
Just a few weeks later, Roy unapologetically led the charge against a last-minute Trump proposal to raise the debt ceiling before he took office. This time, there was no humor intended when Trump, stung by the betrayal, called him “another ambitious guy with no talent” engaging in “some cheap publicity for himself.”
Now as Trump and his inner circle eye internal threats to passage of their legislative agenda, Roy’s name keeps coming up. More than any House conservative, the 52-year-old political veteran is seen as having the swagger to rev up the hard-right rabble-rousers who have repeatedly derailed GOP leaders’ plans.
Previously a staffer for Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Roy also knows the ins-and-outs of congressional procedure and federal policy. And he speaks in language that pulls at conservatives’ heart strings — and grates on those trying to keep the party in lockstep.
Roy insists the tensions between him and Trump are badly overblown.
“I’m telling you, there is this much daylight between what the president wants to achieve or what I want to achieve,” he said amid an hourlong interview in his office, holding up his thumb and his pointer finger a half-inch apart.
But inside that gap are multitudes of potential conflicts — starting with their radically different views on the role and size of government.
Like the movement conservative he is — his bona fides forged in the tea party era — Roy sees the shrinkage of the federal footprint as his political lodestar, and most of his policy views go back to that.
Trump ran on reducing inflation, he notes. And how should he do that? “Cut spending,” he told me flatly.
In Trump, however, he’s arrayed against a leader with a malleable ideology who disregards ballooning deficits. Rather than a cost-cutting conservative, Trump is a populist who demands wins at any price.
And his agenda will be expensive. The Congressional Budget Office believes Trump’s tax cut renewal alone will cost about $5 trillion. And that doesn’t even include Trump’s no-tax-on-tips and no-tax-on-overtime proposals he hopes to incorporate, nor the costs for border enforcement or other measures that will be added to the partisan bill.
Roy, meanwhile, is already drawing lines in the sand.
“Don’t come to me with the, just, blanket statement, ‘All tax cuts pay for themselves,’” he said. “Look, I want tax reductions — but you need to give me spending restraint.”
And he said he’s willing to fight: “People will try to characterize it as ‘your way or the highway’ — no. I’m literally just trying to make sure that we’re calling balls and strikes about what we’re actually doing. Don’t bullshit the American people with campaign pledges and then come over here and do something different.”
The Deep State Strikes Back
Congressional and intelligence sources tell Tablet that the candidate slotted in for the top intelligence spot on the National Security Council is ill suited to serve the president’s agenda. Adam Howard, reportedly the front-runner for the NSC’s senior director for intelligence, is currently staff director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Republican Congressman Mike Turner. According to several current congressional sources, multiple House members have raised concern over an alleged boast made by Turner on Capitol Hill that he’s “taking over Trump’s IC [Intelligence Community].” Presumably, Howard is meant to be his instrument.
On Sunday, Joshua Steinman, an NSC official from the first Trump administration, posted a long thread on X reporting that the current NSC is being staffed with holdovers from the Joe Biden administration and others unlikely to serve Trump’s agenda, including Howard, whose intelligence experience is limited to the two years he’s served as HPSCI staff director. Biden’s senior director for intelligence is Maher Bitar, an anti-Israel activist once affiliated with the Students for Justice in Palestine. Bitar also came from HPSCI, where he worked under then-Congressman now-Sen. Adam Schiff, one of Trump’s most vocal opponents on Capitol Hill.
“Without an operational intelligence background, you can’t clean up the mess made by the current [Biden] team,” wrote Steinman.
Under Turner’s leadership, HPSCI has been making the IC’s case, defending the interests of a cadre that’s abused its power by spying on Americans, including the president-elect.
The NSC’s senior director for intelligence is the president’s interlocutor with the 18 intelligence agencies that make up the IC and ensures that the president’s initiatives are being fulfilled. The senior director administrates all covert action programs on behalf of the president and controls all classified information flow to and from the White House, most significantly the Presidential Daily Brief. He also has IC-wide oversight responsibility.
And yet, say congressional sources, Turner and his deputy Howard have over the past year neglected their constitutionally mandated oversight duties and instead covered for the IC. The sources say that they have impeded efforts to investigate anything that might have embarrassed Biden administration intelligence officials. When reached by Tablet, an HPSCI spokesman declined to comment for the record.
“[Is Howard] willing to expose IC dirty tricks targeting the President?” Steinman asked in his X thread. He was not outlining a hypothetical but rather referring to the NSC’s work in the first Trump White House uncovering the surveillance of the president and his aides. After the 2016 election, NSC staffers found that Obama officials had unmasked the names of transition team officials in transcripts of foreign intelligence intercepts, most notably Gen. Michael Flynn. Trump’s onetime national security adviser was unmasked by at least 40 Obama officials—including now President Joe Biden.
The Failed Mayors of Chicago, LA, & NYC
Has there been a time in recent memory when the mayors of America’s biggest cities are as collectively unpopular as they are right now? Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and Eric Adams in New York are all in their first terms, yet in their short time in office they have squandered so much of the support that got them elected that they now sport disapproval ratings that would have made President Biden blush. Bass and Johnson already face recall efforts, and the leaders of New York’s city council have discussed how they might remove Adams from office amid his legal troubles. Though their circumstances differ, the three mayors are alike in one key respect: they were elected in one-party progressive towns where reform has become increasingly difficult because large groups of citizens vote based on demographic categories like race, ethnicity, or gender, and then discover that they don’t like the results of the policies they chose. What, if anything, will voters learn from these mayors’ failures?
Of the three, Johnson won his position most recently, in an April 2023 election that saw voters dump incumbent Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot. She had angered voters by failing to stem rising crime, for the mounting social disorder in highly visible settings like Michigan Avenue (Chicago’s Magnificent Mile), and for her failure to reopen the city’s public schools after the teachers’ union helped shut them down for extended periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lightfoot lost in the initial round of Chicago’s 2023 mayoral race, becoming the city’s first mayor in 30 years not to win reelection.
Johnson was an unlikely candidate to succeed Lightfoot, with crime ranking overwhelmingly as voters' top concern. A progressive former teachers’ union organizer who became a county commissioner with backing from the union, Johnson was a Chicago Police Department critic and branded as “racist” some of its crime-fighting strategies, including the ShotSpotter system for detecting gunshots. His progressive plan for addressing crime included erasing a gang database (he considered it discriminatory) and starting a “treatment not trauma” program that uses non-police personnel to respond to some emergencies. He also proposed raising taxes to fund “restorative justice” social programs in the city’s schools as a way of cutting youth violence. And he backed President Biden’s border surge, pledged to keep Chicago a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, and even proposed establishing an Office of Migrant Protection. By contrast, Johnson’s chief opponent, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, preached a tough-on-crime agenda that included hiring some 700 new cops.
Johnson won narrowly. He took 88 percent of the black vote, but what sealed his victory was his corralling of 34 percent of white voters, in part by winning among whites in gentrified areas, according to an analysis by the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Since then, Johnson’s tenure has been entirely in keeping with his campaign. His “restorative justice” and various other interventions have failed to make a significant impact on crime. He shut down the gunshot-detection system, a decision for which he’s been widely criticized. He’s advocated borrowing $300 million to support a schools budget that gives big raises to teachers. Soon after taking office, he allocated $51 million of the strapped city’s resources to services for the migrants flooding into the city. His decision to turn local hotels into migrant shelters brought sharp blowback from the communities that voted for him. “You’ve got 73 percent of the people homeless in this city are black people,” one woman said at a community meeting. “What have you done for them?”
The Attention Crisis
I’m particularly fond of a hand-wringing essay by Nathaniel Hawthorne, from 1843. Hawthorne warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation. They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophesies. Their discussions will devolve into acrid debates, and “all mortal intercourse” will be “chilled with a fatal frost.” Hawthorne’s worry? The replacement of the open fireplace by the iron stove.
It’s true that we’ve raised alarms over things that in retrospect seem mild, the Carr-hort responds, but how much solace should we take in that? Today’s digital forms are obviously more addictive than their predecessors. You can even read previous grumbling as a measure of how bad things have become. Perhaps critics were correct to see danger in, say, television. If it now appears benign, that just shows how much worse current media is.
It’s been fifteen years since Carr’s “The Shallows.” Now we have what is perhaps the most sophisticated contribution to the genre, “The Sirens’ Call,” by Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor. Hayes acknowledges the long history of such panics. Some seem laughable in hindsight, he concedes, like one in the nineteen-fifties about comic books. Yet others seem prophetic, like the early warnings about smoking. “Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?” Hayes asks.
Great question. If we take the skeptics seriously, how much of the catastrophist’s argument stands? Enough, Hayes feels, that we should be gravely concerned. “We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit,” he writes. Thinking clearly and conversing reasonably under these conditions is “like trying to meditate in a strip club.” The case he makes is thoughtful, informed, and disquieting. But is it convincing?
History is littered with lamentations about distraction. Swirling lights and strippers are not a new problem. What’s important to note about bygone debates on the subject, though, is that they truly were debates. Not everyone felt the sky was falling, and the dissenters raised pertinent questions. Is it, in fact, good to pay attention? Whose purposes does it serve?
Such questions came up in the eighteenth century with the rise of a disruptive new commodity: the novel. Although today’s critics rue our inability to get through long novels, such books were once widely regarded as the intellectual equivalent of junk food. “They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study,” the Anglican priest Vicesimus Knox complained. Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—“this mass of trash”—they would lose patience for “wholsome reading.” They’d suffer from “bloated imagination, sickly judgement, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”
Popular writers took a different view, as the English professor Natalie M. Phillips explains in her book “Distraction.” They wondered if unstraying attention was healthy. Maybe the mind required a little leaping around to do its work. “The Rambler” (1750-52) and “The Idler” (1758-60), two essay series by Samuel Johnson, exulted in such mental wandering. Johnson was constantly picking up books and just as constantly putting them down. When a friend asked whether Johnson had actually finished a book he claimed to have “looked into,” he replied, “No, Sir, do you read books through?”
As the mascot of multifocality, Phillips presents Tristram Shandy, the hero of Laurence Sterne’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” published between 1759 and 1767. The novel starts with Tristram’s conception. His mother’s sudden interjection—“Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”—at the moment of his father’s sexual climax leaves Tristram congenitally scatterbrained. Even his name is the product of broken attention. It was supposed to be Trismegistus, but the maid tasked with telling the curate got distracted and forgot all but the first syllable. Tristram relates this tale of woe in a tangle of digressions, punctuated with breathless dashes.
In nine distracted volumes, Tristram never manages to narrate his life. Yet readers found his rollicking thoughts captivating. Perhaps they also found them liberating, Phillips suggests, given the tendency of traditional authorities to demand unwavering focus. “What is requisite for joining in prayer in a right manner?” a widely used Anglican catechism asked. “Close attention without wandering.”
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Items of Interest
Foreign
How Iran Lost Before It Lost: The Rollback of Its Gray Zone Strategy
WHO Freezes Hiring, Restricts Travel After U.S. Withdrawal
Domestic
Trump’s First 100 Hours: Executive Orders and Shock to the System
Hundreds of Illegal Immigrant Criminals Arrested, More Flown from U.S.
Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to Halt After Trump Shock Therapy.
Senate approves Ratcliffe, heads toward votes on Hegseth, Noem, Duffy.
GOP Seeks Places to Slash Spending.
Jamie Raskin enlists psychologists to help Judiciary Democrats.
How Trump’s assault on DEI will ripple across corporate America.
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Jan. 6 Pardons for Proud Boys, Oath Keepers.
Trump, Newsom Discuss California Fires and Forests.
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Marco Rubio faces challenges as Secretary of State.
Trump, JFK assassination, and MLK files to be released.
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Media
Norah O’Donnell exits CBS Evening News.
Conservatives angry that J.D. Vance is giving first interview to CBS.
Rahm Emanuel angry at Morning Joe hosts after calling Pete Hegseth an alcoholic
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Emilia Perez has an identity crisis.
Grammy performers announced, including Sabrina Carpenter.
Podcast
Quote
“Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.”
— Marcus Aurelius