Events

After seeing ABC's interview of the President, Charlie Pierce hadn't "been this horrified since JFK told us about the Cuban Missile Crisis:" Holy mother of god. The only demonstrable difference between Muir's conversation with Donald Trump and Katie Couric's legendary encounter with Sarah Palin is that Trump actually is the President* of the United States. He actually has the nuclear codes. He actually is enacting actual policies that will affect actual people. He actually did happen to the oldest...

I was going to post about Bruce Schneier's observation that President Trump continuing to use his personal Android phone was a huge security risk simply because it has a microphone that can be triggered remotely. But then, just this morning, the Washington Post confirmed that the entire senior management of the State Department abruptly resigned: [S]uddenly on Wednesday afternoon, [the State Department’s undersecretary for management, Patrick] Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned...

Remember when we in the reality-based community said that Donald Trump didn't have the bare minimum intellectual, emotional, or moral capital to qualify for the office of president? We weren't bloody wrong. New York Times reporter gives us a glimpse into the new life of President Trump that confirms our deepest worries: “These are the most beautiful phones I’ve ever used in my life,” Mr. Trump said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening. His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He...

James Fallows has come out of his hiding place (he's writing a book and so has been offline since January 1st) to annotate President Trump's inaugural address. I didn't hear the speech, and now that I've read it, with Fallows' annotations, I'm incrementally more nervous about the next four years. And then came the bald-faced lies about the crowd size at the inauguration. Crowd scientists, such as those at the CIA, estimated perhaps 160,000 people attended the inauguration, somewhat fewer than Obama's...

President Trump—oh, how I hate writing that, but I still respect the office—shut down the National Park Service Twitter account after they tweeted two photos comparing the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations. From Snopes: On 20 January 2017, the day Donald J. Trump took office as President of the United States, news outlets posted photos purporting to compare the size of the crowd attending Trump's inauguration to that attending Barack Obama's first inaugural ceremony in 2009. Although there was not yet an...

While there are vast differences between the Roman Republic and the United States, there are many ways they compare directly. There is always a temptation, in any system of government, for public officials to rule rather than govern; but a well-functioning republic has institutional safeguards to prevent that. Institutions can be corrupted from within, however. And just a few minutes ago, one of the deepest infections in American history just burrowed into the center of our government. I'll leave it to...

And I haven't fully read any of these: Amazon and BBC are co-producing a 6-hour miniseries of Good Omens. Sweet! There's a proposal in Springfield, Ill., to replace the 32-year-old Thompson Center with a 115-story tower. I'm really not happy about Scott Pruitt, and his confirmation hearing didn't make me feel any better. On the last full day of the American Republic, Trump's approval ratings are still historically low. Only a few more hours until we see how much closer to Rome we get.