Lee Zeldin

Four days away from inauguration, the Senate is moving quickly with confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. The saga began with defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s contentious hearing Tuesday and quickly moved to half-a-dozen other hearings the next day, including that of secretary of state nominee, Senator Marco Rubio.  This morning, Congress continued with more hearings for top Trump nominees, including one with treasury secretary pick Scott Bessent, as well as with former representative Lee Zeldin, former governor Doug Burgum and former NFL player Scott Turner — who were nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Interior and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, respectively.

Donald Trump’s second term administration is taking shape, and thus far it’s turned out to be impressively Catholic in its approach — representing Trump’s dominance of the Republican coalition and his capacity to ignore the worst instincts of some of his more vocal supporters on the New Right who see governance through a naive lens. One of the questions heading into this term was who Trump would disappoint by being insufficiently one thing or the other — by being too radical in some areas or too modest in others. But at this point, there are very few people disappointed in the names he’s chosen, outside of a handful of very online voices who had fantasies of their favorite pundits and follows on X getting a shot at cabinet positions.

New York City mayor Eric Adams’s first day in office started with a call to the NYPD. Waiting for the J train to take him from Brooklyn to City Hall, Adams spied three men beginning to tussle. When punches began flying, he dialed 911. He didn’t offer a name until the end of the call: “Adams, Mayor Adams.” The moment, so perfect as to seem choreographed, epitomized Adams’s agenda. Predecessor Bill de Blasio destroyed his credibility with the police department over his eight years in office. Adams, by contrast, was a former NYPD captain who had run on his pedigree, rejected his opponents’ calls to defund the police and promised to revive the plainclothes anti-gun unit disbanded by de Blasio amid the George Floyd protests. The message worked.

The news that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel is planning on conducting an "autopsy" of the 2022 election brought horrible political flashbacks to a decade ago. That was when the post-2012 election autopsy of Mitt Romney's failure gave the GOP all the wrong lessons about what was making them lose. You might remember that 2012 autopsy. It was the one that prescribed moving left on immigration policy as essential to appealing to Hispanic voters. As a now-infamous three sentences put it: We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.

The GOP absolutely blew a historic opportunity in the 2022 midterms and, sadly, it seems nothing in the party will change. For all the talk of accountability and blame last week, many in the GOP now seem content to just… move on. All eyes have turned to the 2024 presidential nomination with former president Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday night that he would be running for a third time. Trump’s rally handed the establishment a welcome distraction from their own failures in the midterms; now, the debate is over how badly Trump hurt the party with his endorsements and whether or not he and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will officially go to war. The party — and more importantly the voters! —  should decide if they still want Trump to be their leader.

On Thursday, a man jumped onstage and tried to kill one of the two candidates running for New York governor. Fortunately, he failed. Even so, the incident was terrifying, not only because it endangered Representative Lee Zeldin but because it underscores two grave problems facing America. One is the failure of our law enforcement system to treat serious crimes seriously, both to deter them and punish the offenders. This failure makes it a misnomer to speak of our “criminal justice” system. It’s not providing justice, and it's not deterring crime, especially violent crime. The second is the danger violence poses to our established constitutional order, beyond its danger to any individual.

Austin Simon, the thirty-five-year-old convicted felon who assaulted a bodega worker in the Hamilton Heights section of Manhattan earlier this month, might still be alive today — if it weren’t all but impossible for law-abiding New Yorkers to obtain a firearm. Simon — dressed in diamond jewelry and a $300 T-shirt — stepped behind the counter to assault sixty-one-year-old Jose Alba, after Simon’s girlfriend’s EBT card was declined when she attempted to purchase a bag of potato chips. A single shot to the leg would have neutralized Simon long enough for law enforcement and paramedics to arrive. Instead, a gory, now-viral, confrontation ensued.

I saw the look on the Uber driver’s face as he dutifully started putting on his mask. “You don’t have to do that for me, buddy,” I let him know. “Thank God,” he smiled, and we were off. Sitting on the parking lot we New Yorkers ironically call the Brooklyn Queens Expressway I thought back to a hungover morning in the winter of 2020, when an email popped up amid my coffee and cigarette. It was from Lyft: there was a picture of me in it, maskless, and a stern warning not to do it again. What a difference two years makes. Today in Gotham, for all intents and purposes, Covid is over. To any sane person, this sounds like good news, but not to the New York Times: the Gray Lady is worried.

The White House is currently facing an internal battle over President Trump’s announcement Monday night that he will sign an executive order temporarily halting immigration amid the coronavirus outbreak. The details of the order had not been finalized as of Tuesday morning, causing frantic debate over which groups of immigrants will be exempt from the ban. Immigration restrictionists have been trying to sell the president on the idea of a ban for at least a week, pointing to various polling that shows it is popular among voters due to fears of the spread of COVID-19 and the high unemployment numbers in the US. Twenty-two million people thus far have filed for unemployment as the economy has practically shut down because of social distancing measures.