Trump administration

The return of two NASA astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore – back to Earth after equipment malfunctions saw their intended week-long sojourn to space turn into a nine-month stay on the International Space Station, should be cause for national celebration. Alas, politics has tainted the stratosphere, with each side of the aisle playing a part in the blame game for the astounding delay in getting our stranded astronauts back home.  Williams and Wilmore will have endured more than just a few missed family events and some extra time spent conducting experiments (they carried out more than 150) aboard the ISS.

Fans of South Park are familiar with the long-running gag involving the show’s portrayal of Canadians as crudely animated, detail-less animated cutouts, perpetually outraged — almost always an overreaction to something America has done. In a rather hilarious instance of life imitating art, President Donald Trump’s assertion that Canada become the 51st state has enraged the notoriously polite society, and age-old suspicions that America has always been poised to overtake their northern neighbors have resurfaced. I get it. When you have an inferiority complex, you can lose your sense of humor.

As insane as some of Donald Trump’s policy proposals first appear, many acquire a certain logic on closer examination. Greenland, with only 56,000 people, has mineral wealth as essential to the weaponry of the twenty-first century as South Africa’s uranium was to that of the twentieth. The place really may require exceptional treatment, as Trump suggests. Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development actually did drift so far into propaganda and election interference that zeroing out its budget came to seem sensible. But there are other policies on which the halo of idiocy still burns as bright as it did on the day the President first proposed them. Chief among these is the executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.

So Donald Trump and Sean Hannity are each springing for a Tesla. It shouldn’t prove much of a hit to their respective wallets, seeing as how each has amassed a not insubstantial fortune thanks to the emergence of the MAGA movement, though Hannity is probably something of a piker next to Trump. Trump went all-in: “Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stand for.

Who would have thought that Michael Wolff would have another book about Donald Trump in him? UK Books editor Sam Leith interviews Wolff on this week’s Book Club podcast. They discuss Wolff’s latest, All or Nothing, which follows the world of Trump from January 6, 2021, to his second inauguration. Seeing as this is now Wolff’s fourth book bringing to light some things those around Trump would presumably prefer to stay in the dark, Leith asks why anybody even bothers to pick up the phone when they see his name on the caller ID. Wolff says that it is in part because he has kind of become their friend after having followed Trump and his cohort around for the last ten years; but it is also because those in “Trumpworld” are themselves trying to figure out what’s been going on.

We’ve been told that President Trump’s address to Congress tonight would dilate on the theme of the “Renewal of the American Dream.” And so it did. But for short hand, two ideas predominated. One was “Woke No More.” The other was “common sense.” Both were themes of Trump’s inaugural address. I have expatiated on the theme of Trump’s embrace of common sense in a talk I gave to the Connecticut outpost of Hillsdale College at the end of January. The irony is that what should be common to all has been so uncommon in an age marked by perversity and ideology. Together, the attack on wokeness and the reinstitution of common sense go a long way towards summarizing the extraordinary achievements of Donald Trump in his first forty-two days.