It was never going to be me

More of that, please. One month down, 47 to go. Here's what we've learned so far.

My unification theory for all things 🍊: He believes that every time someone mentions his name, he gets to live another second. You can actually reverse engineer every decision he makes according to this theory. “Will it make them say my name more? If so, do it!”

That’s why I’ve been attempting to avoid mentioning him here since inauguration. It’s just all so suffocating. But also, saying nothing feels like letting it happen.

What do you even focus on anyway? That’s the genius of “flood the zone.”¹ Everyone who is upset is alarmed by something different, which effectively kills any unified resistance momentum.

Ya could be up in arms about the cop beaters getting pardoned, the gutting of the bureau that protects consumers, the attacks on the press (I’m gonna call it the Gulf of They/Them in order to upset everybody), the incessant footsie-playing with white supremacists, or the pivot towards authoritarianism that necessitates valuing loyalty over competence.

Before Teddy Roosevelt, we had something called the spoils system, or patronage. The point of working for the government was to get a salary and be loyal to whichever president or whichever political movement had put you there. Patronage systems are famously corrupt because, again, the people who are in those jobs are only in them because they're being paid. And they're also famously inefficient because the point is that people are hired not for their expertise or their skills, but they're hired for their political loyalties.

As for my focal point, what can I say? I’m my father’s son. The thing he was most proud of in his career was his stint prosecuting white collar criminals as Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

My dad when he worked as Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

He was a Reagan-loving Republican, yet he woulda hated what’s happening now. Because what he cared about was justice. Someone needs to stop the bad guys.

And right now, we’re watching the veins of the legal system get clogged with cronyism and corruption. It’s creeping slowly, but the agenda is clear: Do his bidding or suffer the consequences.

Which brings me to my favorite thing from the past month: the resignation letter of Hagan Scotten, who worked that same prosecutor job as my dad. He was asked by Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to dismiss federal corruption charges against NYC mayor Eric Adams and refused because, well, it was obvious what was really going on.

No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.

If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.

Inject that sh*t straight into my veins. Viva ordered liberty! (OK, that’s admittedly not the most exciting rally cry, but here we are.)

Look, I get the urge to tune out. But the goal is to get us to stop paying attention. To get us to give up. To get us to obey in advance. And sure, they’ll find their fools and cowards. But I’m with Scotten:

It was never going to be me.

So let’s go…

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Crazy phrases

I can’t with people saying any of these things:

“The justice system was weaponized.”

Um, yeah. The justice system is weaponized against criminals. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

“Woke generals.”

What an inherently hilarious phrase. Like, do they get ranked by number of snowflakes!? Go say it to their faces, armchair warriors.

“Riviera of the Middle East.”

That was Trump’s proposal for Gaza which he spouted out of nowhere and was summarily ignored by everyone involved. Can we please stop treating his mindless riffing as informative commentary or legit policy pivots? It’s just open mic stream of concussion that they always walk back two days later.

"The people voted for this."

Nah, they voted for a guy who gives out fries at McDonald's, not for gutting the bureau that polices credit card scams. What we’re seeing is that if you enrich the country club set while entertaining UFC fans, you can get away with anything.

“If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”

That’s what the White House press secretary (who constantly talks as if she’s berating a roomful of misbehaving third graders) said. Oh, swell. Next up: If the fox comes across a conflict of interest with the hens, he will excuse himself from the henhouse. What could go wrong?

"He's just trolling you."

That doesn't make it ok. I don't like the entire world turning into the internet. I crave leaders who deliver calm. I hate that these naughty little button-pushing boys have this much control over our nervous systems. "U mad, bro?" No, I'm irritated.

First month reactions

🧣 The problem with RFK is everyone thinks he’s right about 20% of the stuff he says, but no one can agree on which 20%.

🧣 It’s very easy to mistake an inability to feel shame for charisma.

🧣 If social media was liquor, X would be a Truth Social and soda.

🧣 The job of this administration right now is not to govern. It is to figure out what this administration can get away with. Basically, it's a hacker determining which systems it can infiltrate.

🧣 We got rid of bullying and now I fear we’ve lost our bullying antibodies and don’t know how to respond when given a seismic wedgie.

🧣 Politics and the internet are the two places we reward insanity the most.

🧣 Imagine being an FBI agent and now ya gotta take orders from a podcaster and a guy with his own line of merch.

🧣 So much of the blame for what’s happening belongs to our dysfunctional Congress. For years, it failed to accomplish anything to the point that Americans now cheer on a tyrannical executive branch merely because it seems able to execute on SOMETHING. People prefer action, even if it is chaotic/random, over sheer paralysis. We’d rather get in a car with a drunk driver than be stuck in the parking garage forever like that one episode of Seinfeld.

🧣 Thought I can’t let go of: Group size is the problem. Split up the USA into four countries (by time zone) and let us each have separate Presidents. Also, split social media platforms into dozens of channels, like cable TV. Make everything smaller, local, and more personal. Our addiction to "scaling" is why everything is huge and sucks.

🧣 “Can’t you say something nice about him?” Fine. One of 🍊’s most impressive innovations: He has redefined how bribery can work. Want regulations lifted? Don’t wanna deal with tariffs? Need to retain your broadcast license? Good news! You can now settle one of his frivolous lawsuits that has no merit for big bucks, donate $1M to “the inauguration,” or buy $🍊 memecoins because “investment.” It’s all legal too – like “Saudis just enjoy staying at his hotel” but with much higher bribe bandwidth. I’ll say it again: He's the greatest con man who’s ever lived. When he eventually fades away, we'll all shake our heads and marvel, "What a magnificent beast."

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Dems

“You’re just a lib snowflake blah blah blah.”

Look, if it makes you feel better, I find the Dems feckless, toothless, clueless, and all other kinds of –less…

🧣 Dem strategy is seemingly to target non-existent constituencies (men’s room tampon users and illegal immigrants who vote). Great way to lock down 0% of the vote.

🧣 Now would be a good time for some Dem, like any Dem, to stand up for the CFPB bureau that just got gutted. “It has completely changed the consumer financial marketplace. Overall it has had a tremendous impact on making it more fair and transparent,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center. Protecting consumers is a good thing, right? Say so! Tell poor people how the CFPB helps them. This should be a layup. Gah.

The agency found [Wells Fargo] had been engaging in multiple abusive and unlawful consumer practices across several financial products between 2011 and 2022 — from auto loans to mortgage loans to bank accounts.

Last month, the agency required the bank to pay more than $2 billion to customers who were harmed by such practices, plus a $1.7 billion fine that will go into a relief fund for victims.

🧣 Kids, you won't believe this: Once upon a time, the Dems understood messaging. 1992:

Mr. Clinton and his aides have said from the very beginning that those interests can be summed up in three phrases, which are on a sign in the campaign's headquarters: "Change vs. more of the same. The economy, stupid. Don't forget health care."

🧣 Remember the fury at healthcare insurance unleashed by Luigi killing that guy? Hey Dems, you had your uniting issue right there and ya just whistled right past it.

🧣 Our country at the end of Biden’s term had a growing economy, falling inflation, slowing illegal immigration and the lowest levels of violent crime in years. Dear dems, mention this! You won’t hear about it in the media for the same reason you won’t hear comedians talking about how much they love their wives.

🧣 The right want their Daddy and the left want their Mommy. Viewed through that prism, everything makes sense.

🧣 The Dem who says the rest of the party is full of crap will win. It worked for 🍊 with Republicans. That’s the age we live in. Being anti-establishment is the way to win when hecklers run the show.

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5-spotted

🗯️ Bret Stephens on how Dems wound up out of power/touch:

Democrats don’t seem to realize how profoundly out of touch they are with that segment of America that they can’t identify through a collection of letters or neologisms: BIPOC, L.G.B.T.Q.I.+, A.A.P.I., the “unhoused,” the “undocumented” and so on. They have lost themselves in forms of identity politics that divide Americans into categories many don’t recognize or from which they feel excluded. And I don’t just mean white, male, Christian Americans. For example, ask many Hispanics what they think of the term “Latinx,” a nonsensical term in a gendered language like Spanish, and you might begin to grasp why more than 40 percent of Hispanic men voted for Trump. Similarly, ask many feminists what they think of the term “birthing people” or “persons with vaginas” and you might risk a well-deserved slap.

🗯️ The Big Tech Takeover of American Politics by Jay Caspian Kang.

There is still hope for the Democrats because they, like the Republican establishment in 2016, are primed for a hostile takeover. In the midterms, will we see candidates crop up across the country who express anger at liberal institutions, at internal corruption in local Democratic governance, and at the selfishness of leaders such as Joe Biden who have put their own egos and legacy over the good of the Party? If so, these new candidates—I do not think we know who any of them are at this point—will be tapping into the most valuable commodities in both the new and old media: conflict and uncomfortable truths. Their specific policy positions will not matter as much as their willingness to call out everyone from Biden and Kamala Harris, to the tech oligarchy, to whatever failing mayor happens to be nearby. Social media will eat them up, Joe Rogan will admire their authenticity, the video clippers will spread their “truth bombs” across the Internet, and they might very well be able to ride that wave of discontent all the way through to 2028. The viral economy might have taken over our lives, but it is also fickle and always backlashing against itself.

🗯️ Hamilton Nolan on the slow assassination of the free press:

This is how it happens. This is how nations decline. You don’t always turn into Nazi Germany. You turn into Russia, or Hungary, or other creaky and corrupt strongman states where everything is kind of a scam and everyone is hustling to please the gangster in charge. That, my friends, is the path we are on here…America’s basic problem is that we have an economic system that concentrates great wealth in few hands and we have a political system in which money is allowed to buy political power in a straightforward way and now, on top of that, we have a President who fully embraces—who lives for—the opportunity to make the world bow to him by exploiting those systems…We have a dozen people in this country who are worth more than $100 billion each and the richest one of all has teamed up with a gutter con man to buy the White House and now everyone who does not kiss the ring will be targeted for retaliation. This is the final form of unregulated capitalism, where fantastically rich and often childlike titans run the world’s most powerful nation for their own pleasure, and what was once thought of as “civil society” cowers in the corner in an effort to avoid provoking the beast. Here we are! Enjoy this spectacle!

Up ahead: My thoughts on Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ actions over the past month…