Notes from an Inauguration

Or, the Canadian Girlfriend Theory of Executive Power

Hello from Washington, where the inaugural festivities have concluded and life now returns to normal—not only in the sense that the tourists all go home, but also in the sense that a president is once again leading the executive branch. It would have been hard, in January 2021, to imagine how President Biden could fail so badly in the basic discharge of his duties that Trump’s return to the Oval Office would be cause for a sigh of relief. But here we are. At least we know again who is making the decisions.

Something of a scattershot edition today, collated after spending the past five days bouncing around various meetings and events. In the Financial Times yesterday I put down some initial thoughts, on having “optimism but not confidence as Trump takes control”:

The grounds for optimism lie in the quality of the senior appointments that Trump has made, which represent extraordinary improvements over his first-term choices. If the administration’s discipline and execution have travelled as far as the distance from a Mike Pence to a JD Vance, a Rex Tillerson to a Marco Rubio, or a Reince Priebus to a Susie Wiles, a new golden age may indeed be upon us.

Whereas in 2016 Trump outran the supply lines of supporting institutions, ideas and staff, he can now draw from a deep bench of talent and a thick playbook aligned with his own priorities. Across agencies and White House offices, he is quietly stocking his team with serious players.

But the team captain, the coach and the quarterback is still Trump himself. Not many people have done well placing bets on the decisions he will make in the Oval Office, least of all when predicting he will do the expected thing that the conventional analysis recommends. The fruit is larger and juicier and hanging lower than ever, and now everyone waits to see what he will pick.

TikTok on the Clock

Already we’re seeing this with TikTok, which has quickly taken on the sordid character of a bipartisan humiliation. Trump signed an executive order back in 2020 seeking to force the app out of the American market, and then Biden signed a law in 2024 that would shut it down this week unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, relinquished control. But neither has shown an appetite for placing the national interest and the rule of law above their narrower political priorities.

First, Biden indicated that he would not enforce the law that he had signed. Then TikTok shut itself down anyway, blaming Biden and offering Trump the opportunity to be the hero who restored service. Trump is taking the Chinese up on the offer, and his team actually sat the TikTok CEO next to Tulsi Gabbard, nominee to be the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. TikTok turned the service back on and Trump signed an executive order with no basis in law whatsoever granting it a 75-day reprieve. Now he is attempting to tie his threat of imposing tariffs on China to the demand that the U.S. should be given “half of the value of TikTok,” saying, “if I don’t do the deal it’s worthless. If I do the deal, it’s worth maybe a trillion dollars.”

If you’re confused, you should be. The purpose of forcing ByteDance’s divestment of TikTok is to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from controlling one of the largest U.S. media platforms and the data of its American users, not to confiscate some share of the equity. The purpose of imposing tariffs on China is to move supply chains out of the country, not to extort a social media company.

And then of course there’s what the law actually says, which, you know, kind of should be determinative on all these questions. This is not really a difficult issue. Whether the administration can gets its act together here will be a good early test of its ability to execute on the much more difficult challenges ahead.

The Defenders of Democracy(tm) Pack It In

Here at Understanding America, from time to time, we have mocked the Defenders of Democracy (not to be confused with the quite important, lower-case, defense of democracy) for their nakedly self-promotional model, entirely disconnected from any genuine effort at protecting democratic norms or strengthening the American political culture.

As I wrote the day after the election, “In Defeat, One More Chance to Get It Right”:

Defenders of Democracy have seemed not to care much about democracy, or its norms and institutions, at all—except when it is helping them to secure and wield power. Their commitment to its defense has been a talking point, perversely intended to avoid any commitment to its actual practice. Vote for us because democracy demands it, the argument went, as if that were a substitute for what democracy actually demands, which is that leaders take the values and interests and priorities of the citizenry as their own.

But credit where due, in a sense, I guess… the Biden administration meltdown in its final week has been so complete that even the Defenders have largely conceded to the farce.

The stories continuing to pour forth about just how far gone President Biden was for much of his term are made all the worse by the persistent efforts at deception from his inner circle. Former first lady Jill Biden still insists “he would have been fine with a second term.” His aides are still saying “he remained sharp in private situations.” One friend tries to claim Biden was still editing speeches line by line as he had decades before. What a coincidence that none of this was ever visible when Biden was allowed to appear in public, which, toward the end, was not allowed at all. Call it the Canadian Girlfriend presidency.

Compounding matters, “Biden” (denoted here with scare-quotes to refer to whomever was making decisions on his behalf) soiled his last days with an unprecedented flurry of illegal acts and abuses of power, most prominently the preemptive blanket pardons for both his own family and other government officials. This was a tough beat for everyone who had gone on the record four years earlier assailing the prospect of far more modest actions that Trump never even took.

It also made a fool of everyone who had thrown a fit when the Supreme Court ruled last year that a president could be immune from prosecution for some official acts. At the time, cooler heads had tried to explain that the effect was less to insulate a president from accountability and more to foreclose a new president from prosecuting his predecessor. It turns out, “Biden” now thinks this is such a good idea that he has gone and set a precedent that the president can protect anyone in an administration from having to fear ever being held accountable for anything. That seems good for democracy.

But the mysterious case of the 28th amendment will go down as the most bizarre chapter. To make a long story short, some people have argued that the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923 (“equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”) has been ratified, even though ratification was not completed on the timeline established by Congress. The Office of Legal Council at the Department of Justice rejects this view. But out of nowhere, “Biden” issued a declaration, as a lame duck, in the final days of his administration, that in fact the amendment has been ratified and is now part of the Constitution.

Suffice to say, this is not how it works. It’s roughly akin to The Office’s Michael Scott believing that one declares bankruptcy by shouting “I Declare Bankruptcy.”

Nonetheless, Vice President Harris endorsed the claim with an appallingly written statement. Once-serious legal scholars Larry Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan chimed in as well to assure us that “Biden” had made the decision “after careful consideration and consultation with constitutional experts.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, long an advocate for the amendment, explained what’s really going on:

This is an incredible moment for reproductive freedom, and a historic day for equality – especially with Americans facing the further degradation of reproductive freedom as the incoming administration takes power. Now, women living in states with restrictions on their reproductive freedoms can – and should – file suits to overturn these unconstitutional laws that discriminate on the basis of sex.

In other words, having lost the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade of whether the Constitution is a “living document” that can be reinterpreted to say whatever Supreme Court justices want, Democrats have now decided just to announce that the Constitution literally says something different. Gillibrand wants someone to litigate under this theory as soon as possible, presumably bringing the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it will lose, at which point she and her colleagues will question the legitimacy of a Court that is refusing to acknowledge their invented and alternative version of constitutional text. Forget fake news, let’s have a fake founding document. That ought to strengthen our democracy’s capacity to govern the nation.

Common Knowledge As An Off Ramp?

It’s all so embarrassingly infantile and deeply corrosive. Everyone knows it. And more importantly, everyone now knows that everyone knows it. This is what’s called “common knowledge,” a concept that had a popular resurgence around the time of Biden’s catastrophic debate performance. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory had a good post about it here.

What’s striking about Biden’s ungracious exit, and that everyone knows “Biden” is responsible for it, and that everyone knows that everyone knows, is that no one is bothering to pretend anymore. The Defending Democracy has become embarrassing. As the New York Times’s Ezra Klein commented over the last couple of days:

We are not enforcing the Tik-Tok ban that *we signed into law* but we are unilaterally declaring the Equal Rights Amendment ratified is an odd final play for the Biden administration.

and

I would read a lot of words on the process that led to the final two weeks of Biden decisions. Was he more involved than usual? Less? Were different people than usual offering information and options? It's felt...distinct.

None of this is good, in the short term. Our republican form of government really does require a commitment from all sides to abide by democratic norms even when the other side is winning, in recognition that the alternative is ultimately worse for everyone. In the medium turn, though, this common knowledge that neither side has the high ground seems like a good starting point for charting a course out.

One way to understand our political moment is that national elites in both political parties failed the American people so badly for so long that voters rationally began disregarding the basic tenets of our civic religion because basic issues of sovereignty, economic security, and so on were taking precedence. Better protection of the constitutional system functions as a political issue, just like cutting taxes or enforcing immigration law. Politicians will pursue it when they have the incentive to do so, which means when they believe it will help them win elections.

You can’t pursue unfettered free trade, financial deregulation, and a college-for-all education system and then get upset when you lose elections to opponents who don’t uphold your “norms.” And as we’ve seen in the past four years, elites have their own set of progressive social issues for which they are equally happy to disregard the same norms they’re otherwise preening about.

But when everyone understands this, and political agendas that address people’s actual priorities and preferences become table stakes on all sides, well then just getting those basics right is no longer the easy differentiator. Then, and only then, will practicing a more aspirational and healthy politics once more become important. At least, that’s the corner we should all aim to turn.

Oren