THERE WILL BE BRUTALITY AND BOASTFULNESS, BUT APART FROM THAT, WE MIGHT HAVE A PAUL RYAN PRESIDENCY

So we woke up to this, a story the incoming Trump administration gave as an "exclusive" to Bari Weiss's Free Press:

The White House strikes out at gender ideology and pronouns. Also: ends housing of biological men in women’s prisons; self-ID on passports; and more.

... an expansive executive order [Trump] will sign tomorrow afternoon [is] called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Trans people will be to this administration what Jews were to the Nazis. This is horrifying, and I hope the analogy goes only so far. But whatever else Trump and his allies do, their brutality toward trans people and the immigrants they intend to round up will be horrifying.

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And yet, on economic issues, the second Trump presidency might seem very familiar. Billionaires are winning. Steve Bannon is losing:

Bannon vowed to eliminate Musk's influence on the White House "before the inauguration." Which means he has roughly 18.5 hrs to get it done. Not looking very promising.

— Σειληνός (Seilēnós) (@seilenos.bsky.social) January 19, 2025 at 5:34 PM

He has about an hour and a half left.

Bannon lost. There'll be plenty of H1-B visas. As for the rest, here's a story from Politico Europe that portrays all of the globalists MAGA voters hate as thrilled to have Trump in office again:

The Davos Man is back

... and he’s running America.

DAVOS, Switzerland — Long maligned as out-of-touch plutocrats, thousands of World Economic Forum regulars are descending on the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos this week with a spring in their step, electrified by Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 return to the White House.

They’ll hear from the man himself Thursday, with Trump expected to address the forum via video just days after he’s inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. WEF officials say they expect a “broad footprint” from the new administration to jet in later in the week — tech billionaire and Trump buddy Elon Musk may even drop by.

Meanwhile in Washington, after mounting a historic political comeback in part by railing against globalist elites, Trump is packing his Cabinet and coveted administration advisory slots with deep-pocketed figures from the finance, tech and crypto worlds. Among them: Cantor Fitzgerald boss and Davos regular Howard Lutnick (Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary); billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has been advising Trump during the interregnum at Mar-a-Lago; and crypto backer Paul Atkins as Securities and Exchange Commission boss.

It gives an early taste of the close ties between business and government that look set to define the second Trump presidency.

And it’s a signal: The Davos Man has come in from the cold.

Yes, MAGA voters, you got played. This week, Trump will address the World Economic Forum -- the folks you think want to force you to eat bugs and live in the fifteen-minute cities that you portray as gulags.

This dovetails nicely with an exchange Michelle Goldberg and Ross Douthat had in a New York Times roundtable published yesterday:

Douthat: You should never underestimate the Republican capacity to just do “deregulation and tax cuts” in response to any political eventuality.... Musk seems to have drunk deep from the elixirs of Paul Ryanism on budgetary matters, congressional Republicans are still congressional Republicans, and so there will be ... deregulation and tax cuts, or the extension of the last round of Trump tax cuts, at the very least. (Whether Musk can magically make deep spending cuts happen as well — there one should be skeptical.) ...

Goldberg: I agree with Ross that deregulation and tax cuts will likely be the central accomplishment, if you want to call it that, of the new administration. It’s fascinating to me that, after all the talk about Trump dethroning Paul Ryanism, his movement is now full of people dreaming about even more aggressive forms of economic austerity.

And maybe Trump's voters won't care if they're still hurting economically after four more years of Trump, as long as they get to watch their non-elite enemies suffer.

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There might not be much bread, but there'll be plenty of circuses. Trump had a rally at the Capital Arena in D.C. yesterday, and he's planning to go back for another rally tonight:

Mr. Trump is planning to return to Capital One Arena on Monday, after he becomes president, and his aides are considering whether to have him sign some of the executive orders from a desk placed onstage.

Maybe he'll hold a rally there every night. It'll be like a Vegas residency.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis is angry about a New York Times story that describes some of the ways Trump intends to assert himself:

And Swan, Haberman, and the #BrokenTimes give him that show.

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— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 7:50 AM

But the story should serve as a warning to Democrats about the risks inherent in their strategy of "say nothing and hope Trump destroys himself":

Interviews with more than a dozen people who have recently spoken with Mr. Trump describe a president-elect who views his power much differently than he did on the eve of his first inauguration in 2017. Back then he was on the defensive; the resistance to his presidency was fierce after his shock win and he was more deferential to Washington veterans, heeding their advice on whom to pick and what to prioritize. Now, he smells weakness all around — on Capitol Hill, in the C-suite and in the news media.

He's not even worried about Democrats.

The way Mr. Trump sees it, his biggest concern as he heads into a second term is not the Democrats. He is far more worried about his own party. So tight are the G.O.P.’s congressional majorities that it would take only a handful of disobedient Republicans to kill his chances of fulfilling his major campaign promises.

But congressional Republicans won't be disobedient. Trump is wrong about that. He's absolutely right about the weakness and fearfulness of Democrats and the media, and while he's stupid in many ways, this is the one kind of intelligence he has in abundance: an instinct for taking advantage of other people's weakness and fecklessness.

This is not a call for Democrats to be "angry about everything," although that actually worked eight years ago. It's a call for Democrats to express open, visceral outrage at, say, a Cabinet nominee who thinks polio vaccines are bad. Stop looking over your shoulders and asking yourselves whether rural white voters or podcast bros will be angry at you if you say polio vaccines are good! "Polio is bad" is not a controversial opinion!

I like this idea from Jason Linkins of The New Republic:

... liberals need to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face ... and more forcefully blame Trump for those problems’ continued existence. They need to raise a hue and cry over everything under the sun that’s broken, dysfunctional, or trending in the wrong direction; pile line items on Trump’s to-do list, wake him up early and keep him up late. Every day, get in front of cable news cameras and reporters’ notepads with a new problem for Trump to solve and fresh complaints about the work not done.

... Democrats should already be planning to hang all the foreseeable albatrosses around his neck, and gaming out how they’ll swiftly nail Trump to the wall for the crises that catch him by surprise.

And when Trump gets plutocratic, call him "Donald J. Romney" or "Mitt Trump." That'll piss him off. Maybe lowering his poll numbers a bit could save a few trans people and immigrants from the brutality Trump has in store for them.