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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The year of FAFO [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-22
New York Times:
Twenty-two States Sue to Stop Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order The lawsuit to block the president’s executive order is the first salvo in what is likely to be a long-running legal fight over immigration policy. Eighteen states and two cities, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., challenged the order in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, arguing that birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is “automatic” and that neither the president nor Congress has the constitutional authority to revise it. Four other states filed a second lawsuit in the Western District of Washington. Mr. Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship was “extraordinary and extreme,” said New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, who led one of the legal efforts along with the attorneys general from California and Massachusetts. “Presidents are powerful,” he said, “but he is not a king. He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen.”
So, everything we said he was, is true. Everything we said he’d try, he’s trying. There was no overreaction on our part.
x Just in case people don’t fully grasp it. The pardoning of insurrectionists is Trump’s way of building loyalty from militias and domestic terrorists to carry out unofficial acts for him — Olga Lautman 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@OlgaNYC1211) January 21, 2025
What Trump is doing is not popular. He’s not popular. Hold on to your hats.
x GOP senators and party leaders had for months insisted that Trump wouldn’t give blanket pardons to the J6 rioters, instead saying he would do it on a case-by-case basis. But he essentially just gave them a blanket pardon.
https://t.co/Iyqsi9Om7d — Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 21, 2025
x Pardoning the violent J6ers is not what majorities support. Not even Republicans. pic.twitter.com/dRv4MWpZ0v — Natalie Jackson (@nataliemj10) January 21, 2025
Jonathan Bernstein/Good Politics/Bad Politics:
Governing as an Authoritarian Trump starts undermining the Constitution on Day One We don’t know yet – we won’t know for a while – the extent to which he will succeed. When it comes to specific policies, I want to echo what I’ve heard a bunch of other people say: Just because Trump and his people say that something is happening through executive action doesn’t mean it’s really going to happen. Some of it will happen, but some will be challenged inside and outside of the administration, and some of it will turn out to be little more than hand-waving to begin with. Lots of steps exist between saying that there will be an action and eventually enacting new policy. Trump’s pardons of insurrectionists, however, are unfortunately as close to self-enforcing as anything a president ever does. And it’s really the hallmark decision he made on Day One, putting him solidly on the side of treason to the Constitution that he had just sworn an oath to uphold. But it’s not just the pardons; many of his executive actions are simply lawless, from citizenship to TikTok and more. Some of it will be terrible policy. Some of it may be reasonable policy on which people will disagree. But undermining the rule of law is what it is even in the pursuit of perfectly successful and popular policy choices. All of it, whether he succeeds or is defeated, is massively corrosive to the Constitutional order.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
American oligarchy begins as Trump makes billions while MAGA gets left out in the rain In D.C. for the launch of Trump 47, the MAGA faithful got soaked as a once and future POTUS cashes in. We don’t know if the $TRUMP crypto buyers are the kind of people who also wait 10 hours in a January downpour to pay tribute to their king, or foreign potentates seeking a legal (but...really?) way to bribe the new POTUS, whose business entities control 80% of the meme coin. An Axios report Sunday said that wild early trading sent the value of $TRUMP to a level that netted the incoming president — again, on paper, with complicated rules on cashing in — $56 billion; other reports suggested the number settled closer to just a mere $10 billion. Either way, the meme coin is the most shocking monetization — and cheapening — of the White House in American history, pulled off in a brazen style that would impress Trump’s favorite billionaire strongman, Vladimir Putin. Proving yet again that history repeats as farce, returning first lady Melania Trump showed up Sunday with a meme coin of her own, again with a seeming billion-dollar payday. This was the true meaning of Inauguration Weekend 2025: the kickoff of America’s Second Republic as an unregulated and utterly unrepentant oligarchy. As the masses struggled through the wet and swampy rat maze erected for them near Chinatown, they passed women in Texas cowboy hats and designer scarves and men in tuxedo tops, or even one chap I saw in a full-length mink coat, ducking into restaurants where lobbyists and tech dudes drank dry martinis and avoided the deluge.
x Wonder if the strategists at Abandon Biden/Abandon Harris or the voters of Deerborn, Michigan happened to catch this:
https://t.co/e7iujf0iw9 — S.V. Dáte (@svdate) January 21, 2025
Steve Vladeck/One First:
Birthright Citizenship, "Invasions," and the Supreme Court President Trump has vowed to go after birthright citizenship on his first day in office. He's going to lose, but in a way that may well provide cover for other controversial immigration measures To make a long story short(er), I have no doubt that Trump will try to do something that looks like a restriction of birthright citizenship. And whatever he attempts might even meet with at least some initial success (although it would be harder to implement than the travel ban—where there was an immediate opportunity to deny entry to folks arriving into the United States on international flights). But for as cynical as many have become about constitutional interpretation in this day and age, there are compelling reasons to believe that birthright citizenship is not going anywhere, anytime soon. The larger issue is the possibility that headlines about Trump being rebuffed on birthright citizenship may obfuscate more effective, but perhaps no-less-legally-dubious shifts in immigration policy in the new administration.
x For liberals, this presidency has a chance of being every bit as bad as feared. It's not an overreaction. When people tell you who they are and what they want to do, just believe them.
https://t.co/nbKsspx2y6 pic.twitter.com/r6rBw4wp9S — Lakshya Jain (@lxeagle17) January 20, 2025
Richard Edelman/TIME:
We Are on the Precipice of a Grievance-Based Society Four preconditions, which have been building for the past decade, have exacerbated these grievances. First is a pervasive lack of belief in a better future. Only one-third of respondents believe that the next generation will be better off. In every Western democracy 30% or fewer believe so. In Germany, just 14% of people believe that the next generation will be better off. And in France, just 9% believe so. There has also been a widening divide in trust among top and bottom income brackets. Low-income respondents have profoundly less trust in institutions than the top quartile. For instance, 48% of low-income respondents trust institutions, averaged across business, government, media, and NGOs—compared to 61%, on average, among high income respondents. Business sees the greatest divergence of any institution, with a 16-point trust gap between high- and low-income groups. Institutional leaders themselves may have also dropped the ball. Globally, two-thirds of respondents worry about journalists, government officials, and CEOs intentionally lying to them. And there are fewer and fewer agreed-upon facts. Nearly two-thirds of respondents find it difficult to differentiate between news from a reliable source and disinformation. The decision by social media networks to move away from fact-checking will further complicate an already messy media context.
Jill Lawrence/The Bulwark:
Lies and False Pieties: Don’t Buy Donald Trump’s Presidential Act He hasn’t suddenly turned into a caring, patriotic statesman who tells the truth. So much projection, so many lies, such blatant partisanship where care and compassion are in order. A government that can’t manage a crisis? That would be Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Rampant sanctuary for dangerous criminals from prisons and mental institutions all over the world? No and hell no. A country that can’t deliver emergency services to “the wonderful people of North Carolina” or Los Angeles, where fires rage “without even a token of defense”? Ridiculous on its face, but even more so from a climate-change denier who blocked $20 billion in aid to Puerto Rico after massive hurricane damage and then obstructed an investigation into why that happened.
x Kinda seems like a whole lotta people found out for the first time today that there's a very large, very vibrant progressive wing of Christianity (and religion in general). — Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) January 21, 2025
Moira Donegan/The Guardian:
Beware, Trump: the American spirit is indefatigable It loves freedom and equality, abhors tyranny, values minding your own business and hates, above all, to be told what to do. This will haunt Trump soon enough There is something broken in the soul when such spectacles can no longer shock you. But I confess that they no longer shock me. America is ruled, now, by men who are extremely psychologically transparent: their resentment and greed, their desperate, seeking needfulness, their insecurity and rage at those who provoke it; these things seep off these men, like a stench. They are evil men, and pathetic ones: mentally small, morally ugly. They are relentlessly predictable. Here is another prediction: these men will not succeed in all their schemes. They will not deport as many people as they say they will; he will not change the law as much as they pledge to; they will not, cannot, capture the institutions as completely, or bury dissent as successfully. They cannot do everything they aim to do. Because politics is not over; because our institutions are not all collapsed; and because the existing institutions are not the only methods of resistance and refusal.
Cliff Schecter covers a roasting of commentator Scott Jennings:
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