I’d like to write something about the worse than expected beginning of the Trump regime. But there’s so much happening, so fast – 90% of it very bad – that I don’t know where to start.

There’s the pitiful, spiteful culture war stuff. MAGA will be so proud:

• For Federal organizations, removing all minority recognition events, including National African American/Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month
• Requiring all Federal employees to remove their pronouns from their email signatures
• Deleting data about gender, contraception, abortion, HIV statistics from Federal websites
• Removing all references to DEI from Federal websites
• Firing any Federal employees who administer DEI programs
• Renaming things like Denali and the Gulf of Mexico

It’s a lot, but none of that is going to matter much because more substantive, more damaging fuckery is happening in parallel:

• Firing hundreds of FBI agents who participated in the Trump investigations (just doing their jobs)
• Firing thousands of civil servants for any number of actions that the Trump team finds objectionable
• Firing the prosecutors who handled the Jan 6 cases – again, they were just doing their jobs, following the law
• Firing the Inspectors General of many organizations – the watchdogs for bribery, corruption, and crime
• Giving Musk and his minions keys to the financial kingdom – access to and control of Federal payment systems
• Freezing and then unfreezing Federal spending on programs already committed by Congress
• Rolling back or removing hundreds of environmental and worker safety regulations
• Placing idiotic tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and other nations, for no good reason that I can ascertain
• Firing up Guantanamo Bay as a new prison for illegal immigrants
• Giving nonsense orders to CA water authorities to release water from reservoirs for no good reason, so Trump can claim he “opened the faucet” (this is criminally insane – I need a drink just thinking about it)

Trump 2.0 is much, much worse than the first time. He came in with a plan (Project 2025), and the loyalists ready and willing to do anything he orders. This isn’t “an orderly transition of power”. It’s pretty much the definition of a coup.

I’m worried on multiple fronts. I think the social and economic disruption that will follow all this will destabilize the US economy, and the dollar’s value will drop. Stock, bond and mortgage markets will roil. And we won’t have the experienced people in place to pull things back together as they start to unravel.

It’s hard to imagine that this is what the Trump team actually wants. More likely, the various factions (the fiscal hawks, the billionaire bros, the culture warriors, the white Xtian nationalists) are simply focused on getting their narrow goals served and no one is interested in the big picture.

You can make a strong argument that this is the beginning of the end – the America we grew up with won’t survive. I hope that’s not the case, but right now we’re in a plane headed down with no pilot available to pull it out of a fatal crash. I’m not sure our seat belts will help.

Update – this just happened. Trump wants to decide what we teach students in every state. Horrific.