Mick Hartley

Interesting from Justin Webb in the Sunday Times, from Washington, on the first few days of hectic action from Trump:

The point everyone made after the immediate fun was that the contrast with the humourless, semi-moribund end to the Biden years was so extreme as to be psychologically, almost physically, shocking to the nation.

Violent criminals pardoned, Panama threatened, sex and gender sorted; it carried on long after midnight and, like the Spanish Inquisition, could strike without warning….

Ah yes, the conventional wisdom went, he was indeed energetic but wait till the hurdles come. Wait till it all gets tricky, with the courts rendering some of the orders void, with the immigration ambition — get rid of all those without proper papers — coming up against the fact that many of them are living decent American lives vital to the economy and to keeping inflation low. Ditto for tariffs, if they are imposed: muscular but self-defeating.

But this, perhaps, is a misunderstanding of the second age of Trump. The hurdles? Bring them on. And crash into them. Jump some, dump some. Pretend they weren’t there. Swerve round them even if the course is now a new one.

The phrase of the moment is this: “Attention is the new money in American politics.”

It is a profound truth. A truth with consequences for America — perhaps for us too — that are only now beginning to take shape. The net worth of the billionaires sitting around Trump at the inauguration caught the attention of many, but the more important point is that they hold the keys to attention itself in the modern world….

What Trump understands is that the attention does not need to be soft and fuzzy and positive, which was the aim in the old days when attention was a passive thing bought by money. Look at what happened last week. The insults, the coarseness, the firings, alongside the promises to bring world peace and harmony and lead a unified nation. A BBC interviewer pointed out to me that there seemed to be intellectual incoherence in some of Trump’s first week. Ya don’t say! …

It’s keep-’em-guessing elevated to high political style. In fact more; it is actually substance. It is what Trumpism is.

But this time you get the sense as well that things might change. To regard it all as a hot mess and nothing more is to miss the effectiveness of Trump. He was consequential in his first term largely because his Supreme Court picks paved the way for the end of Roe v Wade. This time there may well be cultural changes that last, because Trump is pushing at a door which — to the distress of progressive Democrats — seems to be wide open.

Immigration is top of this category. Already Democrats are beginning a long, painful conversation about whether they want to oppose the deportation of criminals: a deportation bill named after Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, has already passed both houses of Congress and done so with the backing of Democratic politicians.

The same is likely to happen with bills mandating promotions in government based on merit rather than skin colour.

But the biggest of the Trump open doors is on sex and gender. His executive order on the subject was tightly written and clearly focused. He has not (yet) waded into the rights and wrongs of childhood gender transition, but he has expressed very clearly a desire to see trans women out of female sport and out of female prisons. Both are, according to opinion polls, popular policies. Do the Democrats want to fight to keep biological males in prisons with women?

To judge from the Dems' reaction so far, the answer is, yes. It's the hill they're choosing to die on.

The problem — whisper it — is that for many Americans, including a fair swathe of Democratic party voters, their party has become the extremists.

Polls taken during Trump’s first week suggest some enthusiasm for the new world. A CBS poll finds nearly a quarter of Kamala Harris voters declaring themselves optimistic about the next four years. To this cross-party group, Trump is not making America great again. He is making it normal again.

They don’t want to buy Greenland, according to CBS. But the threat has their attention. At the start of the wild ride ahead, they are engaged and holding on tight.

The comments, it's fair to say, are mixed:

"What an appalling, fawning and obsequious article."

"The article is none of these things. It is scarily prescient for those of us who despise Trump, as it recognises that he might actually get some things right."