Picking Through the ‘Shock and Awe’ Debris

If Trump wants your opinion, he’ll tell you what he wants it to be

You should be like that guy

If you’ve understandably tuned out current events, congratulations. For those of us paying attention, the dawning of Trump 2.0 has been overwhelming.

It’s supposed to be that way. Remember to think in longer time frames than one day. Slow and steady will win this race.

If you really want to catch up, view Trump’s executive orders here.

Trump and his Project 2025 friends promised around 200 executive orders. I can’t believe some in the media are saying that number really happened. The actual total was 26, compared to nine first day orders by Joe Biden and one by Trump in his prior presidency. You’re doing the devil’s work when you don’t check the facts.

Yes, there are a lot of them, comparatively. After all, the finest minds on the right did the hard work, and all the incoming president needed to do was choose Day One’s noise.

It’s fair to say the rule of law has been trampled, with the world’s biggest drug marketplace entrepreneur being pardoned (in return for the Libertarian Party endorsement), and the 1500 plus participants in 2021’s coup cosplay.

It’s fair to say the administration intends to legalize discrimination based on race or sex in the federal sphere. They even reached back to undo an executive order signed by LBJ in 1965 concerning federal contractors.

All federal employees in diversity, equity, and inclusion roles will be placed on paid leave by this week and all DEI-related offices, programs, and their related websites and social media accounts will end by 5pm Wednesday.

Lawsuits to challenge these executive orders have been filed in three areas: ending birthright citizenship, the Musk-led entity for government efficiency, and the reclassification of civil service employees.

Opposition to Trump’s moves has been largely muted from those commonly perceived as having power or influence.

Authoritarianism thrives on despair. Overwhelming the public to the point of neutralizing any opposition is the goal.

As JIll Filipovic put it:

• Even most close politics-watchers — even most elected officials — can’t keep track of every proposal and order and change and action Trump has put into motion, and have to pick what they believe are the most dangerous or salient to most vociferously oppose. News outlets have to pick and choose which ones to cover; those that aren’t covered, or aren’t highlighted, or have potential consequences that are complex and don’t fit into a pithy headline, go largely unseen by the public. Activist groups with limited budgets and staff have to pick which ones to fight.

The last thing people need to do is freak out. Executive orders are not a magic wand. Let us be deliberate and never lose sight of the fact that Trump is a tool of the oligarchy.

We don’t know how some institutions that aren’t already emasculated will react to Trump’s orders. In the meantime, there are things buried in the bullshit that have been overlooked in media coverage or will have unintended consequences.

The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than in 2023, amounting to $5.7 billion a day, according to a report by Oxfam. That is the ultimate problem.

Case in point: We’re all women now.

The executive order aimed at making transgender humans disappear, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” has an error embedded in it, even as it gives the religious right approval for fetal personhood.

Such language, if adopted by legislatures, effectively categorizes any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer. It’s also been leveraged at the state level to restrict in vitro fertilization access and even used to limit access to forms of birth control.

The error in this executive order, assuming the personhood language was deliberate, concerns how gender is identified.

• “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” the order reads in part. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

• All fetuses have phenotypically female genitalia until they reach six to seven weeks of gestation, at which point some fetuses can start to be visually differentiated as male, according to the National Institutes of Health.

You could call the NIH to verify this point, but another executive order forbids all external communications of any kind from inside the US Department of Health and Human Services, including the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.

Speaking of communications, The US Constitution no longer appears on whitehouse.gov, and the Spanish language version of that site has been deleted. Also, the page for the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention has been deleted.

One thing has been made clear: if Trump wants your opinion, he’ll tell you what he wants it to be, which gets me to the topic of retribution.

Episcopalian Bishop Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde asked for mercy during a service attended by President Trump and entourage, and apparently that’s a no-no. Check out her language and compare it to the President’s late night rant on social media:

• In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country. We’re scared now. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.

• "There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives."

• "Let me make one final plea, Mr. President," Bishop Mariann Budde said in her 15-minute sermon. "Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now."

Trump’s response:

• “The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. . . She and her church owe the public an apology!”

Re-read the Bishop’s words and tell me where she was nasty and why an apology would be needed.

To no one’s surprise the online threats have poured in, and one Congressman even suggested that she be deported for daring to speak those words in front of the President.

Fresh out of jail, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was interviewed by Alex Jones on Infowars. (He received a pardon after being sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy.)

• Now it's our turn. I'm happy that the president's focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I'm not gonna play by those rules. The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted. They pardon the J6 committee? Fine. In this country, our case proves that you could be put in prison for anything. They need to be imprisoned. We need to find and put them behind bars for what they did. They need to pay for what they did.

I, for one, think the decision to free all the Jan 6 rioters will have long term effects. Rhetoric aside, it’s probable that a subset of those pardoned will become the core of a paramilitary force aiming to intimidate and inflict violence of people they view as being anti-Trump. Let’s face the facts, these weren’t nice people to start with and I doubt they learned any lessons on civility in jail.

New York’s Congestion Pricing Is Working. Now Comes the Real Test by Liza Featherstone at The New Republic

• In the first week of the new policy, Manhattan traffic dropped by 7.5 percent. Commute times are down dramatically on many major and notoriously clogged arteries, including, every single day, almost all day, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Holland Tunnel, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Queensboro Bridge—meaning not just lowered congestion and pollution but time savings for those motorists who do need to drive. Subway, bus, and commuter rail ridership are already way up.

• The right-leaning New York media spins these same facts as evidence of a crisis. The New York Post, which has spent months finding every possible person inconvenienced by the policy, reported the public transit increases as a negative: Trains and buses are now too “crowded,” with “riders smashed up against one another.” A suburban Long Island paper for the Orthodox Jewish community, 5 Towns Central, also followed the playbook of reading failure into success, showing photos of the empty Lincoln Tunnel and declaring that the policy had backfired, turning the city into a “ghost town.” The Post also indignantly lambasted what it called the MTA’s “bogus data” from the first week of the policy, declaring the traffic and transit numbers released by the agency “prove nothing and are irrelevant to the tolls’ true purpose, which is to bleed the public.”

• Congestion pricing, in other words, now faces a crucial test that every good climate policy going forward will have to pass: Can its success stand up to a relentless campaign of fake populist counternarrative and reactionary misinformation?

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First U.S. H5N1 Death Sparks Urgency: Scientists Warn That Bird Flu Is Mutating Faster Than Expected Via Texas Biomedical Research Institute at SciTechDaily

• H5N1, which is naturally present in wild birds and deadly to chickens, has recently spread to a wide range of mammals and, for the first time in the spring of 2024, began infecting dairy cows.

• As of early 2025, the outbreak had spread through herds across multiple states in the U.S. and infected dozens of people, mostly farm workers. So far, most people infected experience mild illness and eye inflammation and the virus is not spreading between people. The first H5N1 death in the U.S. was reported in January 2025 following exposure to infected chickens.

• “The clock is ticking for the virus to evolve to more easily infect and potentially transmit from human to human, which would be a concern,” said Texas Biomed Professor Luis Martinez-Sobrido, Ph.D., whose lab specializes in influenza viruses and has been studying H5N1 since the outbreak began last year. The team has developed specialized tools and animal models to test prophylactic vaccines and therapeutic antivirals.

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American Pravda: By Surrendering to Trump, META, X and TikTok Are Making Themselves Tools of the State by Dougald Lamont

• Incredibly, when the EU tried to enforce laws against X’s abuses, Vice-President Elect J D Vance said that if they did so, that the U.S. would pull out of NATO, which is yet another example of the completely maniacal behaviour of this administration.

• For any country to refuse foreign ownership of their media is completely in line with the stated beliefs of the U.S. founding fathers. Constitutional originalists can cite Alexander Hamilton, “Foreign powers also will not be idle spectators. They will interpose, the confusion will increase, and a dissolution of the Union ensue.”

• Wise words. One of the answers to what to do with all of the threats, bluster cruelty and manipulation is to call it out for what it is. We don’t have to put up with it.