Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated today with historically low approval numbers and under a cloud of investigation into his campaign’s ties to the Russian government and its propaganda campaign to influence the 2016 election. First up in today’s roundup, The New York Times report on the FBI’s investigation:
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.
Here’s Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
We survived the crooks and liars and incompetents and alcoholics. I think we’ll survive Trump too. But it will require people on the left and the right to guard our institutions, and to say to him no, you just can’t do that. I was struck Thursday by words written by Eliot A. Cohen, a conservative, writing in The American Interest: “nothing will teach him gravitas, magnanimity, or wisdom.”
No, nothing will. But I still hold out the hope that we the people can punish him for his lack of those qualities, his lack of any belief system. He didn’t win a majority of our votes. He doesn’t today have a majority of our support. And time will show that gravitas, magnanimity, and wisdom, especially wisdom, still matter.
David Brooks argues that Trump’s greatest threat to the country is his absolute incompetence;
The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.
That’s ultimately why this could be a pivotal day. For the past few decades our leadership class has been polarized. We’ve wondered if there is some opponent out there that could force us to unite and work together. Well, that opponent is being inaugurated, not in the form of Trump the man, but in the form of the chaos and incompetence that will likely radiate from him, month after month. For America to thrive, people across government will have to cooperate and build arrangements to quarantine and work around the president.
People in the defense, diplomatic and intelligence communities will have to build systems to prevent him from intentionally or unintentionally bumbling into a global crisis. People in his administration and in Congress will have to create systems so his ill-informed verbal spasms don’t derail coherent legislation.
Robert Dallek writes in The New York Times about President Obama and his opportunity to not simply fade into the background:
Then there’s Theodore Roosevelt, who already had his share and more of hobbies and adventures to tend to in 1909, but nevertheless spent his early post-White House years lambasting his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt was so incensed by Taft’s coziness with big business and his apparent lack of interest in his predecessor’s progressive agenda that he ran for the presidency in 1912 as a third-party candidate.
Anita Hill is up with an op-ed in The Washington Post:
Much has changed for women in the past quarter-century, but too much has stayed the same. Yes, some high-profile allegations of sexual harassment receive wide attention. Yet harassment, despite now-standard training to the contrary, is still routine in too many workplaces and exacts a physical, psychological and economic toll. [...] In 2016, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, commentators declared that feminism is over, lost or dead, and so is social justice; women should move on. But what I witnessed after the hearing, when thousands of women demanded that our leadership in Washington reflect their experiences, gives me hope. I’m convinced that those who expect women to recede quietly will soon be disappointed.
Paul Krugman:
[S]tuff always happens. Maybe there will be a new economic crisis, helped along by the rush to undo financial regulation. Maybe there will be a foreign affairs crisis, say over adventurism in the Baltics by Mr. Trump’s good friend Vladimir. Maybe it will be something we’re not thinking about. Then what?
Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.
But as far as we know, almost no people meeting that description will be in the new administration, except possibly the nominee for defense secretary — whose nickname just happens to be “Mad Dog.”
So there you have it: an administration unprecedented in its corruption, but also completely unprepared to govern. It’s going to be terrific, let me tell you.
Ryan Cooper:
Brace yourself, America: The Trump administration is going to be an epic disaster — an orgy of looting, corruption, and austerity. [...] It'll be foxes in every henhouse, private industry in charge of the state, and an epidemic of looting and corruption. For Republicans, this might be business as usual. In these dark times, it's worth returning to Thomas Frank's book The Wrecking Crew, which lays out a convincing account of how the rash of Republican corruption in the mid-2000s was a natural and logical product of their approach to government. Movement conservatism views the very idea of quality government with scorn, and its major normative principles are the positive value of greed, love of private industry as such, and worship of markets as the institution to which all human society must be subordinated. Such a political faction naturally spits out Jack Abramoffs by the score.
We close today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s analysis:
I can’t pretend this is a normal inauguration. Of course I celebrate the peaceful and orderly transfer of power, but I also hope that Saturday’s protest march is big and loud and spirited — and that it represents the start, not the culmination, of something.
Trump’s power is not unchecked. We, the citizens, are the ultimate authority. We must let him know, through our elected officials and with our own rude voices, when he threatens to go too far.
Get ready. We have work to do.