Tag: inaugural address
2017 inaugural address

Now We Know What Trump's 'American Carnage' Rant Was About

Does anyone remember “American carnage”? In his 2017 inaugural address Donald Trump portrayed a collapsing society, emphasizing in particular the “crime and gangs and drugs” destroying America’s cities.

It was a peculiar and disturbing speech, in part because it bore no relationship to reality. Then as now, America had many problems. But runaway urban crime wasn’t one of them. In fact, Trump chose to proclaim urban carnage after a remarkable generation-long run of plunging crime in our major cities. New York, for example, had only 335 murders in 2016, down from 2,262 in 1990.

So what was that about?

At the time, I thought it was mostly about sadism. Trump clearly loves punishing people, so he was eager to portray a nation full of people who needed punishing. And it remains true, as Adam Serwer pointed out back in 2018, that for Trump and many of his supporters cruelty is a goal in itself, that they rejoice in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

But the events unfolding in Los Angeles as you read this and, I fear, the events likely to unfold across much of America soon, quite possibly this weekend, suggest that the motivations of Trump and his cronies go deeper than mere (mere!) sadism. They want to use false claims of chaos to justify a power grab that, if successful, would mark the end of the American experiment.

As I assume everyone knows by now, on Friday heavily armed — and masked — ICE agents began raiding workplaces in and around Los Angeles, seeking to arrest people they claimed were illegal immigrants. Crowds quickly gathered to protest. After all, ICE wasn’t rounding up members of violent gangs. It was scooping up ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, many of whom had friends and relatives in the neighborhood.

The protests were relatively peaceful, although there were some scuffles, objects thrown and vandalism. Los Angeles has experienced real riots in the past. This didn’t even come close. But ICE and some other law enforcement personnel responded with heavy application of force — not lethal weapons, at least not yet, but lots of tear gas, rubber bullets, and so on.

Until ICE moved in Los Angeles was, in fact, remarkably peaceful. Like other major American cities, LA experienced a significant but not huge crime wave in the aftermath of Covid but has since seen that wave more than completely recede:

Los Angeles right now is probably as safe as it has ever been.

But if you read Trump, which you should to get past the sanewashing, the City of Angels sounds like a scene from Fallout:

And Noem has called LA a “city of criminals.”

As a New Yorker, I’m accustomed to seeing my quite livable city portrayed as a hellscape. Still, there are 13 million people living in Greater Los Angeles who can testify that it has not, in fact, been invaded and occupied, let alone taken over by insurrectionist mobs.

Oh, and let’s not forget that an actual insurrectionist mob tried to overturn the 2020 election — and Trump has pardoned its members.

But no matter. Trump wanted an excuse to mobilize the National Guard, even though the governor of California not only didn’t request it, but has sued Trump to demand that he rescind the order.

When did a president last federalize the Guard against a governor’s wishes? Sixty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson mobilized the Alabama National Guard against the wishes of George Wallace, so that the Guard could protect civil rights marchers.

I’m still seeing some news analyses portraying what’s happening as a confrontation over immigration. And there are definitely people in the administration, led by Stephen Miller, who simply hate immigrants — legal or not, it doesn’t much matter. White South Africans seem to be the only exception.

But this looks bigger even than a play by an administration that has been finding, to its horror, that mass deportation is a lot harder than it sounds — especially if you make any effort at all to follow due process.

What it looks like is an attempt to create confrontations that can be used to impose something that, for practical purposes, amounts to martial law.

And if that’s what it’s really about, what’s happening in Los Angeles is just the beginning.

Most immediately, what is going to happen this Saturday? The government is going to hold a costly military parade in Washington, even though we aren’t celebrating any recent victories I’m aware of. This is the kind of thing one expects to see in Red Square, not the capital of a democracy. And guess what: the parade will also fall on Donald Trump’s birthday.

Many pro-democracy groups have teamed up to organize protests against the parade. There will be “No Kings Day” demonstrations all across the country. I don’t know whether there will be any violent incidents. But I’m quite sure that Trump and his allies will claim that violent incidents are happening and seek excuses to use force against the protestors.

So it’s important to understand what is happening here. Trump isn’t reacting to any real threat of disorder in California. And while anti-immigrant bigotry is certainly an important factor, it’s not the whole story.

No, this is all about finding excuses to use force against Trump’s critics and opponents and justify an anti-democratic power grab.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his daily Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Drill Baby Drill? How 'MAGA Brain' May Kill US Energy Independence

Drill Baby Drill? How 'MAGA Brain' May Kill US Energy Independence

Does anyone remember “Drill, baby, drill?” What with all the tumult over Donald Trump’s disastrous trade war, many have forgotten that energy production played a big role in his second inaugural address. He claimed that we were facing a “national energy emergency,” and that he would bring prices down and make America rich by releasing the “liquid gold under our feet.”

There was, in fact, no energy emergency. One thing you always find Trump and MAGA in general doing is assuming that the real world must look the way their prejudices say it should look. Squishy liberals who believe in rule of law were in charge last year, so America must have been in the grip of a terrifying crime wave — even though the homicide rate in 2024 was close to a 65-year low:


Source: Jeff Asher

Similarly, the Biden administration was full of woke environmentalists who believe in the global warming hoax, so they must have crippled energy production — even though America in the Biden years was, for the first time in generations, producing more energy than it consumed:

When I wrote about this at the time, I suggested that Trump was suffering from "MAGA brain,"

the belief that the only way you can get results is by being tough and nasty, avoiding anything that might be considered woke. Thus, to achieve energy independence, we must put aside worries about pollution and climate change while blocking clean energy.

So administrations that care about climate change and the environment in general must be crippling the energy sector. Biden may have presided over record oil production and growing energy exports, but we’ll just say that we have an energy emergency anyway.

You can probably guess what’s coming next. There appears to be a real chance that America will lose its newly reacquired energy independence. And if it does, we know who will be responsible: Trump himself.

To see why, we need to look at the factors responsible for America’s return to energy self-sufficiency.

One of these is fracking — extracting oil and gas embedded in shale by fracturing that shale with high-pressure liquids. Yes, there are serious environmental issues involved both in the fracking process and in the fact that more fossil fuel production adds to greenhouse gas emissions. But while the Biden administration took climate change seriously, that didn’t stop oil and gas production from rising on its watch.

The other factor was the incredible rise of renewable energy. Not that long ago wind and solar power were widely seen as silly, hippy-dippy conceits. Now they’re major contributors to energy supply:


Data source: US Energy Information Administration

In the case of shale, it’s all about prices. Drilling new shale wells is expensive. In fact, Trump’s vision of drastically lower oil prices never made any sense, because any large drop in oil prices would make new shale wells unprofitable. And since production from any given shale well drops quickly over time, anything that caused new drilling to fall substantially would quickly translate into declining oil production.

How low would prices have to go to shrink the U.S. oil industry? Recently the Dallas Fed did a survey which suggested that drilling in many major fields would stop if the price per barrel fell below the low 60s:

And that was before Trump’s tariffs raised costs, so the critical price is probably higher now. And guess what: oil prices right now are at a level where we can expect production to fall. Here are oil futures:

Why did oil get cheap? Look at the sudden drop on April 2, a.k.a. Liberation Day, when Trump first announced extreme tariffs. It’s obvious that oil prices are down thanks to pessimism about the global economy, which in turn is tied to Trump’s trade war. And by the way, that war is by no means over. A new analysis by the Yale Budget Lab finds that the damaging effects of Trump’s tariffs are only modestly mitigated by his surrender to China.

And as for renewables: Trump hates them, wind power in particular. He offers crazy justifications for that hatred — did you hear about his claim that offshore wind farms kill whales? — but it’s pretty clear that he has been nursing an irrational grudge ever since he was unable to stop a Scottish wind farm that he thought ruined the view from a golf course he owns.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that MAGA types in general dislike renewable energy because they don’t consider it manly.

So what will be the economy-boosting effects of drill, baby, drill? Nil, baby, nil.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, where he now posts almost every day.

Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman Substack.

Christie On Two Levels

Christie On Two Levels

WASHINGTON — It’s rare that you can look at your television screen and see not only what is happening but also what might have been. Chris Christie’s inaugural address on Tuesday was at once a masterful summary of the best thinking among Republicans about where their party needs to move and a compendium of proclamations that now carry unfortunate double meanings.

The New Jersey governor gave the speech he would have given had there been no George Washington Bridge scandal and no allegations about the use of Superstorm Sandy relief money to pressure a local official on a development project.

You can’t blame him for sticking to the old script. He now has to live his public life on two levels. And Christie’s speech made an important contribution: The tough former prosecutor denounced our dysfunctional, counterproductive approach to the drug problem.

“We will end the failed war on drugs that believes that incarceration is the cure of every ill caused by drug abuse,” Christie declared. “We will make drug treatment available to as many of our nonviolent offenders as we can, and we will partner with our citizens to create a society that understands this simple truth — every life has value and no life is disposable.”

Forget the scandals for a moment: Christie here is speaking for an expanding consensus that (forgive me) bridges left and right, liberals and libertarians, about the foolishness of filling our prisons with those who are the victims of their own crimes. Pushing this cause along could be Christie’s good deed.

But like everything else in the speech, this passage also had a political purpose. Offering a dash of libertarianism, which appeals to a key subset of the Republican primary electorate, with a soupçon of compassion is just what the consultant gods would order up. And that’s the sort of balance Christie struck throughout.

For the Tea Party ideologues, Christie dutifully mocked “the power of almighty government to fix any problem, real or imagined.” He fired a shot across the Hudson River, aimed perhaps at Bill de Blasio, New York City’s populist mayor. “Let’s be different than our neighbors,” he said. “Let’s put more money in the pockets of our middle class by not taking it out of their pockets in the first place.”

And even Rand Paul couldn’t do better than this: “I do not believe that New Jerseyans want a bigger, more expensive government that penalizes success and then gives the pittance left to a few in the name of income equity. What New Jerseyans want is an unfettered opportunity to succeed in the way that they define success.”

But the ideology came draped in the finery of anti-partisan, anti-gridlock fashion, finished off with a flourish to a resurgent, caring brand of conservatism.

“We have to be willing to play outside the red and blue boxes that the media pundits put us in,” said the man who may be demonizing the media in the coming months. “We have to be willing to reach out to others who look or speak differently than us; we have to be willing to personally reach out a helping hand to a neighbor or a friend suffering from drug addiction, depression or the dignity-stripping loss of a job.”

On a normal day, the once pro-Christie media would have gone into a swoon. But there’s a new normal for the man who once led the GOP presidential polls. Suddenly, anodyne pronouncements sounded strange.

When he said that “each vote cast is an act of faith and trust,” Christie reminded everyone that a breach of trust is precisely why he’s in trouble. When he praised his state for having “put aside political partisanship,” his listeners remembered that hardball is his calling card. When he criticized an “attitude that says I am always right and you are always wrong,” you wondered if he was describing what The New York Times called his “swagger and unapologetic belligerence.”

For there was other news on this inauguration day, including a Pew poll finding that 58 percent of those who’ve heard about the bridge story — including an astonishing 42 percent of Republicans — don’t believe Christie’s account. Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP’s defeated 2013 candidate for governor of Virginia, said that Christie should step down as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. And New Jersey’s legislators consolidated their investigation of him into one Senate-Assembly supercommittee.

Aside from all this, Christie had a great day. But for now, “all this” is what defines him.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne

AFP Photo/Jeff Zelevansky

WATCH: Christie Delivers Second Inaugural Address, Leaves Out Scandals

WATCH: Christie Delivers Second Inaugural Address, Leaves Out Scandals

On Tuesday, New Jersey governor Chris Christie delivered his inaugural address amid the scandals plaguing his second term.

The event garnered national attention this year as people waited to see if Christie would address the investigations he is currently facing.

But unlike his recent State of the State address, in which he acknowledged the investigations, Christie opted to stick to to his prepared transcript and did not mention the Bridgegate scandal – the possibly politically motivated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in September — nor the investigation into his use of Superstorm Sandy relief funds.

Instead, Christie more subtly acknowledged that with the “great honor” of serving New Jersey “comes solemn obligations – to make the hard decisions, to raise the uncomfortable topics, to require responsibility and accountability, to be willing to stand hard when principles are being violated and to be willing to compromise to find common ground with all of our people.”

The governor – whose popularity is declining nationwide according to the most recent USA Today/Pew Research Center poll – also took a swipe at Washington, first criticizing big government and then partisan politics, saying, “We cannot fall victim to the attitude of Washington, D.C. – the attitude that I am always right and you are always wrong.”

“The attitude that puts everyone into a box they are not permitted to leave. The attitude that puts political wins ahead of policy agreements,” Christie continued. “The belief that compromise is a dirty word.”

Seemingly encouraging bipartisanship, he added: “We have to be willing to play outside the red and blue boxes the media and pundits put us in; we have to be willing to reach out to others who look or speak differently than us; we have to be willing to personally reach out a helping hand to a neighbor suffering from drug addiction, depression, or the dignity-stripping loss of a job.”

This notion of bipartisanship has a lot to do with why Christie is viewed as a very likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016. The governor’s supposed ability to work with Democrats and appeal to Independents, however, may be threatened now that he is under investigation.

Still, Christie appeared confident, asserting, “We have survived the worst natural disaster in our state’s history and together to restore, renew, and rebuild the state we love. Each of these challenges have been met by a new, unified force in public life – a New Jersey setting the tone for an entire nation. A tough New Jersey. A resilient New Jersey. A proud New Jersey.”

You can watch Governor Christie’s entire inaugural address below.


AFP Photo/Jeff Zelevansky
Video: NJTVonline via YouTube

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