On Tuesday night, February 24, Trump delivered his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation. In that speech, he did a number of things:

–made grandiose claims about how the economy was in terrible shape under Biden and has made a miraculous recovery under him;

–repeated his reference to tariffs as a tax that other countries are paying to the United States, which is not true;

–gave several highly prestigious awards, including a Purple Heart to a National Guardsman who was shot in Washington and survived, a Medal of Honor to a 100-year-old World War II veteran; a Medal of Honor to a commander in the recent Venezuela raid; a Legion of Merit medal to a Coast Guard hero who rescued 164 girls in last summer’s flooding in Texas; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the goalie on the winning US Olympic hockey team (article in TheHill.com, February 24, 2026); and

–cited the involvement of Somalis in apparent childcare fraud in Minnesota as evidence that US immigration policy is letting in people whose cultures are all about dishonesty.

Republicans are hoping to get some mileage out of a moment during the speech when Trump asked people to stand if they agree with the statement that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Republicans stood; Democrats didn’t. Of course, the reason Democrats didn’t stand was that they associated this statement with approval for Trump’s specific current actions in cities like Minneapolis, but it’s giving Republicans a propaganda tool, the ability to say “The Democrats made clear that protecting American citizens is no longer their primary objective” (in the words of one Republican strategist). We can expect to be hearing this a lot in Republican ads for the midterm congressional elections next fall (article in Politico, February 26, 2026).

But now I want to focus on another part of his speech, that involving transgender youth.  Let’s start with Trump’s own words:

And here is one more opportunity to show common sense in government. In the gallery tonight are Sage Blair and her mother, Michele. In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home. After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time. But today, all of that is behind them because sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full ride scholarship to Liberty University. Sage and Michele, please stand up. And thank you for your great bravery and who can believe that we’re even speaking about things like this. 15 years ago, if somebody was up here and said that, they’d say, what’s wrong with him? But now we have to say it because it’s going on all over, numerous states, without even telling the parents. But surely, we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents will. Who would believe that we’ve been talking about that. We must ban it and we must ban it immediately. Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. Amazing. [Inaudible] boy, oh boy. We’re lucky we have a country with people like this. Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we?

One aspect of this story that is not in dispute is that this individual suffered a horrible ordeal. The teen, who was adopted and raised by maternal grandmother Michele Blair, apparently ran away from home, fell into the hands of sex traffickers, and was raped. The teen spent some time in a Maryland facility for boys, suffered sexual abuse there, ran away from there, and suffered further abuse in Texas. All of this is horrific, and clear not the fault of either the grandmother or the school.

But we need to consider what may have happened before all that, back at the school. Listening to Trump, one could easily imagine that Sage Blair showed up for school one day, got called into the principal’s office, and was told “We’ve observed that you have some masculine tendencies, so we’ve decided to transition you into being a boy, because that’s obviously what you want. Don’t argue, here’s your new name, here are your new pronouns, and here’s your new bathroom.” Trump would have us believe that the actions of the school drove Sage to run away from home.

The absurdity of that scenario speaks for itself. Clearly, it was Sage Blair who approached school administrators with the desire to be considered male and asked them not to tell Michele, because Michele would not be supportive. To be sure, there’s room for more than one opinion on whether a school system should go along with a student’s transgender proclivities without informing the parents, but let’s at least be clear that that’s what the question is. Trump gives the impression that the whole thing was the school’s initiative–consistent with the broader accusation of teachers being “groomers” of gay and trans youth–and that’s just poppycock.

There’s no way of knowing, at this time, how Sage Blair feels about all of this, and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s none of my business. Sage may very well regard the gender dysphoria at age 14 as a passing phase, may very well resent the school for having encouraged it, and may even blame the school for Sage’s decision to run away, and thus blame the school for the horrible ordeals that followed. The only way we’ll know Sage’s feelings in the matter is if Sage (or Draco, as Sage was called during that period) sees fit to speak out at some point in the future. Meanwhile, though, Trump is waging an all-out war on any kind of affirmation of transgender identity, whether for adults or minors, and is using Sage (or Draco) Blair as a pawn in this agenda and using an obviously distorted version of Sage (or Draco) Blair’s story to make that agenda look like simple common sense.

Transcript of Trump’s speech with video clips

Video of Trump’s speech

Democratic response by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger

CBS News fact check of Trump and Spanberger speeches

Article about Sage Blair in LGBTQ Nation, February 25, 2026

This is not the first time that federal and state forces have been at odds with each other. The civil rights era was replete with confrontations between federal authorities and state governors, where state governors were trying to defend racial segregation and federal authorities were trying to enforce court orders for integration, especially in the public schools.  Now, however, we’re seeing a completely different kind of confrontation between federal and state levels of government.

The Trump administration is determined to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Trump claims that he’s mainly going after criminals, but this is not what’s actually going on. Trump also has a personal grudge against the state of Minnesota, especially its governor, Tim Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. So for the last few weeks, the city of Minneapolis has had agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in thick concentration, going from door to door looking for migrants to detain and deport.

On Wednesday, January 7, an ICE officer named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a woman named Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis. He claimed she was trying to run over him; others say she was trying to get away from him. What is known is that he fired three shots: one from in front of her, and two more from the side. A new report says that he had internal bleeding in his torso. There is some ambiguity as to exactly what happened.

The federal government, however, as dominated by Trump, doesn’t seem to see any ambiguity. The FBI (which is run by a Trump loyalist, Kash Patel) is supposedly investigating the shooting, but whatever they’re doing, they are totally shutting the corresponding state agency out of the process.  Rather, Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing possible charges against Nicole Good’s widow, Becca Good. This has triggered a flurry of resignations by career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Minnesota state authorities are conducting their own investigation. The Trump administration regards Renee Good as a domestic terrorist, not a civilian victim.

Here are the aspects of this saga that are most abnormal:

(1) It’s abnormal for the federal government to refuse to work in cooperation with state authorities when something like this takes place.

(2) It’s abnormal for any level of government not to see the need for an investigation when a law enforcement officer shoots a civilian.

(3) When things are normal, the president does not tell the Justice Department whom to investigate and prosecute. Moreover, when things are normal, career prosecutors have more latitude to use their own judgment in these matters. Here, Attorney General Pam Bondi is running the show from the top down, and she’s obviously taking her marching orders from Trump.

Trump’s response to the whole saga is to send more ICE agents into Minnesota. This fits in with his overall philosophy of governance: that’s all about getting tough and getting tougher.

Story on NBC News, January 13, 2026

To state the obvious, the majority of Republicans in Congress are not only loyal to Trump but subservient to him. When Trump vetoed two bills that had passed Congress with strong bipartisan support, with every appearance that he was motivated by vengeance against individuals involved rather than ideology, some Republicans voted with the Democrats to override his vetoes, but not enough to muster up a two-thirds majority in either chamber.  Thus, a majority of Republicans, even though they had initially favored these two bills, did not want to anger Trump by voting to override his vetoes.  (Article in TheHill.com, January 8, 2026)

But a handful of Republicans–again, just a handful–are speaking up against Trump’s actions in Venezuela, and have voted with the Democrats to invoke the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to restrain Trump.  (Article in Politico, January 8, 2026; see also this article and this one)  Now, it’s a purely symbolic measure, because Trump can and will veto any such bill that they pass, but it does show that subservience to Trump among congressional Republicans isn’t air-tight.

And this is understandably true. Trump has claimed to hold an America First ideology, which implies avoiding getting entangled with foreign countries, and yet he not only launched a mission that killed over 100 Venezuelan political and military personnel to arrest President Nicolas Madura and his wife, but also intends to “run” Venezuela and control its oil industry for some years to come. And this is where a key question arises: Does loyalty to Trump and the so-called MAGA movement mean loyalty to a set of policy principles, or does it just mean personal loyalty to Trump for whatever he wants to do?  The fact that the Republicans at their 2020 national convention didn’t even bother to write up a platform, and then in 2024 issued a platform that was made up entirely of Trump’s own talking points, would seem to indicate the latter.

Trump is also threatening to take over Greenland, a territory of Denmark.  He claims it’s necessary for America’s national security, but that’s absurd, because the United States already has a military base on that island, as well as the full cooperation of the government of Denmark for any reasonable expansion of its military presence that US leaders deem wise. What’s more, for whatever natural resources Trump wants from Greenland, those too can be negotiated. But with the same kind of stubborn persistence we normally associate with children at the age of four, Trump keeps saying that no, the US needs to take it over. And one of Trump’s advisers has suggested that if the US moves in, Denmark will step aside, viewing the cost of war too high–which, by the way, is the way Hitler took control of Austria in March of 1938.

For any Republican to oppose Trump, however, is a huge career risk, because since Trump came on the scene, Republican primary election campaigns for the House or Senate have been largely about who’s more loyal to Trump, and anyone who displeases Trump is likely to lose the next Republican primary in his or her district or state.  Liz Cheney–a very conservative Republican from Wyoming–not only lost her seat in the House after supporting Trump’s second impeachment and co-chairing the House committee investigating Trump’s role in the January 6th attack, but was also declared by the Republican Party in her state to be a non-Republican, a traitor. And of course Trump’s own definition of a traitor is anybody who isn’t personally loyal to him. So if every Republican who stands up to Trump gets voted out, the result could be a Republican Party in Congress that’s even more loyal and subservient to His Majesty Trump.

How long is this going to last? That’s anybody’s guess. An important marker of where we’re going is going to be this year’s November congressional elections. The Republicans can be expected to lose some seats in the House, probably to the point of losing their majority, but if they lose big–and if they lose their majority in the Senate (which is going to be harder for the Democrats to pull off)–then it will appear that swing voters who voted for Trump in 2024 are starting to have second thoughts about this whole Trump era.

Right along, Congress has been able to create regulatory agencies in the executive branch that are not directly subordinate to the president. In such agencies, the president can only fire commissioners for bad job performance, not political disagreement. Thus, in the making and enforcing of regulations, the commissioners in such agencies have not had to worry about making the president happy. However, all that may be about to change. The Supreme Court has just heard arguments in a case where Rebecca Slaughter of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is challenging Trump’s power to fire her over ideological differences.

The Constitution does not explicitly say that Congress has the power to create a regulatory agency with powers independent from the president. (The Constitution doesn’t say anything specific about departments and agencies in the executive branch at all, though it does anticipate that there will be executive departments.) However, in the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the act of Congress creating the FTC was constitutional and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not have the power to fire a conservative FTC commissioner who was giving him grief over New Deal programs. Now, Trump is asking the Supreme Court to overturn that precedent.

In the justices’ responses to the arguments that were heard on Monday, December 8, a pattern seemed clear: The liberal justices were concerned about the power of the president being unchecked; the conservative justices were concerned about hypothetical scenarios where Congress could convert cabinet departments and other parts of the executive branch into independent agencies and put them beyond the power of the president to control who worked there.

The argument on Trump’s side is that the Constitution concentrates executive power in the president and says nothing of any agencies that won’t be directly accountable to the president. On the other side is the argument that creating independent regulatory agencies is a necessary and proper part of Congress’s lawmaking powers, since the areas where Congress makes laws are likely to involve technicalities that independent agencies can best deal with.

While it looks as if the Court is going to be on Trump’s side in this case, the big remaining question is how broad and sweeping the ruling will be. There is another case, which the Court will be hearing separately, involving Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board, Lisa Cook. The Court has given observers reason to think that, while it will probably allow Trump to fire FTC commissioners, it may allow the Federal Reserve Board to maintain its independence. Even so, the whole concept of independent regulatory agencies may be about to be seriously altered.

Article in Politico, December 8, 2025

Article at SCOTUSblog, December 8, 2025

Report on NPR, December 8, 2025

Two major areas of change in US foreign policy in 2025 need to be noted: a revision in the criteria for the State Department’s annual human rights report, and a new National Security Strategy document that the Trump administration issued in early December 2025.

Every year, as required by Congress, the State Department issues a report on human rights conditions and abuses, country by country, around the world. In April of 2025, the Trump administration issued a set of memos calling for changes in what these reports will focus on. Among the issues that are not to be treated as human rights abuses in these reports are: denial of freedom of movement; denial of peaceful assembly; holding of political prisoners without due process; bad prison conditions; restrictions on free and fair elections; forcing refugees and asylum seekers to return to their home countries; harassment of human rights organizations; and persecution of individuals for being LGBTQ+ or belonging to any other vulnerable affinity group–including persons with disabilities and women. (NPR report, April 18, 2025) Further guidelines released in November of 2025 treat DEI policies, facilitation of mass migration, and gender-changing medical treatment for minors as human rights abuses. The news policies also purport to put greater emphasis on freedom of speech, including the freedom of opposition political parties to compete, but that part appears to be thinking of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which makes hate speech and disinformation on social media illegal. (Obviously, “hate speech” can be a matter of definition.) It also appears that Trump wants it to be easier for far-Right parties in European countries to get ahead. (NBC News report, November 21, 2025)

And, during the first week of December 2025, Trump released his National Security Strategy. (Here is the actual document.) Among other things:

–He represents his new policy as a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, essentially heightening the sense of the United States being the policeman of the Western Hemisphere. (It should be noted that Teddy Roosevelt issued the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, justifying a long spate of military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.) It reads as a clear promise of US muscle-flexing in the hemisphere to defend perceived US interests, including stopping drug trafficking and restricting migration to the US. (Many are wondering whether Trump intends to launch a full-frontal ground assault on Venezuela to force the ouster of President Nicholas Madura, who is holding on to power despite losing the last election.)

–He has reinforced his demand that member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) spend 5% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, an increase from what the target had been before: 2%, and more recently 3.5%. Trump has accused other countries in NATO of freeloading off the United States. (It should be noted that the other countries in NATO did contribute troops in the US War on Terror, the only time that the provision of “an attack on one is an attack on all” has ever been invoked.)

–He claims that European countries are suffering “civilizational erasure” due to declining birth rates combined with overly loose immigration policies–which appears to mean that they’re declining due to a lower percentage of the population being white. A similar interpretation can be put on this sentence: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”

–Unlike Biden, Trump does not view Russia as an existential threat to international peace and stability. His main point regarding Russia, and Russia’s war in Ukraine, is that the Ukraine war has strained relations between Russia and most other European countries.

–Trump soft-pedals the tensions with China but speaks of the importance of the US maintaining a strong position in the world economy.

Leaders in the European Union (EU) find some of the remarks in the NSS alarming, especially where he downplays the Russia threat and where he shows his support for far-Right (“patriotic”) parties.

Article in Politico, December 5, 2025

Article in TheHill.com, December 5, 2025

Expert interview on NPR. December 8, 2025

NPR report on European Union reactions to the NSS, December 8, 2025

In recent days, Trump has been deploying federal troops and the National Guard on the streets of Washington, DC, and has announced a federal takeover of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department.  He has two stated objectives: clearing homeless people off the streets and getting tough on crime.  While some DC residents undoubtedly think he’s making them safer, many others don’t (NPR report August 16, 2025), and the lawfulness of this move is being questioned (NPR report August 12, 2025).

It needs to be remembered that the District of Columbia is the only part of the United States proper (not counting external territories) that is not part of a state.  It would be much harder for Trump to demand control of a police department in any other city–New York, for instance.  And up through 1973, the federal government directly controlled DC’s institutions of governance.  That changed in 1973 with the Home Rule Act, in which Congress relinquished most means of control and made the city self-governing.  (Here is the full text of that act.)

According to that act, the president can, in the event of an emergency, solicit the services of the city’s police department.  But that’s many steps away from assuming control over it.  Moreover, as has been seen in other contexts, Trump has a way of getting creative with the definition of the word “emergency.”  (Here is his executive order, issued Monday, August 11, 2025.)  The city had a high crime rate a few years ago; it’s down to a thirty-year low now.  That doesn’t mean that crime isn’t a problem in DC, but is it such a problem that the a federal takeover of the police force is needed?

Put in a larger context, what’s going on now reflects the fact that for years Republicans have been accusing the Democrats of being “soft on crime.”  Consistent with that, Trump is playing to a base that sees crime purely in terms of the difference between being tough and being soft.  In this mindset, there’s no room for supporting programs aimed at helping youth in vulnerable population groups get ahead educationally so they won’t be so likely to turn to crime.  It’s just all about being tough.  It’s in that spirit that Trump, in one of his announcements, said that DC police would now be allowed to do “whatever the hell they want to.”

This saga is in the early stages now, so where it’s heading is anybody’s guess.  But given that the city has a nonwhite majority in its resident population, it won’t be surprising if there are some racial incidents, and if nonwhites perceive themselves as being targeted as potential criminals in the interests of keeping whites safe from crime.

Two basic points that need to be understood are:  (1) Each major party wants to have a majority in both the House and Senate after next year’s midterm congressional elections; and (2) the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections.  Because the Republican Party has a narrow majority in the House, the Democrats appear well positioned to take a majority in 2026.  (It’s going to be harder for the Democrats in the Senate.)  With that in mind, obviously, both parties are going great guns with campaigning for their candidates in the states, with the Republicans hoping to keep their majority and the Democrats trying to flip it.

But there’s another way that the Republicans hope to keep their majority in the House:  gerrymandering.  As Texas Governor Greg Abbott was calling the Texas legislature into special session to vote up relief for victims of the early-July flooding disaster, President Trump asked the Texas Republicans to do something else in that special session:  redraw the maps for congressional districts, to give the Republican Party five more seats.

Gerrymandering has been going on for decades, and both parties have played that game.  Even so, the brazenness of this move–doing it in the middle of a decade rather than right after a new census (when some redrawing of maps has to happen anyway) comes close to being unprecedented.

The Supreme Court has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is perfectly all right, at least in the eyes of the federal courts.  (To be specific, the ruling in the 2019 case of Rucho v. Common Cause was that the federal courts cannot interfere with partisan gerrymandering; partisan gerrymandering is not judiciable in the federal courts.  This does not stop state courts and state legislatures from stopping it, but that’s not going to happen in Texas.)  The federal courts can still halt racial gerrymandering, the drawing of district lines to limit the strength of racial groups, but the Supreme Court has been reluctant in a number of cases to see racial gerrymandering.  In the South, racial and partisan gerrymandering come close to being the same thing, as the party line largely coincides with the color line.  It should also be noted that, as a result of rulings in the early 1960s, congressional districts in a state have to be around the same size as each other.

As the Texas Republican legislators got ready to do their redistricting, Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state in order to deny the Republicans a quorum and thus prevent the legislature from doing any business at all.  After some threats, the Democrats are getting ready to return, for this reason:  They’ve learned that California Governor Gavin Newsom is calling upon California’s legislature to do some gerrymandering of its own, to redraw the lines of California’s congressional districts to create some more seats for Democrats.

This comes at a time when political divisions in this country are at their sharpest, when feelings about the Trump presidency are causing a lot of tension in family relationships and friendships, and when each party regards the other as sinister and conspiratorial and regards itself as the nation’s only hope.  And it makes the political system more about naked struggles for power rather than about representativeness and good-faith governance.  There’s some element of this when things are normal, but obviously things are not normal at all now.

Article in Politico, August 4, 2025

(Note: The title of this post is a parody of “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” the title of an 1896 newspaper editorial by William Allen White in the Populist era, and of a 2004 book by Thomas Frank.)

On Friday, February 28, 2025, the White House hosted Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  Trump, Zelenskyy, and Vice President J. D. Vance met for 50 minutes in the Oval Office in the presence of reporters and TV cameras.

For the first 40 minutes, Trump and Zelenskyy were very polite to each other.  Even then, however, it was clear that they had two different narratives in mind.  From Zelenskyy’s point of view, it was all about the need for Russia, which invaded Ukraine three years ago, to withdraw, and for the United States and other countries to provide guaranteed security to Ukraine for the future.  Zelenskyy showed pictures of the brutality and stated that 20,000 children had been kidnapped and were being re-educated in Russia.  Trump, on the other hand, saw it as being about making a deal–he used the word “deal” over and over again.  And while Zelenskyy spoke of Russian president Vladimir Putin as a monster and the sole aggressor in the war, Trump spoke of the war as a conflict between two mutually hostile powers and spoke of Putin as someone who could be counted on for a fair deal.  Trump repeatedly called President Biden stupid and blamed Biden for prolonging the war while Trump, had he been president, would have prevented it by working out a deal from the very start.  Trump wrote (or rather had Tony Schwartz ghostwrite for him) a book titled The Art of the Deal some years ago, and he seemed to regard the answer to this mess being a deal.  The only provision of the “deal” that Trump even got specific about was US access to Ukrainian minerals.

Trump was resoundingly noncommittal about future security guarantees.  He mentioned that European countries had pledged to help with that effort, and he suggested that the presence of US workers mining those minerals would in itself constitute a sort of security assurance for Ukraine, since Russia wouldn’t be likely to attack a country that had US workers in it.  “I’m not worried about security,” he said.  “I’m worried about getting the deal done.  Security is the easy part.”  And later, “I don’t think you’re going to need much security.  I think once this deal gets done, it’s over.  Russia’s not going to want to go back, and nobody’s going to want to go back.”    Conspicuously absent from Trump’s words were any assurances to Ukraine of protection from Russia, any suggestion that Russia was the aggressor and Ukraine the victim, or any agreement on the need for Russia to withdraw or, for that matter, concede much of anything.  Implicitly, he seemed to trust Putin to make a fair deal and then honor it.  He also implied that even if Putin broke agreements when other presidents of the United States were in power, Putin would never break an agreement on Trump’s watch.  Repeatedly, Trump referred to “the deal” and “the agreement” as being protection enough.  Zelenskyy pointed out that Putin was raining bombs down on Ukraine that day, while knowing this meeting was taking place, not much of a sign of Putin’s good faith in the peacemaking effort.

As part of calling Biden incompetent and blaming Biden for the war, Trump boasted that he had stopped a lot of wars–prevented wars that nobody ever even knew were going to happen.  “I could give you a lot of nations that would tell you right now they were probably going to war. Right now there is a nation thinking about going to war on something nobody in this room has ever heard about. Two smaller nations but still big.  I think I stopped it.”  He offered no details; you can decide whether you believe him on this.  Zelenskyy looked a little bit amused.

It was around the 40-minute mark that the meeting got contentious and heated.  It started when Vice President Vance reaffirmed the administration’s criticism of Biden’s handling of the war, referring to Biden’s approach as “chest thumping.”  Vance then said, “What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy.  That is what President Trump is doing.”  Zelenskyy responded by reviewing Putin’s past aggressions and failing to honor agreements, including the 2014 occupation of Crimea.  Now, Vance got angry, told Zelenskyy that it was disrespectful of him to “come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this before the American media….  You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”  This set off a direct quarrel between Trump and Zelenskyy, with Zelenskyy repeating his position, and Trump admonishing him that he doesn’t “have the cards” and should appreciate Trump for making a deal to end the war.

Rather than narrative beyond that point, I’ll just invite you to watch the video.  Again, the quarreling starts at the 40-minute mark.  There’s more to the earlier parts as well, so the whole thing is worth watching.

Here’s the full video of the meeting on C-SPAN.

Discussion of the meeting on NPR.

When Congress authorizes the spending of money by the executive branch, it is not the prerogative of the president to put a stop on that spending.  The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 affirms that principle.  Therefore, from reading the Constitution and from contemplating the notion of “checks and balances,” one would think that when the president does attempt to block spending that has been approved by Congress, Congress would be up in arms about it.  However, there’s a factor that the framers did not take into account when they designed the structure of government:  political parties.  The spending in question was authorized by past Congresses, either with bipartisan or all-Democratic support.  The current Congress has a Republican majority, and nearly all of the Republicans in Congress seem unconditionally loyal to Trump, no matter what he does.

Trump did rescind one of his orders, freezing the payments of most domestic grants, but some other freezes are still in effect.  What’s getting the greatest amount of attention is the cutting off of funds for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  Trump has claimed, without evidence, that there’s massive fraud in the spending, and he has also made a big deal out of reports that US money is being used to encourage transgender proclivities in overseas youth.  He’s in the process, as we speak, of putting most of the staff of USAID on furlough (article in Politico), and the funds for a lot of programs have been cut off.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is now running USAID, says exceptions will be made for live-saving programs, but it’s not clear how much of that will be a reality.  Some, including Republicans, are pointing out that USAID is one of the ways that the US competes with China for global influence (article in TheHill).

He’s also cut off money that was authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by Biden in 2022, to be dispensed through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  At the moment, according to this article in Politico, he’s doing so even in defiance of a federal court order to release the funds.

Trump’s support base things the EPA is superfluous, thinks climate change is a hoax, and thinks the United States is too generous to the rest of the world, so these actions aren’t likely to bother them much.  But Trump is acting like an autocrat, and it is going to be very significant to see what limits on his power he actually faces.

In a number of issue areas–climate change, DEI, foreign aid–newly elected president Donald Trump has been proceeding differently from most presidents.  Instead of trying to get a wide range of expert opinions to consider before making decisions, Trump is starting by making decisions and doing his utmost to purge the government of all persons whose opinions aren’t in line with his own, including civil service workers who are supposed to have job protection,  Already, a large number of government employees have been placed on leave, and many are being offered buyouts, incentives to resign.   (If everybody who got that offer accepted it, there would be real chaos in the government.)

One of the areas where Trump is setting up his own opinions as being definitive is that of transgender youth.  It’s a small minority of youth who experience gender dysphoria, and an even smaller number of them who are receiving medical treatment for it.  Thus, we’re not talking about a population group that, by itself, has a great deal of political leverage.  But it’s also true that gender dysphoria, especially when combined with lack of access to medical treatment to facilitate a sex transition, has led to suicide in a number of cases.  Sadly, I predict that Trump’s new executive order is going to cause a fresh new spate of teenage suicides.

One of Trump’s first executive orders upon taking office was a declaration that the federal government only recognizes two sexes, male and female, and only recognizes the sex shown on a person’s birth certificate as being that person’s sex.  He also, early on, announced that he was again going to kick transgender persons out of the military, on the premise that not knowing one’s own sex is a sign of weakness.  Then, on January 28, 2025, the president signed a more sweeping executive order.  It essentially does the following:

–defines minors as all persons under 19;

–defines “chemical and surgical mutilation” as including every kind of gender-affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy;

–calls the positions of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “junk science” and directs all federal agencies to reject WPATH positions and draw up new policies of “best practices”; implicitly, it can be assumed that those “best practices” will be in line with Trump’s own position;

–directs all federal agencies to deny funding to agencies that are researching gender-affirming care for minors; and

–calls for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to use leverage, including Medicare and Medicaid funding conditions, to stop health care facilities from providing gender-affirming care (or, as he calls it, “chemical and surgical mutilation”) to minors.

Anyone reading that executive order would get the impression that Trump is trying to protect minors.  However, he is disregarding the suicide factor, and he is also failing to consider that the medical profession most likely already has safeguards in place–perhaps needing some tweaking–to ensure that minors don’t make the decision to alter their gender lightly.  He clearly holds the position that persons who feel themselves to be in the wrong body–minors and adults alike–need to be counseled to accept the sex they were born with and move on.  That may sound good in theory, but in a lot of cases it doesn’t work in practice.

I don’t think this is even the end.  This executive order involves minors, but he has also said that he plans to stop government-subsidized insurance from paying for transgender care for adults.

This is an important issue to be watching.

Full text of the executive order (please click and read)

UPDATE:  A group of families and advocacy groups is suing in federal district court to stop this executive order from taking effect.  Article in TheHill, February 4, 2025.