ChrisWeigant.com

Trump's War On Medical Science

[ Posted Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 – 16:07 UTC ]

The last time he was president, Donald Trump faced a big crisis. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic was erratic at best (and even that's being charitable). Later, he and his followers demonized the doctors and medical experts who were desperately trying to save lives with their advice and recommendations -- so threateningly that President Joe Biden felt the need to pre-emptively pardon Dr. Anthony Fauci right before he left office. Biden feared that Trump would harass Fauci via the Justice Department, so he precluded it from happening.

This time around, President Trump is pre-emptively taking a wrecking ball to the federal government's medical establishment, in what can only be called a war on medical science. It was telling, during the early months of the COVID crisis, that Trump kept complaining that we were doing "too much testing." The numbers of people infected and hospitalized and dying were shooting up dramatically, after Trump had promised the country that they wouldn't. The solution, as far as Trump was concerned, was to just stop testing everyone. That way, there wouldn't be any big numbers to alarm everyone. Hey presto! Problem solved!

This is a rather juvenile approach to a problem, obviously. It is the equivalent of hiding your head in the sand, or sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming: "LA LA LA LA... I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" But Trump saw no problem with this approach.

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A Lawless Presidency

[ Posted Tuesday, January 28th, 2025 – 17:18 UTC ]

President Donald Trump is fast making a warning many Democrats made before his election come true: that he would prove to be an utterly lawless president. Trump's disdain for not only federal law but the entire federal judiciary is becoming more and more apparent, and he's barely begun his second week back in office. He hasn't taken the final step in creating a completely unfettered and lawless executive branch, but at this point it seems only a matter of time before he does so.

Trump began his presidency celebrating lawlessness. He released dangerously violent criminals into the populace, and it's only a matter of time before one of the January 6th insurrectionists commits another shocking and violent crime. One was just killed by police after resisting arrest, in fact, less than a week after being pardoned. Trump celebrates political violence and lawlessness -- as long as it is in support of him, of course.

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Cracks In Republican Unity

[ Posted Monday, January 27th, 2025 – 17:05 UTC ]

If President Donald Trump's agenda gets stalled in any way, it's going to happen because of dissent within his own Republican ranks. And one week in to Trump's second term, cracks are already appearing in the MAGA facade. How deep or wide those cracks may become is still an open question, but it certainly is interesting to see them appear so quickly.

The Republican Party has an incredibly thin majority in both houses of Congress. They can only afford to lose three Senate votes on any party-line issue, and their margin is even slimmer over in the House. This gives incredible power to recalcitrant GOP members, some of whom are impervious to Trump's threats of in-party retribution. This coming week will be an interesting one, because we may just see those cracks widen even further.

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Friday Talking Points -- Out-Of-Control Eggflation!

[ Posted Friday, January 24th, 2025 – 18:45 UTC ]

In just about every presidential election, the political punditry tries to frame what happened in it in the easiest possible way, sometimes pinning a win or loss on a certain demographic slice of the electorate (remember "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads"?) and sometimes putting the focus on a single oversimplified issue. One of the big themes in this regard for the last election was the price of eggs. True to form, they even slapped a cutesy label on it: voters were angry about "eggflation."

Which is why we sincerely hope that Donald Trump is asked about it as often as possible -- say, once a week, at a minimum -- now that he is president again. Because for all his promises, eggflation is going to be a very tough problem for him to solve.

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The Amorality Of The Republican Party

[ Posted Thursday, January 23rd, 2025 – 16:54 UTC ]

It's been clear for a while that the Republican Party has become completely amoral. Their partisanship has become more important to them than any quaint notions of right or wrong. To them, right versus left is all that matters.

Republicans now refuse to condemn pretty much anything that any other Republican does -- no matter how amoral -- starting at the top with President Donald Trump. The GOP has claimed for decades that they are the "law and order" party, but that all goes out the window when Trump pardons hundreds of people who assaulted police officers. Supporting cops is less important than supporting a fellow Republican. Morals are conveniently set aside whenever necessary.

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Pardon Me?

[ Posted Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025 – 17:15 UTC ]

I mean that title facetiously, of course, since I have not recently committed any crimes for which I would need any sort of official pardon. But then, neither did Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But before I get to addressing the flurry of pardons issued this week by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I would like to dismiss one issue that has been raised in the midst of it all (indeed, because it is so easy to dismiss). Some have decided that "pardon reform" is now necessary, to rein in what is essentially an unchecked power of U.S. presidents.

It sounds nice, on the face of it. Put some legal guardrails around the ability of a president to erase any and all federal crimes, prosecuted or not. What guardrails would be necessary or beneficial is an open question, but to me it's not even worth debating. I say this not in defense of any of the pardons issued this week, but because the process to change this so is so hard that actually reforming the presidential ability to pardon would be a near-impossibility.

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Trump Attempts To Rewrite Fourteenth Amendment

[ Posted Tuesday, January 21st, 2025 – 16:54 UTC ]

Well, that didn't take long. Hours after swearing an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, President Donald Trump issued an executive order which attempted to rewrite one part of that same Constitution. He did so unilaterally, without any action by Congress. Of course, neither Congress nor a U.S. president is actually capable of changing the Constitution's text on their own -- that would require a constitutional amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states' legislatures. But that pesky detail didn't stop Trump from trying.

Trump's order would (if upheld by the courts, which is highly doubtful) end "birthright citizenship" by putting new restrictions on who would be considered an American citizen at birth. This would essentially ignore (or radically change the meaning of, at the very least) part of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here is the text of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, in full:

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Happy Martin Luther King Junior Day

[ Posted Monday, January 20th, 2025 – 16:21 UTC ]

Today is a federal holiday to honor the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. As I sometimes do, I thought today would be a good day to both reflect on King's life and what he stood for, while reading some of his own words.

King did much more than give one memorable "I Have A Dream" speech, but sadly that's what he has been distilled down to in our national collective consciousness. King fought valiantly for what he believed, always using the tool of non-violence to convince others of the rightness of his cause.

Because of his exemplary work, in 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This enraged some in America (J. Edgar Hoover among them), but to King he felt the honor was somewhat undeserved. At the time, he was the youngest recipient of the award ever (he was only 35 years old). In the speech he gave in Oslo accepting the award, he was almost apologetic: "Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize." Because King knew there was a lot more for him to achieve, he felt the award was somewhat premature, at best.

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Friday Talking Points -- Farewell, President Biden

[ Posted Friday, January 17th, 2025 – 18:59 UTC ]

And so we come to the final Friday Talking Points of President Joe Biden's term in office.

It is perhaps appropriate that the funeral of Jimmy Carter happened in the midst of Biden winding down his final weeks. Because Joe Biden -- another one-term Democratic president like Jimmy -- will likely become more appreciated as time goes by, just as Carter was.

Joe Biden had a pretty spectacular first two years in office, in terms of getting legislation passed. Granted, he had a Democratic Congress to work with and the continuing crisis of a pandemic to spur the politicians to actually act. He used both to get a sweeping agenda passed which will have an impact for years to come. But he had to grapple with two corporate-friendly Democrats in the Senate who held him back from achieving an even-more-historic agenda. If the full "Build Back Better" plan had made it past Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, then Americans would doubtlessly feel a lot differently (and better) about government's role in their economic lives.

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Biden's Bridge To Nowhere

[ Posted Thursday, January 16th, 2025 – 17:40 UTC ]

Watching President Joe Biden's farewell address from the Oval Office last night was rather bittersweet. For me at least, it all had a flavor of "what might have been." But in the end, Biden's promised bridge to a new generation of leadership really led nowhere.

While campaigning early in 2020, Biden appeared on a stage with three other prominent Democrats, who were at the time "expected to be considered for the vice presidential nomination" -- Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. Biden said during this campaign event: "Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country." While Biden never actually did explicitly promise to serve only a single term as president, many read his comments to mean exactly that -- Biden would defeat Donald Trump, run a bridging presidency, and then step aside and make way for a younger generation of Democrats to carry the torch forward.

This didn't exactly work out as planned, obviously. As Biden leaves office, the Democratic Party is at this moment almost completely leaderless. There is no one individual the party looks towards as its future. The 2028 presidential primary season is going to be brutal on the Democratic side, as a whole bunch of candidates will vie for the mantle of the party's leadership. Until then, we've got Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both now only minority leaders in their respective chambers of Congress. Neither one is all that well-known to the public at large, and neither one truly speaks for his whole party. There are a number of state governors who long to be seen as the party's true leader, but none of them has really achieved that status at this point.

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