Trump & Vance Watch
Watching what they do and pondering what we should do
Here is the Trump & Vance Watch bibliography. It is only up to date from before the dated updates as I have taken to only having Zotero on my primary computer, not on the laptop. FLASH: On April 1, Trump’s press secretary Caroline Leavitt accounced that going forward, Trump’s pronouns would be me, my, mine. Back to the present, Michelle Goldberg reported something I’ve often suspected: Wall Streeters get fired for being bears not never for beint errant bulls; thus, none of them predicted WOKE would be replaced by CHAOS.
First, check this out from NYTimes which compared the official inauguration photo provided by Trump and his mugshot from Georgia. Subbing to Heather Cox Richardson is valuable thing; she updates daily. The latest is from Quasim Rashid, Project 2025 is here. Plus one substacker endeavored to write about every Trump executive order and TNP did a valiant job covering week one. Yours truly has started an essay called Are We a Free Country or Not?
Other than my existing “beats” on Transrights, Middle East Peace with Justice and Immigrant and Refugee Rights, I kinda sorta need a way to track and comment on what Trump and Vance are up to. As usual, I think that if only I can rely on my bibliographical database skill—I’m a 2010, 2016 and soon 2025 author or co-author within Oxford Bibliographies Online—and if I can only write a few perfect sentences, hopefully shorter than this one—I can magically change the word or at least increase the odds I’ll help win at least one victory for humanity before times up.
Here is where I will do it.For instance, take his executive order on birthright citizenship. Let’s start with the ever-valuable TNP (The National Prospect) to which I subscribe. There, Harold Myerson gives rundown on the executive orders. And here is a special TNP rundown from the whole staff. There is one substack that focuses on watching what Trump does and I’ll link to it here, and have done a paid sub to it. I may need a tip jar of my own to keep doing that! As always, my updates to existing Posts on my Beats section do n-o-t send you an email! Only new posts and my occasional “notes”. In the future I’m going to try to avoid clicking “notes” when I re-stack something, to reduce the number of emails to subscribers.
6/29/25: Bloomberg reports surging unemployment among black women, including a third of laid off federal workers being black women.
6/29/25: Heather Cox Richardson on the BBB.
6/12/25 Trump’s speech at the now re-named Fort Bragg.
6/10/25: New essay requirements for G-5 and above civil service jobs.
6/5/25: DOGE is building a massive database per WIRED.
5/20/25: Snyder on Trump and Martin.
5/9/25: Apparently, Trump lays out his personal philosophy here in his Alabama commencement address. The Free Press covered it but it is behind a firewall. Newsweek has a transcript.
5/4/25: Tim Snyder warns about Trump’s use of terror.
5/2/25: New York Times editorial board speaks about Trump’s danger to democracy.
4/24/25: You can only take so much. Here is what Trump actually said in his meeting with the NATO leader.
4/7/25: Marc Cooper asks if we have turned the corner on the movement to stop Trump from doing some at least of his damage. Yes and no, he said. In my Trump/Vance Watch beat on my substack, I commented:
Marc concluded: “This was mainstream America coming into the streets and that has a truly revolutionary aspect to it.” He suggested: See my friend Micah Sifry’s NYTimes gift op-ed on this crucial topic of movement leadership. It’s right on the money.” He outed those on what I like to call the far and loony left who are condemning Corey Booker for not talking about Gaza, which is still under attack. Booker was perhaps concerned that our very own Rome is burning. True, there are many on the far left who are not loone (see my Taxonomy of Five Versions of Conservative, Moderate/Liberal, Progressive and Left Ideology: Utopianism, Libertarianism, Pragmatism, Authoritarianism and Patrimonialism).
From what I can see most are well-behaved in these protests. As Marc put it: “As a 60 year veteran of these sort of demos and protests what a relief it is to finally see some not led by these “leftists” trapped forever in a 1968 mindset. On this topic I refer you to Max Sawicky, a veteran boomer leftist economist who sternly warns those expecting a sudden magical burst of socialism to be wasting their time. As he did and so did I for too many years. It is NOT inevitable.” I also liked Max’s piece.
We have a lot of thinking and rethinking to do. But let’s remember that our resistance to Reagan did succeed in preventing most of his damage (see Piven and Cloward’s New Class War). We may be able to do it again. Alas, Trump may have factored opposition in and he may care most about the most racist things he is trying to do, mainly attacks on immigrants and repression of dissenter, so we may need to focus more squarely on those items.
3/28/25: NYTimes on how DOGE is doing its dirty work.
3/21/25: Oh my, the WSU reports Musk was to receive a briefing on top secret plans for how the US would respond in a war scenario with China. The WSJ had two sources. The NYT reported on it as well. They likely just slipped him a thumb drive instead. Likely at least one Pentagon official with close ties to competing defense contractor leaked the info (Space X competes with Lockheed.)
3/16/2025: From Time, the list of the Dems who voted for the Republican funding resolution. Here is Bernie on the matter.
3/15/25: Three pieces of must reading on Trump. The piece by Jonathan Chait, titled The Fear Economy in print and online (gift copy) The Real Goal of the Trump Economy: The president isn’t trying to engineer prosperity for Americans. He’s seeking power for himself. It documents how Trump operated as 45 and will likely operate as 47, and says: “The nature of Trump’s economic vision—populist? nationalist? traditional conservative?—has been the subject of endless debate. The reality is that he brings together the least attractive elements of capitalism and socialism, fusing heavy-handed state control with high inequality, and entrenching a set of oligarchs who serve simultaneously as the ruling party’s victims and co-conspirators. The more that political favor displaces market competition as the basis of corporate success, the worse things will get.”
My reaction is not to define the nature of his economic vision but to typologize the nature of his political perspective. This article is chapter and verse evidence that Trump fits in none of the conservative examples of the first four rows of my 25-type taxonomy, namely utopian (social conservative), libertarian (classical liberal), pragmatic (neoliberal), or authoritarian (fascist) but rather in row five in box 17 (monarchism and contemporary patrimonialism).
It is true that much of the base of his support is well described in another recent Atlantic article, Stephanie McCrummen’s Army of God: Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state. That “box” is box one of my taxonomy: where the fundamental Value System it utopian in nature, and where social power is exercised in the service of an ideal. For social conservatives, the utopian ideal is ‘traditional’ patriarchal family and religious values, which are often (not always) distorted in ways one can hardly recognize them, such as the transformation of the evangelical Pentecostalism of my grandmother into the warped love-the-sinner naming of Trump as prophet by the offshoots of what McCrummen discussed as the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, which seeks to destroy secular government and place Christians on the top of the seven mountains (media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment and to crush the—Unhumans—the actual title of a book! But Trump is clearly no prophet. He is not a social conservative just a recipient of their support. The way he rolls is Patrimonial, but he is ready to ally with social conservatives, right-wing libertarians like Thiel and the people in the Trump administration who appear to be authoritarians and fascists, such as Vance—he of “extra-constitutional means”— although also willing to endorse NAR—and Miller, whose expressed views are racist and increasingly fascist in nature, not “just” xenophobic. The Defense Secretary is apparently a follower of NAR. This is an important article to read. It seems to me that my taxonomy is showing its value in actually understanding the nature of the various trends in what Nicos Poulantzas called a regional theory of the state. But take this next piece into account.
A third piece is this from Dissent: Fissures in Trumpworld? There will surely be turf wars and palace intrigue within the administration, but there is little reason to think that its core figures will fracture in the pursuit of their basic goal: to break the twentieth-century state. It states: “But an exclusive focus on fissures can cause us to lose sight of what binds the administration together. For most of the key figures slotted into one or the other camp share a deep set of personal connections and ideological commonalities. And the notion that Musk and the tech right represents a sharp break from true MAGA populism rests on a misunderstanding about what MAGA has been from the beginning.”
First, I’ve never seen MAGA populism as a very explanatory phrase. The author, Daniel Luban, correctly zeros in on actual individuals, and also critiques the weakness of MAGA Populism. He says somethings that seems to support my notion of patrimonialism (“But what stands out about the group just surveyed is its cohesion. These figures have a rich history of personal connection and professional collaboration,” But he also cites literature about The Long New Right and the article is full of material I need to use in my Election Analysis database as well.
3/11/25: Mitch Daniels pushes back on the question of impoundment.
3/7/25: Non-compliance begins within the Trump cabinet!
3/2/2025 Mass non-compliance begins, see here.
2/20/25: Real power is fear. I am just parking this year. There is fear in our culture as Bertha Reynolds said in Cleveland in 1953.
2/18/25: Is Musk really coming after Social Security? That radical rag, The Hill, thinks so. I forget who owns The Hill, but they ain’t radical!
2/17/25: Cuts to Medicaid and Food Stamps on the way.
2/8/25: WAPO reports Musk’s goal is to automate the federal government. My deep state source tells me that if they are going to do this, they are going to have to go to a guaranteed annual income, because without jobs, people will not be able to survive, and they will also have to provide universal health care. Meanwhile, one federal judge after another is excoriating Trump in no uncertain terms.
2/6/25: I must admit, I haven’t been focused on this generally, as opposed to Trump’s immigration policy, anti-trans policy, and other Beats. But this piece in the Times was interesting, about Duffy’s transportation policy being allegedly pro-natalist. I read the actual memo. My reaction is that it seems less pro-natalist than anti-senior citizen community in nature. Ironically, since there are high marriage and birth rates among immigrants, it may actually help states which have high immigration rates or high levels of farmworkers; I’m not sure. Interesting, it wasn’t anti public transportation!
2/6/25 Flash! Direct from my in-house MSNBC Mom! It turns out Trump will be entering the financial services interest. Enough of those funds where you can invest in environomentally correct funds! Where the firms do good things! Now Trump will let you invest in firms that do bad things! I’m just kidding, since when is a fund that invests in bitcoin ventures bad!