The Week Ahead

January 19, 2025

Tomorrow, Monday, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It is also, of course, the day the peaceful transfer of power between two American presidents will take place. Unlike this day four years ago, when the transfer from Trump to Biden was marred and almost upset by Trump’s criminal attempt to hold onto power after losing the election, Joe Biden will hand over the reins of power graciously.

I have no plans to celebrate the inauguration of the incoming president. That’s my right as an American, to stand in protest, honoring the Constitution, our system of laws, and the presidency, but not the man who will occupy that office for the next four years. Instead, I will spend Monday summoning the courage to continue to speak truth to power in the face of what lies ahead.

Already, we see signs that Trump, who tried to walk away from Project 2025 during the campaign, is taking steps to implement it. Despite the campaign's claim that people who worked on Project 2025 would be banned from the new administration, Trump has brought them on in droves. That includes Russell Vought for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought, who authored the chapter on the “Executive Office of the President” was, “also deeply involved in drafting Project 2025's playbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.”

“Properly understood, [OMB] is a President’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course,” Vought wrote in Project 2025. There is no reason to doubt we are headed into full-on implementation.

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, is also[p listed as a contributor to Project 2025. And so on.

“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” Trump's incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “All of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.” But Leavitt herself appeared in training videos for Project 2025.

The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is a “first 180 days” strategy. The authors wrote, “The time is short, and conservatives need a plan. The project will create a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.” And right on target, Trump has promised a barrage of executive orders on day one of his new administration. Some of the items he has mentioned include mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, blocking rights and care for transgender people, pardoning January 6 defendants, imposing his tariffs which would function in reality as a tax on American consumers, canceling the current mandate to move to electric vehicles, and open up preserved lands to drilling.

Politico Pro is reporting that the executive orders will include orders “summarizing immigration, energy, and government reform,” and also “the process for removing insubordinate employees” and the legal and constitutional guardrails that may prevent Trump from firing employees who don’t follow orders. They also spoke about Trump planning actions to reverse President Joe Biden’s diversity, equity, and inclusion orders across the federal government.

It’s increasingly clear that the executive orders will be a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s first day in office. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins is reporting that Trump will sign some of them on Capitol Hill after he is sworn in and others at the Capitol One Arena, the venue for his supporters during the indoor inaugural.

Congress and the courts will have the ability to block some of these actions when they exceed the president’s authority. If the courage is there, the moment is coming when we learn what Trump will do the first time an issue filters up to the Supreme Court and that Court tells Trump he can’t do what he wants to. Trump likes the Court when it’s on his side. What he will do if it tells him he has exceeded his authority on a key issue may be an entirely different matter. Of course, he can spin those decisions to claim he would have had great success if only he hadn’t been prevented by a [pick your adjectives] out of control political entity that was devoted to preventing him from making America great again. But we may well face a moment where the president contemplates ignoring a lawful court order.

Trump’s inaugural speech will set the tone. Although Trump has said his theme is unity, that’s more worthy of Saturday Night Live than serious consideration. It’s not as though Trump has ever lied to the American people. [See, Project 2025, above]. He also claimed, just ahead of the 2016 election, that he would be a great unifier.

Trump’s first inauguration was overshadowed by his manufactured controversy about crowd size and KellyAnne Conway’s introduction of the whole “alternative facts” thing, which pretty much foretold Trump’s entire first administration. So, there is some point to paying attention. And I will listen to, or at least read, Trump’s inaugural address so we can discuss it. You’ll recall that the first time, he talked about “American carnage,” a theme from which he has never fully backed off.

Other presidents have taken a different approach.

George W. Bush started by telling the audience, “I have just repeated word for word the oath taken by George Washington 200 years ago, and the Bible on which I placed my hand is the Bible on which he placed his. It is right that the memory of Washington be with us today, not only because this is our Bicentennial Inauguration, but because Washington remains the Father of our Country. And he would, I think, be gladdened by this day; for today is the concrete expression of a stunning fact: our continuity these 200 years since our government began.”

Donald Trump could not say those words because they would expose him to ridicule for who he is and what he has done. While I don’t agree with President Bush about much when it comes to policy, these words resonate across the years, “No President, no government, can teach us to remember what is best in what we are. But if the man you have chosen to lead this government can help make a difference; if he can celebrate the quieter, deeper successes that are made not of gold and silk, but of better hearts and finer souls; if he can do these things, then he must.”

Barack Obama opened his inaugural address with these words, “Each time we gather to inaugurate a President we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

“History tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing,” Obama cautioned, “that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”

Joe Biden, speaking just weeks after a mob of Trump’s followers swarmed the Capitol, said, “Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The will of the people has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded. We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”

Biden expressly invoked January 6 when he said, “And here we stand, just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, and to drive us from this sacred ground. That did not happen. It will never happen.”

If Donald Trump addresses January 6 at all, it may well be to praise the mob as patriots and announce pardons for some or all of them.

Eight years ago, Donald Trump told the [smallish] crowd at his inauguration: “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” This was a promise he never delivered on. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” said the man who sat back and watched television as the Capitol was overrun by his supporters.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who earlier in the day was seen saluting protestors, was later captured fleeing the Capito as it was overrun.

Trump said, “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”

None of it was true.

I’ve referred before to the final speech delivered in Birmingham by President Obama’s second attorney general, Loretta Lynch, before she left office. It happened the weekend before Trump became president. In that speech Lynch echoed Obama as she discussed the coming Trump presidency: “We have work to do.” Those words were my mantra during Trump’s first administration.

For all of us, we have work to do.

We’re in this together,

Joyce