Day One of the Next Administration.

The November election won't stop Trump from issuing dictatorial executive orders, and he's not going to sign any bills the upcoming Democratic House and Senate pass, no matter what they are, so we're going to have to put up with an increasingly erratic and weird Executive Branch over the next two years.

It may, frankly, get much, much more worse.  There's literally nothing I'd put past Trump whatsoever.

Assuming we all make it to January 20, 2029, it's going to be a priority for the incoming administration to act quickly.  Republicans, having taken a drubbing in 2026 and 2028, will be back on the conservative bandwagon and howling about anything a Democratic administration does.

So, looking forward, what should it do on day 1?

The very first thing it should do is an omnibus executive order wiping out every standing executive order and declaring any issued by Trump a nullity. This should be done partially on the legal premise that Trump was not a legitimate President and all actions he took, including executive actions and appointments to Federal office are null, void, and of no effect.

Any executive orders that were worth doing can be preserved in a following order, or the same order.

Yes this means that over 5,000 Federal employees that were Trump appointees would lose their offices immediately, including sitting judges.

And it means that every single military officer commissioned during Trump's interregnum would lose their commissions.  They can be recommissioned in a following order, but it would have to be a conditional order so that if they were deemed disloyal or associated with the criminal war in Iran, they would be removed.

On day one, the incoming President should order that any officer complicit in the illegal war against Iran be court-martialed appropriately, including every current member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

All the Joint Chiefs should be removed.  The senior positions should be filled with Reserve and National Guard officers.

Every member of the Space Force should be transferred into the Air Force.  Eliminating the Space Force would take an act of Congress, but that doesn't mean it's absurd presence really has to be tolerated.  Former Space Force personnel would report to their stations with Air Force insignia within six hours of the order, as they otherwise came on duty.

Taking a page out of the conservative agenda (I am conservative), women should be removed from combat MOS's.  Basic training should be strictly segregated by gender.  All Air Force basic training should be transferred to the Army.

On Day 1 Lt. Gen. William H. "Butch" Graham Jr., head of the Army Corps of Engineers, should be summoned to appear as soon as the inauguration is over.  He should be given an order to cause the demolition and removal of the Ball Room with in 24 hours of receiving the order.  The same shall apply to the Triumphal Arch.  Within an additional 48 hours, the subterranean bunker complex shall be filled with cement.

The helipad should be broken up and restored to grass.  A dedicated Marine Corps helicopter and dedicated Air Force aircraft for Presidential use shall be halted and those aircraft, all of them, returned to conventional service use within their respective branches.  Likewise the Rose Garden paver shall be removed.  All the gilded crap shall be tossed out within four hours of the inauguration and the interior of the impacted areas restored within twelve hours.  The gilded equestrian statutes shall have the gold removed within 48 hours.  The rhino lining in the reflecting pool shall be removed with in 48 hours.

All Federal lands subject to mineral exploration including petroleum exploration shall be withdrawn from the same, something well within the President's authority.  Biden's order on electric vehicles shall be restored and expanded.

Federal lands removed from withdrawal by Trump shall immediately restored to their prior status.

Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino should be summoned (the current Postmaster General's appointment is illegitimate) and ordered to restore the 671 sorting machines that were dismantled in the first Trump administration back into service within one week.  If they are not available, and they likely are not, he will be ordered to cause their replacement within one month.

Federal offices which have been relocated, such as the Interior's, shall be ordered back to their original quarters within one week of the inauguration. As the order to move them was invalid, all costs associated with the moves to and from other locations shall be ordered to be recovered by the U.S. Attorney's Civil Division by those causing the moves to occur, including Donald Trump.

All use of government property during the interregnum of an improper and personal nature, such as Trump's use of government aircraft, shall likewise be subject to a suit for recovery.

The complete Epstein files shall be released along with an order that anyone implicated in them shall be sought for prosecution, no matter who it is.

All existing "emergencies" which have been declared in place by prior Presidents shall be declared over and any authority extended under them eliminated.  Any order allowing the imposition of tariffs by the President shall be declared over.

All combat operations in place by the United States anywhere would be ordered over within an hour of the inauguration.  Restoring the status quo ante in the Persian Gulf is now almost impossible, so how to proceed on this would be tricky in the extreme.  The best course may be to immediately ask for an international convention on the topic.

Military aid, and frankly any aid, to Israel would be terminated.  The country has been there since 1947 and can make it on its own.  Israel has a right to exist, but it's situation does not involve a vital interest of the United States.

Likewise, pulling out militarily in the Middle East should be ordered to be commenced.  It would take some time, but it should be done.

All military missions to Venezuela would be withdrawn within twelve hours of the inauguration and the legitimate elected head of state recognized as the proper one.

All extrajudicial killings by the U.S. military in the Pacific and Caribbean would be ordered halted and anyone participating in them, right down to the E1 level, ordered to be prosecuted.

All "pardons" issued by Trump would be declared null, void, and of no effect, with anyone released from jail ordered to be returned. An illegitimate President cannot issue a pardon.

The production of penneys would be ordered resumed.

Currency bearing Donald Trump's signature would be ordered to be recovered through the banking system for destruction.

Trump's name would be stricken from anything it attached to during his "second term".

There's be a lot more to do, but that's what ought to happen on the very first day.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

 

An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat

An open call to Greenlanders

I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.

Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports.  I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule.  There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.  

I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it.  Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.  

Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.  

I've written a lot about how we got here.  The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another.  The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy.  I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.

If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed.  More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism.  Again, France provides the model.  After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party.  The French right died. 

I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way.  Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump.  By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026.  The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.

That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him.  Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump. 

Not all of it will be capable of being repaired.  A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.

But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think.  In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S.  Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans.  The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence.  We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.  

Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.

Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do.  A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration.  The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to.  Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair.  The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.

The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice.  Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.

If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference.  Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial.  The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere.  Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.

In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur.  A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it.  While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.

The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation.  Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place.  We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that.  Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit.  Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor.  Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves.  Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else.  Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end.  Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein.  Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.

Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away.  Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States.  But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.  

Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.

Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there.  The U.S. military won't be there.

2028 Election, Part I. The Preview of Coming Attractions Editions.

December 19, 2025

 And the 2028 Presidential Season has begun.  Erika Kirk of Turning Point USA has endorsed J. D. Vance.

And yes, it's way, way, early.

But perhaps its not surprising.  Trump's mentally departing the stage and chance are good that he'll be out of office in the next few months, Vance is probably looking towards his future right now.  His best chances for that position, of course, would be if Trump is escorted out of the building babbling about being the greatest and sent to a gilded retirement home.

But if that doesn't occur, the knives will be coming out before 2028.  Marco Rubio will not have sat through four years of soul corrupting dementia not to take a run at the White House.  No doubt others are in the wings.

One who may be in the wings, if I'm wrong on his being too demented to carry on in any fashion, is Donald Trump. Everyone keeps noting that he's constitutionally barred but he has no regard for the law in the first place and his threads to run need to be taken seriously.

On Vance, he's a true NatCon, although a recent convert to the philosophy, and his being backed by Turning Point means something, assuming that Turning Point doesn't fly apart or become highly diminished (which I think it will).  It's hard to know exactly what's going on, but it might be suspected that it's probable that Kirk's coming out now has the backing of other significant NatCon figures, who know that they need to put their man in power now (Trump really isn't their man, but their tool).  A figure like Rubio would turn the clock back.

And so the race is on.

December 22, 2025

It wasn't until listening to the weekend shows that I learned that Marco Rubio has endorsed Vance as well.

That's really interesting, and frankly surprising.

Cont:

And now the rumors are circulating, probably correctly, that Ted Cruz will be running.

Moreover. . . .

The NatCon nerve center and author of Project 2025 starts to come unglued as the Trump Administration does:

Top Heritage Officials Flee to Mike Pence’s Nonprofit as Think Tank Fractures

The conservative movement continues to splinter about how to deal with its most controversial voices

I've always thought Roberts' organization would maneuver to put Vance in power in 2026 and shove aside the Pine Tree flag folks, who don't have the intellectual capacity to run a government.  The risk has always been that they'd hold the hand they were dealt too long.

They may have.

And Pence, who didn't look like a good candidate before, is starting to with some folks.

A modest proposal to the 47th (or 48th, if you think Trump is a legitimate President) President of the United States.

Donald J. Trump, vandal, proposes to vandalize the White House by the construction of this gilt monstrosity:

The White House Announces White House Ballroom Construction to Begin

The White House

July 31, 2025

Washington, D.C. — For 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed. President Donald J. Trump has expressed his commitment to solving this problem on behalf of future Administrations and the American people.
 
The White House is one of the most beautiful and historic buildings in the world, yet the White House is currently unable to host major functions honoring world leaders and other countries without having to install a large and unsightly tent approximately 100 yards away from the main building entrance. The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.
 
In recent weeks, President Trump has held several meetings with members of the White House Staff, the National Park Service, the White House Military Office, and the United States Secret Service to discuss design features and planning. 
 
President Trump has chosen McCrery Architects as lead architect, which is well-known for their classical architectural design and based in our nation’s capital. CEO Jim McCrery said: “Presidents in the modern era have faced challenges hosting major events at the White House because it has been untouched since President Harry Truman. I am honored that President Trump has entrusted me to help bring this beautiful and necessary renovation to The People’s House, while preserving the elegance of its classical design and historical importance.”
 
The construction team will be headed by Clark Construction, and the engineering team will be led by AECOM. 
 
The project will begin in September 2025, and it is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term. 
 
President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure. The United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications. 
 
The White House Ballroom will be substantially separated from the main building of the White House, but at the same time, it’s theme and architectural heritage will be almost identical. The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits. The East Wing was constructed in 1902 and has been renovated and changed many times, with a second story added in 1942. 
 
The White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said the following: “President Trump is a builder at heart and has an extraordinary eye for detail. The President and the Trump White House are fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserving the special history of the White House while building a beautiful ballroom that can be enjoyed by future Administrations and generations of Americans to come.” 
 
The White House will continue to provide the American public with updates on this project at whitehouse.gov/visit.

The United States Supreme Court has established that a President's actions will be presumed to be legal if there's some basis to do so.

So, next President, as your first action, you should order the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to erase this ballroom from the face of the Earth on the next inauguration day, and dump its hideous refuse into the Atlantic.  By this I mean, on inauguration day.  

Scrape the sucker and restore the White House back to what it was.