President Dorian Gray

What I love about Frump is that he's using all of the tools available to him to exercise his power! I love it when people use power in new and interesting ways to get things done. Yes, the DOG-E stuff is illegal (Congress determines funding and the existence of federal agencies, not the executive) and morally deplorable (he's targeting things he doesn't like, not things that need "reform" or will save money), but Frump is making so many people angry because it's so ingenious and effective. At some point in these first few weeks, he'll run out of interesting ideas to piss off liberals and antagonize his enemies, and at some point I'd expect the courts and Congress will get in involved and it will be interesting to witness that battle unfold. But so far, Frump has had an admirable plan to exercise legitimate powers and create such brash new ones that the system had no idea how to respond.

While I have great respect for the boldness of these first few weeks, Frump remains awful. Just an awful person. So morally disfigured. I can't bear to even look at him. He's the Dorian Grey of American capitalism--every wretched excess, every unholy impulse is etched in his unseemly orange visage. Ew. It's like looking at capitalism's grotesque shadow--greed, short-term thinking, externalizing costs onto others.

Frump's 2nd term agenda emerges from his disfigured character: it's either a) cruel or b) self-enriching. Those are Frump's only two coherent motivations. That seems to be what gets him up in the morning (or keeps him up all night). Everything fits into one of two categories: the politics of cruelty (immigrants, USAID, gender), or the politics of self-enrichment (pardoning J6 rioters, Panama Canal pronouncements, CFPB). I'll be interested to see how far cruelty and self-enrichment can get him before his popularity shrinks from where it is now (about 45%), to 35%, to 25%. Where's the tipping point?