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The Tribute to a Little-Known Soldier Joe Nocera

Published

1 year ago

November 11, 2023

The tribute to Emilio Barbosa in Bennett Park. (Photo by Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

My neighborhood in upper Manhattan surrounds a small, sweet park—Bennett Park, it’s called—that marks the highest natural point in New York City. Long ago, it was the site of Fort Washington, which the Continental Army built in the summer of 1776 only to have it captured by the British until the end of the Revolutionary War. Today, the fort’s walls are partially outlined by cobblestones, and dogs frolic around a centuries-old cannon.

In 1996 the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation added another war memorial in Bennett Park, this one dedicated to the memory of a man—a kid, really—who had grown up in the neighborhood and had been killed during World War II. His name was Emilio Barbosa. The inscription said that he was a native of Nicaragua who had lived on Pinehurst Avenue, a street that borders the west side of the park. At 17 he joined the Marines and spent the next two years manning a 20mm gun turret on the USS Nevada, fighting first at Normandy Beach and then in the Pacific theater. He died at the age of 19, when a Japanese kamikaze pilot flew into the Nevada as she bombarded Okinawa.

Barbosa’s small plaque, low to the ground and under a tree, is easy to miss. But I’ve found myself lingering over it from time to time, wondering about the man it honors—imagining, for instance, how terrifying it must have been as that Japanese plane closed in on him. My father also served in the Pacific, and decades later, when he could finally bring himself to talk about it, he said that the experience of watching a kamikaze pilot dive toward his ship had instilled in him a profound belief in God.

I’ve visited the Normandy American Cemetery in France and the Long Island National Cemetery, where the endless rows of unadorned white gravestones can be overwhelming—and can raise those same kinds of questions. How had these men lived? How did they die? What might they have done with their lives if they had survived the horrors of war?

Maybe it’s because Emilio Barbosa isn’t among the tens of thousands of soldiers buried in one of those massive national cemeteries, with nothing but a name on a gravestone—maybe it’s because his little memorial offers such a poignant outline of one soldier’s short life—that I felt I wanted to know more. And in learning more, I thought that on this Veterans Day, we might better appreciate the sacrifice he—and all the other soldiers who died in America’s wars—made for their country.

One thing I’d always wondered is when Emilio came to America. None of his descendants I spoke to knew the precise date, but the internet did—January 1929, when he was three years old. He arrived in New York from Managua with his parents and two older brothers. Why had the Barbosas immigrated? Emilio’s descendants definitely knew the answer to that: his father Jose, a prominent journalist, was fleeing the wrath of Anastasio Somoza, about whom he’d written critically. Somoza wasn’t yet Nicaragua’s dictator, but he had already amassed power and was using it to crush critics.

“He had been an intellectual in Nicaragua,” Jose’s great-granddaughter Magdalena told me about her ancestor. “Once he got here, though, he was a longshoreman.” This, of course, is the classic immigrant’s tale: you sacrifice so that your children can have a better life in America. And they did, moving eventually to a large apartment on Pinehurst Avenue in Washington Heights, where Emilio and his two older brothers went to public school, listened to pop songs on the radio, played baseball—and spoke mostly English to each other. Like many immigrants, their most fervent desire was to join the melting pot, to be as American as they could possibly be. Jose became known as Joseph. One by one, they gained their citizenship. And when the U.S. entered World War II, Jose’s three boys didn’t wait to be drafted; they immediately signed up. Joseph Jr., the oldest, joined the Army; Benjamin, one year younger, chose the Navy; and Emilio enlisted in the Marines.

Emilio was described to me as a happy-go-lucky kid who was a superb baseball player, far better than his older brothers, whom he worshipped, and who looked after him as they grew up. They tried to talk him out of enlisting—he had a year to go before he was eligible for the draft—but he wouldn’t listen. If his big brothers were going to fight for their adopted country, then so was he.

The impression I got talking to Emilio’s two nephews, named Emil and Benjamin Jr., and Emil’s daughter Magdalena, is that the youngest of the Barbosa boys saw by far the most combat. “My father didn’t see a lot of fighting,” said Emil of his father Joseph Jr. Once, when Joseph Jr. confronted a German soldier, “they looked at each other and decided not to shoot at each other.”

Benjamin Sr. was a corpsman who took a bullet in Guam while trying to get a badly injured soldier to safety. As he would later tell the story, at a bar one evening during his recovery, the nurse he was with kept staring at a Marine who was with a group of soldiers. When he finally looked up to see who the Marine was, he realized it was his brother Emilio. They took advantage of the situation to have their photograph taken together. It was also the last time Benjamin saw his younger brother.

Emilio Barbosa (right) with his older brother Benjamin, the last time they were together. (Photo courtesy of Ben Barbosa)

The USS Nevada, the battleship Emilio was assigned to, was so old she had fought in World War I. She had been damaged and repaired after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was serving as a convoy ship, protecting more modern vessels.

But that changed with the Normandy invasion. Positioned in the English Channel, she bombarded German positions for days before heading to the Pacific, where she shelled Japanese defenses in advance of the Allies’ amphibious assault at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese countered with kamikaze attacks, one of which killed 11 men. Emilio was among them.

The 11, plus the Japanese pilot, were buried at sea. Five months later, Japan surrendered.

The Barbosas were a close family—many of them living at one time or another at 90 Pinehurst—and Emilio was not forgotten. Joseph Jr.’s son Emil told me he was named after his uncle. Benjamin Jr. recalled that “Memorial Day was a very sad day for us. It wasn’t barbecues and parties. It was remembering Emilio.”

Emil believes that his father Joseph Jr. always felt some residual guilt that his youngest brother had followed him into the war—and that he wasn’t able to say goodbye. “As he got older, he got more sentimental,” says Emil. “And he decided he wanted to do something for Emilio.”

Joseph Jr. worked as a dental technician after the war. By the mid-1990s he was retired, and with time on his hands, he began lobbying the parks department for a monument for Emilio in Bennett Park, so close to where he’d grown up. His family thought it was a fool’s errand, but he could not be dissuaded, even as one year after another passed, and still no memorial.

“Sometimes his temper got the best of him,” says Emil. “He thought the city was dragging its feet.”

But to the astonishment of all but Joseph Jr., after four years, the city finally agreed. Emil helped his father write the inscription, and in the summer of 1996, a small ceremony was held. The parks commissioner attended, as did a contingent of Marines, a marching band from the local Catholic school, and various Barbosas. Magdalena, 44, then a teenager, remembers being impressed by the spectacle.

“We never thought it was going to happen,” she says with a laugh.

Although Joseph Jr. and his brother Benjamin died years ago, Emilio’s candle has never been extinguished. A few years ago, his grandnephew Jason Barbosa wrote on the website findagrave.com that Emilio was the reason he joined the Marines.

“He was [a] hero to me my whole life,” he wrote. “Semper Fi to all that shall read this.”

And Emil told me that his daughter Alexandra, the current resident of the apartment on 90 Pinehurst, usually places flowers over Emilio’s plaque on Veterans Day.

This year, I may do the same.

Joe Nocera is a columnist for The Free Press, and the co-author of The Big Fail. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @opinion_joe.

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

56 minutes ago

January 21, 2025

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Yesterday, we saw the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaug…

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

56 minutes ago

January 21, 2025

admin

It’s Tuesday, January 21. I’m Olly Wiseman and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. It’s good to be back.

Today we answer the big questions about the transfer of power in Washington. Among them: Will Trump fight lawfare with lawfare? Will TikTok survive? Is neoliberalism dead? Is Trump cool? Does that even matter? Are we at war with Panama now? And: that hat.

But first: the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaugural address and more like a State of the Union / campaign speech mashup. Ignoring unifying inaugural speech traditions stretching back to George Washington, he trashed his political opponents and touted new policies that would bring about a “golden age.”

His proposals were a Trumpian mix of serious (action on immigration and inflation) and, well, strange. It’s the Gulf of America now, and we’re “taking back” the Panama Canal, baby!

His promised day-one executive orders included:

Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)
Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”
Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.
And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)

Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Back to Trump’s speech. If there was a theme, it was that his own astonishing political comeback portends a national revival, one that he’ll deliver.

“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

Trump went further. His comeback, and his country’s, he claimed, weren’t just linked but were providential. Recalling the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, he said: “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Gone was the grim “American Carnage” theme of his first inaugural speech. He spoke of the many challenges that “will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

It is a promise both populist and popular, a reminder of why Trump won.

It is also, as my colleague Peter Savodnik argues in his column today, the death knell of neoliberalism and the end of cool.

Here’s Peter: Trump’s critics, “the so-called progressive elites, are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness. They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see not simply its emptiness but its rot.”

Read Peter’s article, “Trump Is Uncool. And That’s a Good Thing.”

Joe Biden’s Unpardonable Last Act

Another promise Trump made was to “rebalance” the scales of justice. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department of our government will end,” he said in his inaugural address. This would normally sound like a partisan gripe, if it weren’t for the final presidential acts of his predecessor, writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.

Just moments earlier, Joe Biden had issued sweeping preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. The outgoing president did the same for some of his successor’s high-profile opponents, including Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. The level of clemency is without precedent, writes Eli, and inconsistent with Biden’s 2020 promise to uphold the rule of law. Indeed, four years ago Biden expressed his concern that Trump would pardon his own political cronies.

Trump now faces a choice: continue Biden’s erosion of norms, or end the cycle of lawfare. Which will it be?

Read Eli’s full report on Biden’s final act as president—and how Trump might respond.

(Photo by Rebecca Noble via Getty Images; illustration by *The Free Press*)

TikTok on the Clock

The first big internal MAGA dustup of Trump’s second term centers on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social network. Congress passed legislation that forced either the ban or the sale of the app, but on Sunday Trump gave TikTok an eleventh-hour reprieve announcing his intent to keep the app alive for 90 days. Hours after going dark, the short-video platform blinked back on.

This was welcome news to the crowd at a TikTok-sponsored inauguration party Sunday evening. Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold was on the scene and spoke to influencers who say: “We the people are for TikTok.” Read her full dispatch here.

Meanwhile, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Silicon Valley supporter of Donald Trump, argues that the new president’s TikTok maneuvers undermine the rule of law. Now that Congress and the Supreme Court have weighed in, it doesn’t matter what Trump thinks of the TikTok ban. “The law must take effect,” writes Joe. “Because in our republic, it is the Congress that writes the law. If President Trump disagrees, he can try to change Congress’s mind.”

Read Joe Lonsdale’s op-ed: “Mr. President, Don’t Abandon the Rule of Law to Save TikTok.”

Melania Trump, wearing a hat, looks on during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena. (Jim Watson via Getty Images)

Fashion Police: Inauguration Edition

Okay, now the important stuff: the outfits. Suzy Weiss answers some of the really pressing inauguration questions: How did Melania pull off a hat that obscured half her face? Was there a hidden message in Trump’s choice of tie? And Lauren Sanchez’s white lace corset under a blazer: inappropriate or awesome? (Answer: both.) Read Suzy’s full fashion report here.

(Of course, the best-dressed crowd in D.C. this past weekend came to the party we threw. Read about that here.)

More Notes on the Inauguration. . .

Did the inauguration really need to be inside? Freezing temperatures forced proceedings indoors for the first time in forty years. But America’s ruling class wasn’t always so sensitive. As my colleague Chuck Lane points out, yesterday’s weather, frigid as it was, couldn’t hold an icicle to the 30-below wind chill at Ulysses S. Grant’s second inauguration on March 4, 1873. Chuck describes the frosty scene at that evening’s inaugural ball, held in a hangar-like temporary pavilion, in his book The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: “Dignitaries gamely shuffled across the dance floor in their overcoats, as horn and tuba players squeaked out music through the frozen valves of their instruments. Dozens of birdcages dangled from the ceiling; the canaries inside were supposed to accompany the orchestra. But the cold was so intense that the birds shivered, tucked their beaks under their wings, and then began to drop dead.”
In the beginning—i.e., last Friday—there was the $TRUMP meme coin. It’s kinda sorta like Bitcoin, only Trumpier. On the day it was issued, as traders anticipated the new president’s inauguration, it rose from $10 to $75, giving it a total value of more than $10 billion—billions, we should point out, backed by nothing but Trump’s considerable celebrity. It was yet another signal that his administration would embrace crypto. Then came the $MELANIA meme coin. Weirdly, its arrival caused the $TRUMP coin to drop down to $40. Then $TRUMP rose again in anticipation of the inauguration. Then, both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins fell by 30 percent as he gave his inaugural address. Strange. Or maybe not. The volatility of meme coins is a given—that’s kinda the point for traders—and anticipation is always a more powerful driver than the actual event. What does the future hold for $TRUMP and $MELANIA? Probably more extreme volatility. But maybe people will figure out the coins’ value is built on air and they’ll collapse—at which point, maybe the president might decide to regulate crypto after all.

Indicted New York mayor Eric Adams ditched MLK Day celebrations in his city to attend the president’s inauguration. It’s the latest act of Adams’ MAGA charm offensive, which has included a trip to Mar-a-Lago and a shift in his position on immigration, saying he is open to a rollback of sanctuary city policies. Many speculate Adams—who faces federal bribery and fraud charges—is angling for a pardon. Whatever Adams’ next chapter, his eyebrows will still be flawless.
Carrie Underwood improvised an a cappella performance of “America the Beautiful” after technical difficulties nixed her backing track. “You know the words—help me out here,” the country singer said, before launching into the patriotic anthem. . . and nailing it.

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January 20, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

4 hours ago

January 21, 2025

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The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon today was set on Friday, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By Sunday morning it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.”

As Salmon noted, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution,” which prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any gift or title from a foreign leader or government, “written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.” Salmon also pointed out that there is no way to track the purchases of this coin, meaning it will be a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him.

Former Trump official Anthony Scaramucci posted that “anyone in the world can essentially deposit money” into the bank account of the president of the United States.

On Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own coin. It took the wind out of the sales of Trump’s coin, although both coins have disclaimers saying that the coins are “an expression of support for and engagement with the values embodied by” the Trumps, and are not intended to be “an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” Her cryptocurrency was worth more than $5 billion within two hours.

CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”

Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics under Trump in his first administration, who left after criticizing Trump’s unwillingness to divest himself of his businesses, wrote to CNN: “America voted for corruption, and that’s what Trump is delivering…. Trump’s corruption and naked profiteering is so open, extreme and pervasive this time around that to comment on any one aspect of it would be to lose the forest for the trees. The very idea of government ethics is now a smoldering crater.”

At a rally Sunday night at the Capital One Arena in Washington, Trump highlighted the performance side of his public persona. He teased the next day’s events and let his audience in on a secret that echoed the “neokayfabe” of professional wrestling by leaving people wondering if it was true or a lie. After praising Elon Musk, he told the crowd “He was very effective. He knows those computers better than anybody. Those vote counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So it was pretty good…. Thank you to Elon.”

This morning, hours before he left office, President Joe Biden pardoned several of the targets of MAGA Republicans, including “General Mark A. Milley, Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee.” Biden clarified that the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” He noted, “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”

But, he said, “These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.” He later pardoned his siblings and their spouses to protect them from persecution by the incoming president.

Before he left office, Biden posted on social media: Scripture says: “I have been young and now I’m old yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken.” After all these years serving you, the American people, I have not seen the righteous forsaken. I love you all. May you keep the faith. And may God bless you all.”

This morning, members of the far-right paramilitary organization the Proud Boys marched through the capital carrying a banner that read “Congratulations President Trump” and chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Two days ago, Trump moved his inauguration into the Capitol Rotunda, where his supporters had rioted on January 6, 2021, because of cold temperatures expected in Washington, D.C. Even with his supporters excluded, the space was cramped, but prime spots went to billionaires: Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook, Google chief Sundar Pichai, TikTok chief executive officer Shou Zi Chew, and Tesla and SpaceX chief executive owner Elon Musk, who appeared to be stoned.

Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, was there, as were popular podcaster Joe Rogan and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk.

Although foreign leaders are not normally invited to presidential inaugurations, far-right foreign leaders President Javier Milei of Argentina and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni were there, along with a close ally of Chinese president Xi Jinping.

The streets were largely empty as Trump traveled to the U.S. Capitol. Supporters watched from Capital One Arena as Trump took the oath of office, apparently forgetting to put his hand on the Bibles his wife held. After Vice President–elect J.D. Vance had taken the oath of office, sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had sworn in Trump, the new president delivered his inaugural address.

While inaugural addresses are traditionally an attempt to put the harsh rhetoric of campaigns behind and to emphasize national unity, Trump’s inaugural address rehashed the themes of his campaign rallies. Speaking in the low monotone he uses when he reads from a teleprompter, he delivered an address that repeated the lies on which he built his 2024 presidential campaign.

He said that the Justice Department has been “weaponized,” that Biden’s administration “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” that the U.S. has provided “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals,” that the government has “treated so badly” the storm victims in North Carolina,” and so on.

Fact-checkers at The Guardian noted the speech was full of “false and misleading claims.”

Trump went on to promise a series of executive orders to address the crises he claimed during his campaign. He would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” he said, and “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” (Border crossings are lower now than they were at the end of Trump’s last term.) He promised to tell his cabinet members to bring down inflation (it peaked in 2022 and is now close to the Fed’s target of 2%), bring back manufacturing (the Biden administration brought more than 700,000 new manufacturing jobs to the U.S.), end investments in green energy (which has attracted significant private investment, especially in Republican-dominated states), and make foreign countries fund the U.S. government through tariffs (which are, in fact, paid by American consumers).

He also vowed to take the Panama Canal back from Panama, prompting Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino to “fully reject the statements made by” Trump, and Panamanian protesters to burn the American flag.

With a declaration about the Pennsylvania shooting that bloodied his ear, Trump declared that he believes he is on a divine mission. “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

After his inaugural address, former president Biden and former first lady Dr. Jill Biden left, and Trump delivered a much more animated speech to prominent supporters in which CNN’s Daniel Dale said he returned to his “lie-a-minute style.” He rehashed the events of January 6, 2021, and claimed that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell…that’s a criminal offense.”

But the bigger story came in the afternoon, when Trump held a rally at the Capitol One Arena in place of the traditional presidential parade. Supporters there had watched the inauguration on a jumbotron screen, booing Biden and jumping to their feet to cheer at Trump’s declaration that he had been saved by God. In the afternoon, Elon Musk spoke to the crowd, throwing two salutes that right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, interpreted as Nazi salutes.

Trump and his family arrived after 5:00 for the inaugural parade. The new president spoke again in rally mode after six, and then staged a demonstration that he was changing the country by holding a public signing of executive orders. Those appeared to be designed, as he promised, to retaliate against those he feels have wronged him. Among other executive orders, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, drawing approving roars from the crowd.

As Jonathan Swan of the New York Times noted, “Signing executive orders and pardons are two of the parts of the job that Trump loves most. They are unilateral, instantaneous displays of power and authority.” After signing a few executive orders for the crowd, Trump threw the signing sharpies into the crowd, and then he and his family left abruptly.

Back at the White House, retaliation continued. Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of the January 6 rioters who had been convicted of crimes related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, including Enrico Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who was serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

His pardon also included Daniel Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to tasing Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who suffered cardiac arrest and a traumatic brain injury. “Omg I did so much f—ing s— r[ight] n[ow] and got away,” he texted to his gang. “Tazzed the f— out of the blue[.]”

Trump signed an executive order that withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization, another that tries to establish that there are only two sexes in the United States, and yet another that seeks to end the birthright citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment. He signed one intending to strip the security clearances from 51 people whom he accuses of election interference related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, and has ordered that an undisclosed list of Trump appointees immediately be granted the highest levels of security clearance without undergoing background checks. He also signed one ordering officials “to deliver emergency price relief.”

Behind the scenes today, officials in the Trump administration fired the acting head of the U.S. immigration court system as well as other leaders of that system, and cancelled the CBP One app, an online lottery system through which asylum seekers could schedule appointments with border agents, leaving asylum seekers who had scheduled appointments three weeks ago stranded. Trump officials have also taken down a government website that helped women find health care and understand their rights. They have also removed the official portrait of former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley from the hallway with the portraits of all the former chairs…now all minus one.

But for all their claims to be hitting the ground running, lawyers noted that some of the executive orders were poorly crafted to accomplish what they claimed—an observer called one “bizarre legal fanfic not really intended for judicial interpretation”—and lawsuits challenging them are already being filed. Others are purely performative, like ordering officials to lower prices.

Further, CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand reported that almost an hour after Trump became president, “current and former Pentagon officials say they don’t know who is currently in charge of the Defense Department,” a key position to maintain U.S. security against adversaries who might take advantage of transition moments to push against American defenses.

Bertrand reported that the Trump transition team had trouble finding someone to serve as acting secretary until the Senate confirms a replacement for Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Trump’s nominee, former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth has had trouble getting the votes he needs, although tonight the Senate Armed Services Committee approved him by a straight party line vote.

Bertrand notes that two senior department officials declined to take on the position. The Trump administration swore in Robert Salesses, deputy director of the branch of the Pentagon that focuses on human resources, facilities, and resource management—who has already been confirmed by the Senate in that position—as acting Defense Secretary.

Beginning tomorrow, the Republicans will have to deal with the fact that the Treasury will hit the debt ceiling and will have to use extraordinary measures to pay the obligations of the United States government.

—

Notes:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/robert-salesses-serve-acting-us-defense-secretary-nbc-news-reports-2025-01-20/

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/18/trump-meme-coin-25-billion

https://apnews.com/article/trump-pentagon-defense-secretary-hegseth-7bf18dfaaa53e3e75a76e3fd768a7fdd

https://time.com/7208371/trump-inauguration-2025-photos/

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/20/us/trump-executive-orders

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/20/melania-trump-launches-cryptocurrency-ahead-of-donald-trumps-inauguration.html

https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/06/news/walter-shaub-office-of-government-ethics-resignation/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/20/tech/meme-coins-donald-melania-trump-intl-hnk/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/19/politics/key-lines-trump-rally-dc-inauguration-eve/index.html

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/national/capitol-riots/for-the-first-time-since-january-6-2021-proud-boys-march-in-dc-donald-trump-capitol-riot/65-edd2f779-154e-4f5e-8dd6-0dabd2707c5d