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Trump Wins Bigly in Iowa. Fentanyl for Minors in Canada. And, Is the Golden Age of TV Over? Oliver Wiseman

Published

1 year ago

January 16, 2024

Trump speaks after a commanding victory in Iowa. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Before last night, the biggest margin of victory by a Republican in an Iowa caucus was 12 points, achieved by Bob Dole in 1988. Donald Trump blew that record out of the water with a lead of just under 30 points.

The networks called it for Trump after just thirty minutes of caucusing before many Iowans had even cast their votes—a move that led the DeSantis campaign to level the charge of “election interference” at a media “in the tank for Trump.”

With 95 percent of ballots counted, Trump had won 51 percent of the vote. DeSantis and Haley came a distant second and third at 21 percent and 19 percent, respectively. (Haley described her third-place finish as evidence that the primary was a two-horse race.) Vivek Ramaswamy came fourth with 8 percent and suspended his campaign late Monday night.

In his victory speech, Trump thanked his supporters and said he thought it “was time for our country to come together. . . whether it’s a Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative.”

Many critics are asking: How is it possible that a man impeached twice by Congress and criminally indicted four times still has so much sway with the American heartland? How can Trump be so far ahead that were you to add Haley’s and DeSantis’s votes together, he’d still have a double-digit lead?

Part of the answer lies in the shortcomings of the man who started the race as his main opponent (more on that from Peter Savodnik in a second). But a far more important factor stems from the massive divide between college-educated and working-class voters. This gap isn’t just dividing Republicans and Democrats; it’s causing fractures within the parties themselves. As Batya Ungar-Sargon explains, that divide is still the engine of Trump’s strength. It’s also why, as she explains, “the average Republican voter hates the Republican Party.”

Why the average Republican voter hates the GOP—but loves Trump

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

To the surprise of no one and the dismay of the liberal commentariat class, former president Donald Trump has crushed the first GOP primary election.

Iowa, which voted twice for Barack Obama before flipping to Trump in 2016, gave Trump a decisive win Monday night. And in Iowa, as in the Republican Party and the country more generally, the class divide was the defining feature of the night.

According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin—just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many—33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.

That’s a 30-point gap in support for Trump—and a 25-point gap for Haley. It’s the gulf separating the college-educated from the working-class, who don’t just have different candidates of choice but different concerns, different struggles, and different priorities.

Working-class Americans are worried about the economy, immigration, our foreign entanglements, and the disappearing American Dream—all issues Donald Trump not only talks about but has a solid record on. Haley represents the GOP that Trump replaced—the free-market, chamber-of-commerce, nation-building version of the party that is dominated by a donor class whose interests are completely at odds with those of the working class.

Unfortunately for Haley, her party is now the party of the working class. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.) As much as the Republican donor class wishes Haley were the party’s nominee, there’s no going back for your average corrections officer.

The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party. The average liberal feels well-represented by the Democratic Party because the Democrats’ base, like the party leadership, are college-educated elites. They share the same list of priorities. But the average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China.

Whether they realize it or not, this is why Democrats truly hate Trump. Without him, the left would soon have had a pretty permanent monopoly on power.

But if Iowa is any indication, not so soon after all.

And now, Peter Savodnik on the man who was supposed to save the Republican Party. . .

Where Ron went wrong

By Peter Savodnik

Ron DeSantis was supposed to be Serious Trump. Maybe a little lawyer-ish, a little stiff. But so what? Stiff meant competent. And wasn’t that what Republicans wanted? Didn’t they want to build the wall? Crush the administrative state? Just with a little less bluster?

Recall that after the Republicans’ disappointing 2022 midterms, DeSantis became the party’s “presumptive nominee” in 2024. On a night when 11 of the 21 candidates endorsed by Donald Trump lost—including Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania—DeSantis expanded on his 2018 win by nearly 10 percentage points.

Seven months later, the Florida governor announced his presidential bid—in a very rocky Twitter Space rollout with Elon Musk—and soon after, he decamped to Iowa, racking up the endorsements of the state’s Republican governor, tons of state senators and representatives, and the highly coveted Bob Vander Plaats, the influential evangelical leader.

He did everything he was supposed to—and it wasn’t what Republican voters wanted.

They wanted the Duck à L’Orange, and they seemed convinced that anyone who wasn’t him was a squish.

Which is why Donald Trump trounced the whole Republican pack Monday in Iowa. At the time of writing, DeSantis looked like he’d come out on top in a close tussle with Nikki Haley for a distant second place. Little consolation given the expectations for his candidacy a year ago.

Team DeSantis insists that a big part of the problem is the conservative media ecosystem, and they’re not wrong. How else could their candidate lose?

As DeSantis said of Trump last week while stumping: “He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media—Fox News, the websites, all this stuff. They don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers, and they don’t want to have their ratings to go down.”

Few defeats more powerfully illustrate what we’ve known since 2016: that the old rules no longer matter, that no one cares if you did a brilliant job holding down the proverbial fort in Florida. What they care about is that you not simply enact, but, more importantly, embody your agenda. If you’re not angry enough—or entertaining enough—then your agenda isn’t a real agenda. It’s a fake politics probably conjured up by some deep-state AI.

Final thought: it’s utterly mystifying how it is that this keeps happening, that the politicians are still playing catch-up eight-and-a-half years after Trump descended his gilded escalator, that they have yet to intuit what he knew way back when—that America is broken and coasting and cracking up, and if you’re still adhering to the stale strictures, you don’t really get it.

Ron DeSantis was supposed to implement the Trump agenda and make his party serious again and forge a national coalition that would bring together conservatives and economic populists and maybe even a few old-fashioned liberals, and he failed because he didn’t grasp how deep the rage runs.

For now, alas, only one man in the race gets that.

From our newsroom: Iowa FOMO

This time last year, my colleague Francesca Block had January 15, 2024, circled on her calendar. Formerly a reporter at The Des Moines Register, yesterday would have been her D-Day. But then life intervened and she joined The Free Press last September. So I asked her: Does she have FOMO, and what do her old Iowa contacts and colleagues make of this year’s caucus, with its record-setting low temperatures and a front-runner a long way ahead throughout the race?

My friends back in Iowa told me it was so cold yesterday that their eyelashes froze as soon as they stepped outside. The highways have been full of rolled-over cars in ditches from the slick, slippery roads in recent days. One of those stranded cars had Vivek Ramaswamy in it, who had the ultimate Iowa experience when a nice local man pulled over to help him push his SUV out of the ditch. (Iowa nice is a real thing, people.)

So it might sound weird to say I was sad not to be there yesterday. There’s no place like Iowa—it’s the only place in the country where a local Pizza Ranch turns into a political salon, in which important questions are asked about our society by the everyday people so often left out of the mainstream media’s narratives.

Take 63-year-old Iowan Doug Stout, who lives in Dallas County just west of Des Moines. I met Doug last March at a local barbecue joint in a Des Moines suburb at an event for Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who at the time was flirting with a presidential run. Since then, Doug has been to more than a dozen caucus events with an open mind—meeting face-to-face with 15 different candidates as they traversed the state, trying to make their case to Iowans. He’s seen Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley at least five separate times each, he told me over the phone as he prepared to head out for the night to caucus in the subzero temperatures. He revealed that he’d be caucusing for Haley.

“I think people underestimate just how seriously Iowans take the job of electing somebody,” he said. “Just ask any of the candidates; they’ll tell you they get questions here they don’t get anywhere else. They really find out not just what the candidates stand on, but they try and get a feel for who they are.”

At the end of the day, though, it seems Iowans are less concerned about who actually won the caucus than who made it to caucus day in the first place. Stout told me the myth about Iowa is that the state is supposed to “choose the president.”

“Everybody focuses on who wins. Everybody focuses now on who’s gonna finish second, but Iowa’s job has always been to winnow the field, and we did that already,” he said.

As he pulled on his winter coat and prepared to drive on the slick roads just over three miles to participate in his 12th presidential caucus, Stout told me it feels very bittersweet. While he’s glad the increasingly ugly political ads will stop taking over his TV and his phone will soon be free of campaign text messages (he told me he’s gotten seven a day from different campaigns every day in the past week), he said, “I’m not always glad when caucus day or election day gets here.

“It’s like, I love football. I love football season. But I don’t really enjoy the Super Bowl because it’s kind of the end,” he said. “It’s kind of anticlimactic, and plus, the next day it’s over. It’s very much a change in the pace of political life in Iowa after an intense 10 months.”

Fentanyl for minors

Scrolling through headlines, there’s one question I find myself asking more and more often: What the heck is going on in Canada? From race-based criminal sentencing to media censorship, Canada seems determined to become a world leader in progressive illiberalism. Thankfully, we have one of the great explainers of Canadian craziness on staff here at The Free Press: the mighty Rupa Subramanya. Rupa has covered a lot of big north-of-the-border stories for us, including the furor over the truckers’ protest and Canada’s rapidly expanding euthanasia industry.

And so when I read about a scheme in British Columbia that provides minors access to fentanyl without parental consent—yes! For real!—I asked Rupa to explain what was going on.

Here’s her report:

Since 2020, British Columbia has made a point of providing a “safer supply” of fentanyl to addicts—and, more recently, it has loosened the rules, making it easier for doctors and nurses to prescribe the highly addictive drug to even more people.

That includes minors, who do not require a parent’s permission to get a prescription.

The provincial government did not publicize this change—which took effect in August 2023—and most Canadian media has steered clear of the story.

That could be because many Canadian parents are worried about their children getting hooked, or overdosing, on fentanyl. Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death among 10- to 18-year-olds in British Columbia.

In April of last year, a five-year-old girl in Nanaimo, British Columbia, just west of Vancouver, accidentally stumbled on a packet of fentanyl at school. Thankfully, her mother found the drugs before anything happened.

British Columbia’s fentanyl policy is in keeping with other Canadian innovations such as medical assistance in dying (MAID), Canada’s euthanasia program that, come March, will be available to those suffering from psychological disorders like anorexia and may be extended to “mature minors” in the future. (I wrote about MAID for The Free Press in 2022.)

The new fentanyl policy also dovetails with a British Columbia pilot program launched in January 2023 that legalized small amounts of drugs such as heroin, meth, crack cocaine, and ecstasy.

With a population of roughly five million—a little less than one-eighth of Canada’s population—British Columbia has accounted for about a third of all 32,000 drug-related deaths in Canada since 2016.

Julian Somers, a clinical psychologist at Simon Fraser University, just outside Vancouver, told me that the new British Columbia fentanyl policy—distributing a highly addictive drug at pharmacies and clinics—has never been tried anywhere else.

“Rather than taking steps to actively reduce risks, which we’re clearly not doing—it’s not even discussed—our current policies have the appearance of actively contributing to increased risk,” Somers said.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood. . .

For ink-stained wretches like us, it’s hard to imagine a more exciting, more glamorous event than the Iowa caucus. But apparently there was something else going on last night in Hollywood.

The big winners at the Emmys were Succession, Beef, and The Bear. (Here’s a full list of who won what.) But the bruising streaming wars have entered a penny-pinching phase—get ready for AI scripts and more ads—while younger audiences continue to look elsewhere for their entertainment. Which leaves us asking: Is truly must-watch TV getting rarer?

This month marks 25 years since the first episode of The Sopranos aired. And in an interview with The Times of London to mark the anniversary, the show’s creator, David Chase, said the golden age of television is officially over. “Something is dying,” he said, lamenting the collapse of the big streamers and the pressure to serve an audience with ever-shorter attention spans.

Is Chase right? Ian Martin thinks so. Martin is the writer of some of the funniest political comedies of all time—Veep and its British progenitor The Thick of It. He argues that the golden age of TV has died along with the end of HBO’s Succession—whose fourth and final season was nominated for 27 Emmys. (It won six Emmys last night, including Outstanding Drama Series, and Kieran Caulkin admitted he still hasn’t seen the show’s final episode.)

Read Ian’s argument in full here:

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor at The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

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The inauguration of a multi-billion dollar grift Judd Legum

Published

2 hours ago

January 21, 2025

admin

On Monday, Donald Trump took the oath of office — the first person to be sworn in as president while simultaneously hawking an eponymous meme coin.

Trump launched $TRUMP, a crypto token, on Friday night. Meme coins are crypto tokens tied to a celebrity or joke. The first and most famous is DOGE coin, a cryptocurrency centered around a famous image of a Shiba Inu dog. $TRUMP features an image of Trump during the assassination attempt last summer.

While meme coins are nominally tied to digital “artwork,” they function primarily as a speculative asset. Since many meme coins attempt to capitalize on online trends, they are known for extreme volatility. Hailey Welch, an online personality known as the “Hawk Tuah girl,” launched the “Hawk” meme coin in December. The Hawk coin’s value exploded shortly after launch, reaching a market cap of $490 million. But the price quickly collapsed. Today, the total value of all the 999 million Hawk coins is less than $30,000. You can buy 338 Hawk coins for less than one cent.

Trump is leveraging the prestige of the presidency and the global coverage of the inauguration to boost the price of $TRUMP. By Sunday evening, the price of one $TRUMP coin soared to over $75, putting the value of the 200 million $TRUMP coins in circulation at nearly $15 billion. By Monday afternoon, $TRUMP had lost about 40% of its value.

The primary beneficiary of this speculative activity is Trump himself. In a move that raised red flags even among crypto enthusiasts, 80% of all $TRUMP coins are reserved for a company owned by Trump. At its peak, the value of these coins exceeded $50 billion, making $TRUMP, which did not exist a few days ago, the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. The $TRUMP coins owned by Trump are currently locked, meaning they cannot be sold, but will be released in tranches over the next three years.

In 2016, Trump’s net worth was estimated to be about $3 billion. Before the launch of the $TRUMP, that had increased to around $7 billion, largely due to the public listing of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Truth Social loses millions of dollars every quarter and has few users, but Trump’s fans keep its stock price elevated.

So Trump has a huge financial incentive to keep the price of $TRUMP elevated until he can sell his coins. For Trump, there is nothing but upside. He received the coins for free — whatever he can sell them for will be a windfall. Trump’s supporters, however, could suffer huge financial losses. By Monday afternoon, a single $TRUMP coin cost $40. People who buy these coins looking to turn a big profit could instead find themselves with massive losses.

A vehicle for corrupt foreign influence

$TRUMP does not only create problems for reckless Trump fans. It means that the White House is for sale. Anyone seeking to curry favor with Trump — including foreign governments — now has a vehicle to transfer a virtually unlimited amount of money to Trump by driving up the price of $TRUMP coins.

As with all crypto transactions, anyone can purchase $TRUMP anonymously. The only record involves a digital wallet with no public owner. This means a foreign entity could make a large purchase of $TRUMP coins — perhaps boosting $TRUMP’s value before Trump sold some of his holdings — and no one would know. It creates an unprecedented and completely opaque method to bribe the President of the United States.

“While it’s tempting to dismiss this as just another Trump spectacle, the launch of the official Trump token opens up a Pandora’s box of ethical and regulatory questions,” Justin d’Anethan, an independent crypto analyst, told Reuters.

This week, we started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch

Crypto companies under federal investigation boost $TRUMP

Thousands of meme coins are launched every month. The failure rate for meme coins is estimated at over 97%. With so much competition, it is hard to make a significant number of people become aware of a meme coin. Trump, as the President of the United States, solves that problem. But even once people discover a meme coin, it needs to be easy to buy and sell in order to sustain interest.

It is possible to buy and sell crypto assets without an intermediary. But most people buy and sell crypto through a handful of popular exchanges, which make the process easy and allow you to use cash and other assets to fund purchases.

Exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood can greatly increase awareness and demand for a meme coin. At the same time, they are not going to list every new meme coin that is issued — especially since many of them are scams.

But Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood all have made $TRUMP available to their users, dramatically increasing the number of buyers, and sending its price higher. And they aren’t just quietly listing $TRUMP. They are promoting $TRUMP to their user base.

Improving your relationship with the president is a good idea for any business. But these companies have even stronger motivations. Coinbase is currently being prosecuted by the SEC for “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.” The SEC is also prosecuting Kraken for similar alleged activities. Robinhood has not been charged but received a “Wells Notice” from the SEC last May, indicating enforcement action is coming.

The crypto industry is reportedly hoping that, under the Trump administration, the SEC will either end their prosecutions and investigations or offer a favorable settlements.

More broadly, these companies are counting on the Trump administration to allow them to operate legally. The $TRUMP coin allows Trump to make billions from a more permissive regulatory environment. It transforms the presidency from a public trust into a tool for personal enrichment.

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

3 hours 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

3 hours 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.