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Item one: Trump 2.0 is following the "Nike rule": Just do it, and dare the courts to come after them later.

We’re nearing the end of week one of Trump 2.0. What have we learned? Three things, all of them ugly:

From ending birthright citizenship to the shocking halt of grant processing at the National Institutes of Health and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and so much more, Trump is following what we might call the "Nike rule": Just do it, and let the courts sort it out; if some court comes along in two years and says what he’s been doing is unconstitutional or against some law, well, he got away with doing it for two years.

He went too far, for now, on birthright citizenship. A federal judge in Seattle not only called Trump’s executive order "blatantly unconstitutional" but said it "boggles the mind." Judge John C. Coughenour imposed a two-week restraining order, blocking the administration from moving forward. Trump will no doubt move to get the matter in front of a friendlier judge.

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This event is produced in partnership with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Rachel Carson Council.

Most likely, the Supreme Court will have to weigh in someday. It’s kind of hard to imagine the justices or any court overturning birthright citizenship, since it says in plain English right there in the Fourteenth Amendment—which, remember, is as much the Constitution as the first 10 amendments, as the words "We the People": "All people born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." But then again, this Supreme Court has surprised us before. "Originalism" probably doesn’t cover those meddling slavery-enders of the 1860s.

The NIH order effectively freezes that body’s grant-making process, which accounts for about 80 percent of its $47 billion budget. It’s potentially devastating to scientific research in this country, and it portends a bigger shakeup at NIH when budget time arrives—especially if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as secretary of health and human services. And I hardly need to tell you why all of this is happening. It’s not because the Trumpists care passionately about scientific research and have wonderful ideas about reforming the system. It’s for one reason and one reason only. Hint: It rhymes with ouchy.

On the DEI front, a conservative administration is bound to have a different view of these initiatives from a liberal one, and, yes, Trump won the election. A recalibration of these policies, or the appointment of a task force to reexamine them, would have been hard to object to from a small-d democratic perspective.

That, however, is not what’s happening. Some of the language in the memorandum from Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, goes well beyond that. The memo directs federal employees to snitch on their colleagues. It reads in part: "If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days" (the A adds "accessibility" to the list of crimes, even though accessibility rights for people with disabilities are clearly enshrined in law). It threatens possible "adverse consequences" for employees who don’t comply. By next Friday, all executive agencies are to submit "a written plan for executing a reduction-in-force action regarding the employees who work in a DEIA office."

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Even more worrying is the administration’s halting of work by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. No new cases, no indictments, no settlements, no nothing. Usually, administrations just decide on a case-by-case basis which of its predecessor administration’s lawsuits it will pursue and which it will drop; not the Nike administration. It’s all chucked out the window. The wide presumptions are that the division that integrated the University of Mississippi will pursue no civil rights cases, and all consent decrees monitoring police departments will be canceled.

That’s because Trump is a bigly law-and-order Republican, right? Well, not so fast. What kind of law-and-order Republican grants a wholesale pardon to some 1,550 rioters, 89 of whom have pleaded guilty to felony charges of assaulting Capitol Police officers (and some D.C. officers) on January 6, 2021? We know what kind. The kind who enforces the laws he agrees with and flouts or tries to undo the laws he doesn’t like. And that’s called lawlessness.

Again: It would have been … not exactly defensible, but politically less vulnerable to criticism if Trump had decided to pardon only those who weren’t charged with committing violence against officers. But that isn’t what he did. Fuck it: Release ’em all.

I think he knew exactly what he was doing here. In freeing that many people—and especially in freeing the two generals of this army, Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes—Trump has potentially loosed upon an unsuspecting nation his own private militia. Is it early days to jump on the Germany 1930s analogies? All right, I’ll leave that alone. For now, Tarrio vows "retribution" against his pursuers, saying the "people who did this … need to be put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted."

But let’s say there’s another Charlottesville, or a police shooting, or a mass shooting with a seemingly racial element. Do we really think these 1,550 people will just be content to stay at home and watch it all unfold on Fox? The father who called his own son a "traitor" (the son helped turn the father in) and said, "Traitors get shot"?

All this in four days. If these four days haven’t woken you from postelection slumber, you need to ask yourself what it would take. And imagine what four years will be like.

RSVP Now: Can Tourism Foster Tolerance?

Activist, peace builder, and author of Crossing Boundaries—A Traveler’s Guide to World Peace Aziz Abu Sarah joins The New Republic’s Alex Shephard on Tuesday, January 28, for the next TNR Live. Join us to learn how socially conscious travel can promote peace across cultures and perspectives.

Item two: Secretary Hegseth, eh?

The Senate appears poised to approve, probably tonight, Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. As always with Donald Trump’s decisions, it’s hard to rank them in terms of offense, but this one is way up there. Trump knows he’s unqualified. And then there’s the drinking and the alleged sexual misconduct. But he’s forcing the Senate to put him through anyway. They all know better. Well … most of them. Tommy Tuberville may not know better. But someone like John Barrasso does, and people like him should be ashamed—and they should pray that something doesn’t happen to the United States with Hegseth at the helm that either costs American lives or (more likely) results in Trump ordering, and Hegseth executing, some grotesque action that dirties the name and reputation of the U.S. in the eyes of the world for another 20 years, like the Iraq invasion did.

Of all the shocking things we’ve learned about Hegseth in these last few weeks, the shockingest to me is this recent revelation that second wife Samantha Hegseth reportedly gave to the FBI not long ago: "He drinks more often than he doesn’t."

Let’s pause over that statement. A person who drinks "more often than he doesn’t" drinks … a lot. Like, by definition, every day. And kind of early every day. If we assume Hegseth wakes around 7 a.m. and hits the hay around 11 p.m., that means he’s awake for 16 hours a day. If he drinks "more often than he doesn’t," that means that he starts less than eight hours into his day: that is, before 3 p.m.

Now it’s possible that Samantha was exaggerating. Maybe Hegseth had a rule for himself, as some sots do, that they won’t touch the stuff until 5 p.m. But … well, I’ve known people like that. We all have. At some point, 5 becomes 4:45, which becomes 4:30, which becomes 4:15 …

It’s also possible Hegseth has changed his ways since then. If so, more power to him. Republican senators have told reporters that either (1) he told them he’s already stopped hitting the hootch in anticipation of the grave responsibilities before him, or (2) he won’t drink once confirmed. Of course, they took him at their word. Or said they did.

Yes, we should look with sympathy on people with such problems. But that doesn’t mean they need to be the one person in charge of two million people under arms. Try to imagine having even, oh, two or three glasses of wine—apparently a just-getting-started kind of night for Hegseth—and getting a call that North Korean troops are amassed on South Korea’s border. Should the people of the United States really be forced to roll those particular dice? GOP senators’ craven capitulations to Trump are uniformly embarrassing, but they don’t usually have consequences for the rest of us. Let’s hope this one doesn’t either.

Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: "It’s a new car!" A history of classic game shows.

1. In the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s, it was, famously, Columbia professor Charles Van Doren who was given the correct answer by producers of Twenty-One that allowed him to win. Who was the contestant he defeated, who agreed to take the fall?

A. Fred Rutherford

B. Jim Anderson

C. Herbert T. Gillis

D. Herb Stempel

Answer: D, Herb Stempel. You might not have known Stempel, but you might well have known the others—they were all 1950s sitcom dads (Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis).

2. Jeopardy! of course is synonymous with Alex Trebek. But who was the show’s original host, when it was broadcast out of 30 Rock in New York in the 1960s?

A. Don Pardo

B. Bennett Cerf

C. Art Fleming

D. Jack Barry

Answer: C, Art Fleming. You may have known Don Pardo as the guy who did the voiceover intro on Saturday Night Live from 1975 until his death in 2014, but he also introduced the Fleming-era Jeopardy! episodes.

3. Bob Barker is synonymous with The Price Is Right. But what game show did he host before TPIR (in fact, he hosted both for three overlapping years in the 1970s)?

A. Beat the Clock

B. Truth or Consequences

C. You Don’t Say!

D. Password

Answer: B, Truth or Consequences. This show goes way back to radio, before TV. And yes—in 1950, Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name after host Ralph Edwards announced that he’d do a live show from the first town in America that renamed itself after the show.

4. Which of the following celebrities did not appear as a contestant on The Dating Game before he or she became famous?

A. Farrah Fawcett

B. Steve Martin

C. Sally Struthers

D. John Ritter

Answer: C, Sally Struthers. As far as I know, anyway. Lots of aspiring actors did the show. Here’s a video of just some of the celebs who appeared. Great stuff.

5. What was the unusual amount of money the grand-prize winner on The Gong Show took home in the 1970s?

A. $99.99

B. $333.33

C. $516.32

D. $700.07

Answer: C, $516.32. The Unknown Comic. Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine. The Popsicle Twins. Hard to believe this was on daytime TV.

6. Who was the mythically confused woman whose name popped up in a lot of the questions on The Match Game?

A. Dumb Dora

B. Silly Sally

C. Dumb Donna

D. Stupid Stella

Answer: A, Dumb Dora. As in, for example, "Dumb Dora is so dumb"—audience: "How dumb is she?"—"She’s been in kindergarten so long she’s the only girl in class with ____." And yeah, the desired answers usually involved some kind of sexist double entendre. The most interesting thing about the show to a young teen was discovering that all these people who’d been quite funny on my TV—Jamie Farr, Bill Daly, Gary Burghoff—weren’t really very funny at all when someone wasn’t writing their lines.

TNR Travel: See Ireland’s Verdant Beauty This Spring

On the Road in the Emerald Isle

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This week’s quiz: Simple black and white … Since last week’s quiz was so lowbrow, I decided to go highbrow this week. Today, January 24, is Robert Motherwell’s birthday. So let’s talk mid-twentieth-century art.

1. With what school was Robert Motherwell associated?

A. Expressionism

B. Abstract expressionism

C. Minimalism

D. Fluxus

2. Many of Motherwell’s gigantic canvases consisted of just black and white splotches of paint. Who was the other prominent midcentury artist who commonly painted large black and white canvases?

A. Ad Reinhardt

B. Clyfford Still

C. Elaine de Kooning

D. Franz Kline

3. Who said: "On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting"?

A. Willem de Kooning

B. Jackson Pollock

C. Barnett Newman

D. Arshile Gorky

4. Who among the following is not considered an abstract expressionist sculptor?

A. Richard Serra

B. Isamu Noguchi

C. David Smith

D. Louise Nevelson

5. Which abstract expressionist artist accepted a commission to paint murals for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant but, opposed in principle to spending more than $5 on a meal, grew disgusted with the idea that his work would be used as a backdrop for wealthy diners, yanked the murals, and gave the money back?

A. Hans Hoffman

B. Mark Rothko

C. Philip Guston

D. Sandy Amoros

6. In 2015, the Whitney Museum in New York stirred a controversy by doing what with a Pollock canvas?

A. Allowing visitors to touch it

B. Rotating it so it made viewers dizzy

C. Having a monkey attempt to replicate it

D. Hanging it sideways

See? We’re not always circling like buzzards over the pop culture gutter. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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