Notrak

I can't remember the last time an incoming President arrived in Washington by train.  Maybe Ike in 1953.  Lincoln famously arrived in Washington by train in 1861 . . . after having been smuggled through Baltimore in the dead of night to avoid a possible assassination.  But Joe Biden won't even be able to do that.  He had planned to arrive in Washington on Amtrak, a transport service he has famously supported for his entire political career, in advance of his presidential inauguration.  But the dangers posed by the threats of anti-Biden militants proved to be too great.

Of course, this is a lost opportunity for publicity for Amtrak, the national passenger railroad having never been used for the arrival of an incoming President before.  It has been used for the departure of an outgoing Vice President.  (That Vice President's name?  Joe Biden.)  Amtrak, woefully underfunded and underappreciated (especially by the MAGA crowd - public transport being an assault on personal freedom and all), is barely making it to its fiftieth anniversary.  Biden's original plans for getting in to Washington would have been, like the COVID vaccine for all of us, a real shot in the arm for Amtrak.

No matter.  Once Biden is sworn in, he'll likely push for more funding for Amtrak and for modernizing it to bring it up to par with the bullet trains of Europe - something Bill Clinton and Barack Obama mostly paid lip service to with little of anything to show for it.  And if Biden succeeds,  Amtrak will certainly be able to run for another fifty years.

Trump World

Donald Trump, after only a few days in the Presidency, is living down to expectations.  After a belligerent and incendiary inaugural address laying out his reactionary vision for America, he moved to start the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, deny federal funds for family-planning groups that suggest abortion as a recourse, and cancel mortgage premium cuts.  All by executive order.  Wait until Congress gets in the act!

Meanwhile, the women of the world (and their male counterparts) held a whole bunch of marches across the country and across the planet  to protest Trump.  Now the women of America have the daunting task of stopping Trump's agenda despite Republican control of all of Washington.  The Democrats remain ineffective as an opposition party; they can't even seem to decide on on a party chairman.

One heartening fact is that the marches in America brought out so many people and so much energy that the anti-Trump contingent has a lot of energy to tap and is eager to do so.  It seems to me that they will likely concentrate on the state and local races, if only because the 2018 congressional midterms are stacked against the Democrats in both houses, thanks to a lopsidedly Democratic Senate class up for re-election and a gerrymandered Republican House.  The only trouble is, a lot of state legislative districts are skewed in favor of the GOP as well.           

And the Trump White House actually disregards not only the estimated number of people at marches but the estimated number of the people at the inaugural?  Sean Spicer started off his tenure as White House spokesman on the wrong foot, insisting that the Trump inauguration was one of the most attended inaugurations in history, of not the most attended inauguration, when the facts show otherwise.  Trump aide Kellyanne Conway said that Spicer had offered up "alternative facts" to counteract such reports.  An alternative to a fact is not a fact, it's a lie.  But who cares, when all of this talk about alternative facts, started by the Trump White House, was really a diversion from the fact that Trump wants to privatize public broadcasting, eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and block-grant Medicare and Medicaid money (ensuring that it won't be distributed generously and fairly)?

We're all about to get dumber, sicker, and more culturally impoverished.