• Peter Baker writes in the NYT on what is the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.  An excerpt:

By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals…“He’s not trying to give the appearance that he’s doing the right thing anymore,” said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a longtime advocate for government ethics. “There’s nothing in the history of America that approaches the use of the presidency for massive personal gain. Nothing.”

• Writing in the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel has an excellent piece on X’s descent into a cesspool. It’s worth a read: What Are People Still doing on X?  An excerpt:

“You may not have any interest in participating in a culture war. The problem is that on X, everything is a culture war. Culture war is the very point of the MAGA AI slop the platform traffics in and the viscerally cruel White House X account. Culture war is behind Tucker Carlson’s choice to debut his post-Fox show on X and why Alex Jones livestreams on the platform every day. West’s nihilistic neo-Nazi single is an act of culture war: Its message isn’t just that X has energized his ideas, but that the platform renders people like Ye unignorable. Only Musk could shut this machine down, but plenty of others lend it their credibility and happily turn the cranks, ensuring that the culture war grinds on and on.”

• Hannah Ritchie writes in her Sustainability by numbers substack on the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT and concludes that certainly for the average user, it’s OK.

• A podcast & transcript from the Atlantic: The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History

No argument here.

• Vance is clever, but an unlikeable and maladroit liar with a moral compass that twists in the wind.  Jamelle Bouie puts Vance’s flaws on full display in his NY Times opinion piece This Is How Far Vance Will Go to Sell a Lie.  An excerpt:

“During the presidential campaign, Vance defended his decision to slander the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio — to disparage and lie about them for political gain — by telling reporters that he would “create stories” if that’s what he had to do to get the news media’s attention. And here he is again, creating stories. In this case, however, it is less to get the attention of the press and more to defend the administration’s open contempt for the rule of law.”

• Well, given the competence of the current administration in Washington (outlined here by Matt Yglesias), there’s not much optimism for the future of US as a representative trading partner (and perhaps not even as a global financier).  See David Wallace-Wells must-read NYT opinion piece It’s Not Hard to Imagine a Chinese-Led Global Economy – and for a small depressing aside, Daniel Piketty’s blog post Rethinking the world without the US.

• Tom Friedman weighs in, and he’s not optimistic.  Read his I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future in the NYT. A relevant excerpt:

“This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.”

• The always-excellent Ezra Klein has a terrific interview with Paul Krugman on the Trump tariffs, available as a podcast and in print in the NYT – ‘Paul Krugman on the Biggest Trade Shock in History’

• Well, better hope the next pandemic is not right around the corner – because we definitely won’t be ready.  Katelyn Jetelina expounds on the body blows public health is taking from this administration in her latest Your Local Epidemiologist.

• There are of course innumerable opportunities for corruption in this new administration; here the Washington Post comments on one of the more egregious, re. cryptocurrency. An excerpt:

“Trump, who evidently sees crypto as a vehicle to make money, is increasing the urgency of this conversation by providing cryptocurrencies with a new nefarious use: funneling money into the president’s pocket in exchange for governmental favors.”