Directing Your Attention
We’re still 45 days or so away from Inauguration Day…but you’d be excused if you thought Donald Trump was already president.
He’s got world leaders flying to meet with him in Florida in response to social media posts he makes. He’s attending the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He’s going to the Army-Navy football game.
Meanwhile, back at the White House…the person who still holds the office is almost an afterthought, dozing off during a meeting in Angola, and his vice-president is nowhere to be found since serving Thanksgiving dinner at a food kitchen a week ago.
I get it that in our what-have-you-done-for-me-lately society, we move on pretty quickly to the next great thing. But there’s a lot going on in the world and within our still-porous borders.
For example, the government will partially shut down two weeks from today unless a new spending bill—either short or long-term—is approved by Congress. Not much talk about that, and you may have forgotten, since the deal they cut was back in September. So in short, they kicked the can down the road three months—a quarter of the way through the fiscal year—and still no framework for how to proceed, with only two weeks left.
The government in France just collapsed. A partial Middle East ceasefire got off to a rocky start. The Ukraine/Russia war started heating up again. And all those items were just from this week.
I’m trying to recall a presidential transition where the focus was so heavy on the new guy at this point. There’s still plenty the current guy could and should do, despite being a lame duck with Congress quacking along with him. That said, I’m not sure handing a federal workers union a Christmas present of allowing employees to work from home for five years is what I have in mind, though.
Decades from now, we’ll look back at the first quarter of this century as one of most unique political times in our nation’s history. Hopefully, it will be viewed as “unique” in a positive way.
