Front Porch
Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy.
The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to …
Critic's Corner
Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On
A couple years ago I went to see Pavement at Kings Theater in Brooklyn, which was fine. The real surprise of the evening was seeing Horsegirl open for them. Bob Nastanovitch, a longtime member of Pavement and a family friend, had gotten us the tickets and said that I should like Horsegirl better than Pavement, because they had a younger, cooler sound. And I was a young and cool 13-year-old, after all. At the time, their youngest member was 17, which was still really impressive to me and to Pavement themselves. After the show, we also found out that one of their members used to babysit the friend I was with, so we got to meet them and they were totally nice and everything.
I’ve been sitting on Horsegirl since that moment, because I was super shocked at how good they were. Also, they hadn’t really released anything since their first …
Gavin Newsom’s Giant Ponzi Scheme
California’s Con Man in Chief rips off American taxpayers while crushing small businesses to pay the state’s supersized population of scammers
A scheme too obscenely corrupt for his own party to stomach
Let them eat Gruel
Last November, the celebrity chef and restaurateur Andrew Gruel got a call from his wife, who manages parts of his business. There was an issue with their payroll taxes: They were $2,000 more than the couple had expected. Getting billed for thousands of dollars, without explanation, understandably alarmed the chef. So Gruel called their payroll company to find out what had happened. What he was told provoked him into posting a tweet that went viral the following day.
“California has a budget shortfall,” his tweet explained, “and the federal government wants money back that it lent California for UI that it ‘lost.’ They are making up for it by having business owners pay it.” When Elon Musk commented with his signature one-word boost — “Really?” — Gruel replied, “Yup, state defaulted on their loan and the businesses …
