happy Wednesday, happy day one of the second 100 days of the Trump administration.

I got a fascinating interview coming up today with a woman by the name of Jody Vittori.

She's a military veteran. She's a professor in practice for global politics and with a concentration on national

security issues at Georgetown University. But she spent a lion's share of her career in the military,

educated at the Air Force and Academy. And she's a specialist in kleptocracies and actually,

you know, how democracies get corrupted. And she wrote a pretty provocative piece for

foreign affairs about that issue. Is America creeping into a kleptocracy? You've probably heard

me use that word. I said that in 2024, at a minimum, that Donald Trump had turned the

Republican Party in some ways into a kleptocracy.

I don't think we're there yet as a country. But when you have, when you have things like

this inaugural fund that law firms have to pay into, in order to keep the government off

their back, that would pretty much put you into that in, in that category where you might be arguing that we are we are

creeping into that so look it's a it's a long conversation i want to get into that but before i get

into that i want to talk a little bit about the second hundred days because i think in fairness to

him you know look i've been highly critical because i think this has been a disastrous start. This is not because whether I support him or oppose them. This is just political incompetence, how they've gone about this. Yes, I think it's economic incompetence too. But if this was the plan, they've executed the plan extraordinarily poorly, right? There was a way to do government

reform better and more secure. There was a way to do tariffs better. There was probably a way to

order, reorder his agenda, but he chose not to do it. And there's a fundamental part of his

presidency that strikes me as a bit lazy, that he is kind of mailing it in. And you know,

one way you can see this, that Donald Trump is now mailing in the presidency? It's his travel

schedule for the first hundred days. He marked the 100th day with a trip to Michigan.

What's shocking about his trip to Michigan is that that's the first, essentially, it's the

first battleground state he's bothered to visit since the beginning of his term.

...