PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: Trump’s first month: The good, bad, unclear, and abhorrent.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 821 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The day Donald Trump was inaugurated, my son was born.
In retrospect, the timing feels inevitable ("Founder of politics newsletter has baby on inauguration day"), but it created an interesting dynamic for me.
Most notably, I got to step back from the day-to-day ruckus of what it's like when Trump is flooding the zone with news and could take in each story with a bit more thoughtfulness. And as I return from paternity leave, it means that I now have the chance to share a month’s worth of distilled thoughts with you about the start of the Trump administration.
I've decided to sort Trump’s first month into four buckets: the good, the bad, the unclear, and the abhorrent. Many of you know me, are familiar with my writing and views, and understand that my politics are all over the place. To get ahead of some criticisms I expect: Yes, there are more things in the "bad" and "abhorrent" sections than the "good" section. This shouldn't be surprising. Most presidents make their most aggressive, partisan, and base-oriented actions early on in their presidencies. This is especially true when they have control of both the House and Senate, and is even more true of a president who campaigned on a revenge tour against his "enemies." As a political moderate, I am not a member of Trump's base, so I already expected to have, at minimum, mixed feelings about his first month in office. And while I didn’t review Biden's first month in 2021, I also had strong (and mixed) feelings about his initial executive orders, push to eliminate the filibuster, and terrible cabinet nominees.
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Transcript
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| 1:00.8 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, This is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, |
| 1:28.5 | some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. |
| 1:31.3 | I am your host, Isaac Saul, back in the saddle. |
| 1:35.1 | It's nice to be sitting here on the microphone. |
| 1:38.5 | I'm at home now, my four-week-old son sleeping upstairs peacefully for now. If you hear him in the background, |
| 1:46.9 | you know, that means one of his little two or three-hour naps has been interrupted, |
| 1:51.3 | probably by my loud voice booming through the podcast. There's so much to say. I mean, |
| 1:57.5 | I've been out for four weeks. It feels like I've been out for four months or a year. |
| 2:02.8 | There's been a lot of news. And that's why I'm here today because I'm coming back in earnest |
| 2:08.5 | to Tangle next week. And during the break, I told the team I was going to just work on this |
| 2:14.6 | piece kind of in the background on Trump's first month. It occurred to me |
| 2:18.6 | that I'd be coming back right around the one month mark and took about five weeks of paternity leave |
| 2:24.5 | by next week. And Trump's first month just ended yesterday on Thursday and I'm recording this on |
... |
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