No Time for Wonkery

This is hell, nor are we out of it

Donald Trump’s second inaugural speech was as vile as expected, but also surprisingly dull.

OK, I guess his promise to take back the Panama Canal was a bit exciting. But nobody took him seriously. And I was ready to write a fairly long, workmanlike post about what seemed like the most substantive part of his speech, his declaration of a national energy emergency.

But then came his flurry of post-speech announcements, above all a mass pardon of people who tried to overthrow the government four years ago. Basically, American democracy may just have died.

Under the circumstances, I can’t focus on energy policy, and neither, I suspect, can most of my readers. Nor do I have any special insight into this awful moment. So this will be a short post.

For what it’s worth, I was planning to focus on this section of Trump’s speech:

The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices. That is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.

America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.

We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.

We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.

This is absurd stuff. U.S. energy production is thriving; in recent years we’ve become a net energy exporter, something that last happened when Dwight Eisenhower was president:

There’s much more I could say about Trump’s energy delusions. And I will, eventually; despite everything, economic life does go on.

For now, however, it all seems insignificant beside the reality that the president of the United States has thrown himself fully behind political violence.