Let the Good Times Roll

That is not the case this time. He has been announcing key appointments at a historically rapid pace. Having already spent four years in the White House, he has a much better idea of where the pitfalls lie, after having experienced frustration with many of those he appointed and having been preoccupied by the ongoing Russian collusion investigation in his first two years in office. He has a much clearer vision of what he hopes to achieve and the obstacles that must be removed.

Though never known for his attention to the details of policy, as long ago as December 2022, Trump already detailed a plan to prevent government agencies — e.g., the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security — from colluding with social media companies, as they did in 2020 to stifle the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the ways in which Joe Biden was implicated in Hunter’s influence peddling.

Trump has proposed to rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes social media platforms from suit for material posted on their sites, to require strict rules of transparency and neutrality as a condition for protection. In addition, he has proposed financial penalties for universities involved in identifying disinformation on social media, as did Stanford — one of the world’s leading research institutions — in 2020, in conjunction with government actors and social media platforms.

In a similar manner, he has taken aim at the huge DEI bureaucracies entrenched in almost every university, and proposed to hold universities accountable for the harassment of Jewish students with a loss of government funding. He has posted that on day one of his administration, he will notify every university president that continued anti-Semitic propaganda will result in loss of accreditation and federal funding. (Execution of that threat will no doubt result in numerous First Amendment challenges.)