Dem
47
GOP
53
There were a few more stories from the first 48 hours of the new Trump administration that may be of interest, but probably don't warrant a whole item. So, we're going to lump them together.
To start, the ratings are in for the President's inaugural, and... he's not going to be happy. They were down 27% from Joe Biden's inauguration in 2021, and 20% from Trump's first inauguration in 2016. And Trump fell WAY short of Barack Obama's first inauguration (though he beat the second one). Here's the total viewership for the last five presidential inaugurations:
| President | Total Viewers |
| Obama I | 38 million |
| Obama II | 21 million |
| Trump I | 31 million |
| Biden | 34 million |
| Trump II | 25 million |
Trump's total on Monday is even less lustrous when you consider that: (1) the population of the country is roughly 10% larger today than it was in the Obama years and (2) this year's inauguration took place on a holiday, when plenty of people were home to watch. And there's no Sean Spicer around, this time, to tell us that the viewing audience for Trump II was the biggest in American history.
Moving along, there is still some debate going on about Elon Musk's hand gesture, and whether it was an actual Nazi salute, or it was merely a boisterous gesture that just so happened to look exactly LIKE a Nazi salute. Yesterday, some folks with a fair bit of insight on this subject weighed in. All over social media, particularly eX-Twitter and its further-right cousins like Gab, Neo-Nazis expressed delight about the salute. "WE ARE FU**ING BACK," said one of them, just to give one example. Of course, what would Neo-Nazis know about Nazi salutes?
And finally, someone discovered that if you go to the new White House website, and you navigate to the page for the Constitution, this is what you get:
Redesigning a website is tricky, and it's easy to have a few oversights. But if there was ever such a thing as a Freudian oversight, this would be it. (Z)