Well, here we are: After a long presidential campaign full of warnings from each “major” party campaign about the horrible things the other “major” party’s candidate would do to us if elected, Inauguration Day approaches.

On January 20, Donald Trump begins his second (non-consecutive) term as president of the United States.

Within days — possibly within hours — we’ll start finding out how accurate his opponents’ warnings were, and whether or not he really intends to keep his own campaign promises.

To some degree, the warnings and the promises are identical. For example, Trump would say he promises, and his opponents would say he threatens, to launch mass abductions, cagings, and deportations of immigrants.

In other cases, the promises keep changing, often in contradictory ways that leave us just guessing at what he intends to do, especially vis a vis foreign policy.

Some of his supporters expect Trump, based on his own statements, to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine and put Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu on a leash in Gaza.

Others among his supporters expect, again based on his own statements, to double down on US support for Ukraine and/or Israel.

What do I expect? Plenty in general, but nothing in particular other than the usual theatrics from Trump, from “both sides of the aisle” in Congress, and from the media.

I expect, in a word (er, acronym), BOHICA.

That’s an old bit of military slang for the predictable recurrence of negative events: “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”

Popular perceptions of Trump tend toward the superlative.

To his supporters, he’s a fearless, iconoclastic, possibly even divinely ordained, leader figure, disrupting the establishment to Make America Great Again.

To his opponents, he’s a whiny, self-dealing criminal in terms of personality, literally Hitler reincarnate and possibly even the Antichrist in terms of politics.

In my opinion, he’s just another politician, albeit one with a flair for the dramatic and a firm grasp of what H.L. Mencken called “the whole aim of practical politics …. to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Every president, without exception, finds ways to be worse than the previous one. Some presidents also find ways to be better than their predecessors.

All presidents function within a system that’s resistant to change, but tends to drift toward increased presidential power to screw up all our lives.

Trump doesn’t look like an exception to those two rules —  but he’s better than most politicians at inspiring panic among both supporters and opponents.

That’s a job qualification. Panic is what politicians WANT from you. It’s the hook in your lip. Don’t be a fish.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On January 10, US president-elect Donald Trump officially became a convicted felon as New York judge Juan Merchan sentenced him on 34 counts of falsifying business records to disguise “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels as legal expenses.

The sentencing followed a 5-4 Supreme Court rejection of Trump’s request that it intervene to postpone the sentencing. That the vote went 5-4 instead of 9-0 constitutes a far greater scandal than anything Trump stands convicted of.

Most elements of the case against Trump — the payments to Daniels before he was elected in 2016, and the charges and trial after he left office in 2021 — relate to periods of time when he was not president.

Even the part that relates to the period of time when he WAS president — his reimbursement, disguised as “legal expenses,” to the attorney who acted as cut-out for the hush money — didn’t concern any “official act” of the presidency conferring immunity for such per last July’s Supreme Court ruling (which itself lacked any convincing constitutional justification).

In effect, the four dissenting justices claim that anyone who has ever been president of the United States should enjoy life-long immunity from criminal prosecution (at both the federal and state level), even for acts committed outside the scope or time frame of that person’s presidency.

So, what were those four justices trying to save Trump from?

The sentence included no prison time, no fine, and no probation requirements.  Merchan’s “unconditional discharge” consisted entirely of entering the convictions into the public record.

That doesn’t mean the convictions bring no consequences.

Under New York law, felons must provide DNA samples to law enforcement.

Under New Jersey law, Trump’s golf courses may lose their liquor licenses.

Under (unconstitutional) federal law, Trump may no longer possess firearms.

And some countries’ regimes deny entry to convicted felons, which in theory could impede his ability, even as president, to visit those countries.

It could have … and, for anyone not named “Donald Trump,” likely would have … been far worse.  He faced, among other possible consequences, up to 20 years in prison.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that anyone not named “Donald Trump” would have faced prosecution over the matter, or that even he himself would have faced prosecution if he’d lost the 2016 presidential election and faded into obscurity.

Whatever Trump may be wrong about, he’s right that this was all about politics.

And politics makes people — including Supreme Court justices — stupid.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When you pull out your phone, tablet, or laptop — or sit down at a desktop computer — what Internet content should you not need the government’s permission to view?

It’s a simple question and the only correct answer is “all of it.”

But Florida’s politicians, following those of several other states,  are stomping their feet, declaring themselves your babysitters, and yelling that if you want to view particular web sites, you need to beg for their permission first.

HB3, which came into effect on January 1, includes two silly components and one truly terrible implementation hook.

Component #1: HB3 restricts access to social media for those under 14 years of age, and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to use social media accounts. Fortunately, that part has been blocked by the courts … for now.

Component #2: HB3 requires users to be 18 years of age or older to access “material harmful to minors” — that is, pornography.  But there’s already a federal law (18 US Code § 1470) against providing pornography to those under 16. It’s not Florida politicians’ job to enforce that law or to change its age threshold.

The implementation hook is a requirement that social media platforms and porn sites implement “age verification” protocols for all viewers.

How are these platforms supposed to “verify” your age? By requiring you to show them your government-issued identification card, of course.

So even if you’re an adult, you’re not allowed to view pornography on the Internet, from Florida, anonymously.

Some porn sites are complying with the law. Others are blocking access from Florida IP addresses. And still others are simply ignoring the whole thing.

Fortunately, the whole matter remains entirely in the hands of Floridians, thanks to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

These handy-dandy services — some free, some paid, and of varying reliability and variety — allow you to disguise where you’re from when visiting web sites.

For example, you might be at your desk in Gainesville, Florida, but access Pornhub (one of the sites blocking Florida IPs) “from” the Netherlands. Yes, I just did that. Purely for research purposes, of course.

Unsurprisingly, according to media reports, Floridians’ use of VPNs has increased by a factor of ten or more since January 1.

Are some of those Floridian VPN users minors? Of course. I’d rather children didn’t view porn, but I know they’re going to (I feel old; when I was a kid, my friends and I  didn’t have the Internet and had to raid adults’ hidden print magazine stashes). Forbidding it just makes it more attractive.

The cool thing about VPNs isn’t that they make it possible to view porn when politicians don’t want you to.

It’s that they make it possible to view ANYTHING, whether politicians want you to or not, and without those politicians even being able to know you viewed it.

Internet freedom and Internet privacy are important — which is why it’s important that HB3 fail, and fail spectacularly, and be SEEN to fail spectacularly, in its mission of making politicians our Internet babysitters.

Fortunately, it’s doing just that.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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