An Anglican priest gave a Nazi salute as well (apparently this is our thing now, my god). The church revoked his license as soon as they heard about it though.

The president caught his own top level staff by surprise calling for mass detainment of immigrants at Guantánamo Bay. That's a concentration camp, folks. We already have them at the southern border (have for years) and they're inhumane as fuck. Those typically hold people attempting to cross the border (including those seeking asylum). This escalation means rounding up people already living in the country and packing them in an external high security location. It can't get any plainer.

@SRLevine it's trying. CalExit is gathering signatures again.

the US is experiencing rapid unscheduled disassembly.

The president fired the current heads of the coast guard and TSA and all members of an aviation security committee (while leaving the committee technically still in existence) as part of a broader purge addressing "misuse of resources." We've also sworn in a new transportation secretary who promises to reduce regulations on self-driving cars and "restore confidence" in Boeing.

About an hour ago, a passenger plane landing at Ronald Regan nat'l airport (that's near Washington DC, not Washington state, for anyone confused by the headlines) collided with a military helicopter. Details still incoming.

The president wants to "clear out" remaining Palestinians from Gaza and move them to Jordan or Egypt. Pretty much everyone is angry about this.

We've made our second attempt to withdraw from the WHO. (The first one was reversed after Biden took office.) The WHO coordinates globally in instances of pandemics but also serves the public in more routine matters like establishing best practices and guidelines. And apparently air traffic control (https://time.com/7208937/us-world-health-organization-trump-withdrawal/).

I mentioned upthread that we halted a bunch of foreign aid, and some of this is also global health related: there's an immediate freeze on the distribution of HIV antiretrovirals to countries that have been receiving that form of aid (https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/01/25/g-s1-44762/pepfar-trump-hiv-foreign-aid). There are programs for other global health issues that will be similarly affected.

There is a massive push for US dominance in AI. This involves revoking and rewriting policies to favor AI across multiple sectors.

Only days after (if I have my timeline right), a Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a model trained with vastly fewer resources than US competitors and performing as well. OpenAI feels very threatened and NVIDIA stocks lost $600 billion (although they've partly recovered).

The Gulf of Mexico is to be renamed the Gulf of America (Google is apparently going to make this change immediately, at least when accessed from the US) and it sounds like some other landmarks are being renamed or un-renamed, such as Denali to Mt. McKinley.

Jumping around a bit... we've apparently expressed interest in absorbing Greenland and possibly Canada. They have not expressed interest in joining us.