San Francisco      Visiting the California Bay Area on my annual spring multi-meeting tour, unsurprisingly, the new Trump administration, its operations, excesses, and follies invariably sucked up no small amount of conversation.  Nonetheless, life goes on, even as heads shake with everyone waiting for the next shoe to fall.

Reading the tea leaves, there’s hope, even if mixing the metaphor, we may find ourselves grasping at straws.

Mike Waltz, former Congressman, and now former National Security advisor and Signal abuser for adding the editor of The Atlantic to a chat where the aggressively inept Secretary of Defense, and serial Signal encrypted phone and message service abuser, shared the launch plans for strikes in Yemen, did finally get moved out of that post, which for a minute might make all of us feel safer.  Only for a moment, though, once it becomes clear that in Trump II world a demotion doesn’t mean the doghouse, but representing our great country in the United Nations.  Woefully, yet another reminder of how much international coordination means to this administration.  Equally, worrisome is the national security post is now to be filled by former Senator Rubio along with his other jobs of administering a depleted State Department and a gutted Agency for International Development.

Better news was the federal judge’s decision that the Democratic judge who was re-elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court should remain seated and the post-election challenge by her Republican opponent should be dismissed.  For a while, North Carolina courts had first seriously considered allowing 60,000 votes to be “cured” or dismissed, and then walking back from that mistake, still allowed thousands of military and foreign residents ballots to be challenged.  Success here would have opened up systemic partisan loser appeals everywhere and forever, if voters who registered properly according to the law, voted properly according to the law, and were counted properly accounting to the law, could somehow after the fact be disqualified by partisans unhappy with the proper income.  I’m not sure the proverbial fat lady is singing on this yet, but it seems at this point the odds have shifted, and it’s a relief for all who believe in democracy.

In a total surprise, the Trump Justice Department has mirrored moves by the Biden Justice Department and asked for a suit to be dismissed that challenged the ability of women to access abortion pills by the mail.  Who saw this coming?  Few, I’ll bet, but even if it’s a Machiavellian move to take a way a solid Democratic issue that hurt the Republicans in many elections, it’s a huge relief as well.

Which is not to say that we’ve come to better days.  A story about the progress of the autocracy in Hungary over the years in The New Yorker included the snippet of an interview with a professor there.  He commented that even in that crippled democracy, essentially, if you knew the red lines and stayed away from them in what you said and wrote, living in that country, “you could still have a good life.”  To me this seemed a not too subtle implicit warning that the immense resilience and adaptability of people – one of the great human strengths — might also allow the outrageous there, and now here, to be something that too many, perhaps most, could come to accept and accommodate.

To me, that seems a horror almost too profound and chilling to contemplate.  We must resist being lulled into such acceptance, believing the hope we see in the tea leaves for the future might be a true picture of reality.