Springfield Butcher is our go to for steaks and big cuts like that. I had originally planned on picking it up Tuesday but they were still closed then.

I also got two other things for my birthday today:

1. The Ultra 4K BluRay of GODZILLA MINUS ONE.
2. The realization that my current BluRay player cannot play 4K movies.

I mean, not like ALL of it. Give me time.

So is Jett. Who is also younger than I somehow imagined.

of Arc.

(This is for me.)

As Shapiro said, Trump MIGHT be the thing holding back the worse thing. I worry we will find out too quickly if he is right.

Someone commented that the most powerful person in the world might well be whoever spoke to the President last. And if they are skilled in evil, and he is something of a Weekend at Bernie's president—what happens when that pretense is gone?

Now the groypers and the kleptocrats are in. This is the "move fast and break things" side of the administration, and they are much more skilled in evil. The thing about Trump's moderating power is that it's a fragile thing, and prone to manipulation.

Trump 47 has been a much different story. The adults and their restraint has gone, but much of the rake-stepping persisted, particularly in the first part of the year. Anything that has required true competence—see his record in pretty much any courtroom bar SCOTUS—has not gone well.

A lot of credit for restraining him was given to the "adults in the room" during Trump 45. And they did help to some degree, but even their presence was a signal of his not knowing how to get what he wanted.

Even with them present, what did happen was often occasioned by a lot of rake-stepping.

To quote Athey Keith in Wendell Berry's JAYBER CROW: "If the devil don't exist, how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?"

Trump often runs up on the limits of his competence.

The man is, simply put, not good—not skilled—in doing evil. This isn't to say that he hasn't done and enabled a lot, or to minimize any of it that he has and continues to do. There is still a lot of that. A lot. But he has never been particularly effective about it.

I think it's possible that he's right, but about the evil influences in power NOW that Trump himself is moderating. Not that I think he's doing that out of good will—Trump's self-moderating influence is not (has never been nor could ever be) his morality or decency. It's his general incompetence.

I got the sense he was thinking more along the lines of a rubber band theory. When power reverts back to the other side, that thing will be so much worse (and I think even he had in mind something much worse than, say, Kamala Harris or a normal D politician, but someone truly authoritarian).

In it, Shapiro made a comment that struck me as likely more true than perhaps he would be inclined to admit. He said (paraphrasing here) that the thing he feared was that Trump wasn't the big bad thing, but rather was the thing holding back the big bad thing.