Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Bret Stephens: Gail, I feel heartsick watching the images coming out of Los Angeles. Lives, homes, businesses, landmarks, neighborhoods — charred, destroyed, vanished. I know there was bound to be a political dimension to this and a lot of blame to throw around, but this should be an occasion for unity of purpose.Gail Collins: Absolutely. The whole world is united in sorrow.However, once the fire’s finally under control and we pass through our first stages of grief and mourning, I really, really believe we need to deal with global warming and climate change — a phenomenon our incoming president says he doesn’t believe in.Bret: Yep — but it’s way too soon for political arguments and ideological score settling, whether the alleged culprit is climate change or D.E.I. For now, let Democrats and Republicans work together to get Angelenos the help they need. Later, we can fight about it all.Gail: Agree. And we’ve got a lot of other stuff to fight about with the new Congress starting up. But we need to begin with — sigh — Donald Trump. I’m kinda satisfied with the outcome of his trial here in New York.Bret: Say more.Gail: Can’t send a guy to jail when he’s just been elected president by people who have been fully informed about his conviction on 34 felony counts for, um, falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.But giving him an unconditional discharge makes him the first felon ever to serve as president. Think that’ll be his footnote in history?Bret: To me, the conclusion of this drama just reinforces the sense that the prosecution, verdict and sentence were fundamentally political.I’m not talking about the morality of Trump having an affair with a porn star while his wife was at home with a newborn and then trying to cover it up with a hush-money payment. Voters can decide for themselves what to make of that, and they have. I’m talking about the convoluted rationale for the case — a misdemeanor record-keeping offense transformed into a felony — which would almost certainly not have been brought against a less notorious defendant. Also, the wrist-slap sentence, which would not have been given to a less important defendant. Or do defendants convicted of 34 felonies ordinarily get off scot-free? Finally, the political effect of the case, which was to raise Trump’s standing with his base, not to mention helping him raise a fortune for his campaign, while furthering the perception of politicized justice in the hands of progressive prosecutors.Gail: The Trump base would be enthralled if he got arrested for anything.Bret: Which is another reason to oppose him only in the court of public opinion. Long story short: Liberals now get to call Trump a felon, while the rest of America calls him Mr. President. Any sense of what his first few weeks back in office will look like?Gail: I am very, very interested in seeing what happens in Congress, where the very narrow Republican House majority wants to extend the Trump tax cuts, many of them targeted toward the wealthy. Speaker Mike Johnson has made it clear he wants to avoid any cuts to Medicare or Social Security. Sounds pain-free, except for that old devil, the national debt. Bret, you’re a genuine fiscal conservative. How does all that strike you?Bret: Well, maintaining current tax rates instead of letting the 2017 cuts expire would support private spending and investment, create jobs, enhance productivity and reduce the burden of debt relative to gross domestic product. I’m also hoping Trump is serious this time about taking an ax to government waste — like the $100 billion a year lost to Medicare and Medicaid fraud — and dumb federal mandates, regulations and subsidies, like the billions we waste every year on ethanol and other environmentally destructive biofuels. According to one study, there were some 1,091,860 federal regulations as of January 2023.Gail: Let’s see if Elon Musk and associates actually pick the unwise ones to eliminate.Bret: Fair point. Maybe he can whittle it down to a mere 420,000 regs and see who gets the joke. And, yes, Musk’s prominence in Trumpworld does worry me. Far too great a concentration of personal wealth, political power and media influence. That, plus his newfound fondness for far-right parties in Europe. The question is whether the Trump-Musk bromance will last four years — or four months.Gail: Could go either way, right? Enormous personal wealth is one thing Trump really respects. But if we ever hit the point where the president thinks Musk is getting more attention than he is, all bets are off.Bret: Another only-in-Trumpworld subject I’ve been mulling, Gail, is his demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. While he’s at it, what about changing the name of New Mexico to Not Mexico? Or Arizona to Amerizona? Or El Paso to No Pasarán?Gail: Hey, we can ask Musk whether trying to rename a major international body of water is an efficient way to spend money.Bret: Not to mention the forthcoming renaming of Greenland, as one viral meme had it, as Mar-a-Igloo. Which reminds me: Should we buy it?Gail: Many Greenlanders would like to get out from under Denmark’s thumb, but I doubt Trump’s big hand would be an improvement.Can’t think of new territories I’d want to see us acquire. But you’re the foreign affairs guy, what do you think?Bret: Well, here goes: I’m for it. Not by force, of course. But Greenland is strategically important, minerally wealthy and economically underdeveloped — which is why the Chinese have taken an unwholesome interest in it. Also, why is there still an enormous European territory, larger than Mexico, on the North American continent?We should urge Denmark to allow Greenlanders to hold a referendum on the following: a U.S. offer to make Greenland a self-governing U.S. territory, with a status similar to that of, say, the U.S. Virgin Islands — which we also bought from Denmark, during World War I — and an offer to pay every person in Greenland $1 million over 10 years to become U.S. citizens. With around 57,000 people in Greenland, that would cost the U.S. about $5.7 billion a year. Not a steep price for an island that could someday be as important to the United States as Alaska, once known as Seward’s Folly.Gail: It’s one week until Inauguration Day, Bret. Any entertainers you’d like to propose for the — shudder — celebration?Bret: Are the Village People still around? Who would you suggest? Rudy Giuliani doing his best Frank Sinatra imitation?Gail: Ah, glad you brought up Giuliani. He’s an excellent example of why the public should always remember that just because somebody is good at doing one particular thing doesn’t mean he’s good at everything. Or even two things.Excellent crime fighter back in the 1980s, but going into politics was a disaster for Rudy — from bad mayor to crazy Trump acolyte who’s basically going to lose everything he ever earned to two Georgia election workers he wildly defamed after Trump’s election defeat.Bret: I remember Rudy a little differently: showboating U.S. attorney, terrific mayor, human train wreck.Gail: As for the entertainers, I guess it’s Kid Rock all the way.Bret: There’s a musical term for his art: barf. Different subject — any thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to overhaul Meta’s speech rules to make it less censorious and even move part of its operations from California to Texas?Gail: We have to remember that we’ve moved into an unprecedented world of human communication, where the old rules we made to regulate public speeches and the printed word won’t necessarily all work.But the idea that we’ve moved beyond fact-checking is … way farther than I’m ready to go. And as you probably know, Bret, I once wrote a book about Texas. Many wonderful people in Texas, but powerful folk who move their businesses there are not generally in search of Texan input.Bret: Well, the problem is that Zuckerberg basically admitted that left-leaning, California-based Meta employees were censoring opinions they didn’t like and that a social media platform should not be in the business of trying to tip the scales in political debates.While he was at it, Zuckerberg also told Joe Rogan that “people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse” to get them to take posts down, which is a heck of a way for a Democratic administration to protect the principles of the First Amendment. Maybe it’s time that liberals remember that if liberalism stands for anything, it’s freedom of speech for all.Gail: We can all join hands and agree that representatives of the president should not curse at publishers whose contributors criticize the administration.So much better to have civilized conversations. Right?Bret: Absolutely. Although there’s something to be said for solitude. Which reminds me: Be sure to read Elisabetta Povoledo’s captivating obituary in The Times for Mauro Morandi, known as Italy’s Robinson Crusoe. Morandi, who died this month, lived alone for 32 years in an abandoned hut on the beautiful and otherwise uninhabited island of Budelli, just north of Sardinia, until old age and local officials forced him off a few years ago.“The most important thing,” he said, “is that I have a serene relationship with time.” If only we all could.
