What to Follow Right Now: A Government of Permission Slips

Permission to threaten, permission to loot, permission to abandon, permission to call it leadership.

What we are keeping our eyes on today is the way Mary’s morning roundup is already sprouting new limbs. Her piece got the central mood exactly right: a government run on grift, vanity, coercion, and fantasy, with Hegseth sniffing around a defense fund, Trump spinning Sharpie folklore, and a war sold as strength while regular people get handed the bill. What feels freshest this afternoon is how quickly that same logic is spreading into everything around it. The war is still the headline, but it is no longer the whole story. It is becoming the atmosphere in which every other abuse now gets explained away, excused, or folded into the show.

So, the thing to follow right now is not just the cost of the war, though that cost is already landing exactly where Mary said it would. On March 31, AP reported that gas prices had climbed to a national average of $4.02 a gallon, the highest since 2022, while Trump was lashing out at allies for refusing to fall into line behind his Iran campaign. That matters not only because the war is moving from maps to grocery money, but because it shows the governing instinct beneath it all: when the chaos spreads, the answer is not competence or repair, it is more bullying, more theater, more contempt for anyone who will not carry the burden for him. Mary named that instinct this morning. The latest news just makes it more expensive and more obvious.

The domestic pieces Mary did not center fit that frame almost too neatly. The Supreme Court’s 8 to 1 ruling against Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors is not some separate culture-war sideshow. It is part of the same permissions structure. Harm gets rebranded as liberty, protections get recast as censorship, and institutions once tasked with restraint start talking like accomplices. The unresolved DHS shutdown belongs here too. TSA workers have started getting paid and airport bottlenecks have eased, but the broader shutdown continues and some workers reportedly received partial or incorrect pay. Once again the visible mess gets patched just enough to quiet the cameras, while the deeper disorder remains intact.

Then there is the vanity layer, which is where today’s news feels almost too on the nose. Florida has now cleared the way to rename Palm Beach International Airport after Trump, and Trump has unveiled the design for a gleaming Miami presidential library tower full of the usual self-mythologizing flourishes. At the same time, King Charles is still scheduled to make a state visit to the United States in late April despite criticism in Britain tied to the Iran war. That is the part I would really emphasize today. Mary wrote about a presidency that lies, threatens, pardons, and profiteers. The freshest news shows the companion truth, which is that the pageantry never pauses for the damage, the damage is part of the pageantry now. Rights get narrowed, workers get stranded, fuel prices jump, allies get berated, and somewhere in the middle of it all the golden monuments keep rising.

So, I would keep your eyes on how Mary’s themes are metastasizing beyond the roundup’s immediate subjects. Follow the war, yes, and follow the pain at the pump, because that is where the foreign-policy swagger turns into household math. But also follow the permissions multiplying around it: the courts loosening the guardrails, the shutdown revealing whose suffering counts and whose does not, the ceremonial institutions still rushing to flatter the man at the center, and the whole political culture adjusting itself so that cruelty, chaos, and self-worship can all pass for normal governance. Mary gave the moral grammar this morning. Today’s fresh news shows how many other institutions are already speaking it fluently.