Starting point

Trump has been in office less than a week and the freakouts haven't ceased. If anything, the amount of shrieking I see on social media has only gotten louder. It feels a bit like this (a bit NSFW, by the way):

I'm not crazy about using executive orders generally; I would strongly prefer the power to reside in Congress. That genie left the bottle about the time Grover Cleveland left office, however, and the only president who wasn't fond of using executive power after that time was Calvin Coolidge. So for Congress to assert its prerogatives, we'll need to see a big change in thinking. It's difficult to use muscles that have only atrophied in the past 90 years.

Meanwhile, Trump's opponents would do well to consider who is in the opposite camp, as Myron Magnet reminds us:

Commentators are right that a big portion of Trump voters were working-class Americans displaced from their jobs by Obama’s war on fossil fuels, by globalization, automation, and the shifting balance in manufacturing from the importance of the raw materials that go into products to that of the engineering expertise that designs them. These are the people Trump referred to in his Inaugural Address as “the forgotten men and women of our country.”

But that’s only part of the new president’s coalition. As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to  the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

Obama's IRS minions may have driven the Tea Party underground, but it did nothing to quell the reasons the Tea Party arose in the first place. We may have seen a counter to the Tea Party marching in the streets of our major cities over the weekend, dressed in pink hats. I'll be watching to see if the energy of the marches translates into a coherent political movement with specific goals, or if it remains virtue signaling writ large.