(Roughly) Daily

The estimable Jill Lepore on her strategy for coping during the “First 100 Days”…

On the twentieth of January, the year of our Lord 2025, Donald Trump’s one hundred days began.

Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.) Wow. Thank you very, very much.

I read his second Inaugural Address early the next morning in bed, curled, bent to the glow of an iPhone in dark mode, a morning ritual that always feels like sin.

From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.

Then, dutifully, I scrolled through the Day One executive orders:

A full, complete and unconditional pardon . . . offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 . . .

. . . the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States . . .

. . . establishes the Department of Government Efficiency . . .

. . . eliminate the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” . . .

. . . directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.

The Day One executive orders included—and depended on—the President’s formal, executive declarations of not one, not two, but three national emergencies: an immigration emergency, an energy emergency, and a terrorism emergency. There was also the Donald-Trump-is-President-again emergency.

I buried my phone under my pillow and closed my eyes. Blindly, I reached over to my nightstand and groped for a book. I pulled off the stack the first of the Penguin Little Black Classics, a collection of slender paperbacks that I’d been meaning to read, each as thin and sleek as my phone, bound in black, with white type on a plain cover. Dark mode.

No. 1, Giovanni Boccaccio, “Mrs Rosie and the Priest,” is described on the back cover as “bawdy tales of pimps, cuckolds, lovers and clever women from the fourteenth-century Florentine masterpiece The Decameron.” The book opened like a flower, like a hinge, like a butterfly, like a pair of hands in blessing. I turned to the first page:

I was told some time ago about a young man from Perugia called Andreuccio, the son of a certain Pietro and a horse-dealer by trade.

My heart leapt. I had found my doomscrolling methadone. With five hundred gold florins in his bag, Andreuccio set off for Naples. And I made a vow to read one volume of the Penguin Little Black Classics each morning in bed, matins, for a hundred days. Two and a half times Lent. In case of emergency, break open a book…

And read she did– each morning, before the day’s decrees, she turned to a slim book, hoping for sense, or solace… and happily for us, she kept a journal: “A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump,” from @newyorker.com. (In the event of a paywall: an archived version.)

* “Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.” – Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

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As we pursue perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Aretha Franklin impatrted some timeless advice: she released “Think” (which she had co-written with Ted White), the first single from her upcoming album Aretha Now. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, Franklin’s seventh top 10 hit in the United States and hit number 1 on the magazine’s Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles, her sixth single to top that chart.

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