In 2025, the Trump administration had us asking: Who thinks up these things?

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David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

Way back in 1981, someone deep in the Reagan administration – it’s still not entirely clear who this innovative thinker was – came up with the creative idea of counting ketchup as a vegetable to conform to federal school-lunch requirements. It gave late-night wise-guy commentators and others a field day, especially since a case was made to include pickle relish, too. Suddenly that cafeteria hamburger perspiring on a steam table became the kale and chia seeds of the time.

The condiment controversy of almost a half century ago is nothing. The Trump administration, full of policy pathfinders for the current era, is serving up a feast of rules, regulations, and risible decisions that prompts the question of the age:

Who actually thinks up these things?

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A couple examples from the past month alone:

First, changing the nameplate of the former Biden-era assistant secretary of health, Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who led the country’s Public Health Corps, on the picture hanging in the hallway of the Department of Health and Human Services.

And then, in a decision that prompted enormous interest among those few of us who know there is a difference between Helvetica Neue and Hiragino Mincho ProN type fonts, the administration continued its War Against Woke by ruling that sans serif type was “wasteful” and represented a radical dagger at the heart of American values. The world breathed a sigh of relief when the same arm of the American government that produced the Marshall Plan issued a memo titled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper.”

There’s more. The administration apparently is not satisfied that long-standing American allies Canada and Denmark – neither of which are fond of the notion of losing territory to the United States, and both easily described as the souls of civility – are in revolt against the country that once exported the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the checks-and-balances precepts of its Constitution. Thus Team Trump is sticking to its guns in a needless controversy in the Netherlands, a country that hasn’t been a threat to the New World since the Dutch lost New York to the English in 1674 – and that until earlier this year kept the United States on a moral pedestal and, in a remarkable gesture of respect for American values and gratitude for the country’s role in liberating it from Nazi occupation and tyranny, tended dutifully and devotedly to American war dead in a lovingly maintained military cemetery that became a target of the administration’s DEI purge.

And before the country paused for its annual Christmastime break, the Trump White House unveiled the Presidential Walk of Fame, with pointed descriptions of previous chief executives. Unable to resist a dig at his predecessors, the plaque under Joe Biden called him “by far, the worst President in American history” and claimed that he was the beneficiary of “the most corrupt Election ever seen.”

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There’s also an undeclared war taking place in the Caribbean, a red-hot war under way in Europe, Americans are worrying about the price of milk, and the administration is worried about Ms. Levine’s birth name, the typeface on State Department documents, and whether a Dutch cemetery recognizes the Black military personnel who fought for freedom abroad in the Second World War even as they were denied basic freedoms at home.

Who thinks up these things?

Probably not HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though it is possible that he believes portrait plaques harbour a heretofore unknown autism threat. Probably not Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who issued a strong statement in favour of changing typefaces despite having other, presumably more pressing, duties to attend to and a multitude of international hot spots to visit. As for the cemetery contretemps, the mystery remains, though some evidence points to former American Battle Monuments Commission chairman Charles Djou for ordering the removal a commemorative panel at the American Cemetery in Margraten saluting the sacrifice of Black soldiers – who incidentally were dispatched to do much of the morbid work of grave digging there.

As for the White House plaques, press secretary Karoline Leavitt described them as “eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind.” Eloquence, like beauty and corrupt elections, is often in the eyes of the beholder. But there can be no doubt about the author of Biden plaque. It bears the unmistakable style of the current president of the United States.

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Democrats have done a lot of dumb things as well. Bill Clinton had a trim from Beverly Hills hairstylist Christophe on Air Force One that prompted weeks of controversy over whether the result was shutting down four Los Angeles International Airport runways. He didn’t delay air traffic, but the symbolism seared. Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas once charged lobbyists $10,000 to have breakfast with him, through he had the decency to say he made a “doozy” of an error.

It’s not that we in the press don’t have a lot to answer for. We were the geniuses who filled valuable newspaper real estate with speculation that Jimmy Carter was signalling something significant when he changed the part in his hair from the right side to the left. Just as sometimes a banana is just a banana, sometimes a haircut is just a haircut. And sometimes a typeface is just a typeface.

But somewhere, deep in the federal bureaucracy that Donald Trump is trying to purge, there are munchkins who think up things. So add the identity of these decision makers to the mysteries involving Jeffrey Epstein and the puzzle surrounding the 9,000 sightings of mysterious underwater objects, that Marine Technology News reported were sighted within 10 miles of American shorelines in recent years. Meanwhile, we here at The Globe are satisfied with our typeface. It’s GMtext.