Update. Within 24 hours of this post going live, the governor announced his first (and so far only) concrete response to the Trump presidency: an interagency task force to assess the potentiial impacts of Trump tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Must have been a complete coincidence, right?

You might think that the deliberately shambolic start of the second Trump presidency would have been a major topic at Gov. Phil Scott’s January 30 press conference. After all, in a very short period of time Trump has issued a blizzard of executive orders, many of dubious legality and/or constitutionality, that are designed to radically recast or possibly euthanize the federal government. The one most directly pertinent to governing the state of Vermont was Trump’s since-withdrawn threat to put an immediate halt to a wide range of federal payments. (The threatened imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports would have had a profound effect on Vermont, but they hadn’t been bruited as of January 30 and have since been put on hold.)

You might think the specter of Trump would have dominated Scott’s presser, but you’d be wrong. The topic of the day was, shocker, “affordability,” especially with regard to Scott’s housing plan and his extremely modest tax reduction plan. Which, at $13.5 million, would average out to a scant $20 a year for every Vermonter.

(Of course, it wouldn’t be distributed evenly. The three elements of his plan are (1) an expansion of the Democrats’ child tax credit, (2) an end to state taxation of military pensions, and (3) an end to state taxation of Social Security benefits. The latter two, aimed largely at retirees, seems an odd way to address Vermont’s demographic challenges. Our biggest demographic shortfall is in mid-career adults, who are mainly too old to benefit from a tax credit on young children and not old enough to benefit from the other two provisions.)

Neither Scott nor his officials voluntarily addressed how Trump setting fire to the federal government might impact Vermont. None of the assembled reporters asked a single question about it until the 44-minute mark in a 47-minute presser. Almost an afterthought, then. But Scott’s response was highly informative — for what he didn’t say, more than for what he did.

Those who read my previous post will not be surprised to learn that it was Vermont Public’s Peter Hirschfeld who posed the Trump question. But it wasn’t up to his usual standards and allowed Scott to wriggle off the hook. (Having been through that rodeo before, I suspect that Hirschfeld had run through his prepared questions and then saw an opportunity to query the governor again, since his colleagues were not taking full advantage of the opportunity.) Hirschfeld’s initial question was, would Scott have adjusted his FY2026 budget based on what Trump is doing?

Which isn’t the point, really. Scott couldn’t have written a budget based on a flaming bag of unknowns. What he could have done, and what a prudent executive would have done, is to draw up contingency plans. One possibility: squirreling away as much money as possible from the current fiscal year as a buffer against potential cuts in federal funding.

But hey, don’t ask me. I’m not the governor, nor do I play one on the teevee.

Scott’s answer was about as blasé as it could have been. “I don’t believe we’d be doing anything different than we’re doing today,” he said. “We’ve heard a lot of rhetoric over the last week, we’ve heard a lot of rhetoric over the last few months, but we don’t exactly know what it’s going to mean for us until it actually happens.”

On the one hand, he’s got a point. On the other, we’re a long way past mere “rhetoric.” This blizzard of executive orders and unprecedented moves by his top officials are orders of magnitude beyond “rhetoric.” The beginning of Trump’s first term was chaotic to its very core. Trump 2.0 is moving at warp speed to pre-empt opposition and enact something that looks very much like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for killing government as we know it. You know, the plan Trump consistently, and unbelievably, denied throughout his campaign.

This is purposeful. Which makes it all the more dangerous than Trump 1.0, and potentially far more harmful to Vermont.

Scott’s conclusion? “We can’t speculate. We’ll just have to address it when it comes our way.”

Sure. That’s a plan. Wait until the meteor strikes, and then try to backfill your disaster response.

Meanwhile, the guy who might be running for governor before you know it — or shall we say he’s already nudge-nudge, wink-wink running for governor? — Treasurer Mike Pieciak is stepping into the Scott-sized breach. Pieciak has established a task force whose purpose is “getting ahead of this fast-changing [Trump] policy.” In an interview with Vermont Public, Pieciak pointed to his past experience as commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation — working for some guy named Phil Scott — when “we were proactively communicating with all the stakeholders,” which allowed the state to “better protect Vermonters.”

Sounds like the 2025 Phil Scott is taking a much more passive course than the 2017 version. Can we get a time machine?

Throughout Scott’s answer to Hirschfeld, there was not even a whiff of a hint of a suggestion of criticism aimed at the elephant in the White House. This, from the rare Republican who’s been willing to publicly endorse Trump’s Democratic opponents. Repeatedly.

So why is he so circumspect at the very moment when Trump seems more dangerous than ever — to the economy, to our social polity, to potential targets like New Americans and LGBTQ+ folk, to our democracy itself?

I don’t know, but I have an informed theory. Thanks to Republican gains in legislative elections, there are now quite a few very Trumpy people in the House and Senate minority caucuses. Until now, Scott has kept his distance from those people — including the ones in top VTGOP leadership.

He no longer has that luxury. He needs the ultraconservatives. He needs them more than they need him: They don’t have a serious hope of enacting their agenda in Vermont, so they have no need to play the Statehouse game. He may not like them, and they don’t like him, but as long as he keeps his comments guarded and neutral (“we’ve heard a lot of rhetoric” without specifying the source), they won’t publicly break with him.

As of this moment, Scott is mostly right: The worst of the Trump agenda has yet to take effect, either because of overwhelming blowback or court orders or quick deals with targeted countries. (If you’re transgender or know someone who is, your mileage may vary.) But the elephant will occupy our china shop for another four years, and sooner or later he’s going to wreak havoc. Our governor would be wise to have some contingency plans in his back pocket.