> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement

Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.

And even supposing that an administration doesn't fully trust Congress (or its ability to execute through parliamentary gridlock), there are a bunch of people in the executive branch whose whole-ass job it is to investigate this stuff, and could legitimately be directed to shift their priorities without Congressional approval. Oops, scratch that; there were a bunch of people with that job. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...

Probably because it's implausible, trivial to fake, and there's no way to conclusively prove it's real without the original tweet still being up.

Being in bed with tax preparation companies is probably the main thing, but I also vaguely recall a statement by someone years ago (perhaps Grover Norquist or Dick Armey) that filing tax returns should be kept annoying simply for the sake of keeping people angry about taxes in general.

I was sure this was wrong, but it's true: according to official state counts, Donald Trump won 49.80% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris's 48.32%. The top 5 was rounded out by Jill Stein (0.56%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0.49%), and Chase Oliver (0.42%) [1].

[1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...

(yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to federal agency data in this thread)