“We’re so back,” one reporter whispered to another.

All of the chairs in the White House briefing room were filled, and reporters and photographers were crammed into every available nook and cranny. I was standing in the back, squeezed in between a window and a none-too-pleased Secret Service agent.

The sight was reminiscent of the COVID briefings of 2020: President Donald Trump gripping the sides of the lectern in the White House briefing room, pursing his lips as he looked out at the journalists yelling and jockeying for his attention.

And just like in 2020, Trump used a national calamity to try to score political points and denigrate his foes. Fourteen hours after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter outside Washington last night—the first crisis of the young administration, a moment to console a stunned and grieving nation—Trump repeatedly implied that the crash was the fault of his Democratic predecessors and of DEI policies.

[Read: He could have talked about anything else]

Trump offered no evidence to support his claims but repeatedly cast the blame on others, even as bodies were still being pulled from the frigid waters of the Potomac River just a few miles away.

“Because I have common sense, okay?” Trump said, when asked how he had concluded that diversity programs—programs that Trump claimed were put in place by the Biden and Obama administrations—were to blame. “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

The crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people and was the first major crash in the United States involving an airline in more than 15 years. Trump’s instinct after the tragedy was yet again to choose divisiveness. On social media, within hours of the collision, he offered not condolences but conspiracy theories: “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.” As he did so often in his first term, he was reacting to a crisis as an observer and not as the president, who has the resources of the federal government at his disposal and the responsibility of getting answers.

And then, in his briefing-room appearance today—the first of his 10-day-old second term—Trump offered a few initial notes of sympathy, and then turned almost immediately toward castigating DEI, leaving several correspondents to turn and shake their heads in disbelief.

“I put safety first,” Trump said. “Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

Trump showcased his instinct to immediately frame tragedies through his own ideological or political lens, facts be damned. And it’s a pattern: Earlier this month, he blamed the Southern California wildfires on Democratic politicians and suggested that illegal immigration was the cause of a terrorist attack in New Orleans, even though the attacker was a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

When pressed today, he snapped at reporters (“I think that’s not a very smart question—I’m surprised, coming from you”) and called on friendlier faces from conservative-leaning outlets, who tossed him softballs. He admitted that the crash was still under investigation and that the cause was not yet known. But he was quick to claim that the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered its standards under President Barack Obama (“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white’”) and that his administration was restoring them, despite the hiring and spending freezes his team has aimed to put in place.

But summarizing Trump’s remarks on air-traffic controllers doesn’t quite capture the experience of sitting through them:

Can you imagine, these are people that are, I mean, actually, their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have. Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened, because of the stress when you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it.

Seated to the right of Trump was a phalanx of supportive aides—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—who would all get brief turns at the microphone to weigh in on the tragedy and praise Trump’s leadership.

Trump’s eyes darted around the room. His hand, with its index figure outstretched, would move in little circles as he considered which reporter to call on. Then it would steady, and he would point deliberately, selecting one person in a sea of outstretched hands, gesturing that he or she was being granted the privilege of asking the president the next question.

Similarly freewheeling question-and-answer sessions became the hallmark of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with Trump performing for the cameras—often for more than an hour at a time—and exuding the bravado of someone who believed that he alone could steer the nation through the greatest public-health crisis in a century. Trump couldn’t get enough of those press conferences. He pushed to hold them as close to the 6 p.m. evening news as possible to increase viewership; he used them to take swipes at his political opponents, including then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who tended to hold his own COVID briefings earlier in the day.

But instead of being reassuring, fact-based public-service announcements, the briefings were defined by falsehoods, politicization, and outlandish recommendations to inject disinfectant. Those nightly battles, Trump’s closest aides believe, helped seal his defeat in the 2020 election. He came across as incompetent, desperate, eager to shift the blame. He ignored suggestions to turn the briefings over to then–Vice President Mike Pence, the head of his COVID task force, or to a team of doctors and scientists. He kept going to the podium day after day. By the time he finally abandoned the briefings, he trailed Joe Biden by six points in the polls.

Both Hegseth, a former Fox News host, and Duffy, once a reality-TV star, have significant experience in front of the cameras. But a White House official told me that there was never a question that Trump himself would brief the press after the crash.

And when the news conference ended after 36 minutes, the reporters, some with dazed expressions, filed out of the briefing room. As I navigated the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a fellow journalist’s phone and the text message he had just sent:

“WTF.”

Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.

The great federal-grant freeze of 2025 is over, but don’t expect it to be gone for good.

The Office of Management and Budget, which issued a memo freezing grants on Monday, has revoked it, The Washington Post first reported. The whole thing went so fast that many people may have never had a chance to sort out what was happening. Yesterday, amid widespread confusion about what the order did or didn’t do, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was unable to answer specific questions about it. State and local officials of both parties were bewildered, and yesterday afternoon, a federal judge blocked the order. Today, OMB folded—at least for now. The White House says that it has withdrawn the grant freeze in the memo, but not the executive orders mentioned in it, some of which assert a freeze on spending. Part of the goal appears to be to short-circuit court proceedings that might produce an unfavorable ruling.

This episode resembles the incompetent fumbling of the first Trump administration, especially its earliest days. But this was no fluke and no ad hoc move. It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch, and this week’s drama is better understood as a battle over priorities within the Republican Party than as unmanaged chaos.

The abortive grant freeze is an example of the second Trump administration’s strategy to drastically deploy executive power as part of a bigger, and somewhat paradoxical, gambit to shrink the federal government as a whole. “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” the current OMB head, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration convened by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank. The strategy is to seize power and dare both Congress and the courts to stop it. This tactic is unpredictable, as this week’s misadventures show, but it’s also relatively low-risk. The ideologues inside the administration want to see what they can get away with, and if it doesn’t work, so be it.

[Read: ‘It’s an illegal executive order. And it’s stealing.’]

But the administration has other staffers who are more responsive to politics. President Donald Trump, for example, has relatively weak ideological commitments. The court injunction yesterday was a nuisance, but what really seems to have done in the freeze was the backlash—not so much from the public, but from state and local officials, including many Republicans, who were outraged about the withdrawal of funds and lack of communication. The political team won this round over the ideologues, but there will be more.

At a mechanical level, the fight over the freeze was a battle over impoundment, the power of the executive branch to not spend money appropriated by Congress. Federal law on this is as settled as any: A law passed in 1974 prevents impoundment, except in cases where the president seeks permission from Congress. But Trump and some of his aides argue that that law is unconstitutional.

In a letter to Congress in the last days of the first Trump administration, Vought (then the head of OMB) wrote that the law “is unworkable in practice and should be significantly reformed or repealed.” In September, the attorney Mark Paoletta co-wrote a report for Vought’s nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, arguing that the power of impoundment was constitutional; Trump has now appointed Paoletta the general counsel of OMB, a position he also held in Trump’s first administration. And as my colleague Russell Berman reported yesterday, Vought refused to commit to abiding by the Impoundment Control Act during his confirmation hearings. And Vought and his allies had a plan for how to knock it down.

“President Trump will take action to challenge the constitutionality of limits placed on the Impoundment Power,” the Trump presidential campaign said—in other words, he planned to disobey the law, litigate any challenges, and hope to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court. It’s worked in the past.

This all goes to show that sometimes the chaos has a strategy behind it. Things just didn’t shake out the way Vought’s crew had hoped this time.

One curiosity is why the administration wouldn’t just try to go through Congress to rescind funding passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. After all, Republicans now control both the House and Senate. The White House might have a few reasons for wanting to do it on its own. First, legislation is slow, and Trump prefers to show results fast. Second, Republican margins are narrow, and although GOP elected officials and voters favor cuts in the abstract, they don’t always favor cuts to particular things that voters like, so the White House might struggle to get even the requisite simple majority to rescind some of the spending it tried to freeze this week. Third, impoundment per se is not the only goal—it’s also a means to the ideological end of seizing power for the executive branch.

In Project 2025, Vought laments that Congress has yielded too much power to the presidency. “The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people. This challenge is created and exacerbated by factors like Congress’s decades-long tendency to delegate its lawmaking power to agency bureaucracies,” he wrote. Paradoxically, his plan for limiting the executive branch is to give it more muscle.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

As if to prove Vought’s point about congressional deference, Speaker Mike Johnson has backed the White House thus far. Just a decade ago, conservatives were furious that then-President Barack Obama was using executive orders to do things that congressional Democrats had failed or declined to do. Now the use of much more radical executive orders is the first recourse of the Republican president.

Because this effort is core to the ideological agenda of Project 2025 principals such as Vought, the revocation of this executive order likely won’t be the last effort we see along these lines. And having to back down for political reasons tends to make the internal battles only fiercer. Trump’s attempts to decimate the civil service and clear out career bureaucrats are well known, but Project 2025’s authors reserved special animus for those whom they expected to be on their side during the first Trump administration.

“I had a front-row seat on many of these issues and importantly [saw] how bad thinking would end up preventing what we were trying to accomplish, from less-than-vigorous political appointees who refused to occupy the moral high ground, particularly in the first two years of the president's administration,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. He has no intention of letting that happen again.

The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

At issue in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, is whether Tennessee’s ban on medical treatments for gender dysphoria—the medical diagnosis for someone who believes their gender does not match their biological sex—unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex. The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

[Read: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

Crucially, the law bans treatments—such as hormones and puberty blockers—only for the purpose of a minor’s gender transition; they remain legal to prescribe for any other reason. The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. The Biden administration’s position was that this kind of care can be regulated—then–Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar cited as a legitimate example a West Virginia law that requires two physicians to sign off—but that the regulation cannot be discriminatory. Not all measures that distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional—see, for instance, sex-specific bathrooms—but they are subject to greater legal scrutiny; Tennessee is denying that it is engaging in discrimination, and thus not subject to that level of scrutiny.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. A recent JAMA Pediatrics study found that fewer than 0.1 percent of young people with private insurance received hormone treatments or puberty blockers during a five-year period—a limited number of patients overall, but one for whom the stakes are very high. The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

Much depends on the nature of the justices’ ultimate decision and how far-reaching it is. The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.” As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

“One of the things that’s worth emphasizing is that for the people who brought the case, the movement that’s behind this litigation, there have long been anxieties about sex-discrimination jurisprudence, period,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, told me. “So if that’s the agenda that’s driving the litigation, and the Court is embracing the arguments behind that agenda, you have to wonder if this isn’t the end of the road.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

[Read: Anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination]

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests—especially when, as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the population at risk is so few as to be politically powerless.

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them. The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination. Trump has shut down the White House’s Spanish-language website, ended refugee- and humanitarian-parole programs, and unconstitutionally attempted to nullify birthright citizenship.   

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Even before Trump took office, Republican-controlled states passed laws that curtail women’s rights to free speech, privacy, and movement on the grounds that those restrictions are necessary to ban abortion—something that, as Justice Samuel Alito took pains to reiterate during oral argument in Skrmetti, neither he nor his colleagues in the conservative movement regard as sex-based discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss. One transgender congressional representative was enough for Republicans to demand that all of the Capitol’s bathrooms be restricted by “biological sex.” The tiny percentage of trans children receiving care is justification to ban them from accessing treatment they seek. A defense-funding bill passed with limited Democratic support and signed by President Joe Biden will ban gender-affirming care for the children of service members—for those with trans children, their reward for serving their country is that their children will be discriminated against. If they are stationed in states like Texas, which has no less than 15 military installations, they will have few options, if any, for care outside the military system.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

This is shameless bullying, but then, the president is himself a bully of the highest order, and presidents are moral exemplars, for better and worse. It is not necessary for one to approve of gender-affirming care in order to respect people’s right to make their own decisions about what medical care is best for them and their families, or to oppose this kind of outright, ideologically motivated state persecution.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”

Buried within one of the dozens of executive orders that President Donald Trump issued in his first days in office is a section titled “Terminating the Green New Deal.” As presidential directives go, this one initially seemed like a joke. The Green New Deal exists mostly in the dreams of climate activists; it has never been fully enacted into law.

The next line of Trump’s order, however, made clear he is quite serious: “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” The president is apparently using “the Green New Deal” as a shorthand for any federal spending on climate change. But the two laws he targets address much more than that: The $900 billion IRA not only funds clean-energy programs but also lowers prescription-drug prices, while the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law represents the biggest investment in roads, bridges, airports, and public transportation in decades. And the government has spent only a portion of each.

In one sentence, Trump appears to have cut off hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that Congress has already approved, torching Joe Biden’s two most significant legislative accomplishments. The order stunned even some Republicans, many of whom supported the infrastructure law and have taken credit for its investments.

And Trump didn’t stop there. Yesterday, the White House ordered a pause on all federal grants and loans—a move that could put on hold an additional tens of billions of dollars already approved by Congress, touching many corners of American life. Democrats and government watchdogs see the directives as an opening salvo in a fight over the separation of powers, launched by a president bent on defying Congress’s will. “It’s an illegal executive order, and it’s stealing,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me, referring to the order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law.

Withholding money approved by Congress “undermines the entire architecture of the Constitution,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told me. “It essentially makes the president into a king.” Last night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans “blatantly disobeys the law.”

The Constitution gives Congress the so-called power of the purse—that is, the House and the Senate decide how much money the government spends and where it goes. Since 1974, a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act has prohibited the executive branch from spending less than the amount of money that Congress appropriates for a given program or purpose. During Trump’s first term, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated that law by holding up aid to Ukraine—a move that became central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

Trump has argued that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, and so has his nominee for budget director, Russell Vought, who had the same job at the end of the president’s first term. Vought also helped write Project 2025, the conservative-governing blueprint that attracted so many attacks from Democrats that Trump disavowed it during the campaign.

In his Senate confirmation hearings this month, Vought repeatedly refused to commit to abiding by the impoundment act even as he acknowledged that it is “the law of the land.” “For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could do it for less,” he told senators at his first hearing. During his second appearance, when Van Hollen asked him whether he would comply with the law, Vought did not answer directly. “Senator, the president ran against the Impoundment Control Act,” he replied. His defiance astonished Democrats. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” Van Hollen told me.

The pause on funds for the Biden-signed laws did not draw as much attention as other moves Trump made on his first day back in the White House, especially his blanket pardons for January 6 defendants. Nor was it the only one that appeared to test the limits of his authority. A separate executive order froze nearly all foreign aid for 90 days, while others targeted birthright citizenship and civil-service protections for federal employees.

But the order cutting off spending for the IRA and the infrastructure law could have far-reaching implications. State and municipal governments in both Democratic and Republican jurisdictions worry that they may not be able to use investments and grants that the federal government promised them. “It’s creating chaos,” DeLauro said. “I honestly don’t think the people who are dealing with this know what they are doing.” She listed a range of popular and economically significant programs that appear to be on pause, including assistance for home-energy bills and money to replace lead pipes that contaminate drinking water.

“It was alarming,” Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told me. Bacon, a Republican who narrowly won reelection in a district Trump lost, called the White House after reading the text of last week’s executive order to seek assurance that money he’d secured for Nebraska—including $73 million to upgrade Omaha’s airport—wouldn’t be stopped.

The immediate confusion became so intense that a day after Trump signed the order, the White House issued a memo seeking to clarify its scope that seemed to slightly narrow its impact and open the door for some spending to continue. Bacon told me that he was assured the directive applied mostly to Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate, which Trump railed against on the campaign trail and is part of the IRA. DeLauro, however, said the memo offered little clarity: “Everything is at risk.”

Yesterday’s memo extending the funding pause to all federal grant and loan programs set off another frenzy. The directive sought to exempt Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as other direct aid to individuals. But according to a copy of the memo published by The Washington Post, it explicitly targets “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Whether the funding pause constitutes an illegal impoundment is unclear. The executive branch does have some latitude in how it spends money. And yesterday’s memo instructs federal agencies to halt funding only “to the extent permissible under applicable law.” Describing last week’s order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law, Vought told senators that it was merely a “programmatic delay,” a term that arguably falls within what federal departments are allowed to do.

More broadly, executive orders are frequently less consequential than they appear, Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and occasional Atlantic contributor, told me about last week’s directive. “It’s one thing to try to get a really nice headline for cutting back on government spending. It’s another thing altogether to decline to spend money that people are expecting you to spend,” Bagley said. “I would not be surprised if rhetoric does not match reality.”

To Charlie Ellsworth, a senior adviser with the nonprofit watchdog Congressional Integrity Project, Trump’s executive order on clean energy unmistakably oversteps the law. “They could have done this legally, but they didn’t,” Ellsworth, a former Schumer aide, told me. A new administration, for example, could have justified a pause in spending to ensure that a program was being funded in accordance with the law. But the order instead instructs agencies to ensure that the spending aligns with new policies set by the Trump administration. Ellsworth said that the order is “self-evidently” illegal.

The fight is almost certain to wind up in the courts, which have repeatedly ruled against the president’s ability to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. Indeed, Vought’s Senate testimony seemed to invite a legal challenge that could lead the Supreme Court, now with a 6–3 conservative majority and three Trump-appointed justices, to reconsider the question. “That seems to be their game plan,” Ellsworth said. “They want to get sued. They want to go to the Supreme Court.”

Van Hollen told me that he believes the Court would rule against Trump but that preferably the dispute won’t get that far. “You would hope that Republicans in Congress recognize they have an institutional interest in protecting Article I [of the Constitution] and the power of the purse, which is clearly congressional,” Van Hollen said.

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Beyond the question of legality, Van Hollen warned that Trump’s orders would jeopardize virtually all negotiations over spending on Capitol Hill, because Democrats would not be able to trust the administration to keep its end of any agreement. Although Republicans have majorities in both the House and the Senate, they will need to strike deals with Democrats to avert government shutdowns and a catastrophic default on U.S. debt.

There were early signs of GOP pushback on last week’s spending freeze, but it fell well short of a revolt. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee, said at one of Vought’s hearings that he disagreed with the administration’s view on spending and impoundments. “I think if we appropriate something for a cause, that’s where it’s supposed to go, and that will still be my position,” Paul said. And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chair of the Budget Committee, said at a second Vought hearing that he, too, had “concerns” about impoundment. But neither of them planned to stand in the way of the nominee who has argued for the president to wrest control of spending from Congress. “When you win, you get to pick people,” Graham told Vought. “And I’m glad he picked you.”

On the Republican side, the fight might be left to lawmakers such as Bacon, who has some protection from presidential retribution because he represents a purple district where voters might reward him for standing up to Trump. The GOP, he said, should go after policies it opposes through legislation, not executive order. “You just can’t determine what laws you want to execute and what you don’t,” Bacon said of Trump. Executive orders, he added, “have gotten out of hand” from presidents in both parties. “You can’t change the law,” Bacon said. “I think Republicans should stay true to that notion.”

The staff was still setting up dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s outdoor patio on a balmy early-January evening when Donald Trump sat down. He was surrounded by several top advisers who would soon join him in the West Wing and who wanted to get his input before his attention shifted to his wealthy guests and Palm Beach club members.

Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, led the conversation, listing some of the dozens of executive orders that had been teed up for Trump’s signature once he reclaimed the presidency. She wanted to talk about sequencing, according to a Trump adviser present at the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. How would he like to stagger the orders over the first few weeks back in office?

“No,” Trump replied, this person told me. “I want to sign as many as possible as soon as we show up.”

“Day one,” he said.

Trump has followed through on the promise of an onslaught, unleashing in his first week more than two dozen executive orders, holding a nearly hour-long news conference and other question-and-answer-filled public appearances, and posting several times a day on social media. Some of this, of course, is in Trump’s nature. He is an inveterate showman whose instincts are to seek attention and dominate the discussion.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

But this time around, Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared “favorite” president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.

Trump’s actions in his first week have been a mix of signal and noise, of distraction and seriousness. He has taken some defeats. But Trump has succeeded, at least, in creating a stark contrast with the quiet of his predecessor, and in (yet again) shifting the nation’s political discourse back toward him. And compared with 2017, the resistance has been far more muted. The Democrats, without an obvious head of the party and still digging out from November’s election disappointment, have yet to make a focused counterargument to Trump, instead getting largely drowned out in the national discourse.

“This is four years in the making. It’s days of thunder. The scale and the depth of this has blown the Democrats out. It’s blown out the media,” Steve Bannon, a former senior White House aide who still informally advises Trump, told me. “He vowed to start fast and now knows what he’s doing. This is a totally different guy than in 2017.”

When Trump left office in disgrace after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, former administration officials, conservative lawyers, and think-tank researchers began drafting orders and legislation—most famously, the Heritage Foundation initiative known as Project 2025—that could act as the foundation of a Trump revival. And after he won, his inner circle made clear that this time the administration would be staffed with true loyalists.

Wiles, who also co-chaired Trump’s campaign, told a closed-door gathering of Republican donors in Las Vegas in the early days of the transition that the president’s first moves would be to reinstate some executive orders from his first term that President Joe Biden had revoked, according one of the Trump advisers and another person familiar with the meeting. Wiles told the private gathering, for a group called the Rockbridge Network, that Trump would begin by withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization. Trump, indeed, signed those orders on his first day back in office, but they were only two of the directives to which he affixed his signature—with a giant Sharpie—in ceremonies held at the Capitol; inside a sports arena in Washington, D.C.; and in the Oval Office during his inauguration festivities and in the days that followed.

His executive orders so far have covered immigration, trade, demographic diversity, civil rights, and the hiring of federal workers. Trump ordered DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs in the federal government to be eliminated. He curtailed the Department of Justice’s civil-rights investigations. Federal health agencies were ordered to halt public communications. And he moved to expand presidential power by eliminating protections for federal workers—so he could more easily staff agencies with supporters—and by refusing, without citing any legal authority, to uphold the U.S. ban on TikTok despite a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the ban’s favor.

“The EOs are so much better-executed now,” Bannon told me. “Back in 2017, we were writing things on the back of envelopes. It was like a playground game, shirts and skins. Now they have good people working, real lawyers.”

Some of Trump’s moves have been symbolic, such as one order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and another to insist that, even in national times of mourning, flags be flown at full staff on Inauguration Day. Others ordered government reviews—to examine China’s compliance with trade deals, for example, or the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs—but might not have real heft. If it was hard to tell the difference between what was real and what was for show, that was by design, the two advisers told me—to make it difficult for Trump’s opponents to focus their outrage.

His aides debated for weeks about how to enact his campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 rioters, whom the incoming president had declared “hostages.” Days before Trump took office, many advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, expected that pardons would be issued for many of the offenders but not, at least immediately, for those convicted of violent crimes, including assaulting police officers. But Trump overruled them, issuing a blanket pardon, and he included commutations for the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, each of whom had been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The two Trump advisers said that Trump thought leaving anyone out would invalidate the underpinning of the Capitol riot—his insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump also decided that any blowback would be manageable.

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

Not everything has worked out for Trump in his first week. Even some staunch Trump allies recoiled from the pardons for violent January 6 offenders; Senator Lindsey Graham called them “a mistake” on Meet the Press. Perhaps most notable, Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship generated a wave of legal action and was blocked by a federal judge. On his first day in office, Trump took on the Fourteenth Amendment by issuing a directive to federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country illegally or under temporary visas. The U.S. government has long interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that those born on American soil are citizens at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The U.S. district court judge who blocked the order, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and told a Trump administration attorney, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order.”

Trump has also struggled to achieve his goal of fast-tracking Cabinet confirmations in the early days of his administration. His choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, became the first Pentagon nominee to require the tie-breaking vote of the vice president to be confirmed. And Trump’s team is even more concerned about his pick for director of national intelligence, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard. The president’s aides are not certain that she has the needed support, and Trump himself has expressed some doubt that she’ll be confirmed, the two Trump advisers told me.

Despite these stumbles, the White House has reveled in Trump’s bombastic, over-the-top style, believing that his message is breaking through. Immigration officers have conducted raids in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; and other cities. A dozen Guatemalan men in shackles were boarded onto a military aircraft in El Paso, Texas, for the deportation flight to their native country, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia in a tiff, now seemingly resolved, over deportation flights. His advisers have also aimed to keep the media off-balance. The White House press office has not sent out a daily schedule to reporters, and has given little notice for Trump’s events. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has yet to hold a formal briefing (though the first is tentatively slated for later today).

The speed and volume of Trump’s orders so far seem to be scrambling the left. Millions of protesters marched in cities across the nation on January 21, 2017. Democratic civic groups exploded in popularity, liberals organized voter-registration drives, and cable-TV ratings and newspaper subscriptions soared. Late-night comics made Trump their top punch line. Trump’s hastily written travel ban on Muslim-majority countries went into effect seven days into his term in 2017, sending lawyers and even ordinary citizens sprinting to airports to assist those who were suddenly subject to detainment. That moment, in many ways, was the early high-water mark of the resistance and set a template for the Democrats’ defiance going forward.

Yesterday marked the first week of Trump’s second term. No large-scale protests have taken place. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued during last week’s caucus meeting that Democrats cannot chase every outrage, because the Trump administration will “flood the zone” with maddening changes, one person in the room told me. In a Saturday Night Live sketch this past weekend, the show’s Trump character shut down a performance based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which became a liberal totem a decade ago. The mood among Democrats, at least in some quarters, feels more like resignation than resistance.

So far, the action on the left has been centered more in the courtrooms than in the streets. Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me that the organization has filed lawsuits to contest a variety of Trump’s immigration orders and has worked to train volunteers in dozens of states to help local officials in responding to the administration’s plans.

“We’re in a different moment. People are not as surprised as the first time. But I would not mistake that for a lack of willingness to fight,” Schifeling said. “It seems like this first week is one giant test balloon—seeing what will stick, seeing what they can get away with. It’s incumbent on all of us to stay calm and firmly push back on them. Don’t give them an inch.”

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as White House communications director for Barack Obama and worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s campaigns, told me that Democrats “can’t stay demoralized” and must recognize that Trump proposed “an agenda that people bought into”—that even gave him a popular-vote victory.

“Now [we need] to stay most focused on those issues—like prices—which he is the most vulnerable on,” Palmieri said. Inflation was a core campaign issue, and Trump himself noted during the transition that he “won on groceries,” telling Meet the Press in December, “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

“It’s a tangible thing, and he needs to deliver,” Palmieri said.

That hasn’t started happening yet. For all the shock and awe of Trump’s first week, none of his initial actions directly took on inflation. But nor are Democrats making Trump look particularly vulnerable.

Joe Biden has now left office, but the fight over the meaning of his Middle East policies is only just beginning.

Biden’s defenders argue that he left the incoming Trump administration with the strongest American position in the region in decades—and that his decision to back Israel to the hilt following the Hamas attacks was hard but ultimately strategically correct. Biden’s detractors within the Democratic Party argue that he caused irreparable harm to America’s interests and undermined international norms by what they see as his unquestioning support for Israel regardless of a steadily mounting civilian death toll.

Both sides’ arguments have their merits—and which of them ends up winning the debate matters, because the Trump administration and administrations to come will set their policies based in some part on how Biden’s foreign policy is remembered.

Undeniably, the Trump administration inherits a region that looks dramatically different—in a way that favors U.S. interests—from the one that Donald Trump left in 2021. America’s principal adversaries in the region—Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Hamas—are all in retreat.

Iran in particular has suffered humiliating losses over the past six months, mainly but not exclusively at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces. For more than four decades, Iran had worked to construct a “Shia crescent” of aligned forces that stretched from its territory through Iraq and into Lebanon to squeeze Israel and its majority Sunni Muslim neighbors.

This would-be Iranian empire has collapsed. The regime of the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, and his father before him, is gone after half a century in power. Israel has eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership and has otherwise battered the group beyond recognition. Aides to President Biden swept into Lebanon while bombs were still falling to negotiate a cease-fire and shepherd a political process. In a rare diplomatic triumph for the administration, those efforts helped Lebanon usher in a new president and prime minister, both of whom Hezbollah would surely have blocked were that group still powerful enough to do so. Biden’s aides also deserve credit for working closely with Trump’s team to win a cease-fire in Gaza during the administration’s waning days.

Iran’s regional power has long rested on three pillars: support to militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah; conventional missiles and other weapons; and an incipient nuclear program. Other than Yemen’s Houthis, Iran’s proxies have been humbled. So, too, has its conventional military posture, as Israel and its partners, including the United States, swatted Iran’s missiles aside not once but twice in 2024. Only Iran’s nuclear program remains (more on that in a bit).

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

But Iran isn’t the only U.S. rival on the retreat in the Middle East. Russia, bled dry by the war in Ukraine and unwilling (and likely unable) to intervene again on Assad’s behalf, finds its treasured warm-water port in Syria now at risk, because the new government in Damascus is anxious to expel foreign militaries from its territory.

Some of Biden’s aides have been telling their colleagues and journalists that the position in which they are leaving the region vindicates the president’s decision—backed by his closest aides but disputed by many other advisers—to support Israel to the fullest extent since the horrific October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. Sources in the administration have told me that, as they see it, no U.S. president will have inherited such favorable terrain in the globally strategic region since Bill Clinton came into office in 1993.

These claims infuriate the president’s many critics in the Democratic Party. They argue that Biden and his team, through their policies in the Middle East, have done incalculable damage to America and its image across the globe, and that any strategic gains will ultimately be proved ephemeral as Hamas and Hezbollah rearm and reassert themselves in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. Pointing to tens of thousands of dead Palestinian and Lebanese civilians—and the use of American weapons in killing them—they claim that Biden undermined international norms to a greater extent than Trump did in his first term. These critics are largely unpersuaded by and impatient with American and Israeli arguments that Hamas alone necessitated this level of carnage by using human shields, or that a high civilian death toll was inevitable in densely urban terrain. The Department of State under Antony Blinken, they complain, had no evident problem assessing war crimes in other jurisdictions yet never seemed to have enough evidence to do so in the Palestinian territories.

Some of Biden’s Democratic critics are particularly despondent that Trump—never a huge fan of Israel’s wars, which don’t play very well on television—was able to seize the mantle of peacemaker, forcefully directing Israel to arrive at a cease-fire agreement before even taking office. Many Americans have embraced isolationism after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some progressives worry that the Democratic Party anachronistically remains “the party of war.” Other critics—and I include myself here—argue that largely ceding all major questions of policy and strategy to Israel in 2023 and 2024 was an unforgivable choice for the world’s only superpower to have made.

The Biden administration will not be remembered for injecting much fresh thinking into American foreign policy. Almost all of Biden’s senior aides were also senior aides to President Barack Obama, and many of the most senior stayed the full four years rather than making room for younger talents. Whether the next Democratic administration similarly staffs itself with alumni from the Biden administration will largely depend on which assessment of the president’s policies prevails within the party.

My biggest worry about the next four years is that a weakened Iran will seek solace and protection in the acquisition of nuclear weapons. A new nuclear era in the Middle East could erase many of the past year’s strategic gains. The Trump administration can try to degrade or slow Iran’s nuclear development through military action, but the only way to stave it off altogether is through a process of diplomatic engagement, similar to the much-hated Iran deal of 2015. Trump, ever the pragmatist, might confound his more hawkish aides by reaching out to Iran in its moment of weakness and his moment of strength. He would be wise to do so.

*Sources: Samuel Corum/Getty; Ilia Yefimovich / picture alliance / Getty; Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency / Getty.

For President Donald Trump, inheriting a relatively quiet and orderly southern border with Mexico is a political inconvenience. During his campaign, he painted an apocalyptic picture of migrants swarming the frontier, and he returned to the White House organized and ready for border wars, even as U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer and fewer illegal crossings. Shortly after taking the presidential oath Monday, Trump declared a national-security emergency for the border, ordered the military to make plans to “secure” it, and signed a constitutionally questionable executive order restricting birthright citizenship.

Much more telling and immediately consequential, though, was the new administration’s decision to shut down the border agency’s app, CBP One, which had allowed asylum seekers who had not yet crossed into U.S. territory to make appointments at legal ports of entry. Migrants who were waiting in Mexico and expecting to meet with CBP screening officers this week learned that “existing appointments have been canceled.”

Far from preventing chaos, though, killing CBP One could produce more. Then again, Trump’s political interest lies in exploiting the border, not effectively managing it.

This week, social-media platforms were flooded with pictures of crying asylum seekers who had appointments scheduled after Trump’s oath and realized they were out of luck. Those pictures may gratify MAGA diehards, and make some in the Trump coalition think “cry harder.” But migrants don’t simply disappear by wishing them away. The conditions that brought them to the U.S. border didn’t miraculously get less pressing with Trump’s presidency. And people who cannot seek asylum legally in the United States may instead pursue unlawful ways to enter the country.

[Read: Biden saw what was wrong with Democrats’ immigration policy]

The president and his supporters would have the public believe that CBP One was an “online concierge service for illegals,” as Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, recently described it. “They made an application to facilitate illegal immigration,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared last week. In fact, CBP One embodied the kind of imperfect but pragmatic compromise that’s essential in immigration policy. The app was introduced under the Trump administration in 2020 to manage cargo-truck crossings at the border. The Biden administration expanded CBP One in 2023, creating a process by which a limited number of migrants could lawfully apply for asylum—which, under federal law, people fleeing persecution in their home countries are allowed to do—while also imposing considerable restrictions on that opportunity.

Previously, people entering the country could assert their intention to seek asylum after presenting themselves to a U.S. official anywhere along the border; they would then typically be paroled into the country while awaiting a hearing on their application, and they could apply for a special permit to work lawfully. Eventually, President Joe Biden concluded, albeit amid intense political pressure, that the asylum system was being overused and that an influx of applicants was swamping the government’s ability to administer it.

After CBP One was established, asylum seekers needed to present themselves at a port of entry (if they could get there) at a specified time (if they could get one of 1,450 appointments available each day). The administration generally declined to hear asylum claims made by any other means. Even as the system created a clear process for seeking asylum—one that, according to the Associated Press, facilitated the entry of nearly a million migrants—it was intentionally designed to curb asylum access and has been much maligned by progressives and immigration advocates for that reason. Indeed, immigrant-rights advocates sued the Biden administration because they viewed the app process as exclusionary to the point of violating federal law.

[Read: How Democrats lost their way on immigration]

The recent decline in illegal crossings—the 46,600 illegal crossings in November represented the lowest number in more than four years—is happening partly because Mexico and other countries throughout Latin America are clamping down on migration via their territory. But it’s also because CBP One had helped to end a free-for-all and establish a well-organized line.

Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump was not obviously more effective than other recent presidents in controlling migration flows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lowest number of illegal crossings during his first administration occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In place of CBP One, the new administration has asserted that it will reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which many asylum applicants would have to stay south of the border while their cases are being adjudicated. During Trump’s first term, about 70,000 asylum seekers waited in Mexico for an immigration hearing, and unlawful border crossings were higher than during the Obama administration; the number of illegal crossings in the final months of Trump’s first administration were higher than in the final months of Biden’s.

Trump’s recent moves have unsettled the legal process. This week, immigration-rights groups that have sued the government over CBP One sought an emergency hearing to determine the new administration’s impact on asylum efforts. They had contacted government lawyers to ask about the effect of Trump’s announcements, but those lawyers, according to the plaintiffs’ legal filings, “said they could not provide their position” yet.

[Read: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’]

The value to Trump of ending CBP One appears to be mostly political. The current situation at the border neither accords with his base’s expectations nor justifies the kind of far-reaching emergency measures that the new president and his allies are intent on pursuing. The asylum process has been thrown back into confusion, and the abolition of legal pathways to asylum increases the incentives for illegal crossings. Ending CBP One conveniently helps lay the groundwork for more aggressive policies. The voters who sent Trump back to the White House may have been appalled by past chaos. For Trump’s anti-immigration offensive, order is a bigger problem.

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier. The culprit is not LED technology per se, but the bafflingly unhelpful way in which LED bulbs are labeled.

Walk into a well-stocked hardware store, and you will find two main types of bulbs to choose from: “soft white” and “daylight.” (Let’s ignore the existence of Wi-Fi-enabled smart bulbs, which are a solution in search of a problem.) Soft white sounds like it will be the whiter of the two, when in fact it is the more golden option. Daylight sounds like it should be warm and natural; it is instead cold and ugly. The confusing nomenclature has led an untold number of people astray, condemning them to harsh lighting that makes everything in a home, including its residents, less attractive.

[Read: The shopping method that isn’t going anywhere]

For about 99 percent of human history, all artificial light was incandescent, meaning the by-product of heating something to the point that it emits visible radiation. First came fire; then oil lamps, candles, and gaslight; and, finally, Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb, which operates by heating a filament until it glows. The light produced by an incandescent bulb has a yellow-orange color to it, which we accordingly describe as “warm.” In John Updike’s 1960 novel, Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom looks through his neighbors’ windows at dusk and sees, past the pale glow of their black-and-white televisions, “the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves.”

Incandescent lighting, however, is inefficient: It literally generates more heat than light. This is why budget-conscious institutional settings have long tended to use fluorescent light, which looks awful but uses much less energy. And it is why Congress passed legislation in 2007 mandating the phaseout of incandescent bulbs in favor of LEDs, which use even less. (Donald Trump rolled back that mandate, and then Joe Biden unrolled it; in his second term, Trump is all but assured to un-unroll it.) An LED light works under a wholly different principle from an incandescent one. Instead of heating a filament to the point where light is produced as a by-product, LEDs send electricity through a semiconductor in a way that causes energy to be released as visible photons.

“The first generation of LED lights were just heinous,” Bevil Conway, an artist and a neuroscientist who specializes in color perception, told me. The bulbs emitted a harsh blue-white light by default, creating a terrible first impression for the technology. But the industry has figured out how to “tune” LEDs to generate essentially any color or shade, including something very close to the warm yellow-white of a classic bulb. LEDs still have their share of issues—as I write this, the light in my apartment’s entryway is flickering erratically, as if haunted—but they can glow as warmly as the incandescents of old, while lasting much longer and using much less energy.

If, that is, you can figure out which one to buy.

LED light bulbs are not generally labeled as “warm” or “cool”; that would be too easy. That information is typically buried in the fine print on the side or back of the box. Instead, they have those perplexing labels—remember, “daylight” is cool (despite sounding sunny); “soft white” is warm (despite sounding pale)—and a color temperature, which is measured on the Kelvin scale. You might intuitively think that a higher Kelvin number corresponds to warmer light, but listening to your intuition would be a mistake. In fact, higher-energy light appears cooler. The “soft white” label generally corresponds to 2,700 degrees Kelvin light, while “daylight” is usually applied to 5,000 degrees Kelvin.

What we have here is a classic case of marketing that makes sense to the people selling the product, but not to the people buying it. Indirect natural daylight is, technically, pretty blue. (Perhaps you are familiar with the sky.) When the light-bulb industry labels its 5,000-Kelvin bulbs “daylight,” it’s trying to helpfully indicate that you’re getting a blue light—never mind the fact that a dinky white light bulb does not actually approximate the feeling of sunlight. As for soft white, that “goes back to the incandescent era, where the light emitted from your standard household [bulb] was marketed as ‘soft white light,’” Tasha Campbell, a senior product marketing manager at Signify, which sells Philips-brand light bulbs, told me.

Cold white might have its uses—interrogations, morgues—but the home is not one of them. If you live in an urban area, you can see what I mean by walking around after dark and looking at the windows of an apartment building. If your neighborhood is like mine, most will emit a cozy, warm glow, like fires at the backs of caves. But a troubling share—perhaps one in 10, or one in five—will instead emit a grim, sickly pallor. Those are the daylight apartments.

Bizarrely, some of these apartments are inhabited by people who were not tricked into purchasing terrible lighting, but actively chose it. These are the victims of an extensive body of online propaganda. One popular theory holds that daylight bulbs have a special capacity to help you focus on what you’re doing. “Daylight bulbs are perfect for areas where specific work or detail-oriented tasks are performed,” advises The Spruce, in an example typical of the genre. “These rooms include kitchens, offices, and basements. Bathrooms may also be a good place for daylight bulbs, providing ample light for getting ready.”

The implication is that, until LEDs were invented, everyone was fumbling around in dangerously warm light, unable to chop an onion without losing a finger or read a book without going blind from eye strain. This is preposterous. High-quality cool light can have some advantages for rendering color and detail, which is why it might make sense for, say, an art museum. But if Marcel Proust could write In Search of Lost Time by incandescent lamp, you don’t need 5,000 Kelvins to write an email.

[M. Nolan Gray: Why dining rooms are disappearing from American homes]

A related theory, popular within the lighting industry, holds that daylight bulbs are “energizing.” A video on the Philips website, for example, says, “Use ‘daylight’ to create a bright, energizing setting for improved concentration.” There’s a kernel of plausibility here. Manuel Spitschan, a professor at the Technical University of Munich who has studied the effects that different-color temperatures have on humans, told me that light suppresses the pineal gland’s production of melatonin, the hormone that tells our brains it’s time to get sleepy, and that blue light suppresses it more than yellow light. The daylight-bulb theory is that cool artificial light will mimic the sun’s “melanomic daylight illuminance” more than warm light will, thus keeping us more alert.

The hitch in this theory is that the pineal gland produces melatonin only when it’s dark out. This means that to the extent that cooler bulbs suppress melatonin, they do so mainly in the time when our bodies are trying to help us get ready for bed, not during business hours. Moreover, Spitschan said that the intensity of light “has a much stronger effect than the color temperature.” When it comes to alertness, very bright beats very white.

Because the world is a big and varied place, I’m willing to believe that some people genuinely prefer a cooler bulb, just as some people presumably prefer Bob Dylan’s most recent albums to his 1960s masterpieces. Good for them, I guess. For everyone else, let there be light—but, for God’s sake, let it be warm.