“I’m avoiding getting too high on the good days and too low on the bad days,” Mitch McConnell was telling me.

“Is today a good day or a bad day?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” was all McConnell said, chuckling.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to arrive at the Capitol to address Congress. Earlier that day, the White House had imposed 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico and a new 10 percent tariff on all imports from China. The stock market was cratering. Trump seemed to be systematically dismantling the federal government and methodically abandoning Ukraine and freaking out scores of leaders and citizens from Kyiv to Panama City to Ottawa to Nuuk to, perhaps most of all, Washington. And McConnell was sitting in his Senate office, wondering what fresh horrors Trump had in store for the evening.

Or at least that’s what I imagined McConnell was wondering. He’s not one to offer up much confirmation about what he’s wondering.

It seemed like a logical assumption, given the outlying position the senator from Kentucky occupies in today’s GOP. Few Washington species are more isolated these days than elected Republicans who despise Trump and are very much despised back by Trump. Not to mention a lame-duck Republican—until recently one of the most powerful figures in his party—who has been a steadfast advocate for free-trade policies and has vowed to devote his remaining time in office to national security, specifically fighting for the causes of Ukraine and NATO and against Russia.

The night before, Trump had announced a halt to all aid to Ukraine. A few days earlier, he and Vice President J. D. Vance had engaged in a televised ruckus with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Virtually no Senate Republicans had raised objections to any of this, with a few exceptions.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

McConnell had not yet weighed in, either. And I felt fortunate to be granted an audience, considering how rarely he gives interviews. I have been writing about politics in Washington for more than two decades and had never spoken to him, although I’ve tried many times in various Capitol corridors. “For the last couple of decades, I’ve spent my time smiling and walking on by,” McConnell told me, summarizing his general approach to hallway press relations. Occasionally, McConnell might blurt out a “Good try” in response to a shouted question, but only if he’s feeling expansive.

I was also eager to speak with him because many people around McConnell have described him as feeling “liberated” now that he has stepped down as head of the Senate Republican Conference after 18 years. This sense of newfound freedom seemed like it would be even greater after McConnell announced on February 20—his 83rd birthday—that he would not run for an eighth term in the Senate in 2026. I wasn’t expecting McConnell to start wearing shorts and a hoodie around the Capitol like his Democratic colleague Senator John Fetterman, but I was curious to ask the former leader what being “liberated” means for him, especially in light of recent events.

“Well, an example is the Washington Post op-ed today,” McConnell told me. He had just published an article about how a government shutdown could be costly to defense spending in the long run: “Extending the 2024 budget through the end of FY2025 would mean the Defense Department would lack the funds to make payroll for 2 million service members,” McConnell wrote. “Especially after accounting for the additional 10 percent junior enlisted pay raise authorized last year.”

The op-ed was not riveting. But I mention it because McConnell did—three times—as an example of his current state of liberation.

I asked McConnell what he thought about that Trump-Vance-Zelensky scene in the Oval Office last week. “Here is the way I look at this whole episode,” McConnell told me. “What we need to avoid at the end is a headline that says ‘Russia Won, America Lost.’”

A sphinxlike response. Or perhaps a nonresponse.

“With this particular president, we know we’re going to have a lot of drama along the way,” McConnell continued. “The really important thing is, how does it end?”

I took another crack at getting his reaction to the Oval Office episode. Trump had actually paused U.S. funding to Ukraine—a massively tangible action, much more than just drama. I also mentioned that a few of his Republican colleagues—most pointedly, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—had been critical of Trump’s recent posture on Ukraine and Russia. Did he have any reaction to the past few days?

“Well, at risk of repeating myself,” McConnell said, before repeating himself: “I’m trying not to overreact to every moment of drama that went on.” When I pressed him on Trump’s funding pause, McConnell said he hoped it would be “just a temporary thing.”

How did McConnell think things were going generally in these first months of the second Trump administration? “Better than expected?” I asked. “Worse than expected?”

“Well, I’ve already answered that twice.”

I tried a different tack. Many people around Washington, of both parties, sound quite concerned about what appears to be happening in the second Trump administration so far. What was his level of concern or despair or whatever the word is?

“I’m not going to answer that,” McConnell replied.

“Okay.”

“You’ll get the answer to it in pieces.”

“How should we look?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, take the Washington Post editorial today …”

The afternoon I met with him, McConnell told me he didn’t know whether he would attend Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday evening. “I’m sure gonna listen to every word,” he said of the speech. “It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m physically present.” He wound up watching from home.

The senator’s health appears to be in some decline. Over the past few years, he has suffered a number of distressing public freeze-ups and falls. McConnell is currently using a wheelchair; his staff has in some cases attributed his recent infirmities to the lingering effects of childhood polio. His face is gaunt, his voice pinched and his words at times hard to decipher. He has suffered hearing loss.

When spotted around the Senate these days, McConnell cuts a delicate figure. He is also a delicate topic among his Republican colleagues.

[Read: Mitch McConnell’s worst political miscalculation]

Most of them once granted McConnell their unambiguous allegiance. He was first elected to head the Senate Republican Conference in 2007 and went on to become the longest-tenured party leader in the history of the chamber. But Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP has made it impossible for McConnell to serve in any meaningful leadership role these days.

The mutual loathing between the two men has been richly catalogued. A quick sampler: Trump has called McConnell “dour, sullen, and unsmiling”; a “broken down hack politician”; and a “disaster,” among other things. (He also referred to McConnell’s Taipei-born spouse, the former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”)

In turn, McConnell has described Trump as a “despicable human being,” “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” and someone who “has every characteristic you would not want a president to have.” In a 60 Minutes interview last month, host Lesley Stahl read McConnell some other choice brickbats McConnell had reserved for Trump (“nasty,” “sleazeball,” “not very smart”), which the senator hilariously tried to downplay as “private comments.”

“Well, they’re in your biography,” Stahl pointed out, referring to a recent volume by the longtime Washington journalist Mike Tackett, who drew on about 50 hours of on-the-record interviews with his subject, as well as exclusive access to a series of private oral histories that McConnell had recorded.

“Yeah,” McConnell acknowledged, not disputing any of the descriptions.

It did not matter that McConnell was instrumental in helping Trump achieve his 2017 tax overhaul and his appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court. Or that McConnell, despite saying that Trump’s conduct on January 6 showed him to be unfit for office, voted to acquit the outgoing president after he was impeached a second time. Or that McConnell, in his leadership role, remained a fierce partisan and steadfast in his support for Republican candidates, including Trump, whom he supported again after he became the Republican nominee in 2024.

The tumultuous political alliance between McConnell and Trump clearly could not be salvaged, let alone repeated. McConnell announced early last year—several months before the November election—that he would step down as Republican leader at the start of the current Congress in January.

Since Trump’s reelection, McConnell has come to occupy an uncharacteristic role inside his caucus: The old horse has turned into something of a maverick. His foreign-policy views in support of strong, Reagan-style engagement abroad—especially against authoritarian regimes—run counter to the Trump-styple isolationism that dominates much of today’s GOP. “I picked this issue because it’s the most important thing,” he told me of his focus on national security. “Because we’re talking about world peace here.”

He added that Russia’s “horrible invasion” of Ukraine has had a unifying effect on the world’s democracies. “If you look at who’s on the other side—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and Iran’s proxies—I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell told me. Yes, I said, although the more pertinent question seemed to be whose side a Donald Trump–led America was on. Did he worry that things might be moving in the wrong direction?

“That’s the doomsday scenario, right?” McConnell said. “I tend to come down on the optimistic side.” He did not say why, other than to reiterate that “there is a lot of drama” and “in the end, it depends on how it works out.”

Freed from the constraints that leadership imposed on him, McConnell did vote against more of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—than any other Senate Republican. Would he have taken the Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard votes if he were still leader? “Probably not,” McConnell told me.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

“When he says that he feels liberated, he is no longer responsible for advancing the administration’s priorities or a strictly Republican agenda,” Senator Susan Collins, the moderate Republican of Maine, told me. Collins, who counts herself as a strong McConnell ally, said that the majority of her caucus respects the former leader, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. “There are a handful of Republican senators who are polite in our conference meetings that trash him online or on television or podcasts,” Collins said, adding that this is “a real problem.” To praise McConnell too fulsomely in public runs the risk of annoying Trump, who tends to see even the most tepid praise of an enemy as disloyal.

In the days after McConnell announced that he would not seek reelection, I surveyed a handful of other Republican senators about his awkward position inside the caucus that he had led for so long. Their responses comprised a hodgepodge of restrained respect, resigned pity, and laughable obfuscation.

“Look, I respect the leader, I do, as I said in a tweet that got all kinds of retweets,” Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has shown more-than-occasional disrespect for McConnell over the years, told me. As he waited for an elevator just off the Senate floor last week, Johnson noted that McConnell “absolutely reveres and respects” the institution of the Senate. “It’s sad that he’s had these falls. There’s nothing good about getting old,” he added.

A few minutes later, I encountered the Trump loyalist Josh Hawley of Missouri. Hawley, who had called for McConnell’s ouster long before he stepped down as leader, seemed rather un-thrilled by my questions as I walked alongside him.

“Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for him, or comment,” Hawley told me, when I asked what he thought these last days in the Senate have been like for McConnell, and what his legacy will be. “I don’t want to comment, or commentate.”

I asked Hawley whether he believed that McConnell has been an ally of Trump in the new administration. “He’s voted against a bunch of his nominees, but again, I can’t comment on what his viewpoint is,” he said.

What was Hawley’s own viewpoint on McConnell?

“Well, that’s a big question. In what sense?” he asked.

“As a colleague, as a senator, as a champion of the Republican Party of today,” I said.

“Oh, listen, I think he’s had a very long career. I think he’s served his state and his country with a tremendous sense of duty.”

Hawley did not comment—or commentate—beyond that.

“You realize I’ll be 84 when I leave here. I was 42 when I got here,” McConnell told me. “Half of my life I’ve spent here.”

This was McConnell becoming a bit more chatty, if not expressive, as our interview wound down. My visit to his office also yielded these Kentucky kernels:

He said he hasn’t talked to Trump since Trump’s first term ended. He did speak with Joe Biden recently. “Not in any great detail. He just gave me a ring,” McConnell told me. “We became friends years ago. And I ended up actually being the only Republican at Beau’s funeral.” He said his treatment in the media has gotten considerably better of late. “I’ve discovered how to improve your press,” McConnell told me. “Announce you’re leaving.”

After not quite half an hour, my time was up. McConnell’s time was not, he emphasized—any valedictions or obituaries for his career would be premature. “My story’s going to unfold over the next year and a half,” he said.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

A minute earlier, I’d wondered aloud where the larger story was headed—whether the good guys or the bad guys would prevail, and which team America was on.

“I think between Ukraine and Russia, it’s not hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell said.

“It’s unclear who Trump thinks the good guys are,” I replied, hoping to trigger some reaction. No such luck. “Not gonna touch that?” I said to fill the silence.

“Good try.”

Long live the king!

Down with the king!

President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.

Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.

But the president has also asked advisers in recent days about moving the Declaration of Independence into the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to describe the planning.

Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original document. Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building, in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession. The original is behind heavy glass in an oxygen-free, argon-filled case that can retract into the wall at night for security. Because of light damage to the faded animal-skin parchment, the room is kept dimly lit; restrictions have been placed on how often the doors can even be opened.

But to the relief of aides, subsequent discussions appear to have focused on the possibility of moving one of the historical copies of the document, not the original. “President Trump strongly believes that significant and historic documents that celebrate American history should be shared and put on display,” the White House spokesperson Steven Cheung told us in an email.

Displaying a copy would still enshrine history’s most famous written rejection of monarchy in the seat of American power. The document is reprinted in textbooks nationwide and is recognized the world over as a defiant stand against the corrupting dangers of absolute power. It declares equality among men to be a self-evident truth, asserts that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and offers a litany of grievances against a despotic ruler.

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads the 1776 repudiation of British King George III’s dominion over the American colonies. (Spokespeople for the National Archives declined to comment on Trump’s request and whether a Declaration display in the Oval Office is imminent. White House aides also declined to share the timing of when the document might arrive in its new West Wing home, if it is coming at all.)

Since returning to power, Trump has moved quickly to redesign his working space. He has announced plans to pave over the Rose Garden to make it more like the patio at his private Mar-a-Lago club, as well as easier to host events with women wearing heels. He has also revived planning for a new ballroom on the White House grounds. “It keeps my real-estate juices flowing,” Trump explained in a recent interview with The Spectator.

Golden trophies now line the Oval Office’s mantlepiece. Military flags adorned with campaign streamers have returned. And portraits of presidents past now climb the walls—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Gilded mirrors hang upon the recessed doors. A framed copy of his Georgia mug shot appears in the outside hallway. And the bright-red valet button, encased in a wooden box, is back on the desk.

In addition to the National Archives’ original Declaration, the government has in its possession other versions of the document. The collection includes drafts by Jefferson and copies of contemporaneous reprintings, known as broadsides, that were distributed among the colonies.

Alarmed by the deterioration of the original Declaration in the 1820s, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to create an engraving of it with the signatures appended. That version forms the basis of the document since reproduced in school history books—the one with which most Americans are familiar. Adams tasked Stone with engraving 200 copies—but in what passes for a mini 19th-century scandal, Stone made an extra facsimile to keep for himself, the documents dealer and expert Seth Kaller told us.

Many of those Stone copies of the document have now been lost; roughly 50 are known to survive, Kaller said. The White House already has in its archives at least one of the Stone printings. Kaller told us that one of his clients who had recently purchased a Stone facsimile was visiting the White House when President Barack Obama asked him whether he could help procure a Stone printing for the White House.

“The client called me, and I said, ‘I can’t—because, one, there aren’t any others on the market right now, and two, the White House already has one,’” Kaller told us. In 2014, Kaller visited the White House to view the Stone Declaration, which the curator displayed for him in one of the West Wing’s rooms. (The White House curator’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether the Stone copy still resides under its purview.)

It is unclear where Trump first got the idea to add a Declaration to the Oval Office’s decor. Since returning, Trump has shown interest in the planning for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the document’s signing. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order to create “Task Force 250,” a White House commission that will work with another congressionally formed commission to plan the festivities.

Trump and the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who owns four Stone engravings and is a historical-documents aficionado, also met privately at the White House last month, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump had decided weeks earlier to replace much of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Arts so that he could install himself as chair, replacing Rubenstein.

Previously, Rubenstein had worked with the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies to have a modern copy of the Stone Declaration, placed in a replica of a historic frame, displayed at U.S. embassies around the globe.

“Because the Declaration of Independence has—like the Stars and Stripes—become a symbol of the United States, and because the Stone copy of the Declaration is the most recognizable version of that historic document, I thought it would be appropriate to have a new copy of a Stone Declaration placed in each of the American embassies around the World,” Rubenstein wrote at the time in a booklet describing the history and importance of the Stone facsimiles. “My hope was that everyone who visited an American embassy would see not just our flags, but also this unique symbol of our country.” (Rubenstein did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kaller told us that he thinks moving the original document in its special enclosure to the Oval Office would likely cost millions of dollars. But a Stone printing would be far simpler to exhibit, requiring only getting “the lighting right in a display case,” he said. The reason Quincy Adams commissioned the Stone version, Kaller added, was in part for this very purpose.

And if Trump decides he wants it, he will likely get it—even without the powers of a king.

Leading the FDA has long been one of the greatest professional achievements in American health. At the start of every administration, doctors jockey for the role, hoping to steer an agency that regulates 20 cents of every dollar spent in the United States. To be the FDA commissioner who presides over the approval of a cure for a previously intractable disease, or who launches an investigation into a product that is sickening Americans, is to etch your name into the annals of modern medicine. Perhaps you’ve never heard of David Kessler, the FDA commissioner for much of the 1990s, but he is largely the reason the federal government regulates cigarettes at all.   

Marty Makary, Donald Trump’s pick for FDA commissioner, is undoubtedly qualified for the job. A longtime Johns Hopkins surgeon and best-selling author, he has advised the World Health Organization and been elected to the National Academy of Medicine. (Makary, whose confirmation hearings kicked off in the Senate this morning, told Senator Rand Paul that he spent part of yesterday removing a patient’s gallbladder.) Makary is not universally embraced: As a Fox News contributor, he has repeatedly critiqued the medical establishment on air. But he’s still widely regarded as well-credentialed. “He has the ability to become one of the greatest commissioners we’ve seen,” Kavita Patel, a physician and former Obama administration official who considers Makary a personal friend, told me.

But Makary might end up with one of the worst jobs in the entire Trump administration. His scientific bona fides are at odds with the impulses of his boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The newly confirmed secretary of Health and Human Services, who has a penchant for spreading conspiracy theories, has promised lawmakers that he will empower scientists and won’t “impose my preordained opinions on anybody.” But he has also promised to change the agency so radically that delivering on that vision would require Makary to throw much of his medical training out the window. What Makary decides to do will go a long way in determining the extent to which Kennedy is able to remake American health in his image.

That’s not to say that Makary, who did not respond to a request for comment, will be waging a war of resistance against everything RFK Jr. wants and believes. During his testimony this morning, Makary spoke about his desire to improve America’s diet and address chronic disease—both of which Kennedy has made his central focus as America’s health secretary. “We now have a generational opportunity in American health care,” Makary said. “President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s focus on healthy foods has galvanized a grassroots movement in America.” Last fall, he took part in a roundtable with Kennedy where he lamented that “highly addictive chemicals” lace the U.S. food supply. Tackling that issue will be Makary’s surest bet for delivering on what Kennedy wants.

Contrary to Kennedy’s long-standing anti-vaccine advocacy, Makary reiterated in his Senate testimony that he believes that “vaccines save lives.” But like Kennedy and several other prominent Trump health advisers, Makary has been a vocal critic of how the Biden administration handled COVID. In 2021, he called out the FDA’s decision to approve COVID boosters for young, healthy Americans, citing a lack of clear evidence for their benefits relative to the potential side effects. The government’s “policies are no longer driven by science,” he wrote at the time, and “data is being cherry-picked to support predetermined agendas.” (The FDA pushed forward with boosters for young adults without convening its own independent advisory committee, though the agency said its decision was supported by data.) Other statements Makary has made are more questionable. In an appearance on Fox News in July 2023, he said that “100 percent” of Kennedy’s book on Anthony Fauci was true. He didn’t acknowledge that the book falsely claims that “COVID vaccines were causing far more deaths than they were averting.” (“The Marty you might see on Fox News clips is obviously not the person I know,” Patel told me.)

Much of what Makary actually wants to do at the FDA remains unclear. He spent little time during his testimony on Thursday outlining his moves once confirmed. Still, most of the changes Kennedy wants to see at the agency are untenable for any FDA commissioner concerned about adhering to basic science. Kennedy has said that the FDA’s “war” on treatments such as stem cells and psychedelic drugs “is about to end.” Decisions on how to regulate these products typically don’t rest with the health secretary or the FDA commissioner, but with the agency’s scientists and doctors. In both cases, there is no scientific reason for the FDA to change course. The agency doesn’t allow stem-cell treatments for most conditions because they aren’t proven to work and can cause people serious harm; last year, the FDA rejected what would have been the first MDMA-based medical treatment, likely due to shoddy clinical-trial data.

On his own, Makary can do only so much. The FDA’s powers are actually given by law to the HHS secretary, who then has historically delegated powers to the FDA commissioner, according to Lewis Grossman, a law professor at American University. What is given can be taken away; if Kennedy wants to meddle in Makary’s work, he’s well within his rights to do so.

Still, should Makary stand up to Kennedy, he will not be the first FDA secretary to clash with more powerful officials in the administration. Kessler’s efforts to investigate the tobacco industry were so controversial in Washington that, as he wrote in his memoir, the White House worried he would resign if they didn’t allow him to continue his work. If Makary can conjure up a similar power—using whatever leverage and cache he would have as FDA commissioner to negotiate with Kennedy and the Trump White House—he may hold his own. Makary “has both a mandate and an authority to not feel like he needs to step in line with any secretary, much less RFK Jr.,” Patel said.

The first major test for how willing Makary is to stand up to his boss will likely center on mifepristone, an abortion pill. Kennedy told senators in January that he would order the FDA and NIH to review the safety of the drug to determine whether access to it should be restricted. (Access to mifepristone varies by state, though prescriptions via telehealth have complicated the picture.) But that review has already been done. The FDA recently rereviewed the drug’s safety information, and determined that previous restrictions around the drug, namely that patients needed to physically go to a clinic to get it, were unnecessary. The agency is unlikely to find any new evidence that the drug is especially dangerous. If Makary comes up with a reason to question its safety, and thus meddles with the agency’s previous findings, it will show that his loyalty rests more with Kennedy than FDA’s scientists. During his confirmation hearing, Makary was unwilling to preview how exactly he would come down on the issue, much to the frustration of some Democratic senators.

In any administration, overseeing the FDA’s sprawling, vital work is a colossal undertaking. Should he be confirmed, Makary will be tasked with safeguarding the infant formula Americans feed their newborns, the cosmetics we use on our skin, the painkillers we take when we have a headache, the chemotherapy we receive to fight cancer, the pacemakers that keep hearts ticking, the flu shots we get every fall, and even the hand sanitizer we reach for when our hands are dirty. Makary’s biggest challenge, however, could turn out to be his ability to manage up. His ideal version of the FDA presumably is different from Kennedy’s. They both can’t get their way.