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Nothing could have prepared Americans for what the first 50-ish days of the second Trump administration have been like. Even some Cabinet members and Republican members of Congress seem caught off guard. But if you took time to look closely at Project 2025, the effort from the conservative Heritage Foundation to prepare for a new Republican administration, you’re probably a little less shocked than other people.

I’m not the first to point out that many of the actions the White House and other departments have taken since the inauguration are pulled directly from Project 2025. Even though Donald Trump vociferously denied any connection to the work during the campaign, that was always transparent bunk. For example, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, led the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump White House, was the policy director for the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform, and is now leading OMB again.

There are some useful resources online that seek to track which Project 2025 goals have already been achieved, but for all that Trump has done so far, some of Project 2025’s most radical ideas for transforming the power of the president have yet to unfold. What is still in store?

The authors of Project 2025 believe that far too much of the executive branch is not functionally under the control of the president. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Vought told The New York Times in 2023. One example is what are called “independent regulatory agencies”—entitites such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The laws that authorize these agencies give the president the power to appoint leaders, but not generally to remove them or direct policy. That’s different from, for example, a Cabinet department such as State and Treasury, whose secretaries can be fired at will.

“The Trump team came in determined to expand the scope of presidential power,” Don Kettl, the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told me in an email. “Their goal is to stretch the limits of Article II of the Constitution, by using the beginning of the article—that executive power is located in the president of the U.S.—and the take-care clause, to assert that the president has power over all things executive. Congress might pass a law, but once the law is passed, they believe the president ought to have complete control over how it’s implemented.”

Many of the moves that Trump has taken so far appear to be of dubious legality. This week, Vought’s OMB issued a memo laying out plans for mass layoffs of federal employees subject to civil-service protections. Such a reduction in force almost certainly violates civil-service protections and bargaining agreements. Similarly, last week, the administration issued a little-noticed but potentially very important executive order asserting unprecedented power over independent regulatory agencies, cutting against decades of precedent and understanding of existing laws.

These are only the latest examples of the Trump administration’s apparent defiance of Congress’s intent. As Jonathan Rauch noted this week, Trump has fired inspectors general without giving the legally required 30-day notice, even though he could have easily just followed the law. The president also tried to fire Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistleblowers; Dellinger promptly sued, and his firing is currently temporarily blocked by courts. Last week, the administration asserted a right to fire administrative-law judges, who oversee hearings inside executive-branch agencies, even though the law says they can be removed only for cause.

The statutes that govern these matters are not especially ambiguous: Congress intended for these bodies to have some independence. Trump’s aides don’t disagree; they just think that the laws are an unconstitutional infringement on the powers of the executive branch. “There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands,” Vought told Tucker Carlson in November. Unfortunately for Trump, the Supreme Court has disagreed. In a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor, the justices unanimously slapped down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

As Trump takes so many steps, some observers have expressed concern that Trump intends to just ignore courts. This isn’t a crazy fear. Trump has shown that he has no personal respect for the rule of law, and many of his aides—including Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance—have floated the idea of defying judicial rulings. But I think the more likely interpretation (at least for now) is that many of these law-defying, or at least law-bending, actions are ways of getting cases before the Supreme Court in the hopes of eliciting favorable decisions.

“The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later,” the law professor Adam Candeub writes in “Mandate for Leadership,” the main document produced by Project 2025. (He’s since been appointed general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission.) Elsewhere in “Mandate,” Gene Hamilton, who helped design the family-separation policy in Trump’s first term, writes that a conservative administration should seek “the overruling of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States … The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

How the Court would handle such a case is anyone’s guess. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have already said they’d overturn Humphrey’s Executor; Republicans have long pushed for the “unitary executive theory,” which seeks an expansion of the president’s power over the executive branch; and the justices have shown a willingness to bend precedents to help Trump in the past.

The impact of striking down Humphrey’s Executor would be enormous. Agency independence is designed to provide regulatory predictability and consistency and to avoid political interference, but Project 2025 proposes systematically politicizing independent agencies, seeking to use federal power to attack climate-focused investing, compel private corporations’ business decisions, and more. This is especially dangerous with a president who has already begun following through on his campaign promises to use the government to punish his critics, but it would be destabilizing under other circumstances. Any future Democratic president would at least try to return things to the status quo ante, which would mean a wild seesaw in regulation every four or eight years.

Alternatively, the Supreme Court might blanch before such a shift of power from Congress to the executive branch. In 2024’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision, it struck down Chevron deference, which accorded executive-branch agencies broad discretion in interpreting laws, saying that Congress needed to make those decisions. If Trump’s test cases fail, what comes next?

“I always abide by the courts, always abide by them,” Trump said earlier this month. Yesterday, his nominees for top Justice Department roles told senators that they believed the administration could at times ignore judicial orders. We may soon find out which of them is telling the truth.

Related:

What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order? There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the collapse at the NIH Grad school is in trouble. What Trump is really after in the Middle East Radio Atlantic: The Five Eyes have noticed.

Today’s News

Donald Trump hosted U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House to discuss issues including trade and Ukraine’s future. The Trump administration notified most USAID staffers this week that they have been placed on leave or fired and announced that 90 percent of the agency’s foreign-aid contracts worldwide will be canceled. Trump announced that 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will go into effect on March 4, and that China will face an additional 10 percent tariff.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Who counts as a hillbilly—and who gets to decide? Andrew Aoyama examines the complicated history of Appalachia and J. D. Vance’s ties.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

My Mom’s Guide to the Art of Living

By Arthur C. Brooks

My late mother was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. Over her many-decades career, her paintings evolved from highly representational watercolors into mixed-media abstracts. One constant in her work, however, was excellent technique: If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to the mortification of her adolescent son, that’s exactly what it looked like.

Growing up, I could draw a little myself and enjoyed doing so, but I never had her talent. Once, I asked her how I could improve. I suppose I expected her to say something like “Practice 10,000 hours.” Instead, she told me to look at what I wanted to draw.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: CSA-Printstock / Getty.

Read (or skip). The columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe, argues for religion from a rational perspective. “It won’t make a believer out of me,” George Packer writes.

Debate. Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars—and who should win, according to David Sims.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you understandably haven’t read all 922 pages of “Mandate for Leadership,” then allow me to recommend a book—specifically, my own. The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America is out from Random House on April 22. I wrote it as a layperson’s guide to both what Project 2025 wants to do, broken down by subject area, and how the authors propose achieving it. The book is available for preorder now.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When the Department of Government Efficiency stormed the federal government, it had a clear objective—to remake the government, one must remake the civil service. And in particular, the team of Elon Musk acolytes “focused on accessing the terminals, uncovering the button pushers, and taking control,” Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Shane Harris, and I wrote this week in an investigation into the DOGE takeover. Computers, they figured, run the government.

DOGE members and new political appointees have sought access to data and IT systems across the government—at the Treasury Department, IRS, Department of Health and Human Services, and more. Government technologists have speculated that DOGE’s next step will be to centralize those data and feed them into AI systems, making bureaucratic processes more efficient while also identifying fraud and waste, or perhaps simply uncovering further targets to dismantle. Musk’s team has reportedly already fed Department of Education data into an AI system, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer recently appointed to the General Services Administration, has repeatedly spoken with staff about an AI strategy, mentioning using the technology to develop coding agents and analyze federal contracts.

No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns. As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers, which we obtained, “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Mark Gibson / Getty.

This Is What Happens When the DOGE Guys Take Over

By Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Matteo Wong and Shane Harris

They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world’s wealthiest online troll.

On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located. They were interrupted while trying the handles of locked office doors.

“Hey, can I help you?” asked an employee of the agency that was soon to be forced into bureaucratic limbo. The DOGE crew offered no clear answer.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

DOGE and new Trump appointees’ access to federal data and computer systems is growing in both breadth and depth. Defense technologies, Americans’ sensitive personal and health data, dangerous biological research, and more are in reach. Within at least one agency, USAID, they have achieved “God mode,” according to an employee in senior leadership—meaning Elon Musk’s team has “total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more,” Charlie Warzel, Ian Bogost, and I reported this week. With this level of control, the USAID staffer feared, DOGE could terminate federal workers in “a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia.”

In the coming weeks, we reported, “the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration.” Just how far Musk and his team can go is uncertain; they face various lawsuits, which have thus far had varying success. The team may be trying to improve the government’s inner workings, as is its stated purpose. “But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems,” Charlie, Ian, and I wrote, “some are beginning to worry that [Musk] might prefer to destroy” the government, “to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

Related:

The tariffs were never real. How Trump lost his trade war

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Trump takes over the Kennedy Center. Gary Shteyngart: The man in the midnight-blue six-ply Italian-milled wool suit

Today’s News

A federal judge said he would issue a temporary restraining order that would pause parts of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the USAID workforce and withdraw employees from their overseas posts. Donald Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House, where they discussed reducing the U.S.’s trade deficit with Japan. A plane carrying 10 people went missing in western Alaska while en route from Unalakleet to Nome.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka examines a new, unbearably honest kind of writing. Atlantic Intelligence: For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models, Damon Beres writes. “That may no longer be the case.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

Read the full article.

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Stay in the loop. Here are 10 indie movies you should watch for in 2025.

Discover. David Lynch’s work was often described as “mysterious” or “surreal”—but the emotions it provoked were just as fundamental, K. Austin Collins writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome to The Daily’s culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shayla Love, a staff writer who has written about how sobriety became a tool of self-optimization, the ways invisible habits are driving our lives, and how RFK Jr. is seducing America with wellness.

Shayla’s recommendations include a 1967 British television series that starts out like The Good Place, a “Page Six–esque thriller” about the Sigmund Freud Archives, and an “eclipse-viewing” experience that takes place entirely indoors.

The Culture Survey: Shayla Love

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The 1967 British television series The Prisoner starts out remarkably similar to The Good Place: A person wakes up in an idyllic town that caters to their every need and also torments them. But in The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, the show’s creator and star, isn’t dead; he’s a retired British intelligence agent called Number 6 who refuses to submit to the will of the “Village.” He is put through a series of surreal and futuristic tests by a rotating cast of characters named Number 2 while trying not to be killed by a murderous white bouncing ball. A perfect low-stakes, high-octane episodic mystery. And who is Number 1?

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: The best eclipse I saw last year was not the solar eclipse in April but the Instant Eclipse at Novelty Automation in London. For a few coins, you shut yourself inside a broom-closet-size box, look up, and experience an automated eclipse—no path of totality required. It was made in 1999 by Tim Hunkin, an engineer and artist who created dozens of strange and ingenious arcade machines. When I crammed into the contraption with my boyfriend, we heard audio of a noisy crowd that abruptly silenced when the “sun” vanished. We were surprised by how much wonder we felt as the artificial sky lit up with stars. [Related: The most dazzling eclipse in the universe]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: In the Freud Archives is Janet Malcolm at her best. She turns academic drama into a Page Six–esque thriller that you won’t be able to put down. And just when you think the ride is over, there’s a stunning afterword in the NYRB edition that takes you through the messy aftermath of her reporting.

Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki is my fiction pick. Read this book if you have sisters, if you’ve ever been crushed by a crush, if you have authority problems, or if you feel overwhelmed by a family’s capacity for secrets.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: To see Pink Mist (Space Division) by James Turrell, you have to wait. You walk into a completely dark room, hands outstretched, blindly searching for a bench. You sit, feeling lost, staring into pitch black. Then, it appears: a pinkish-red rectangle hovering in front of you. The shape doesn’t move or change colors, but it’s a successful optical trick; it changes you. Once your eyes have adjusted, you can’t unsee it. All of the pieces in the Turrell retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art toy with both your perception and your patience.

Something I recently revisited: I rewatched the entire Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black with my boyfriend, who had never seen it before. I realized how much this show is a part of my DNA—biomedical patents, an utopian island, longevity, nature versus nurture. Tatiana Maslany plays a handful of characters you’ll be convinced are different people by the end. [Related: The slow creep of uncanny television]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” written in 1996 by Dmitri Tymoczko. I’ve returned to this piece dozens of times. The psychologist William James’s interest in altered states of consciousness through nitrous oxide is well known, yet this piece chronicles the lesser-known story of the rogue autodidact philosopher and mystic Benjamin Paul Blood, who inspired James. An Atlantic classic that is still relevant when thinking about drugs and their role in meaning-making or religious belief.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Robert Hass’s translations of three great Japanese haiku poets: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. Hass has so few words to work with, and he picks exactly the right ones.

Like his verb choice in this Bashō haiku:

         A bee
staggers out
        of the peony.

Or how he preserves the humor and lightness of Issa:

        Even with insects—
some can sing,
       some can’t.

Two more, the first from Bashō, the next from Issa, to celebrate the end and start of a year:

         What fish feel,
birds feel, I don’t know—
        the year ending.

           New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
          I feel about average.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “My last trial” Evangelicals made a bad trade. Jonathan Chait: There is no resistance.

Today’s News

During a tour of North Carolina to survey the damage of Hurricane Helene, President Donald Trump described plans to overhaul or eliminate FEMA. He proposed an alternative scenario in which the federal government pays “a percentage to the state” to aid in disaster response. Hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including those who have been convicted of crimes, were flown out of the country last night on military aircraft, according to the White House. The Senate plans to vote later this evening on whether to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Earlier this week, Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka suggests what to read in the face of disaster.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

January 6ers Got Out of Prison—And Came to My Neighborhood

By Hanna Rosin

On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patched founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was in prison, which is where he has been since he was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. By Tuesday afternoon, he was taking a nap at my neighbors’ house.

Read the full article.

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Simon Mein / Thin Man Films Ltd / Bleecker Street

Debate. Have we been thinking about loneliness all wrong? Americans may not feel any more desolate than they did in the past, Faith Hill writes.

Watch. Hard Truths (out now in theaters) takes an astonishingly sensitive approach in telling the story of difficult people, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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Sony Pictures Classics

Watch. I’m Still Here (out now in select theaters) tempts viewers into a comforting lull before pulling the rug out from under them, David Sims writes.

Examine. In an age of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck, the world needs more disobedient artists and thinkers, Jacob Howland writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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