The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]

Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.

People gathered at a pro-Ukraine rally near the Capitol building in Washington as President Trump delivered the first State of the Union address of his second term.

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They don’t make Washington scandals like they used to. Consider the tale of Representative Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. In October 1974, Mills, a powerful Arkansas Democrat who led the Ways and Means Committee, was pulled over in D.C. while driving with his lights off. Foxe, a stripper, leapt out of the car and into the Tidal Basin, the shallow reservoir next to the Jefferson Memorial; she had to be fished out by police. The two had apparently had a physical altercation—they had bruises and scratches—though neither was charged. Mills was initially able to weather the next few weeks and win reelection in November, but after showing up drunk at a Foxe performance later that month, he was forced to relinquish his leadership of Ways and Means and didn’t seek reelection.

Now consider the circumstances in which another Representative Mills finds himself. The similarities are striking; the differences are alarming.

Last Wednesday, police responded to a call about an alleged assault at an apartment in D.C., where Cory Mills, a Florida Republican and strong Donald Trump ally, resides. A police report obtained by News4, a local NBC affiliate, stated that a 27-year-old woman there had what appeared to be “fresh” bruises. The report described her as Mills’s “significant other,” though he is married and the 27-year-old is not his wife. She also allegedly, according to the document, “let officers hear [Mills] instruct her to lie about the origin of her bruises.” Mills denies any wrongdoing and told Politico yesterday, “Both myself and the other individual said that what they’re claiming took place never took place and that’s been reported multiple times.”

Things got stranger: The woman recanted her story and now says there was no physical abuse. D.C. police provided the media with a second report saying officers responded but there was no probable cause for arrest, and then a third report saying police are investigating the incident. They are also, according to News4, investigating their own handling of the matter. Police sent a warrant to the local prosecutor’s office, but it has not been signed—in effect, a refusal to take up the case.

Because Washington, D.C., is not a state, it doesn’t have a typical local district attorney. Instead, it has a federal prosecutor, a position currently filled by the Missouri attorney and failed Republican congressional candidate Ed Martin. After the 2020 elections, Martin was deeply involved in Stop the Steal efforts, and after the January 6 riot, he represented defendants and sat on the board of a group that raised money for the families of people imprisoned for their roles. Trump appointed him acting U.S. attorney at the start of his term, and has since nominated him to fill the role permanently.

In an X post yesterday, Martin described the staff of the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” This is not, in fact, the statutory role of U.S. Attorney’s Offices—they serve the federal government, not the person of the president—but Martin very clearly approaches the job that way.

After taking over the U.S. Attorney’s Office in January, he fired attorneys who were involved in January 6 cases—line prosecutors who were simply doing their jobs by bringing cases about overt crimes—and launched an internal investigation into January 6 prosecutions. He has boasted about standing up against the Associated Press, which he said refuses “to put America first” by not adopting Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

Even while doing his best to support people involved in an actual violent assault on the Capitol, Martin has been sending letters to Democratic members of Congress threatening to investigate them for the standard, though overheated, language they’ve used in reference to Elon Musk and Supreme Court justices. Yet somehow, Martin’s office apparently doesn’t have any interest in pursuing a fairly straightforward assault allegation, including claims of inducing an alleged victim to lie.

Why not? The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about why the warrant wasn’t signed. But investigating a Republican member of the House would make life more difficult for the president and his allies on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to ram a politically volatile spending bill through with his minuscule House majority. Some members have already indicated that they may vote against the bill because of proposed cuts to Medicaid. Losing Mills for any reason would make the task harder. Republicans have already paused the confirmation of Representative Elise Stefanik to be the ambassador to the United Nations in order to maintain their numbers.

This delicate moment also shows why, without action from prosecutors, Mills may not go anywhere. So lurid a story used to be a death knell for a career, but politicians have learned that they can gut out most sex scandals if they are sufficiently shameless. President Bill Clinton pioneered the path, Senator David Vitter and Governor Mark Sanford perfected it, and Trump represents its apotheosis. Wilbur Mills was forced to step down by fellow Democrats—not only because of the scandal but because it was politically expedient: A younger, more liberal group of Democrats was tired of conservative southerners blocking their priorities. Political expedience is also why Republicans are less likely to push Cory Mills out anytime soon.

Trump often speaks about “law and order,” but he’s also made very clear that this means law and order only for some—those who disagree with him, or those whom he finds obnoxious. Those who are on his side receive leniency, even if they have committed a violent assault against the Capitol. The U.S. Attorney’s Office ignoring this case while harassing Democratic members of Congress is one very pure expression of this impulse. Meanwhile, Trump is interested in seizing greater control of Washington’s governance. “I think we should take over Washington, D.C.—make it safe,” he said last week. For whom?

Related:

Trump signals he might ignore the courts. It’s not amateur hour anymore.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“It’s a psyop”: Inside Elon Musk’s empty ultimatum America now has a minister of culture. Elon Musk thinks Democrats should love DOGE.

Today’s News

In a joint letter, 21 civil-service employees resigned rather than implement directives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. They formerly worked for the United States Digital Service and were being integrated into DOGE. House Speaker Mike Johnson will attempt to pass Donald Trump’s budget-plan bill this week, which would include $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts. Some House Republicans are reportedly hesitant about the cuts, which would affect federal spending on Medicaid. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate, announced his entry into the 2026 Ohio governor race.

Evening Read

Photograph by Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic

The Internet’s Favorite Sex Researcher

By Helen Lewis

Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people’s personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We’ll come back to that.

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A month after the January 6 insurrection, a page appeared on the Justice Department’s website naming the defendants charged for their alleged role in the Capitol riot. The list remained in place over the next four years, ballooning as the department brought charges against hundreds of people. Then, shortly after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, it vanished.

Trump has seized on his reelection as an opportunity to rewrite the story of January 6. Just hours after he assumed the presidency, he granted pardons and commutations to the insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, calling their prosecutions a “grave national injustice.” The deletion of the Justice Department’s page on January 6 is a triumph for the insurrectionists whose crimes were erased, and for Republicans more generally, many of whom would simply rather not talk about the late unpleasantness.

But in the long term, the truth of what happened will prove difficult to bury. The roughly six hours during which rioters breached the Capitol are some of the most exhaustively documented in recent history, thanks to the many participants who filmed themselves in action and the investigative efforts of both the Justice Department and the House January 6 committee. Even Trump can’t wipe that away.

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

Trump’s proclamation announcing the January 6 pardons portrays the grant of clemency as the beginning of a “process of national reconciliation,” a parody of the typical language of presidential mercy. He has demanded that the Justice Department drop all ongoing investigations into rioters not yet charged and placed the office that had carried out those prosecutions under the control of Ed Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer who himself tweeted that he was at the Capitol the day of the insurrection. Days into Trump’s second term, when the president attended a rally in Las Vegas, standing behind him was Stewart Rhodes—the leader of the Oath Keepers and a prominent presence on January 6, who had just received a commutation of his 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy.

In this upside-down version of January 6, the prosecutions were the crime, not the coup attempt. And, despite Trump’s smug assertion of “reconciliation,” his administration is now retaliating against the civil servants who played a role in prosecuting the insurrectionists. The Justice Department has fired 15 low-level prosecutors who worked on the January 6 cases, along with officials assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of Trump. Thousands of FBI employees who worked on the January 6 investigations—by many metrics, the largest investigative effort in the bureau’s history—are also waiting to discover whether they, too, will be purged.

The disappearance of the Justice Department’s page on the insurrection, which had expanded to include not just information on defendants and charges but also a growing list of convictions and criminal sentences, was a particularly blunt metaphor for this erasure of history. On January 27, the page was replaced with a “Page not found” message. “This is a huge victory for J6ers,” Brandon Straka, a pro-Trump social-media influencer who himself received a pardon for his role on January 6, wrote on X. “This site was one of countless weapons of harassment used by the federal government to make life impossible for its targets from J6.”

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

This is the politics of forgetting, and the United States is no stranger to it. David Blight, an American-history professor at Yale, has argued that January 6 is a novel twist on the “Lost Cause”—the Confederate narrative of noble sacrifice that fueled successful white resistance to multiracial democracy in the years after the Civil War. The original Lost Cause strengthened into a racist political force over decades. When I reached out to Blight to discuss the comparison, he seemed unnerved by how quickly the memory of January 6 had shifted toward revisionism. “We’re in an unusual moment where evidence doesn’t seem to make any difference,” he told me. “It’s in that world that January 6 is being processed as a historical marker.”

But that evidence does still exist. And among the dissenters to this enforced forgetting are the people who have spent the most time reviewing it: the judges. Trump’s actions “will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote, reluctantly acknowledging that she had no ability to block the Justice Department from tossing out a January 6 defendant’s case. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens.”

And it will be preserved, because those documents are not under the control of the Trump administration. PACER, the public system used by the federal courts to file legal documents, is run by the judicial branch. There is no mechanism through which a vengeful president can bar access to the thousands upon thousands of pages of court filings docketed in the hundreds and hundreds of charged January 6 cases—including the case against Trump. Days after the Justice Department deleted the database of rioters from its website, one judge in a January 6 case used his order dismissing the charges to memorialize the same resource that the department had scrubbed, attaching the almost 140-page spreadsheet as an appendix. That material is all publicly available, and it is not going away, whatever Trump says about injustice or reconciliation.

The same is true of the House January 6 committee’s work—the hours of hearings convened and broadcast as well as the nearly 900-page final report and its extensive compilation of evidence and depositions. It’s all freely accessible on the website of the Government Publishing Office, a legislative agency, and easily downloaded by anyone who wants to keep ahold of it. Outside the government, ProPublica retains an extensive database of videos posted to the defunct social-media platform Parler by rioters on January 6, documenting the siege of the Capitol minute by minute. NPR hosts a database of defendants that reproduces the information the Justice Department tried to delete.

There are more guerrilla-style efforts at archiving, too. As the NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly has documented, the January 6 investigation was shaped by the volunteer efforts of ordinary people who mobilized online to sort through video and social-media posts and send tips to the FBI. Now some of that same energy has turned toward preserving the record. I spoke with one person who participated in those early crowdsourcing projects and is now maintaining a network of bare-bones websites where visitors can access a range of January 6 material, including court documents and videos posted on social media. Another collective is working to save video evidence on Archive.org and download the full spread of court documents. At the time I reached out, this group estimated that about 50,000 pages had been preserved this way so far.

[Read: The January 6er who left Trumpism]

Struggles over historical memory are ultimately “about the power of the story and who gets to control it,” Blight told me, rather than the strength of the facts. And for those who were attacked or threatened on January 6, or who have faced attacks since for their efforts to uncover what happened and bring the perpetrators to justice, the sudden revision of the story without regard for facts has done its own damage. “I get so many messages, ‘Harry, you’re a hero.’ I don’t want to be a hero,” Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who protected Congress on January 6, told The New York Times. “I want accountability.”

Still, the existence of a robust historical record can eventually make a difference. Blight pointed to the white-supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the true violence of which was ignored for nearly a century until scholars began looking through the archive and publishing their findings. Today, it is widely recognized for what it was: a successful assault on multiracial democracy, carried out by a violent mob.

“You can almost predict that with that kind of evidence, as long as it’s not suppressed or destroyed,” historians will one day be able to tell the truth of what happened, Blight said. As the canard goes, history may be written by the victors. But in the long term—perhaps the very long term—it is also written by the people who kept the documents.

Today The Atlantic is announcing the hires of Nick Miroff and Isaac Stanley-Becker as staff writers, and Alex Hoyt as a senior editor. Nick and Isaac both join The Atlantic from The Washington Post: Nick covering immigration and the Department of Homeland Security, and Isaac reporting on politics, migration, and national security.

Below is the full announcement about these hires from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m writing today to share the excellent news that Nick Miroff, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Alex Hoyt are joining The Atlantic—Nick and Isaac as staff writers; Alex as a senior editor. All three are immensely talented journalists operating at the top of their game.

First, Nick: Nick is one of America’s foremost reporters on immigration and knows more about the innermost workings of the Department of Homeland Security than, quite possibly, the department itself. Nick comes to us from The Washington Post, where he spent 18 years as a reporter covering Latin America, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and DHS. He spent seven years as the paper’s Latin America correspondent, based in Havana and Mexico City. He was also part of the Post team whose coverage of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won a Pulitzer Prize. I am very happy that he has agreed to join us, and to cover immigration, at so crucial a moment in American history.

Next, Isaac: Isaac is a fantastically talented reporter and a natural magazine writer. He also comes to us from The Washington Post, where he has covered an impressive range of stories across politics, immigration, and national security with a focus on holding powerful people and institutions to account. His reporting has taken him to German border towns, where he tracked the international spread of conspiracy theories, as well as to the Arizona desert, where he revealed how a Saudi-owned company pumped unlimited supplies of the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa as feed for dairy cows in Riyadh. He was twice part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize—in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and in 2024 for documenting the role of the AR-15 in American life. Isaac holds a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His first book, Europe Without Borders: A History, was published last month.

Finally, Alex: Alex is an extremely skilled editor who brings great literary expertise, a genuine love of magazines, and a keen eye for what makes a distinctive feature. He was most recently an editor at GQ, where he worked on profiles, essays, and reported features. Previously he was the editor in chief of Amtrak’s The National magazine, where he brought the writing of contributors including Jacqueline Woodson, Lois Lowry, and Leslie Jamison to millions of train passengers across America. Alex is actually returning to us; he started his career as an Atlantic fellow in 2010. We’re very glad to welcome him back to the team after his journalistic peregrinations.

Please join me in welcoming them to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,

Jeff

The Atlantic announced a number of new hires at the start of the year, including managing editor Griff Witte; staff writers Caity Weaver, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer; and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

When Donald Trump first won the presidency, Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, angled for a senior position inside the White House, only to settle for an outside job as a political consultant.

Eight years later, Lewandowski set his sights lower. He lobbied to be named chief of staff to Kristi Noem, the incoming secretary of Homeland Security, whom he had spent years advising and promoting as a rising star within Trump’s orbit, two people familiar with the situation told us.

But again he was thwarted. Trump personally nixed the idea, said the people, who requested anonymity to describe private conversations. One added that the president was concerned by the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved. (Lewandowski and Noem have denied the claims of an affair.)

The president’s decision has not stopped Lewandowski from working closely with Noem in her new role, functioning as a traveling adviser while overseeing other employees in her office. The situation has alarmed some in Trump’s circle, who view Lewandowski as a chaotic presence, even by MAGA standards. Lewandowski has a record of feuding with others who are close to the president and creating controversy. He worked as Trump’s first campaign manager during the 2016 presidential race, before becoming a government-relations consultant and political adviser to Trump and other Republican politicians.

Trump remains personally close to Lewandowski, whom he has kept as a friend and ally throughout a range of scandals. But the president is also aware that many of his trusted aides and confidants deeply dislike the 51-year-old, especially after he argued last summer to Trump that he needed to make changes on his campaign. Trump eventually sided with his existing campaign leadership and asked Lewandowski to focus on New Hampshire, a long-shot state for the Republican nominee that Trump went on to lose by nearly three points. But Lewandowski continued to travel with Trump and attended his Election Night party.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said Lewandowski is working as a “special government employee,” a temporary designation that allows him to maintain his private businesses while working in the government. Noem has not named an official chief of staff, according to the department’s website.

In conversations with representatives of other government offices, Homeland Security staff have referred to Lewandowski as a supervisor of sorts. During a recent back-and-forth between Noem’s office and an aide to a governor, a DHS employee invoked Lewandowski’s name, saying, “I’m going to have to check with Corey,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Since Noem was confirmed to her post in late January, Lewandowski has appeared with her on Capitol Hill and traveled with her in New Orleans to prepare security for the Super Bowl. He previously advised Noem during the transition, according to various news reports, continuing his role as a top strategist, cheerleader, and loyalist from her time as South Dakota’s governor.

Lewandowski has told others that he is not interested in a government job, has no office at DHS, and is volunteering through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to do work across the administration. His visits to the Capitol and New Orleans, when Noem was also present, he has said, coincided with meetings he had with other friends and colleagues.

Lewandowski declined to comment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

This is not the first time Lewandowski has managed to stay in Noem’s orbit despite the efforts of those around her to create distance.

In 2021, Noem’s office announced that she was ending her professional relationship with Lewandowski, after the wife of a prominent Republican donor accused him of unwanted sexual advances and of stalking her at a Las Vegas charity event. Lewandowski was also removed from the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Action and lost other political clients. He subsequently agreed to a deferred adjudication deal with Las Vegas prosecutors that included impulse-control training and community service, but no admission of guilt.

A reporter for Breitbart News accused Lewandowski of grabbing her arm at a 2016 Trump event. Lewandowski initially responded by calling the reporter “delusional” and writing, “I never touched you,” on social media. When a video confirmed that Lewandowski had grabbed the reporter’s arm, he was charged by Palm Beach police with simple battery, though the charges were later dropped after Lewandowski argued that he was trying to keep the reporter away from Trump.

In each instance, Lewandowski succeeded in maintaining a level of influence among Trump allies and a direct relationship with the president. He also continued to advise Noem, despite the announcement from her spokesperson in 2021 that he would no longer be advising her after the Las Vegas incident.

“He never actually left the team,” one person who worked in her office at the time told us, requesting anonymity to discuss private information. “As well as continuing to advise her, he also continued to travel with her.”

For now, at least, Lewandowski seems firmly entrenched in both Noem’s and Trump’s circles, albeit from perhaps more of a remove. On Super Bowl Sunday, Lewandowski posted on social media various pictures from the day—riding in Trump’s large official motorcade, smiling with Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, looking down at the 50-yard line from his seats inside the Superdome.

But a postgame picture seemed to best capture Lewandowski’s place in Trumpworld. He shared a photo of the nose of Air Force One—its trademark blue, gold, and teal gleaming against the twilight of the city’s darkened sky—from a slight distance.

“So long New Orleans,” he wrote.

During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to the president.  

Read alongside Elon Musk’s and Vice President J. D. Vance’s apparent willingness to defy the courts, Trump’s rhetoric is a concerning sign about where this administration might be headed. But there is significance to the fact that the administration already has a hefty stack of court orders it might want to defy. Despite Trump’s effort to present himself as an agent of overwhelming force, he is encountering persistent and growing opposition, both from courts and from other pockets of civic life.

Litigants have sued the administration over the seemingly unlawful freezing of federal funds, the deferred-resignation program for civil servants, the destruction of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the handling of sensitive government data by Musk’s aides, the removal of scientific data from government websites, the attempt to write birthright citizenship out of the Constitution, the barring of transgender people from military service, the transfer of undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, and more.

[Read: The tasks of an anti-Trump coalition]

And now the court orders are coming, blocking the administration from pushing forward, or at the very least slowing its speed.

Courts have prevented Trump from dismissing a government watchdog without explanation and granted restraining orders barring the administration from slashing funds for crucial scientific research. They have prevented Musk’s team from meddling with Treasury Department systems and insisted that the government halt its transfer of an incarcerated transgender woman to a men’s prison. Four separate judges have issued orders requiring the government to stand down on its effort to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Litigation has also proved to be a valuable tool for prying loose key information from the administration, like the specifics of just what access Musk’s aides were given to the Treasury Department, and as a means of making legible to the public what Trump is trying to get away with. “It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Judge John Coughenour commented when issuing an injunction against the birthright-citizenship order. But, he went on, “in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

So far, there’s no indication that Trump has attempted to ignore Judge Coughenour’s injunction. In other cases, though, troubling signs have emerged of the administration’s laxity in following court orders, including multiple instances in which judges have found agencies to be in defiance of the court’s instructions and attempts by the government to find work-arounds. It’s not yet clear how much of this stems from chaos and incompetence and how much is a strategy by Trump and Musk, however clumsy, to force a confrontation with the judiciary. Either way, this approach endangers the health of the constitutional order—which may well be the point.

If the administration decides to launch an assault against the judiciary, it will be all the more important that a strong response comes not only from the courts themselves, but from Congress and the public. Trump is skilled at presenting himself as the indomitable voice of a true American majority, creating a facade of consensus aided by the startling quiescence of congressional Republicans. Dissent, both loud and quiet, can crack that facade and make an illegitimate power grab apparent for what it is.

Some of that dissent is already coming from inside the executive branch. Over the course of a bizarre three weeks, the administration encouraged federal workers who had not yet been fired to depart their posts under a “deferred resignation” program clearly modeled on the buyouts Musk offered to Twitter employees after his takeover of that company. (The program closed on Wednesday after it was briefly frozen, and then unfrozen, by a federal judge.) But if the goal was to persuade federal workers to depart on their own, the slipshod rollout and smarmy, dismissive tone—one FAQ provided by the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find “higher productivity jobs in the private sector”—may have backfired. The Subreddit r/fednews is buzzing with government employees expressing defiance. “Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit,” wrote one user. “I took an oath under this position to the American people.” In reference to OPM’s description of the program as a “fork in the road,” some federal employees adopted the spoon as a symbol of their opposition. Earlier this week, federal workers rallied at a protest outside the Capitol holding signs that read Public Service is a Badge of Honor!

In Congress, the Democratic minority, which entered this second Trump era cautiously, seems to be waking up. “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times in an interview published on February 2. Just two days later, though, Schumer was standing outside the Treasury Department leading a rally to protest Musk’s apparent takeover of the department’s sensitive payment systems. Democrats held the Senate floor for 30 hours to drag out the confirmation of Russ Vought, the architect of many of Trump’s most aggressive schemes, to head the Office of Management and Budget, and senators such as Brian Schatz of Hawaii have hinted at plans to escalate to even more dramatic procedural measures. “The roots of democracy are still strong,” Schatz told The New Yorker recently. “It depends on not just members of the legislative branch fighting back but there being a mass movement to back us up.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

This opposition movement will try to build on itself. The Democratic Party is taking more aggressive action in part because of an outraged constituency demanding that it speak up; that, in turn, may encourage Americans to push the party further. Spoon emoji, court orders, protests—all of these serve as indications that those who dissent are not alone. True, courageous leadership can emerge unexpectedly. Within the FBI, Acting Director Brian Driscoll has become a folk hero of sorts for his refusal to provide Justice Department leadership with the names of FBI agents to potentially be fired. Six Justice Department officials resigned yesterday rather than follow orders to dismiss the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: Granting the mayor a political favor would constitute “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent,” the acting leader of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued in a letter to Justice Department leadership, writing, “I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor” as an attorney. During a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a U.S. military installation in Germany, an eighth grader organized a walkout at her middle school to protest Hegseth’s attacks on diversity efforts within the military.

The fact is that Trump is an unpopular president who eked out a razor-thin plurality of the popular vote and whose party holds the slimmest of majorities in the House. So far, he has been able to avoid that inconvenient reality by relying on executive orders. But March 14 is approaching, when the federal government will run out of money and House Republicans—never a compliant group at the best of times—will need to organize to pass a funding bill in order to avoid a shutdown. The limitations of Trump’s attempts to rule by decree, and the inability of his party to govern, may then become unavoidably apparent.

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Sometime on Tuesday evening, the USAID website was taken down and replaced with what looked like a beta page from the internet of the 1990s. There were no affecting photos of American government officials distributing food and medicine overseas. Instead, a box of text explained that nearly all USAID personnel would be placed on administrative leave, globally. With administrative assistance from Elon Musk, President Donald Trump seems to have wiped out the world’s largest donor agency in just a few days. It was a radical act, but maybe not as politically risky, in the domestic sense, as other plans in the grand project of dismantling the federal government. USAID has important beneficiaries, but most of them are not Americans and live overseas.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we discuss where Trump and Musk seem to be headed and the obstacles they are likely to encounter in the future. What happens when Trump starts to face challenges from courts? What happens when Musk goes after programs that Americans depend on, particularly those who voted for Trump? What new political alliances might emerge from the wreckage? We talk with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics. And we also talk with Shane Harris, who covers national security, about Trump’s campaign to purge the FBI of agents who worked on cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol.

“I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends,” Harris says. “I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Today is the deadline for some two million federal employees to decide if they want to type resign in response to the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email. The email, of course, is one in a list of things that Elon Musk, empowered by President Trump, has been doing in order to “disrupt” the federal government.

Donald Trump: We’re trying to shrink government. And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

Rosin: For example: gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system—

News anchor: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granting Elon Musk’s DOGE team access to the federal government’s payment system, which handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Rosin: —dismantle USAID, of which Trump is not a fan—

Trump: And we’re getting them out. USAID—run by radical lunatics.

Rosin: —and neither is Musk.

Elon Musk: If you’ve got an apple, and it’s got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you’ve got actually just a ball of worms, it’s hopeless. And USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

Rosin: All of these efforts are unusual, maybe even unprecedented, norm-breaking—even for Trump. But are they unconstitutional? And could they fundamentally change the character of the country?

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

[Music]

News anchor: At the FBI, some agents have started to pack up their desks as fears of mass firings grow.

Rosin: In the second half of the show, we’re going to focus on a special case inside the government, which presents a different set of potentially history-changing problems—the FBI—with staff writer Shane Harris.

But first, we are going to discuss what’s at stake, more broadly in this overhaul, with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics for The Atlantic.

[Music]

Rosin: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here.

Rosin: So, Jon, of all the unorthodox things that Trump has authorized Elon Musk to do with the federal government, which one strikes you as pushing constitutional limits the most?

Chait: Attempting to eliminate or cut spending for agencies that have been authorized by Congress. This is just a totally revolutionary step in terms of the structure of our government. And it’s kind of shocking, to me, how far he’s been able to go, and how much permission he’s received from the Republican Party.

Rosin: And is there another time in history when a president tested this limit between what Congress authorizes and what the president can do with that? And how has it worked out in the past?

Chait: That’s a great question. You had a struggle with Andrew Jackson over the Bank of the United States. That was a real constitutional struggle between him and his enemies as to how much power the president had vis-à-vis Congress and whether the president had just total authority to do what he wished. And Andrew Jackson was sort of known for pushing the boundaries of the office to or past their limits, and saying if the Supreme Court ruled against him, he would just do what he wanted, anyway. He did the same thing with his attempts to ethnically cleanse Native Americans to take their land. He just fundamentally didn’t care if he had authority from Congress.

That’s the kind of struggle we’re, I think, heading into right now. And Richard Nixon tried a smaller version, I think, of what Trump is doing now. He basically said, Congress has authorized certain kinds of spending, and I’m just going to impound it. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and Congress passed the Impoundment [Control] Act that formalized the fact that Congress has this authority, and the president doesn’t, and if Congress authorizes spending, with very limited exceptions, the president has to carry it out. And if the president objects to certain forms of spending that Congress enacted, he has to persuade Congress to pass a law to change it.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. So that’s the line we’re working with. So it’s the Impoundment Act. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court. Can we talk about examples of, say, how far an administration can go in resisting a previous administration’s policies, but not pushing against this constitutional line? What would be something we’ve seen before? And what would prompt what people would refer to as, say, a legal or constitutional crisis?

Chait: Just in the big picture, the executive branch has been asserting more and more authority, over decades, as Congress has gotten more and more dysfunctional. The use of the filibuster has risen. Congress has gotten less and less able to fulfill its constitutional obligation to really direct national policy the way the Constitution imagined it. And so the executive branch has really kind of filled in this gap in a lot of ways. So you’ve seen presidents of both parties creatively exerting their authority.

You had Trump doing this with immigration, where he, you could say, couldn’t or just barely even tried to get Congress to fund the wall that he wanted. So he just basically redirected funding from the Pentagon to the border by calling it an emergency. And Trump is doing the same thing with tariffs.

Now, Congress basically ceded the president emergency authority to declare tariffs for various national-security emergencies, thinking that this would just be used in the case of something like a war or an international conflict, but it let the president decide what an emergency is. And so Trump can just say, well, an emergency is whatever he wants, and that’s on Congress.

And Biden has kind of pushed the limit in a lot of ways, I think most controversially with student loan forgiveness, where the executive branch has control over student loans, and so Biden just kind of forgave those loans on a kind of sweeping basis. Now, he was challenged legally. But when you’re in power, your party has a pretty strong incentive to interpret executive power in the most sweeping way.

So there’s a way in which both parties have really been engaged in this, but I really think what Trump and Musk are doing now has totally breached the walls of normal and is just turning the Constitution into a farce.

Rosin: Okay. So the reason that’s true is mostly because of appropriations? Because from what you’ve said, presidents are pushing this line constantly. So what are they doing that doesn’t just break norms or traditions, but actually is pushing into constitutional crisis?

Chait: Article I of the Constitution, which is really just, like, the guts of the Constitution, says that Congress has authority over spending.

So Congress establishes an agency. Congress sets its spending levels. And throughout our history, with the exception we’ve described for Nixon, which was slapped down, the presidents have to follow that because that’s the law, right? Now, the president has a role in that. The president can veto some of these laws. If Congress proposes spending that the president doesn’t want, the president can veto it, and then Congress can override it, or Congress can make a deal with him. But whatever emerges from that is the law, and the president has to follow the law.

Rosin: Okay. And does the Trump team have any creative arguments for how to get around this Impoundment Act?

Chait: So far, Elon Musk is just operating in this totally chaotic legal gray zone. So his first target has been the United States Agency for International Development. And one thing they’ve made this argument is that, Well, that was just established by an executive order by the president, John F. Kennedy, 1961, so it can be ended by an executive order. The problem is: After it was established by executive rule, it was later established by Congress. Congress voted to make the United States Agency for International Development an agency.

So after Congress established the United States Agency for International Development, it had the force of law. And so saying, We’re going to eliminate this agency, is just a violation of the law. It’s pretty simple.

Rosin: Okay. I can see the argument. So can we play out both scenarios? The first scenario is: The courts push back on Trump. You know, they enforce the Impoundment Act. They say, You cannot do this. You can’t end USAID. Elon Musk has to stop roaming around the federal government and making these decisions that violate this constitutional balance of power. What happens then? Does it call Trump’s bluff?

Chait: It might, but I wouldn’t count on it, for a couple reasons. Number one: Musk is moving much faster than the legal system can move. And it’s a lot easier to destroy something than it is to build something. So once you’ve basically told everyone they’re fired, and they can’t come to work, they can sit and wait for the courts to countermand that while they’re losing their income and their mortgage is going under, or they could just go find another job somewhere.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just, like, facts on the ground change, so that even if the legal reality doesn’t budge, you’ve already disintegrated the actual infrastructure.

Chait: You lose the institutional culture. You lose the accumulated expertise. And by the time the courts have stepped in, rebuilding it is difficult to do, even if the president wanted to. And obviously, they’re not going to want to anyway. Second of all, it’s not totally clear that they’re going to follow the law, that the law has any power over them.

I mean, remember: Donald Trump established on the first day of his administration that he believes that people who break the law on his behalf can get away with it when he pardoned the entire—or commuted the sentences of the entire—insurrectionists, right?

Rosin: Yeah.

Chait: So Elon Musk knows full well that if he violates the law, Trump is going to have his back. So I think that’s also shaping the behavior of everyone involved in this episode.

Rosin: Right. So it sounds like you pretty strongly believe there is no brake to this. b-r-a-k-e. There is no stop to this. I was thinking that maybe the courts or something to, you know, put some hope in to stop this. But it sounds like no.

Chait: Well, in the long run, the courts can have an effect by saying, You don’t have the authority to eliminate this agency. It still exists, meaning that when the Democrats win back the presidency, if that ever happens, it’ll still be there, and then they can actually rebuild it.

Rosin: So in other words, in that scenario, there’s temporary dismantling, but the balance of powers remains in place, is affirmed by the courts, and things get slowly rebuilt.

Chait: Right. Although, you know, you’ve lost all your talent, you’ve lost your institutional memory, and then you’re probably rebuilding this agency from scratch.

And keep in mind, USAID is just the test case. I think they’re just picking on the most politically vulnerable agency. It deals with foreign aid, right? So most of the people affected by this right now are mostly living in other countries, who won’t get, you know, drinking water and food. And people are going to starve and die of diseases, but they’re not going to be Americans. They can’t vote, so they’re politically weak and vulnerable.

So that’s the target that they’ve picked to establish this principle that the presidency can pick and choose what spending is real and what isn’t. So then they’re going to start to go on to do domestic targets. But then, I think, once they’ve started attacking domestic targets, then they’re going to start dealing with political blowback in a way they’re not facing when they’re going after foreign aid.

Rosin: I see. So that’s a different political—so if that starts to happen, if we enter a period where you have people who have stake in this in the U.S., can you see any interesting alliances that could come out of that moment?

Chait: It’s really hard to see where they’re going, because Elon Musk is not proceeding from an accurate map of reality.

So to just explain what I mean by that, he said that he wants to cut—first he said—$2 trillion from the fiscal-year budget, from one year. Then he revised it down to $1 trillion. So right away, you know, when you’re just picking these random round numbers, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. But he said, like, basically, there’s a trillion dollars in just, you know, waste and improper payments—and there just isn’t. There’s nothing close to that by even the most expansive possible definition. So Musk thinks he’s going to just go through the budget and find waste, and just kill it and add up to a trillion dollars. And he’s obviously not.

So the question is: What happens when his fantasy starts to run into reality? Does he start to just attack social-welfare programs and end payments of food stamps and Medicaid reimbursements and programs like that to people? Does he realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about and he’s in way over his head? We don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think that is the question you’ve got to answer before you start to figure out what the politics look like.

Rosin: Right. And there’s also military budgets. Like, if you think where the giant spending is, you’re running up against budgets that will face a huge amount of resistance if you slash them in the way that he’s slashed other things.

Chait: Right. Yeah. If they start going after the Pentagon, I think you, obviously, cut pretty deeply into the Republican coalition pretty fast. I even think they’re probably starting to accumulate small amounts of domestic political targets with USAID, right? They cut off funding to a Lutheran charity, but, you know, those are midwestern religious conservatives who are operating those programs who are being targeted. Now, most of the money is going overseas, but you’re still hurting people in the United States of America. And I think that pain is going to start to spread more widely if they keep going.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so you’re describing a realistic scenario in which this whole operation does encounter resistance. There are many policy researchers—on the left, even—who have argued that the government does, in fact, need an overhaul and, more specifically, isn’t equipped for a digital age. Is there a chance that in all of this, you know, Elon Musk could usher in a more efficient, tech-friendly kind of government?

Chait: Yeah, well, that was the initial hope that some people who specialize in government reform were hoping for. Jennifer Pahlka is an expert in what’s called “state capacity,” which is just the ability of government to function and to bridge the gap between its ambitions and its actual ability to meet those ambitions.

And part of that is fixing the way government hires and fires people.

But the problem is: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in that in any way whatsoever. He’s just holed up with a bunch of engineers who don’t seem to have any expertise in government or state capacity whatsoever. And they’re just finding programs that people within this kind of right-wing bubble in which he resides think sound radical and just, you know, saying, Delete it! Delete it! and getting cheers on social media for it.

It’s just so completely haphazard. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually making the government, you know, operate better.

Rosin: Yeah. And I suppose Twitter did not become a better, more profitable, you know, smoother-functioning company after Elon Musk took it over. It just became a kind of tool of the culture war—like, an effective tool of the culture war.

Chait: Right. It became smaller, less profitable—jankier, but more conservative.

Rosin: Right, okay. All right. One final thing. So project far into the future. Let’s say that your blowback scenario is real. What political alliances can you see reforming? Like, if you had to predict a political realignment some years down the road that includes a reaction to everything that’s going on now, what does it look like?

Chait: Well, the Trump coalition has really been built on winning multiracial, working-class voters back from the Democrats—and those voters are disproportionately to the right on social policy—and they’ve exploited some of those progressive stances on social policy that the Democratic Party has adopted over the last decade, but they’re still relatively to the left on economics. Maybe they don’t believe in government, in the abstract, but in the specific, they really rely on programs, like nutritional aid and Medicaid, Obamacare.

And every time the Republicans have gone after those programs, their coalition has splintered. That was really a major element in killing George W. Bush during his second term. He decided to privatize social security, and that was a major cause of the decline of his popularity that made him politically toxic, along with the Iraq War and Katrina, social security privatization.

You know, you could see a version of that happening with Trump, but I wouldn’t take for granted that it’ll play out that way because we live in a different world in a lot of ways.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Jonathan Chait.

After the break: Donald Trump also has his eyes set on the FBI. We hear from The Atlantic’s Shane Harris about what that might mean.

[Break]

Rosin: Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Harris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So the president asked the FBI to turn over the names of every agent who worked on the Capitol riots. What do you read into that request?

Harris: Well, I think you don’t even have to read that closely between the lines. You can just read the lines as they were sent in the order that we now have seen publicly, that went from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, of course, who had been one of Donald Trump’s lawyers as a private citizen, telling the acting director for the FBI, Look—we want the names of these people because they believe in the words that he has put, that they can no longer have trust that these FBI employees will implement the president’s agenda faithfully.

So what they are saying is that these are individuals who they don’t think are on board with Trump administration policies. And then of course, you know, we can do a little bit of inference, which is, you know, why would he go after the people who investigated January 6 and his role in it? Which was, by the way, the biggest FBI investigation in the country’s history. You know, these are the agents who interviewed and ultimately gave evidence that created the charges for the Capitol rioters—who were sent to prison, who Trump then later pardoned and who are now free—who investigated his own activity around January 6 and efforts to impede the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration.

So these are the FBI agents who did that case. And you know, what Trump is making very clear here is that, you know, he wants to identify them. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t trust the leadership that oversees them, and either wants them removed or moved, or we’ll see what the disciplinary action is. But some of them, he’s actually said he wants them fired immediately. He’s made pretty clear how he feels about these people and why he’s going after them, I think.

Rosin: Now, that must have landed in a very particular way at the FBI. You know the agency better than I do. As far as I understand it, I mean, you are assigned a case; you work on that case. So how have leaders in the agency responded to that request?

Harris: I think it’s been really interesting. I mean, there’s been this mixture from people I’ve talked to of: On one level, people are not surprised that Donald Trump went after FBI personnel, because it was expected that he would go after senior-leadership-level type people. I mean, he had essentially pushed out the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who—remember—became the FBI director when Donald Trump fired the previous FBI director, James Comey, in his first term.

But people were genuinely stunned by the scope of this demand to know the names of all of these agents who worked J6—and then there’s one other related case—because it’s, you know, potentially 4,000 to maybe even 6,000 personnel if you’re taking in FBI agents, analysts, people who play a support role.

But then something really fascinating has happened: There has been this—I hesitate to say the word defiant—but there are senior leaders at the FBI, including the person who is serving as the acting director right now, who essentially are saying, No, you cannot just fire agents for this reason, for no real cause. These people have protections under civil-service rules. They have due-process rights. And what’s more, some of the advocates for these folks are saying, Look—you can just read the plain language of the order that I just read to you and see that this is a retaliatory response, that what the president is doing is going after people because he doesn’t like their opinions or what they did.

As you pointed out, these thousands of agents didn’t pick to be on the case. I mean, it’s not like they raised their hand and said, Yes, please. I would like to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. They were assigned these cases. So the leadership has actually really kind of dug in here, some of them, and essentially is saying, There’s a process for this. This isn’t fair.

Now, we’ll see how long they can resist the White House on this, but we’re seeing some real institutional pushback from the FBI, which personally, I think, is encouraging.

Rosin: I want to get more into the pushback, but I’m curious what we know about this group of agents. There’s a few thousand. Because, yes, I followed the January 6 cases. I know that it was the biggest investigation in history, but who are they? Like, if you think about losing these 4,000, is why I’m asking, what’s their expertise, and what do they generally do?

Harris: If we take that group of the J6 investigators, the agents themselves, these could be people who were pulled in from all over the country. So this could include agents that were investigating national-security-related matters, counterterrorism matters, transnational crime, narcotics. The universe of these agents, as you know, was so big because the case was so big and demanding.

Trump, though, has zeroed in, more particularly, on some individuals, including some very senior-level officials that have the title of executive assistant director, and he actually named some of these in this order. And those people were involved in things like, for instance, the Mar-a-Lago investigation, when Donald Trump took classified documents from the White House and stored them at his estate in Florida—offenses for which he was later charged under the Espionage Act.

Some of these people—one of them was the special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, which participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Others had supervisory and leadership positions on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It was a counterintelligence squad at the Washington Field Office in D.C. that handled the Mar-a-Lago case. So, you know, he understands that there are people who, individually, separate from J6, worked on the Mar-a-Lago case, as well, and those people are being singled out too.

Rosin: Right. I mean, there are two things here. One is, we’ve talked about this in terms of other agencies, like USAID, which is: What vast institutional knowledge would you lose? So these people worked on individual cases, but also, they have a lot of expertise in counterterrorism. They just must have a large, you know, body of knowledge and experience that you could lose.

Harris: Absolutely. So let’s just take, for instance, the squad at the Washington Field Office that did the Mar-a-Lago investigation. They work in the counterintelligence division of the FBI. So when those folks are not investigating, you know, Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents, they’re looking at things like spies operating inside the United States trying to maybe steal government secrets or recruit agents in the United States. They’re looking at people who might be mishandling classified information. They look at people who might be leaking to journalists as well.

These are folks who work on highly specialized counterintelligence cases. This isn’t just something that you, you know, kind of step into, and on day one, you know how to do it. These are different kinds of tradecraft. They’re very sensitive. These people all will have high-level security clearances. They will have been vetted for these jobs. So folks who are in positions like that, when you eliminate them, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me that there is just then, like, a backup bench of people who can come in to do these really important national-security cases.

And the same would go for anyone who’s working actively on counterterrorism, you know. I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about his concern that there are, you know, terrorists making their way inside the United States, taking advantage of, you know, weak border security or other ways of getting into the U.S. Well, it’s FBI agents who do counterterrorism cases that investigate things like that.

So if you’re suddenly moving people with this level of expertise off their jobs, or you are creating a real disruption and distraction while they’re trying to do their jobs, I think that arguably weakens national security, it creates vulnerabilities, and it distracts the FBI from doing its job, which is to go out and not just investigate crimes but to try and stop violent crimes and bad things from happening to Americans and to the U.S. government.

Rosin: Right. So you can see the future crisis. Like, you can project a future crisis where we are vulnerable to terrorism or something like that because we’ve lost a huge amount of this expertise.

Harris: I think that’s right. Yes. It doesn’t seem to me like he is thinking through the consequences of hobbling the FBI at this moment. What he is interested in is retribution. He’s interested in payback. And he is putting, you know, not only the country, but he’s putting his administration at grave political risk by doing that.

Rosin: Okay, Shane. Here’s something else that I was wondering about. Since when did the FBI come under so much suspicion from the right? I’ve always thought of the FBI as an agency conservatives can get behind, and Trump’s attacks feel like they upend all that. It’s confusing.

Harris: Oh definitely. And this has long been one of the more baffling aspects of Donald Trump’s critique of the FBI, as he’s painting them as this kind of leftist deep state.

I mean, the FBI—I’m speaking in general terms, of course, I mean—it is a generally conservative institution, both because I think that the people who work in it are often politically conservative or just sort of dispositionally conservative. It’s a law-enforcement agency. I mean, it does everything by the book. There are jokes in the FBI about how it takes, you know, five forms that you have to fill out before you can make a move on anything. It is a very hidebound, bureaucratic, small-C conservative organization. I mean, these are cops.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Harris: Okay? It’s a bunch of cops, right? This is like, if you want to think in generalities, like, you know, USAID is like, Oh, yeah, it’s people who want to get to charities, and they worked in the Peace Corps, and they’re all about humanitarian causes. And that, too, is kind of a broad brush.

But, you know, when I talk to people who have worked in the bureau, if you knew these people, these are not people who you would associate with progressive causes. That doesn’t mean that they are sort of reactionary right-wingers. I don’t want to make that impression either. They’re very much following the rule of law. It’s a conservative institution. It is very hidebound and steeped in tradition and in regulation.

And, you know, Trump just has this image of it as this out-of-control left organization. And he has persuaded large numbers of his followers and Americans that this is true. And I have to tell you, in the 20-plus years that I’ve covered national security, one of the most fascinating and bewildering trends that I have seen is this change in political positioning, where now, people who tend to be on the left, sort of—I don’t want to say revere the FBI and the intelligence agencies but—hold them up as models of institutions of government that we need to have faith and trust in, and they’re there to try and protect people. When it was a generation ago, people on the left who were deeply skeptical of the CIA and the FBI because these agencies were involved in flagrant abuses of civil rights and of the law in the 1950s and ’60s.

And now it’s people on the right who, particularly after 9/11, used to be so reflexively defensive of the CIA and the FBI and counterterrorism and Homeland Security, who now have sort of swapped political positions with the critique on the left that see these institutions as, you know, run through with dangerous, rogue bureaucrats who want to prosecute their political enemies. I mean, it’s just like the people have switched bodies.

Rosin: Let me ask you a broader question about this. As someone who’s been tracking Trump’s attempts to rewrite the history of January 6 for a while, I could say I was a little surprised by the blanket pardon of insurrectionists, maybe a little more surprised by this effort to go after the agents who investigated them. Because—and tell me if this is an exaggeration—to me, that could send a message to supporters: If you commit violence on my behalf, not only will you not get punished, but anyone who tries to go after you will be in trouble. Which, if I continue that logic, seems like, potentially, a blank check to commit violence on the president’s behalf. Is that paranoid?

Harris: No. It’s not. It’s not. That is, I think, one of the clear risks that we face with the president behaving in the way that he has. And I would take it one step further, which is to say: The message is that if you are an FBI agent, or maybe more to the point, an FBI leader, someone in a management position, there are certain things that you should just not look into and investigate.

And not to say, like, now that the president enjoys, you know, presumptive immunity for all official acts. I mean, who knows what the FBI is even going to investigate when it comes to Donald Trump. But how good would you feel being assigned a case to look into Elon Musk or, you know, Trump campaign donors who may have engaged in illegal activity or influence peddling, the whole universe of people connected to Trump?

What he is saying by pardoning these J6 rioters is that If you are on my side, I will come protect you. And I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends. I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.

The FBI is there to investigate crimes objectively, regardless of who may have committed them. And what the president is doing now is essentially saying there’s a whole category of people who, if not outright exempt, are people that are going to fall under his protection, and for the people who might dare to investigate them, there will be consequences.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you, but no thank you, for laying that out in such a clear and chilling way. I appreciate it.

Harris: My pleasure, Hanna. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Ron Johnson may be the most anti-vaccine lawmaker in Congress; he’s the kind of guy who says he’s “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated” while claiming without valid evidence that thousands have died from COVID shots. This morning, at the Capitol, Johnson walked over to his Senate Finance Committee colleague Bill Cassidy, a doctor and a passionate advocate for vaccination, and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. The two of them had just advanced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate floor.

The committee vote, which was held this morning in a room crammed to capacity with what appeared to be roughly equal numbers of Kennedy’s skeptics and devotees, certainly fit with the behavior of a compliant GOP. But it was still surprising in its way, if only because, until this morning, Cassidy had been so clearly wary of giving the nation’s highest role in public health to a prominent anti-vaccine activist. At last week’s confirmation hearings, he seemed like he might even be prepared to cast his vote with the opposition. That didn’t happen.

Whether you like Kennedy or not, the hearings showed that he lacks the basic qualifications to hold this office. He knows very little about the nearly $2 trillion behemoth that he would be tasked with running. He flubbed the basics of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and seemed wholly unaware of an important law that governs emergency abortions. The hearings also called attention to a passel of health-related conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. has floated in the past, including that Lyme disease was developed as a bioweapon, that COVID is “ethnically targeted” to infect Caucasians and Black people (and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people), and that standard childhood vaccinations are damaging or deadly.

As of last Thursday, Kennedy appeared to have unwavering support from the committee’s Republicans, who occupy 14 of its 27 seats—with one notable exception: Cassidy. Prior to taking office, the Louisiana senator had personally led a campaign to vaccinate 36,000 kids against hepatitis B. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. And in early 2021, Cassidy joined six other GOP senators in voting to convict Donald Trump on charges of “incitement of insurrection.” The doctor had voted his conscience before. It seemed possible that he would do so once again.

Cassidy made no attempt to hide his skepticism of RFK Jr. during Thursday’s hearing. He spoke up at one point to correct the record after his Republican colleague Rand Paul worked up the crowd of pro-Kennedy spectators by disparaging the practice of vaccinating babies for hep B. Later on, he paused to cite a meta-analysis disproving Kennedy’s often-stated belief that childhood vaccines may be a cause of autism. (Cassidy also explained the concept of a meta-analysis for those in the room and people watching at home.) When RFK Jr. cited his own evidence for being skeptical of vaccines, referring to a paper from a little-known journal, Cassidy put on his reading glasses, peered at his iPad, and reviewed the evidence firsthand. At the end of the hearing, he reported that he’d found “some issues” with the paper, and then implored Kennedy to disavow mistruths about vaccine safety. “As a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed in making America and Americans more secure, more prosperous, healthier. But if there’s someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease [...] It’ll be blown up in the press,” he warned. “So that’s my dilemma, man.”

Cassidy’s “dilemma” hardly went unnoticed by RFK Jr.’s supporters. Calley Means, a proponent of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, said last weekend on The Charlie Kirk Show that MAHA moms are now “camping out at [Cassidy’s] office.” (I did not see any tents or sleeping bags outside his door this morning.) Other MAHA leaders, including the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, have also issued political threats to any lawmakers who might try to stop Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone that votes in that direction, I think, is really burying themselves,” Bigtree told me and a group of other reporters last week.

Cassidy, for his part, wasn’t saying much about his personal deliberations. His only official social-media post from the weekend quoted a Bible verse from the Book of Joshua: “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged,” it read in part. “Be strong and courageous.”

When he arrived at the committee room this morning, Cassidy was somber. He stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed. He’d been verbose at last week’s hearings, but now he said only a single word—“aye”—and left the room. In a social-media post that went up this morning, Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems. “It’s been a long, intense process, but I’ve assessed it as I would assess a patient as a physician,” Cassidy said. “Ultimately, restoring trust in our public-health institution is too important, and I think Senator Kennedy can help get that done.”

Even if Cassidy had voted no, his vote may not have mattered in the end. Under normal circumstances, a nomination that got voted down by the Senate Finance Committee would be dead in the water—but these were not normal circumstances. Majority Leader John Thune could still have scheduled a vote by the full Senate, at which point Kennedy would have been kept from office only if at least three other Republicans had joined Cassidy in opposition.

It’s still not a sure thing that Kennedy will be confirmed by the full Senate. Other Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have raised concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. But the odds of RFK Jr.’s defeat are shrinking, and Cassidy’s thumbs-up may one day be remembered as the mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down from 2017, when that independent-minded senator doomed Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Faced with an opportunity to make the same sort of stand, Cassidy folded. Now the American public is at the whims of the administration’s promises.

You might be forgiven for forgetting—ever so briefly—that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Sometimes it seems like he does, too.

In the middle of the night, as news about the plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was breaking, Trump posted on Truth Social:

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. 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. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

He raises some valid points—ones that many people might be wondering about themselves. The difference between them and him is that he is the leader of the federal government, able to marshal unparalleled resources to get answers about a horror that happened just two and a half miles from his home. He’s the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, and the crash involved an Army helicopter. But Trump isn’t really interested in doing things. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the simple-minded protagonist of Being There, he likes to watch.

This morning, Trump held an astonishing briefing at the White House where he and his aides unspooled racist speculation, suggesting (without any evidence) that underqualified workers hired under DEI programs had caused the accident. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong ideas and opinions, and I think we’ll state those opinions now,” Trump said, and he did. Vice President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized diversity efforts from the lectern as well. (Trump also misrepresented Federal Aviation Administration programs.) Trump insisted that he wasn’t getting ahead of the investigation by speculating, and that he could tell diversity was to blame because of “common sense.”

Trump also paused to accuse former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of “bullshit,” and narrated videos and information he’d seen in the news, interspersing his personal observations as a helicopter owner and passenger. “The people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going,” Trump said. At times, he appeared to blame both the helicopter pilots and air-traffic control. Perhaps it would be better to actually gather some information, but Trump is more interested in pontificating.

The pilots, DEI, air-traffic controllers, Buttigieg—the only common thread appeared to be that everyone was to blame, except for Trump himself.

No one could reasonably hold Trump responsible for the crash, just 10 days into his term—though that is the bar he has often tried to set. “I alone can fix it,” he has assured Americans, telling them that he personally can master and control the government in a way no one else can. He promised to be a dictator, though only on day one. Yet even while discounting his bluster, it would be nice to see the president doing something more than watching cable news and posting about it.

If he’s not going to do that, he could offer some consolation. Almost exactly 39 years ago, after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, President Ronald Reagan memorably described how the astronauts aboard had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Trump is giving us “NOT GOOD!!!”

Though exasperating, this passivity is no surprise. It was a running theme of Trump’s first administration and is already back in the second. In May 2016, Trump reportedly offered fellow Republican John Kasich a chance to be vice president, in charge of domestic and foreign policy; Trump would be in charge of “making America great again.” During Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, he struggled to show empathy for victims or do more than gawk at (and tweet about) the destruction. A few months later, he tried half-heartedly to do more after Hurricane Maria, producing the indelible visual of the president tossing paper towels to victims, like a giveaway at a minor-league baseball game.

[Read: That time Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans]

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

This approach to governance—or refusal to approach it, rather—is inextricably tied to Trump’s Gardiner-like obsession with television. The president watches hours of news every day, and if reports from inside the White House didn’t bear witness to this, his all-hours social-media posts would. Because he has little grounding in the issues facing the government and little interest in reading, television frequently seems to set his agenda. Political allies learned that the best way to get a message to Trump was to appear on Fox News. (Trolls, similarly, learned that a good way to rankle him was to take out ads on the channel.) Trump has used the Fox roster as a hiring pool for his administration.

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

[Read: Donald Trump calls in to Fox & Friends]

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

The presidency is not a spectator sport, though. At the end of Being There (spoiler alert), a group of political advisers conspires to put Chauncey Gardiner forward as the next president. The movie’s central joke is that the childlike, TV-obsessed protagonist has inadvertently fooled the nation’s most powerful circles into believing that he is profound, simply by stating directly what little he sees and understands. Joke’s on us.