Four years ago, the long-running Fox News juggernaut suddenly looked precarious. The 2020 elections proved a major threat, as viewers abandoned the network and huge lawsuits threatened its coffers. Today, Donald Trump is headed back to the White House, and he’s bringing a brigade of former Fox talent with him—a symbolic expression of the Murdoch-owned channel’s astonishing comeback.

Leading the list are Pete Hegseth, a frequent Fox presence who is nominated for secretary of defense, and Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host (and U.S. representative) tapped to lead the Department of Transportation. They’re joined by former Fox contributors Tom Homan (border czar), Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), and Janette Nesheiwat (surgeon general); former host Mike Huckabee (ambassador to Israel); guest host Pam Bondi (attorney general); and frequent guests Michael Waltz (national security adviser) and Marty Makary (commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration). Larry Kudlow passed this time on an administration job to stay at Fox Business.

[David A. Graham: Tucker’s successor will be worse]

In some ways, this staffing strategy looks a lot like that of the first Trump administration. During that presidency, the network was closely intertwined with the White House; the Fox host Sean Hannity was sometimes called Trump’s “shadow chief of staff,” and Hannity’s colleague Tucker Carlson became the leading exponent of Trumpist ideology in the media.

But the mostly synergistic relationship faltered in November 2020. Fox was the first network to forecast that Joe Biden had won Arizona, which infuriated both the Trump camp and conservative viewers. As the Republican Party became engulfed by bogus accusations of electoral fraud, Fox found itself in an uncomfortable in-between position. The network sometimes hosted Trump-world figures who repeated false claims, but privately, hosts ridiculed them. Meanwhile, hard-line viewers became angry with Fox’s refusal to go all in on the Big Lie and started defecting to more extreme right-wing upstarts such as Newsmax and One America News Network; Trump lambasted his former Fox allies. Internally, the network was rattled, and leaders debated next steps. Rupert Murdoch had never loved Trump, and some of his children wondered whether the business would be better served by moving to the center.

Worse was to come. Fox may not have embraced voting-fraud claims as fully as other outlets, but it did air guests’ statements that machines made by Dominion, a company that makes ballot-counting-equipment, had rigged the presidential election. Dominion sued for defamation, and a legal expert told CNN that the prospect of huge payouts represented “an existential threat” to the Fox Corporation. Fox finally settled the case on the eve of a trial, in April 2023, paying $787 million, though not before damaging internal communications had emerged as part of the litigation. A week later, Carlson—the network’s most popular figure—was fired.

[Read: What does Tucker Carlson believe?]

So Fox’s return to dominance today is somewhat surprising. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. The network has led cable-news ratings for more than two decades, and weathered the loss of several prominent hosts before Carlson; as I wrote when he exited, anchors tend to need Fox more than Fox needs them.

Although Trump has sometimes tried to claim credit for Fox’s success, what really seems to have happened is that Trump and Fox rediscovered a symbiotic relationship that allowed both to rebound. A spokesperson for the network pointed out to me that Fox has covered inflation, border security, and President Biden’s apparent decline extensively, getting to those topics faster or in more depth than CNN and MSNBC did. These three issues were also among the most important in the latest presidential election. What seemed like adverse headlines for Trump, including the criminal charges against him, led to high ratings for MSNBC, but Fox still came out on top.

After years of mostly avoiding Fox, Democrats also began to appear on the channel to try to get their message out. Kamala Harris granted one of her rare national-media interviews to Fox’s Bret Baier. Her vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, went on Fox News Sunday two weeks running in October. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an early adopter of Fox guest spots, introduced himself at the Democratic National Convention in August by joking, “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself saying: I’m Pete Buttigieg, and you might recognize me from Fox News.”

The aftermath of the election has many on the left feeling dejected and tuning out the news. MSNBC’s numbers tanked in the week after the election, and the network’s morning-show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski has endured backlash over their meeting for a reset with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. MSNBC’s parent company is also spinning it off from NBC.

[Adam Serwer: Why Fox News lied to its viewers]

The impact of nontraditional news sources, including X and podcasts, on the election has brought a new round of predictions about the demise of traditional media. But Fox’s rebound suggests a different conclusion: Perhaps the answer isn’t that people are really demanding different kinds of news; it’s that they just want conservative news. The nearly uniform shift rightward of the electorate in 2024 suggests that Fox was well positioned to both reflect and amplify voters’ mood.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to gripe about Fox decisions, likely judging that his broadsides can help shape Fox’s coverage to his liking. Shortly before the election, he demanded that the network stop airing paid ads that criticized him, whined when Baier interviewed Harris, and blasted Fox this summer after Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House who sits on the corporation’s board, criticized him. “Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them,” he posted, semi-grammatically. Trump’s selection of so many Fox alumni for his administration is in part a reflection of his instinct that politics is really a form of entertainment, and one of the key qualifications he seeks in any aide is looking the part. But the appointments and nominations over the past two weeks also show that, much like the viewers who left Fox after the 2020 election but have since returned, Trump may not love everything Fox does, but he can’t bring himself to leave it for good.

David Crisp told undercover agent he had ignored "government edicts" to sell £1.7m of his luxury product.

Out goes a Florida man, in comes a Florida woman. Hours after Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, withdrew from consideration, the president-elect last night announced that he will nominate Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department.

Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida, is widely viewed as a more serious and confirmable pick, and although that is partly a statement of what a ridiculous choice Gaetz was, it also shows how far expectations—and standards—have been lowered since the start of the first Trump administration. In 2017, Bondi was passed over for an administration role for fear that she was too scandal-tainted. This time around, she’s the safe, acceptable fallback choice.

If Bondi’s name means anything to you, you’re probably either a Floridian or a real Trump-news obsessive. After a stint as a local prosecutor, Bondi was elected as Florida attorney general in 2010 and served two terms. She left that office in 2019 and worked on Trump’s defense teams for both of his impeachment trials. Bondi also worked as a lobbyist in that period, with clients including the Qatari government, Amazon, and Uber. (You really don’t hear much about “draining the swamp” these days.) She also joined the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned nonprofit.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s first defeat]

Bondi’s highest-profile connection to Trump began in 2013, during her first term as Florida attorney general. Several state attorneys general had probed Trump University, a souped-up real-estate seminar suspected of advertising itself with fraudulent claims. In September 2013, Bondi announced that she was considering joining a lawsuit in New York. Within days, Trump’s personal putative charity, the Trump Foundation, had written a $25,000 check to And Justice for All, a group supporting her reelection—a donation that Bondi had personally solicited several weeks earlier. Bondi then declined to join the suit. (Bondi denies that the payment affected her decision.)

In the kaleidoscopic way of Trumplandia, the foundation itself was a kind of scam; it was later forced to shut down, and Trump admitted to 19 violations, including self-dealing. The Trump Foundation was not legally permitted to make political donations, and instead of reporting the pro-Bondi donation as such, it reported it as a gift to Justice for All, a similarly named nonprofit in Kansas. After The Washington Post uncovered the details, a Trump aide insisted that the mistake was innocent, but the IRS fined Trump $2,500.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Bondi was widely expected to land a job in his administration. In January 2017, Bloomberg even reported that an appointment was imminent, but nothing ever materialized—apparently because Trump staffers were concerned that questions about the donation would make confirmation hearings difficult and damaging. How quaint—now she’s the person Trump is relying on to sail through confirmation. And given the scale of Gaetz’s problems, the weaknesses of other Cabinet nominees, and the fatigue among the press and populace, that seems likely to work.

She is similar in this way to John Ratcliffe, whom Trump last week nominated to lead the CIA. During Trump’s first term, in 2019, he nominated Ratcliffe to be director of national intelligence, a job that helps coordinate all U.S. intelligence agencies. Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw once it was clear that the Senate wouldn’t confirm him, because he had no real qualifications for the job, and had exaggerated what little he did have. (I wrote at the time that Ratcliffe “would have been the least qualified DNI in the position’s short history,” but the current nominee for that post, Tulsi Gabbard, gives him a run for his money.) A year later, Trump nominated him again, and this time the Senate sighed heavily and confirmed him, despite concerns that he would improperly politicize the job. This is precisely what he did: In the last weeks of the 2020 campaign, Ratcliffe disclosed unverified information about the 2016 election, which career officials worried was disinformation, in a blatant attempt to boost Trump’s reelection.

[Read: The art of the swindle]

And yet when Trump announced Ratcliffe’s nomination this time around, it was met with something between a shrug and relief. After all, compared with Gaetz and Gabbard, here was a guy with actual experience in his appointed subject and in the executive branch! Trump has managed to move the goalposts so far, they’re in the budget parking lot.

Pete Hegseth, his nominee to lead the Defense Department, fits the same pattern. He was considered to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration, but not chosen. Now he’s been picked to lead an even more important and sprawling bureaucracy, though the only new qualifications he’s picked up in the ensuing years are three vitriolic books, many hours on Fox, and dismissal from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration. (Hegseth’s nomination seems rickety after revelations of a sexual-assault accusation, but he may yet make it through.)

If confirmed, Bondi will likely be a more effective and reasonable attorney general than Gaetz. She is not driven by personal grievance in the way he seems to be, and she has experience as both a prosecutor and a state attorney general. Like Gaetz, however, she is unlikely to defend the independence of the Justice Department from presidential interference. In addition to her past loyalty, she backed Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Trump has also already named three of his personal criminal-defense attorneys to top DOJ positions. At this stage, perhaps less bad news is the best anyone can desire, but none of this is good.

For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold—command over 2 million American military personnel—he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Hegseth began his involvement in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party’s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth’s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.

Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years—American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024)—lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.

A foundational tenet of Hegseth’s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.

[David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. “Being a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,” he writes—an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. “In previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn’t get to fight in a war.” (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth’s thesis—the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump—goes unmentioned).

Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”

(The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)

One episode looms especially large in Hegseth’s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the “Deus Vult” symbol—a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.

The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden’s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth—who protests that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol—the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.

He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. “I fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,” he writes. “Then I was accused of being one.” This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade as a model to emulate.

In any case, evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are “poisonous”; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by “German socialists.”

Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, “American Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.”

The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. “Yes, our modern social sciences—like ‘political science,’ previously known as ‘politics,’ and ‘social studies,’ previously known as individual disciplines like ‘history, economics, geography and philosophy’—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,” he writes. “Let that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools—public and private—today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.” Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

[Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern]

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay—where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted, most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces—Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. “The nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, ‘international rights’ of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,” he writes. “Not to mention the debate about the ‘rights’ of assholes (I mean, ‘detainees’) at Gitmo.”

Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and if necessary shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest throughline of all three books is the cross-application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his).

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges Hegseth’s readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, he writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule, because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists … You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A Defense Secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump. “We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president,” he said. But after a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the singer—whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly on the island—had second thoughts.

“Never in my life did I think that a month later, a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country, and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump,” Nicky Jam said.

He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.

Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.

In an article about how Trump’s transition is “shocking the Washington establishment,” Peter Baker of The New York Times writes: “Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is.” He’s right that the aberrant nature of the picks may be overlooked, as I have warned, yet it is also true that the actual unpredictability of them is overestimated.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump isn’t bluffing]

On K Street, Politico reports, health-care-industry lobbyists can’t believe that Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They were “expecting a more conventional pick,” even though Trump emphasized Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda late in the campaign, and even though Kennedy said that Trump had promised him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick, as Benjamin Mazer and my colleague Yasmin Tayag have recently written for The Atlantic, but his nomination should not come as a surprise—especially for people whose entire business proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually works. (The influence peddlers reportedly hope that senators will block Kennedy. The fact that they’re still waiting for someone else to solve their problems is further evidence of how little they’ve learned, years into the Trump era.)

Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the Kennedy choice. Back when Kennedy was a thorn in President Joe Biden’s side, threatening to run against him in the Democratic primary, the Post’s editorial board was all too happy to elevate him. Now the board condemns his nomination and tells us that it came out of a meeting with him last year “thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.” The columnist Michael Godwin, who beamed on November 9 that Trump’s victory “offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already feels like Morning in America again,” was back a week later to complain that “it’s not a close call to say” that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, are “unfit” for the roles.

The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators say they are shocked by many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who notoriously professed surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, is “shocked” at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues are “stunned and disgusted.”

Reactions to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled. “Wow,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told NBC. “I’m just surprised, because the names that I’ve heard for secretary of defense have not included him.” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was even blunter. “Who?” he said. “I just don’t know anything about him.”

[David A. Graham: The Trump believability gap]

If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some better staff work. Hegseth was a real possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has repeatedly drawn appointees.

Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense Secretary Hegseth, or a Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported last month, Trump critics were concerned about a “believability gap,” in which voters opposed some of Trump’s big policy ideas, sometimes quite strongly, but just didn’t trust that he would really do those things. Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump is and how he’d govern.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.

In 1991, only one album into its career, De La Soul tried to pull off an unusually audacious move. The hip-hop trio’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was a dense but accessible bricolage of dad-rock samples and flip-it-and-reverse-it nursery-rhyme syntax, establishing the group as innovators with commercial muscle. Two years later, De La Soul publicly renounced the album, dumping everything that made it an instant classic in an act of self-nullification from which the band never really recovered.

The follow-up album, De La Soul Is Dead, sounds like an insecure crew taking wild swings at perceived enemies—Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, the West Coast gangster-rap insurgency—and missing badly. The beats are sluggish, and 3 Feet High’s sample surprises (Hall & Oates! Steely Dan!) are absent, giving the record a thin, attenuated feel. It begins inauspiciously, with a skit involving a kid finding a copy of 3 Feet High in a trash can, and falls further into dispirited score-settling. It is also entirely too long, and both jokey and humorless. And worst of all, it squanders the group’s only opportunity to chart an alternative path for hip-hop at a moment when its adversaries were poised to usurp the genre.

In High and Rising, his new book about De La Soul, the music writer Marcus J. Moore unpacks this baffling decision. De La Soul Is Dead, he argues, was a “bleak and acerbic response to the industry and the band’s mounting frustrations” with music-business chicanery, and with being told they were just one thing when they were confident that they contained multitudes. Moore is a passionate defender of De La Soul Is Dead, which he feels was misunderstood and quickly forgotten, a “ripple” crashing into the “tidal wave” of gangsta rap; N.W.A had released the subgenre’s urtext Straight Outta Compton in 1988. He’s not wrong about the timing of the record, but it is the tenor of De La Soul Is Dead—its blithe disregard for 3 Feet High, and its reactionary swipes at the competition—that didn’t sit well. It still doesn't.

3 Feet High came out of nowhere—to be more specific, from Amityville, Long Island. The 24-track gem from Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason was conceived an hour-long train ride away from the center of New York’s hip-hop culture, and the distance was crucial; De La Soul could innovate in relative isolation. Working with the producer “Prince Paul” Hutson, the group reinvented how hip-hop was constructed, stacking samples and beats over, under, and around its intricate conversational flow, the lyrics hovering within some golden mean between fractured fairy tales and the loopy logic of P-Funk’s George Clinton. “It felt distant yet alluring,” Moore writes of the trio’s debut, “a new masterpiece from a bygone era of Black experimentation.”

[Read: The untold stories behind Hip-Hop’s greatest albums]

The album also felt like the start of something larger than the trio itself. Having found common ground with East Coast mavericks such as A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, and Jungle Brothers—artists who also fused Afrocentrism with jazzy beats and whip-smart lyrics—De La Soul brought them under their big tent. A creative collective they called Native Tongues was born. 3 Feet High’s track “Buddy” was Native Tongues’ statement of intent, a pass-the-mic celebration that included verses from Tribe’s Q-Tip and (on the remix) Queen Latifah. The video for the song, in which various members crowd the frame and joyously egg one another on, felt like the first seedling of a cultural movement.

And then, with De La Soul Is Dead, the group turned its back on the whole thing. “Here is the D.A.I.S.Y. / watching it die, see?” Posdnuos declaimed on “Pass the Plugs,” in a not-so-subtle dig at the first album’s flowery artwork and the notion of De La Soul ushering in a “Daisy Age” of comity and community. (D.A.I.S.Y. was in fact an acronym for “Da Inner Sound Y’all.” The second album cover depicted an overturned pot of limp daisies.)

The album covers, left to right, of “3 Feet High and Rising” and “De La Soul Is Dead.” (Reservoir Media)

Moore, after first chalking up the renunciation to industry frustration, throws out broader theories: The band bristled at being labeled “psychedelic rappers” in the press, and dismissed its public branding as a lure for casual hip-hop fans—in other words, white people. He develops a more layered hypothesis later on. “It’s better to last forever than to exist for a minute,” Moore writes. “De La played the long game.” By this point in the story, in the mid-’90s, the group had been cut down to the size of a cult act. But it hadn’t wanted overnight success; it had wanted a career. Moore rightly argues that, with its second album, De La Soul was trying to steer clear of the trap that has snared so many artists who have had to contend with being “held captive by the music they made as teenagers.” De La Soul Is Dead was the trio’s fast-track bid for respect as mature musicians, but it was protesting too much, too soon.

The second album sold well, but not as well as 3 Feet High, and that wasn’t entirely the group’s fault. It’s hard enough for any popular artist to pivot without shedding listeners; harder still for an act working within hip-hop, a historically conservative genre that tends to tuck its outliers into the margins. The debut had been an avant-garde record with mainstream appeal, but according to Moore, De La Soul was wise enough to know that its fresh commercial sound could quickly grow stale. So the group decided to trash it first.

However legitimate the trio’s outrage may have been, it failed to channel anger into effective art. De La Soul Is Dead took a bulldozer to the debut’s glorious garden. De La Soul’s lightness of touch was muscled aside in favor of churlish criticism of hip-hop’s new turn toward vulgarity, which for the trio was a kind of minstrelsy. But instead of flowing above the fray, De La Soul fell into the petty snipery of the scene—the big dis, the character assassination. 3 Feet High’s Day-Glo grin had twisted into a dyspeptic scowl. The group had given up the high ground, ceded the terms of the debate to its rivals. It was Dre and Snoop’s world now, and De La Soul had sunk into it.

[Read: Did the decline of sampling cause the decline of political hip-hop?]

This heel turn not only blew up the first incarnation of De La Soul; it tore apart the utopian idea that hip-hop’s balkanized turf wars could be set aside in favor of creative fellowship. The trio began to feel rudderless, and the Native Tongues went their different ways. A Tribe Called Quest created its masterpiece, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, while Queen Latifah stopped making hip-hop records after she became a crossover superstar.

Having thrown down the gauntlet at the feet of hip-hop’s stars, De La Soul tried calling a truce with 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, an album that split the difference between goofy ebullience and acrid critique. The tracks “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” and “Eye Patch” hinted at a return to 3 Feet High’s technicolor schoolyard. But there was also “I Am I Be,” which, Moore writes, showed De La Soul “holding [itself] and [its] collaborators accountable for letting the [Native Tongues] collective falter due to egos.” When Posdnuos decried the “tongues who lied and said ‘We’ll be natives to the end,’” it felt like an elegy for a lost cause.

By the time De La Soul released Stakes Is High, in 1996, hip-hop had been commandeered by what Moore calls the “shiny-suit” era of Sean Combs and Notorious B.I.G., all gangster posturing and clunky, bottom-feeding beats. Stakes Is High, which featured the newcomers and future trailblazers Common and Mos Def, received tepid reviews and was largely ignored, much to the dismay of Moore, the superfan. “Quietly,” he writes, “De La reassembled their own vision of what a Native Tongues collective could look like in the ’90s with … MCs who were just kids when the first iteration took shape.” That may be so, but it takes a nation of millions to recognize a movement, and the audience had moved on.

The consignment of a promising musical coalition to oblivion was compounded by a tragic and deeply ironic debacle: The same elements that made 3 Feet High and Rising so innovative sent the album into perilous legal limbo. Because De La Soul’s label, Tommy Boy Records, hadn’t accounted for some sample clearances and the band’s contract was outdated, the album was blocked from streaming services. And so, in the 2000s, the group that had denounced its debut had to spend years trying to secure a foothold for its catalog in the digital world. That finally happened in 2023. 3 Feet High is by far De La Soul’s most streamed album, and by any standard the band’s greatest achievement. But to listen to it now, within the context of De La Soul’s oeuvre, is to be painfully reminded of the road not taken—and of how a musical revolution can be scuttled from within.

One of the many troubling consequences of Donald Trump’s reelection is that he will largely avoid responsibility for his conduct in his four criminal cases. No other criminal defendant in American history has had the power to shut down his own prosecution. This is an unprecedented and wrenching affront to the principle that no one is above the law.

The potential exception is the New York State case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election.

Justice Juan Merchan recently granted the parties’ joint request to pause the New York proceedings while both sides consider what should be done in light of Trump’s reelection. Trump’s attorneys claim that the case must be dismissed altogether to avoid “unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.” Even the district attorney’s office said it wants time to consider how the court should balance the “competing interests” of the jury verdict and the needs of the office of the presidency.

Out of an abundance of caution, Merchan avoided a preelection sentencing that potentially could have influenced the election. But the election result changes nothing about the criminal case. Now that the election is over, sentencing should proceed promptly.

[Quinta Jurecic: Bye-bye, Jack Smith]

Once in office, Trump may cancel federal prosecutions of himself and his allies. He has threatened to use the Justice Department to pursue political opponents. He may seek to bend the justice system to his will in unprecedented ways. But that doesn’t mean the DA or Merchan should “obey in advance” by abandoning the jury’s verdict.

Trump’s attorneys are essentially arguing that the election wipes the slate clean, that the people have spoken and all criminal matters must be dismissed. His former attorney general William Barr made a similar point in an interview with Fox News, where he called on prosecutors to drop all the pending criminal cases. “The American people have rendered their verdict on President Trump,” Barr argued. Prosecutors, he said, should “respect the people’s decision and dismiss the cases against President Trump now.”

What nonsense. The election was not a “verdict” on Trump’s criminality. A majority of voters apparently concluded that Trump’s criminal cases were not disqualifying—just as the sexual assaults, pandemic response, efforts to overturn the last election, and many other things apparently were not disqualifying. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen or that Trump is not legally and morally responsible.

No doubt all public-official defendants would like to be able to say that winning their next election means everyone should just forget about their alleged crimes. That’s not how our system works. An election is not a jury verdict, and winning an election doesn’t make you any less guilty.

When it comes to Trump, the New York case may be the rule of law’s last stand. As president, Trump is sure to swiftly kill off the two pending federal prosecutions—the classified-documents case in Florida and the January 6 case in D.C. He may not even need to do it himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department have already begun discussing how to wind down the cases, based on the DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

Even if the current Justice Department were to attempt to keep the cases alive somehow—such as by merely agreeing to pause them until Trump is out of office in four years—the new Trump Justice Department will simply dismiss them. Trump may pardon his co-defendants and co-conspirators, and may even try to pardon himself.

Unlike with the federal cases, Trump cannot unilaterally make the state prosecutions go away. The Georgia case is currently mired in appeals over whether the DA should be disqualified for a conflict of interest. But although the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president does not bind the states, the reality is that a state will not be allowed to put a sitting president on trial. If prosecutors survive the appeals, the trial might proceed against the remaining defendants in a year or two. But any potential trial of Trump is sure, at a minimum, to be postponed until he is out of office—and who knows whether there will be any appetite to pursue the case at that point.

That leaves New York. Until he granted the most recent extension of time, Merchan was set to rule on November 12 on Trump’s claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity requires dismissal of his convictions. That argument is a long shot, because almost all of Trump’s relevant conduct in the case took place before he was president. And although Trump is arguing that a few items of evidence in his trial should have been barred by immunity, those claims are unlikely to derail the convictions. Assuming Merchan denies the motion to dismiss, sentencing was set for November 26—until the election results cast that into doubt.

The sentencing should go forward. The argument by Trump’s attorneys that the entire case should be dismissed based on his reelection amounts to nothing more than a claim that a president (or in this case, a president-elect) is above the law and may never be held criminally accountable. Thanks to the election results and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, that appalling claim may often be true—but it doesn’t have to be in this case.

The defense claim that sentencing would unconstitutionally impede “Trump’s ability to govern” is laughable. Trump is not yet the president. He’s not responsible for governing anything other than his transition. A sentencing proceeding would involve a few hours in a New York courtroom—probably less time than a round of golf. He could squeeze it in.

[David A. Graham: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

The defense may be suggesting that if Trump were sentenced to prison, that would interfere with his duties. It’s true that a prison sentence could be problematic. If Merchan were inclined to sentence Trump to prison, he would likely stay that sentence pending appeal. Once Trump was in office, even if the convictions were affirmed, the state presumably would not be allowed to jail the sitting president.

In the unlikely event of Merchan trying to jail Trump immediately, a higher court would undoubtedly intervene. The federal courts are no more likely to allow a state to jail the president-elect than to allow a state to jail the president.

But Merchan has sentencing options short of locking up the president-elect. He could impose a fine and/or sentence Trump to probation, suspending the service of any probationary period until Trump leaves office. He could even impose a jail sentence but similarly suspend that until Trump is no longer president.

At this point, the details of the sentence are less important than the sentencing taking place. Justice requires that the criminal process be completed. The defendant has been found guilty by a jury. The next step, in the ordinary course, is for the judge to impose a sentence. That will formalize Donald Trump’s record as a convicted felon. Even if Trump ends up with no substantial sentence, that’s an important legal and historical statement.

Once he is sentenced, Trump’s attorneys may appeal his convictions. That can proceed with almost no involvement from Trump himself. The appeals process will be handled by the lawyers and will not interfere with any of his presidential duties. His convictions may be affirmed on appeal or they may be tossed out, but there’s no reason the regular criminal process can’t continue.

Although the idea was unthinkable to many of us, a criminal can be president of the United States. The people have spoken, as Trump’s attorneys and supporters would say. But just as Trump’s criminal cases did not prevent his reelection, the election should not prevent the regular criminal process in New York from concluding. This sentencing must proceed.

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.

Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.)

Consider where all three were nine years ago. Hegseth was an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran serving in the Army Reserve, backing Marco Rubio for president from his relatively new perch as a Fox News commentator. Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii and the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee; she’d resign the next year to back Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president. Gaetz was a little-known representative in the Florida state House, with plans to run for his dad’s state Senate seat in 2016. Even today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.

After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies—that’s a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us,” he said. “These are people that understand first principles; they love freedom, and they love free markets.” Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups.

By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. “The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” he wrote. He’s remained a loud critic of Pentagon brass, including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s Cabinet]

Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. Gabbard says she believes this is because of criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris. Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.

Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses. (My colleague Elaine Godfrey reported that Gaetz has shown videos of naked women to colleagues; Gaetz was a leading opponent of a revenge-porn law in the Florida legislature.) 

More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.

[David A. Graham: The terminally online are in charge now]

What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.

Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer. But Hegseth is personally well liked and already collecting support from powerful Republicans. Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)

If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.

The central contradiction of Donald Trump’s reelection is this: He owes his victory to the fact that millions of voters appear to have seen him as the stability candidate who would usher in a return to pre-COVID normalcy. But he has put forward a second-term agenda that would be far more radical and disruptive than anything he accomplished while in office.

To much of the country, the notion of Trump as the return-to-normal candidate is laughable. His first term involved two impeachments, intense national protests, a flailing pandemic response, and, as a capstone, a violent attempt to defy the results of the 2020 election. But many voters, perhaps most, see things differently in retrospect. In a New York Times poll conducted toward the end of Trump’s first term, just 39 percent of voters said that the country had been better off since he took office; in a version of the poll conducted in April of this year, nearly 50 percent did. An NBC poll conducted weeks before last Tuesday’s election similarly found that a plurality of voters believed that Trump’s policies had helped their families and that Biden’s had hurt them.

In 2016, Trump voters wanted change—disruptive, confrontational change—and believed that their man would deliver it. They described Trump as a “middle finger” to the establishment and “a wrecking ball” aimed at the status quo. Eight years later, voters once again overwhelmingly said they want change, but the kind of change was very different: a reversion to the perceived better times of the first Trump administration, before inflation and a border crisis took hold under Joe Biden. “In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world,” the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote last year, summarizing the findings of her frequent focus-group discussions. Trump seized on this dynamic, encouraging voters to remember how good they had it when he was in office.  

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

“Less than four years ago our border was secure, inflation was nowhere to be seen, the world was at peace, and America was strong and respected,” he declared at a rally earlier this year.

Even as Trump promised a return to happier times, however, he campaigned on an agenda that seems bound to generate conflict and chaos. His promise to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history” would involve law-enforcement raids at workplaces and homes across the country. His plan to purge the federal government of insufficiently loyal bureaucrats would leave agencies struggling to carry out their basic tasks. His proposal to impose heavy tariffs on all imports would raise consumer prices and could trigger a series of retaliatory trade wars. Some of his ideas, such as directing the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents and inviting the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic to help set federal health policy, depart so flagrantly from established political norms that the consequences are impossible to predict. Given all that, how did Trump win over so many voters who just want things to go back to normal?

One answer is that even Trump’s own voters don’t think he’ll act on many of his proposals. As my colleague David A. Graham wrote last month, “Trump exists in a strange zone where voters hear what he’s saying and then largely discount it, perhaps as a result of his past dissembling, or perhaps because the ideas just seem too extreme to be real.” In one poll taken right before the election, just two-thirds of his supporters said the former president was “serious” about mass deportations; only 38 percent and 21 percent, respectively, said the same about using the military against U.S. citizens and prosecuting his political opponents, both of which Trump has said he would do. When asked why they don’t take Trump’s proposals seriously, voters tend to give the same answer: The media made many similar warnings last time, heading into Trump’s first term, and things never got all that bad. The economy kept humming; the Affordable Care Act never got repealed; the U.S. didn’t get into any major wars.

It’s true that the most dire predictions for the first Trump presidency never materialized. But there’s a very specific reason for that: The institutions and people surrounding Trump prevented him from acting on his worst impulses. The courts struck down more than 70 of Trump’s policies in his first three years alone. The ACA was narrowly saved by a handful of moderate Republicans, most prominently John McCain. Trump’s own vice president refused to negate the 2020 election results. Trump’s staffers repeatedly thwarted his more bizarre ideas and musings. “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job,” a senior national-security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2019.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

In this sense, the “deep state” that Trump blames for his problems deserves some of the credit for his reelection. The limited damage of Trump’s first term reflected an entire apparatus of staffers, civil servants, and institutions that prevented him from doing everything he wanted to do.

Things will likely be different this time. The Supreme Court recently held that presidents are immune from prosecution for anything that qualifies as an “official act,” which it hinted is a broad category. The Republican congressional caucus has mostly purged itself of anyone willing to defy Trump. And Trump’s inner circle is focused on staffing the government with loyalists. The guardrails are largely gone.

“I will govern by a simple motto,” Trump proclaimed in his victory speech last week: “Promises made, promises kept.” Americans often fault politicians for not keeping their word. Swing voters who opted to give Trump a second chance might soon find themselves raising the opposite complaint.

David Coote's alleged video on Liverpool and former manager Jurgen Klopp fuels conspiracy theorists who question referees' integrity, says Phil McNulty.