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The Paranoid Thriller That Foretold Trump’s Foreign Policy

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › the-paranoid-thriller-that-foretold-trumps-foreign-policy › 681430

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

The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

Related:

Emperor Trump’s new map The political logic of Trump’s international threats

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA is starting to crack. Turns out signing the Hunter Biden letter was a bad idea, Graeme Wood writes. Capitulation is contagious.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Stephanie Bai spoke with Russell Berman about the last president to lose, then win, a reelection bid.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message, Elizabeth Bruenig writes. Radio Atlantic: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon. Trump’s first shot in his war on the “deep state” OpenAI goes full MAGA. The animal story that RFK Jr. should know A possible substitute for mifepristone is already on pharmacy shelves.

Culture Break

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

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Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

Grover Cleveland’s Warning for Trump

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › grover-clevelands-warning-for-trump › 681425

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Donald Trump is now the second president to return to the White House after losing a bid for reelection. The first was Grover Cleveland, who ran a successful campaign in 1884 and 1892. I spoke with my colleague Russell Berman about his recent story on Cleveland’s legacy, the ways Trump’s win may reshape it, and how an electoral loss can become a political advantage.

Stephanie Bai: In your recent story, you wrote that some of Grover Cleveland’s fans aren’t too pleased with the comparisons being made between him and Donald Trump. But one similarity that struck me is how both Trump and Cleveland campaigned on the image of being political outsiders to connect with working-class voters—even though Cleveland co-owned a successful law practice and Trump’s return to office has been supported by titans of industry.

Did their initial electoral loss and the subsequent four-year gap between campaigns give any credence to their political-outsider narratives?

Russell Berman: Certainly for Trump, I think that is true. He was able to stand on the sidelines for the past four years and criticize former President Joe Biden for basically everything. Trump blamed him for inflation and made voters think more rosily about his first term than they did while he was in office. And he repeated what he had done successfully in 2015 and 2016, which was to position himself as an outsider—except back then, he really was an outsider to the political system.

Cleveland did that, too, to a lesser extent. By not being in office for four years, he was able to run as an outsider. Similarly to Trump, that’s what he had done earlier in his political career. Even in his runs for office for mayor of Buffalo and then for governor of New York, he was seen as the reluctant candidate. There’s some debate about whether that was true or if he just wanted voters to think that, but he was able to position himself as this anti-corruption populist. And unlike Trump, he actually followed through on his commitment to clean government once in office.

Stephanie: At his inauguration, Trump said he was “saved by God to make America great again” and serve another term. Do you think that his historic political comeback will affect the direction of his presidency?

Russell: Trump has always had this desire to resist any constraints on him and on the presidency. This is also what separates him from Cleveland, and probably what will end up separating their second terms. Cleveland adhered to the constitutional limits on the presidency. He didn’t try to expand the power of the presidency in the way that Trump has already in his second term, with his early executive orders going after birthright citizenship and trying to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. Trump is going to see how much he can get away with and what kind of resistance, if any, he’ll face within the Republican Party or in the courts.

But Cleveland’s comeback turned sour soon after he returned to the White House. His second term was marred by a very deep recession. The economy obviously is pretty strong right now, as we speak, but that can change quickly—especially because some economists are concerned about what Trump’s tariffs could do. So there is a warning for Trump in Cleveland’s story because Cleveland’s second term, similar to a lot of presidential second terms, was much rougher than his first.

Read More

The president Trump is pushing aside: Grover Cleveland enthusiasts aren’t thrilled, Russell Berman reports. The lessons of 1884: When Grover Cleveland clinched the Democratic nomination and faced an allegation of misconduct, he created a new political playbook, Susan Wise Bauer writes. The independence of the executive: In an address to Princeton University published in 1900, Grover Cleveland spoke about the history and political deliberations surrounding his former office. Attempts to undo a presidential legacy: Benjamin Harrison, in the twilight of his presidency, sent a treaty to the Senate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i. Weeks later, Cleveland’s first act as president was to withdraw that treaty and order an investigation of the American-led overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Emperor Trump’s New Map

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 01 › donald-trump-brings-back-manifest-destiny › 681414

When Vladimir Putin daydreams, he imagines himself saluting a phalanx as it goose-steps across central Kyiv. In Donald Trump’s version of the fantasy, he is triumphantly floating through the Panama Canal on a battleship. Both men see themselves recovering lost empires, asserting their place in history by reversing it.

During his first term, Trump set about dismantling the architecture of postwar internationalism by trash-talking and bullying the institutional implements of global cooperation, the likes of NATO and the World Health Organization. This assault on the old order was waged in the name of populism, an attack on elites in foreign capitals who siphoned off taxpayers’ dollars. But what Trump hoped to achieve with these rhetorical fusillades was sometimes unclear, other than pleasing his political base, which adored them.

As Trump enters his second term, those attacks now seem more purposeful. In retrospect, he may have been laying tracks for a more ambitious plan, weakening those institutions so that he could eventually exploit their weakness.

Over the past weeks, he’s declared himself the tribune of a new era of American imperialism, which abandons any pretext of promoting liberal values to the world. In Trump’s newly hatched vision of empire, America stands poised to expand—not just into Panama but into Greenland and outer space—simply because its raw power entitles it to expand. To use the phrase he invoked in his inaugural address, a callback to the 19th-century vision of American imperialism, it is his “manifest destiny.”

This new policy represents a twist in his evolution that makes some of his most ardent supporters look like suckers. MAGA intellectuals and mouthpieces—Tucker Carlson is the paragon—portrayed Trump as a devoted isolationist, a fierce critic of militarism, a leader who would never indulge in foreign adventures. (Writing in Compact, the journalist Christian Parenti exclaimed that Trump “has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”) It turns out that Trump isn’t really a member of the peace party after all.

[Helen Lewis: Carlson and Vance—two smart guys who play dumb for power]

At a glance, Panama is an odd centerpiece for this vision. Before Trump started wailing about it, there wasn’t any apparent issue with American access to the canal. But Trump has focused on it because of its historic resonance. Reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.

In its nostalgic quest to return to a prelapsarian era of the America past, the right used to incessantly harp on the canal. It was, by any ideological measure, a defining symbol of national prowess. In The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough’s epic history of its construction, the author called it “the first grandiose and assertive show of American power at the dawn of the new century … the resolution of a dream as old as the voyages of Columbus.”

But, as McCullough also documents, that triumph came at an immense human cost. By dredging a notch in the earth, many laborers were digging their own grave; they perished in landslides, of rampant heatstroke and malaria and yellow fever. The death toll stoked enduring hatred of the yanqui.  

Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back. Johnson appreciated this lesson only after dispatching troops to quell anti-American riots in 1964. Presidents knew that if the canal remained an American possession, they would have to repeat Johnson’s intervention; the anger over America’s presence would never subside.

Henry Kissinger poured himself into negotiating an agreement relinquishing the waterway. But only Jimmy Carter had the political courage to push a pair of treaties through the U.S. Senate. In classic Carter fashion, his painstaking efforts brought little domestic political benefit. Indeed, by mobilizing moderate Republicans to support the treaties, he helped doom their careers.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

That’s because the insurgent New Right, the faction of the Republican Party that evolved into the modern conservative establishment, appreciated the political upside of demagoguing the issue. As Richard Viguerie, an architect of the right’s emerging infrastructure, put it, “We’re going to ride this hard. It’s a sexy issue. It’s a populist issue.” Running for president in 1976, Ronald Reagan bellowed, “We built it; we paid for it; and we’re going to keep it.” This was a lament for what George Will called America’s “vanished mastery.”

These attacks were highly effective. The New Right bludgeoned the 68 senators who voted to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which helped unseat 20 of them in 1978 and 1980. Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, crowed, “The Panama Canal treaties put us on the map.”

For Ronald Reagan, however, the treaties were merely a campaign talking point. As president, he never sought to reverse Carter’s course. He backed away from the raw nostalgia for empire that he had espoused in the campaign and joined a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, which tended to distance itself from America’s imperial history.

During the Cold War and the era that followed, American presidents justified intervention in foreign conflicts as a means toward the end of defending liberal values, the promotion of democracy, the squelching of communism, and the prevention of genocide. Sometimes this was hypocrisy. Sometimes it was dangerously misguided. But it was also a genuine evolution in values. America no longer used its military might to acquire territories or to blatantly protect its corporations or to acquire precious resources. Interventions were justified in the moral vocabulary of international law.

Donald Trump is abandoning this tradition by describing a Hobbesian world in which the most powerful are given free reign to dominate. If the U.S. wants Greenland’s resources, it has a divine right to them. If it wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico, to suggest the subservience of a neighbor, it can. This type of imperial spirit rarely restricts itself to the rhetorical. Martial threats manifest themselves in martial action. After demolishing the global order, Trump intends to plant his flag on the rubble.

The Animal Story That RFK Jr. Should Know

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 01 › rfk-jr-vaccines-balto-diphtheria › 681416

Just outside New York City’s Central Park Zoo, not far from where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once stealthily deposited a dead bear cub, stands a bronze statue to another animal: Balto, the husky that, 100 years ago this month, played a leading role in a daring and perilous rescue that captured the world’s attention.

Nome, a small town in the northwestern reaches of the Alaskan territories, had been hit with an outbreak of diphtheria, a highly contagious and cruel respiratory infection that can be particularly deadly to the young. As the children of Nome and surrounding communities fell ill, and some died, the town’s one doctor sent a desperate plea to state and national officials for a fresh supply of the antitoxin serum needed to treat the infected and stem a larger epidemic.

But Nome, with its subarctic climate, was icebound in winter and nearly unreachable. With little time to waste, locals organized a relay of dogsleds to transport the needed doses across 674 treacherous miles of Alaskan wilderness in temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero. In all, 20 heroic men and 150 dogs braved the unsparing elements to deliver the lifesaving serum. Balto anchored the final lap.

The centennial of this heroic expedition is particularly timely, coming as the United States Senate considers President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, a serial purveyor of dangerous disinformation about vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

It is not too obvious, in 2025, to state that vaccines work. In 1921, before the scientific breakthrough that led to the Tdap vaccine, approximately 200,000 Americans were infected with diphtheria, and 15,000 died. By the turn of the century, thanks to compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren, the number of cases dwindled to almost nothing. From 1996 to 2018, America experienced an average of fewer than one case a year. Polio, measles, and many other potentially deadly diseases also were virtually eradicated by vaccines.

Yet a rising anti-vax movement, fueled by click-hungry demagogues and a growing populist revolt against experts, institutions, and mandates, threatens to drag America backwards. The movement was turbocharged by political resistance to the COVID vaccines, whose development Trump helped speed and deservedly heralded. Near-universal vaccination rates among America’s schoolchildren are dropping. Even slight declines threaten the herd immunity that protects entire communities from the spread of disease. Predictably, potentially deadly childhood diseases are becoming more common again.

For two decades, RFK Jr. has stood at the forefront of this anti-vaccine movement. In books, speeches, and social-media posts, he has championed a widely discredited theory that certain vaccines promote autism and suggested that life under America’s COVID-vaccine mandates was worse than under Hitler’s fascist regime (he apologized for the latter remark).

In 2021, The New York Times recently reported, Kennedy’s Children Health Defense organization petitioned the FDA to withdraw its authorization of the COVID vaccines, which already had saved hundreds of thousands of people and would allow Americans to resume their normal lives. In the petition, Kennedy’s organization argued that the vaccines were not only harmful but unnecessary, and embraced disproven and dangerous theories about alternative treatments.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

In 2022, the attorney Aaron Siri, a top Kennedy adviser, filed a petition asking the FDA to rescind its approval of the polio vaccine, which, since its inception in the 1950s, has been used by billions of people and has helped subdue that dreaded scourge. For a time, Siri reportedly helped Kennedy screen candidates for future HHS positions and was thought to be in line for one himself, but a transition spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal last week that he was no longer involved.

Kennedy presents the Senate with an interesting dilemma. He bears the name, if not the outlook or gravitas, of his famous father. His emphasis on healthy eating and physical fitness to combat obesity is as sensible now as it was when First Lady Michelle Obama championed those causes in the previous decade, to the scorn of many Republicans. His environmentalism is so pronounced that Trump has publicly assured the “drill, baby, drill” crowd that Kennedy won’t “touch the oil and gas.” His anti-corporate bent and deep suspicion of government bureaucracy appeal to populists on the left and right. And government bureaucracies, which are particularly prone to inertia and special-interest influence, should be challenged.

But their renewal must be guided by facts, not exotic, debunked claims. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the FDA, which approves vaccines. He will have authority over the National Institutes of Health, which funds and underwrites essential research that leads to vaccines and cures, and the CDC, which plays a central role in quelling public-health threats. It is an awesome responsibility and a crucial platform, dangerous in the hands of a charlatan who places conspiracy theories over science.

[Read: RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency]

Vaccines and medications should be rigorously tested and scrutinized for their efficacy and side effects, free of pressure and lobbying from the firms that develop them. The public needs and deserves that confidence. But those tests and standards should be based on proven science and not quackery.

Kennedy will face intense questioning about all of this, as well as his stability and judgment, at his confirmation hearing, which is slated for Wednesday. If he is confirmed, his promotion of junk science and vaccine hesitancy could prove as threatening to American public health as the barriers posed by an unforgiving, frozen Alaskan wilderness were to the desperate children and parents of Nome a century ago.

At the foot of Balto’s memorial in Central Park are three words: Endurance, Fidelity, Intelligence. Can enough United States senators overcome political pressure and demonstrate those same qualities in the coming days?

Trump Targets His Own Government

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › trump-targets-his-own-government › 681413

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Today’s News

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

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

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

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The online porn free-for-all is coming to an end. The quiet way RFK Jr. could curtail vaccinations The “dark prophet” of L.A. wasn’t dark enough. On Donald Trump and the inscrutability of God

Culture Break

Sony Pictures Classics

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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