One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT—but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the U.S. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Indeed, the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open. Unlike top American AI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—which keep their research almost entirely under wraps, DeepSeek has made the program’s final code, as well as an in-depth technical explanation of the program, free to view, download, and modify. In other words, anybody from any country, including the U.S., can use, adapt, and even improve upon the program. That openness makes DeepSeek a boon for American start-ups and researchers—and an even bigger threat to the top U.S. companies, as well as the government’s national-security interests.

To understand what’s so impressive about DeepSeek, one has to look back to December, when OpenAI launched its own technical breakthrough: the full release of o1, a new kind of AI model that, unlike all the “GPT”-style programs before it, appears able to “reason” through challenging problems. o1 displayed leaps in performance on some of the most challenging math, coding, and other tests available, and sent the rest of the AI industry scrambling to replicate the new reasoning model—which OpenAI disclosed very few technical details about. The start-up, and thus the American AI industry, were on top. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

DeepSeek, less than two months later, not only exhibits those same “reasoning” capabilities apparently at much lower costs, but has spilled at least one way to match OpenAI’s more covert methods to the rest of the world. The program is not entirely open-source—its training data, for instance, and the fine details of its creation are not public—but, unlike with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, researchers and start-ups can still study the DeepSearch research paper and directly work with its code. OpenAI has enormous amounts of capital, computer chips, and other resources, and has been working on AI for a decade. In comparison, DeepSeek is a smaller team formed two years ago with far less access to essential AI hardware, because of U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips, but it has relied on various software and efficiency improvements to catch up. DeepSeek has reported that the final training run of a previous iteration of the model that R1 is built from, released in December, cost less than $6 million. Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that U.S. companies are already spending on the order of $1 billion to train future models. Exactly how much the latest DeepSeek cost to build is uncertain—some researchers and executives, including Wang, have cast doubt on just how cheap it could have been—but the price for software developers to incorporate DeepSeek-R1 into their own products is roughly 95 percent cheaper than incorporating OpenAI’s o1, as measured by the price of every “token”—basically, every word—the model generates.

DeepSeek’s success has abruptly forced a wedge between Americans most directly invested in outcompeting China and those who benefit from any access to the best, most reliable AI models. (It’s a divide that echoes Americans’ attitudes about TikTok—China hawks versus content creators—and China’s other apps and platforms.) For the start-up and research community, DeepSeek is an enormous win. “A non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive,” Jim Fan, a top AI researcher at the chipmaker Nvidia and former OpenAI employee, wrote on X. “Truly open, frontier research that empowers all.”

But for America’s top AI companies, and the nation’s government, what DeepSeek represents is unclear. The stocks of many major tech firms—including Nvidia, Alphabet, and Microsoft—dropped this morning amid the excitement around the Chinese model. And Meta, which has branded itself as a champion of open-source models in contrast to OpenAI, now seems a step behind. (The company is reportedly panicking.) To some investors, all those massive data centers, billions of dollars of investment, or even the half-a-trillion-dollar AI-infrastructure joint venture from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, which Trump recently announced from the White House, could seem far less essential. Maybe bigger AI isn’t better. For those who fear that AI will strengthen “the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence,” as OpenAI wrote in a recent lobbying document, this is legitimately concerning: The DeepSeek app refuses to answer questions about, for instance, the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989 (although the censorship may be relatively easy to circumvent).

None of that is to say the AI boom is over, or will take a radically different form going forward. The next iteration of OpenAI’s reasoning models, o3, appears far more powerful than o1 and will soon be available to the public. There are some signs that DeepSeek trained on ChatGPT outputs (outputting “I’m ChatGPT” when asked what model it is), although perhaps not intentionally—if that’s the case, it’s possible that DeepSeek could only get a head start thanks to other high-quality chatbots. America’s AI innovation is accelerating, and its major forms are beginning to take on a technical research focus other than reasoning: “agents,” or AI systems that can use computers on behalf of humans. American tech giants could, in the end, even benefit. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, framed DeepSeek as a win: More efficient AI means that use of AI across the board will “skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of,” he wrote on X today—which, if true, would help Microsoft’s profits as well.

Still, the pressure is on OpenAI, Google, and their competitors to maintain their edge. With the release of DeepSeek, the nature of any U.S.-China AI “arms race” has shifted. Preventing AI computer chips and code from spreading to China evidently has not tamped the ability of researchers and companies located there to innovate. And the relatively transparent, publicly available version of DeepSeek, rather than leading American programs, could mean Chinese programs and approaches become global technological standards for AI—akin to how the open-source Linux operating system is now standard for major web servers and supercomputers. Being democratic—in the sense of vesting power in software developers and users—is precisely what has made DeepSeek a success. If Chinese AI maintains its transparency and accessibility, despite emerging from an authoritarian regime whose citizens can’t even freely use the web, it is moving in exactly the opposite direction of where America’s tech industry is heading.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—one that may rival the costs of the first moon missions—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman. The project, known as Stargate, is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and several other corporate partners that aims to invest $500 billion over the next four years in America’s AI infrastructure: data centers, energy plants, power lines, and everything else needed to develop superintelligent computer programs. The first data center, already under construction, will soon be dedicated to training OpenAI’s next models.

The Stargate Project is a resounding victory for a start-up that was struggling at the end of last year, as Karen Hao wrote for The Atlantic yesterday. OpenAI had lost some of its most talented staff; its relationship with its most important financial backer, Microsoft, was under stress; and it was weathering any number of other public controversies. This week’s announcement, meanwhile, “reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda,” Hao wrote.

The announcement is the capstone to a steady maneuver by Altman to align himself with the incoming administration, another “masterful display of Altman’s power” to ingratiate himself with the powerful and raise huge amounts of capital, Hao noted. Altman, along with executives from Oracle and SoftBank, stood beside Trump in the White House as he made the announcement. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States,” Altman said.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

OpenAI Goes MAGA

By Karen Hao

Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who’d set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

And then there was Elon Musk. He’d co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X. Amid all of this drama, Altman was notified by his sister, Annie, that she intended to sue him; she alleges that he sexually abused her when she was a child. (That lawsuit was filed at the start of this month; Altman and members of his family strongly denied the allegations through a statement posted on X.)

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

Sam Altman doesn’t actually need Trump: As I noted on Wednesday, the Stargate Project felt more like a display of weakness from Trump. These companies could have gone elsewhere; AI’s rapid development would have continued with or without Stargate, and under Trump or a President Kamala Harris. “Only a day into his presidency, Stargate showed Trump taking cues from China, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Biden all at once—from a foreign adversary, the tech giants he vilified in 2020, and a political rival he has ruthlessly vilified,” I wrote. OpenAI takes off its mask: “For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person,” Hao wrote last fall.

P.S.

Of course, Altman wasn’t the only one cozying up to Trump this week. At his inauguration, tech titans whose tools collectively touch billions of lives—including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Elon Musk—stood right beside Trump’s family. “The tech industry has officially placed itself in the palm of Trump’s hand,” Atlantic senior editor Damon Beres wrote on Monday.

— Matteo

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

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

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

The Culture Survey: Shayla Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like his verb choice in this Bashō haiku:

         A bee
staggers out
        of the peony.

Or how he preserves the humor and lightness of Issa:

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

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

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

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

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

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

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

By Hanna Rosin

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

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Who will stop the militias now? Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn What the fires revealed about Los Angeles culture

Culture Break

Simon Mein / Thin Man Films Ltd / Bleecker Street

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

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

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders, rolling back Biden-era policies and pardoning January 6 rioters. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the president’s first week back in office.

Meanwhile, as lawmakers contend with Trump’s initial steps as president, Democrats are attempting to regroup and retrench their party. The “very forceful and energizing resistance that Democrats put up for so long has dissipated, at least in this movement,” Ashley Parker said last night.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Eugene Daniels, a chief Playbook and White House correspondent at Politico; Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Charlie Savage, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times; Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour.

Watch the full episode here.

For President Donald Trump, inheriting a relatively quiet and orderly southern border with Mexico is a political inconvenience. During his campaign, he painted an apocalyptic picture of migrants swarming the frontier, and he returned to the White House organized and ready for border wars, even as U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer and fewer illegal crossings. Shortly after taking the presidential oath Monday, Trump declared a national-security emergency for the border, ordered the military to make plans to “secure” it, and signed a constitutionally questionable executive order restricting birthright citizenship.

Much more telling and immediately consequential, though, was the new administration’s decision to shut down the border agency’s app, CBP One, which had allowed asylum seekers who had not yet crossed into U.S. territory to make appointments at legal ports of entry. Migrants who were waiting in Mexico and expecting to meet with CBP screening officers this week learned that “existing appointments have been canceled.”

Far from preventing chaos, though, killing CBP One could produce more. Then again, Trump’s political interest lies in exploiting the border, not effectively managing it.

This week, social-media platforms were flooded with pictures of crying asylum seekers who had appointments scheduled after Trump’s oath and realized they were out of luck. Those pictures may gratify MAGA diehards, and make some in the Trump coalition think “cry harder.” But migrants don’t simply disappear by wishing them away. The conditions that brought them to the U.S. border didn’t miraculously get less pressing with Trump’s presidency. And people who cannot seek asylum legally in the United States may instead pursue unlawful ways to enter the country.

[Read: Biden saw what was wrong with Democrats’ immigration policy]

The president and his supporters would have the public believe that CBP One was an “online concierge service for illegals,” as Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, recently described it. “They made an application to facilitate illegal immigration,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared last week. In fact, CBP One embodied the kind of imperfect but pragmatic compromise that’s essential in immigration policy. The app was introduced under the Trump administration in 2020 to manage cargo-truck crossings at the border. The Biden administration expanded CBP One in 2023, creating a process by which a limited number of migrants could lawfully apply for asylum—which, under federal law, people fleeing persecution in their home countries are allowed to do—while also imposing considerable restrictions on that opportunity.

Previously, people entering the country could assert their intention to seek asylum after presenting themselves to a U.S. official anywhere along the border; they would then typically be paroled into the country while awaiting a hearing on their application, and they could apply for a special permit to work lawfully. Eventually, President Joe Biden concluded, albeit amid intense political pressure, that the asylum system was being overused and that an influx of applicants was swamping the government’s ability to administer it.

After CBP One was established, asylum seekers needed to present themselves at a port of entry (if they could get there) at a specified time (if they could get one of 1,450 appointments available each day). The administration generally declined to hear asylum claims made by any other means. Even as the system created a clear process for seeking asylum—one that, according to the Associated Press, facilitated the entry of nearly a million migrants—it was intentionally designed to curb asylum access and has been much maligned by progressives and immigration advocates for that reason. Indeed, immigrant-rights advocates sued the Biden administration because they viewed the app process as exclusionary to the point of violating federal law.

[Read: How Democrats lost their way on immigration]

The recent decline in illegal crossings—the 46,600 illegal crossings in November represented the lowest number in more than four years—is happening partly because Mexico and other countries throughout Latin America are clamping down on migration via their territory. But it’s also because CBP One had helped to end a free-for-all and establish a well-organized line.

Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump was not obviously more effective than other recent presidents in controlling migration flows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lowest number of illegal crossings during his first administration occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In place of CBP One, the new administration has asserted that it will reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which many asylum applicants would have to stay south of the border while their cases are being adjudicated. During Trump’s first term, about 70,000 asylum seekers waited in Mexico for an immigration hearing, and unlawful border crossings were higher than during the Obama administration; the number of illegal crossings in the final months of Trump’s first administration were higher than in the final months of Biden’s.

Trump’s recent moves have unsettled the legal process. This week, immigration-rights groups that have sued the government over CBP One sought an emergency hearing to determine the new administration’s impact on asylum efforts. They had contacted government lawyers to ask about the effect of Trump’s announcements, but those lawyers, according to the plaintiffs’ legal filings, “said they could not provide their position” yet.

[Read: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’]

The value to Trump of ending CBP One appears to be mostly political. The current situation at the border neither accords with his base’s expectations nor justifies the kind of far-reaching emergency measures that the new president and his allies are intent on pursuing. The asylum process has been thrown back into confusion, and the abolition of legal pathways to asylum increases the incentives for illegal crossings. Ending CBP One conveniently helps lay the groundwork for more aggressive policies. The voters who sent Trump back to the White House may have been appalled by past chaos. For Trump’s anti-immigration offensive, order is a bigger problem.

Updated on January 25, 2025 at 2:32 p.m. ET

Some presidents turn to think tanks to staff their administrations. Others turn to alumni of previous White Houses. Donald Trump has turned to Fox News to fill the ranks of his Cabinet.

Former Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth was confirmed to be secretary of defense Friday night in a dramatic vote worthy of cable news, if not the world’s greatest fighting force. After three Republican senators voted against Hegseth, Vice President J. D. Vance had to break a tie, making it the tightest vote for a defense chief ever.

Hegseth is unlikely to be the last Fox alumnus on the Cabinet. Pam Bondi, a former guest host, is on track to be confirmed as attorney general, while Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host, will probably win confirmation as secretary of transportation. The outlook is murkier for Fox contributor Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump nominated to be director of national intelligence. Michael Waltz, a frequent Fox guest, is already installed as national security adviser, a Cabinet-level role. And this list omits top officials appointed or nominated for high-level non-Cabinet roles, such as Border Czar Tom Homan, FDA Commissioner-Designate Marty Makary, and Surgeon General-Designate Janette Nesheiwat, all of whom have spent hours on Fox.

[David A. Graham: The Fox News rebound]

Unlike other traditional pools of top appointees, this group doesn’t represent any clear political ideology. A lack of commitment to any strong ideology can be a good thing in a Cabinet official if it means leaders are thinking for themselves. Ideologues tend toward tunnel vision and a bunker mentality, and they can cause a president both policy and political problems. Unfortunately the skulk of Foxes in the White House is not so encouraging. Their political histories and answers during confirmation hearings suggest less independent thinking or pragmatism than strong allegiance to partisanship itself, as does their collective history at Fox News. Wherever the Republican Party has been, Fox has tended to be as well. Whether it’s the GOP leading Fox or vice versa is not always clear or consistent. The channel was neocon during the Bush administration, Tea Party during the Obama administration, and anti-Trump before it was fiercely pro-Trump … and briefly Trump-skeptical again after the 2020 election, before it got back on the bandwagon. As I wrote in November, Trump and Fox have rediscovered a symbiotic relationship that has brought both back to a pinnacle of influence.

One reason Fox has been such a good farm team for the administration is that Trump appears to have chosen many of his nominees on two criteria: their allegiance to him, and whether they look TV-ready. Fox hosts check both boxes, but nearly blind partisanship is not an ideal trait in a presidential adviser. Cabinet officials need to be generally aligned with the president, but they also need to be willing and able to disagree and deliver difficult news—something Trump did not appreciate from his first-term Cabinet. Where Hegseth and Gabbard do have more developed ideologies, they are disturbing: for Hegseth, reported bigotry toward Muslims, opposition to women’s equality, and Christian nationalism; for Gabbard, an odd affinity for figures like Bashar al-Assad.

[Tom Nichols: America is now counting on you, Pete Hegseth]

Many of the Fox alumni have little relevant experience. Hegseth served as an officer in the Army, but he has no other government work and has never run any organization nearly as large as the Pentagon—and those he has led have not gone well. Gabbard served in the Army and U.S. House but has no intelligence experience, but she’s been nominated to oversee the entire intelligence community. Hegseth also has extensive personal liabilities, including serial infidelity, an allegation of sexual assault (which he strenuously denies), and many reports of alcohol abuse. (Relevant, too, is Fox News’s reputation for messy hiring—it has seen a procession of serious personal scandals in its ranks over the years, many of them involving allegations of sexual misconduct.)

In confirmation hearings, Hegseth and Bondi were both able to use their experience on TV to come across smoothly and parry questions they didn’t want to answer. Bondi, for example, avoided questions about the 2020 election that might have either identified her as an election denier or angered Trump, but the result is holes in public knowledge about her views.

Despite their flaws, most (and maybe all) of Trump’s Fox appointees will be confirmed. For that, the president will be able to thank Fox itself, because the network’s coverage helps cheerlead his decisions to Republicans. Once the Cabinet is in place, its members will have to do the hard work of governance. It might not go well for the country, but it should make for good TV.

Bitcoin significantly boosted last week as President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Despite some market turbulence, overall sentiment among crypto enthusiasts remains largely bullish. As investors closely monitor political developments and their potential effects on digital assets, the performance of the…

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