Only rarely does a single company’s new product provoke a major market sell-off. But that’s exactly what happened on Monday, when a large language model from a Chinese company named DeepSeek drove the entire Nasdaq index of tech companies down more than 3 percent and shaved more than 17 percent off the market capitalization of the chipmaker Nvidia—which, until that moment, had been the most valuable company in the world.

The panicked selling of Nvidia had a surface logic. The company provides almost all of the computer chips (called GPUs) that companies such as Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta rely on to train their LLMs. (The Atlantic entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.) Consequently, it has been the biggest beneficiary of the huge boom in corporate spending on AI that we’ve seen over the past few years. (Nvidia’s annual revenue has quadrupled since 2022.) Although DeepSeek also used Nvidia chips to train its model, the company said that they were an older type of GPU—U.S. export controls imposed by the Biden administration have prevented Chinese companies from buying cutting-edge chips. DeepSeek’s disclosure raises the possibility that future progress in training LLMs could be made with fewer, simpler chips, and at a lower cost than previously anticipated. That would obviously put a big dent in Nvidia’s profits. So investors dumped its stock.

[Read: The DeepSeek wake-up call]

If investors are very concerned about how DeepSeek might hurt chipmakers, they seem surprisingly unconcerned about how it might affect big AI software companies. Meta’s stock price, for instance, actually rose on Monday, and although the stocks of Alphabet and Microsoft did take a hit, they bounced back over the next couple of days. Some of that is because the underlying business of these companies, independent of AI, remains enormously profitable. But it also suggests that investors aren’t paying enough attention to the way DeepSeek’s success could disrupt the AI market, and in doing so threaten the future profits of the tech companies that are currently spending many billions of dollars every year on their LLMs.

Tech investors have historically profited by spotting the new new thing. But at the moment, they seem implicitly to assume that all of the fundamental change in the LLM business has already happened and that its future will look much like its present, with the companies that currently dominate the space—many of which are not simply competitors but also financial partners—continuing to do so indefinitely. What happened over the past week is a reminder that these assumptions may not be so solid.

The large language model that caused such a stir on Monday, DeepSeek-R1, is clearly comparable with LLMs such as ChatGPT o1-mini and Claude 3.5. Measured by industry benchmarks that rate subject knowledge, reasoning, and accuracy, the DeepSeek model seems to deliver similar performance while costing much less to develop—though just how much less remains a matter of debate. Beyond dispute is that it’s cheaper to use: Consumers can get access to DeepSeek’s core functions for free, and third-party developers are being charged a fraction of the cost of a product such as ChatGPT. DeepSeek also uses open-source technology, meaning that, in theory, you could download the program and run your own AI on your desktop if you had a powerful-enough computer. The fact that the LLM offers reasonable performance—results that, even a year ago, would have seemed startlingly good—at a significantly lower cost means that it has to be taken seriously as a competitor.

From one angle, in fact, DeepSeek looks like what the business-school professor Clayton Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, dubbed a “disruptive technology”: a product that’s less powerful than the products at the top of the market but also much cheaper, and that has the possibility of improving in quality over time to the point where it offers a superior combination of price and performance for most customers. In this regard, the rapid uptake of DeepSeek by users around the world has been striking. The LLM still has miles to go in market share to catch ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly users, but since its release on January 20, its mobile-app version has been downloaded more than 3 million times from Google Play and Apple, making it the most popular app on both stores. That suggests that the cost of switching from one AI tool to another is very low, and that the moats big AI companies are building around their business may be much shallower than they’d hoped.

[Read: China’s DeepSeek surprise]

The underlying wager that these companies have made is that the big money they’re investing will result in radically better performance, which in turn will enable them to charge hefty sums to businesses and, to a lesser extent, consumers. (OpenAI, for instance, is reportedly targeting $100 billion in revenue by 2029.) And these companies remain committed to that bet. This week, the CEOs of both Microsoft and Meta said that enormous spending is essential to staying competitive in the market. Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the CEO of Anthropic (in which both Amazon and Google have invested heavily), wrote in a blog post that companies are going to continue to “spend more and more on training powerful AI models, even as … the cost of training a given level of model intelligence declines rapidly,” because “the economic value of training more and more intelligent models is so great.” In the long run, such investment may well result in the kind of performance improvement that a company like DeepSeek (which can’t even get access to the most powerful GPUs)—or the many other low-cost LLM developers that are sure to try to emulate it—cannot keep up with.

When you look at ordinary users’ embrace of DeepSeek, though, you can also see an alternative future. In this one, AI performance improves so much that most customers are happy with cheap, good-enough LLMs, and AI models end up as essentially interchangeable, commoditized products, with the small profits that always follow that type of commercial diffusion. We’re going to find out whether the great authors of the disruptive technology that’s transforming the business world might themselves get disrupted.

Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”

While you might question the sophistication of his analysis, Trump was correct about both the physics of the collision (namely, that it could have been avoided if the helicopter had gone either up or down) and the moral valence of the mass casualty event (bad, not good).

But, by midday today, without the benefit of any important conclusions about the cause of the crash, Trump adopted a different perspective. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” he told reporters in a rambling press conference. His strong opinion was that the cause was a “diversity push” in the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring process.

Lest that comment be dismissed as the half-formed musings of a president reacting in real time to a developing event, a few hours later Trump doubled down. In a live broadcast from the Oval Office, he signed an executive order that, in the words of an off-camera Vice President J. D. Vance, pinned responsibility for the crash on “the Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”

The purpose of Trump’s wild finger-pointing appears to be twofold: first, to avoid taking any blame for a disaster; and second, to exploit the tragedy while it is in the public’s mind, using it to advance the notion that his administration is replacing favoritism toward minorities with pure, race-blind merit. “As you said in your inaugural, it is color-blind and merit-based,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, joining Trump at the press conference. “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air-traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

This was rich coming from a man who might be the least qualified secretary of defense in American history—a Cabinet official whose professional qualifications include mismanaging two small lobbying organizations and whose alleged history of drinking and mistreatment of women led his own sister-in-law to urge the Senate to reject his nomination, as it very nearly did.

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

And Hegseth is hardly an outlier. Trump has already done more to abandon the ideal of meritocracy than perhaps any presidential administration since the Progressive Era. He is going to war against the civil-service system, which was established more than a century ago to ensure that federal jobs go to qualified civil servants, rather than as rewards for party hacks, as had been the case previously. Trump, who believes that nonpartisan civil servants constitute a “deep state” conspiracy against him, would rather lose their expertise than risk it being deployed in ways that thwart his personal ambitions.

He has gone even further in this direction in selecting his Cabinet. Every president tends to fill such roles with supporters, but Trump has elevated loyalty to an almost comical degree. Not only must Trump’s Cabinet officials have supported him in the election, but they must endorse, or at least refuse to contradict, his infamously false claim to have won the 2020 election. The driving logic behind many of his most high-profile Cabinet picks appears to be a desire to find individuals who will stand behind the president if and when he violates norms, laws, or basic decency.

That is how Hegseth, despite his miserable record of management experience, was elevated to run the Pentagon. It is how Kash Patel, the author of a ridiculous children’s book portraying himself as a wizard and Trump as a king, was nominated to run the FBI. And it is how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has waged a pseudoscientific war against vaccines and appears to not know basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, was tapped to run the federal department that oversees those programs.

One problem with discussing Trump’s opinions on fast-moving matters like the plane crash is that, in the absence of a completed investigation, it’s impossible to say for sure what did cause the disaster. Investigators haven’t even determined which errors were made, let alone why they occurred. It is possible that the entire fault rests with the helicopter pilot, as Trump himself suggested the night of the crash.

It’s true that the federal civil service has many problems, not least the extreme bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of both hiring qualified candidates and firing low-performing employees. It’s true, too, that the FAA has been sued over a clumsy program to boost minority representation. That effort arose out of an understandable desire to broaden the overwhelmingly white hiring pipeline for air-traffic controllers, but is alleged to have included perverse hiring criteria that unfairly filtered out qualified applicants.

There is no evidence yet that the FAA, let alone its hiring practices, had any responsibility for the crash. But to the extent that Trump thinks the underlying issue is an insufficient focus on merit, his moves to purge the government of non-Trumpist civil servants is all but guaranteed to make the problem worse. When you are not only selecting for loyalty, but defining that loyalty to mean “affirming morally odious values and factually absurd premises,” you are reducing your hiring pool to the shallowest part.

[David A. Graham: Blind partisanship does not actually help Trump]

And to be sure, when loyalty itself is the job requirement, this makes a certain kind of sense. La Cosa Nostra does not recruit its members very widely, because, as with Trump, its fear of betrayal outweighs its interest in hiring and promoting the most skilled racketeers and leg-breakers. When you are trying to run a government along Mafia hiring and promotion principles, you are necessarily forfeiting expertise and intelligence.

If Trump has his way, over the next four years, the political composition of the people engaged in directing air traffic, testing food for safety, preventing terrorism, and other vital public functions will change dramatically. The ones who have a serious problem with January 6 will be gone, replaced by people who are willing to repeat Trump’s lies—if they are replaced at all. You can justify that process as the president’s prerogative to shape the executive branch. What you can’t call it is an elevation of merit.

“We’re so back,” one reporter whispered to another.

All of the chairs in the White House briefing room were filled, and reporters and photographers were crammed into every available nook and cranny. I was standing in the back, squeezed in between a window and a none-too-pleased Secret Service agent.

The sight was reminiscent of the COVID briefings of 2020: President Donald Trump gripping the sides of the lectern in the White House briefing room, pursing his lips as he looked out at the journalists yelling and jockeying for his attention.

And just like in 2020, Trump used a national calamity to try to score political points and denigrate his foes. Fourteen hours after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter outside Washington last night—the first crisis of the young administration, a moment to console a stunned and grieving nation—Trump repeatedly implied that the crash was the fault of his Democratic predecessors and of DEI policies.

[Read: He could have talked about anything else]

Trump offered no evidence to support his claims but repeatedly cast the blame on others, even as bodies were still being pulled from the frigid waters of the Potomac River just a few miles away.

“Because I have common sense, okay?” Trump said, when asked how he had concluded that diversity programs—programs that Trump claimed were put in place by the Biden and Obama administrations—were to blame. “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

The crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people and was the first major crash in the United States involving an airline in more than 15 years. Trump’s instinct after the tragedy was yet again to choose divisiveness. On social media, within hours of the collision, he offered not condolences but conspiracy theories: “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.” As he did so often in his first term, he was reacting to a crisis as an observer and not as the president, who has the resources of the federal government at his disposal and the responsibility of getting answers.

And then, in his briefing-room appearance today—the first of his 10-day-old second term—Trump offered a few initial notes of sympathy, and then turned almost immediately toward castigating DEI, leaving several correspondents to turn and shake their heads in disbelief.

“I put safety first,” Trump said. “Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

Trump showcased his instinct to immediately frame tragedies through his own ideological or political lens, facts be damned. And it’s a pattern: Earlier this month, he blamed the Southern California wildfires on Democratic politicians and suggested that illegal immigration was the cause of a terrorist attack in New Orleans, even though the attacker was a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

When pressed today, he snapped at reporters (“I think that’s not a very smart question—I’m surprised, coming from you”) and called on friendlier faces from conservative-leaning outlets, who tossed him softballs. He admitted that the crash was still under investigation and that the cause was not yet known. But he was quick to claim that the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered its standards under President Barack Obama (“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white’”) and that his administration was restoring them, despite the hiring and spending freezes his team has aimed to put in place.

But summarizing Trump’s remarks on air-traffic controllers doesn’t quite capture the experience of sitting through them:

Can you imagine, these are people that are, I mean, actually, their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have. Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened, because of the stress when you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it.

Seated to the right of Trump was a phalanx of supportive aides—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—who would all get brief turns at the microphone to weigh in on the tragedy and praise Trump’s leadership.

Trump’s eyes darted around the room. His hand, with its index figure outstretched, would move in little circles as he considered which reporter to call on. Then it would steady, and he would point deliberately, selecting one person in a sea of outstretched hands, gesturing that he or she was being granted the privilege of asking the president the next question.

Similarly freewheeling question-and-answer sessions became the hallmark of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with Trump performing for the cameras—often for more than an hour at a time—and exuding the bravado of someone who believed that he alone could steer the nation through the greatest public-health crisis in a century. Trump couldn’t get enough of those press conferences. He pushed to hold them as close to the 6 p.m. evening news as possible to increase viewership; he used them to take swipes at his political opponents, including then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who tended to hold his own COVID briefings earlier in the day.

But instead of being reassuring, fact-based public-service announcements, the briefings were defined by falsehoods, politicization, and outlandish recommendations to inject disinfectant. Those nightly battles, Trump’s closest aides believe, helped seal his defeat in the 2020 election. He came across as incompetent, desperate, eager to shift the blame. He ignored suggestions to turn the briefings over to then–Vice President Mike Pence, the head of his COVID task force, or to a team of doctors and scientists. He kept going to the podium day after day. By the time he finally abandoned the briefings, he trailed Joe Biden by six points in the polls.

Both Hegseth, a former Fox News host, and Duffy, once a reality-TV star, have significant experience in front of the cameras. But a White House official told me that there was never a question that Trump himself would brief the press after the crash.

And when the news conference ended after 36 minutes, the reporters, some with dazed expressions, filed out of the briefing room. As I navigated the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a fellow journalist’s phone and the text message he had just sent:

“WTF.”

Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters that he’s a fighter, a fearless champion who always has their back. Such guarantees, however, apparently do not apply to people who worked for him when they’re threatened by foreign assassins. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the former Pompeo aide Brian Hook have all been targeted by Trump for political retribution. They are also being targeted by the Iranians, but the regime in Tehran has marked them all for death.

The president may be spoiling for a fight with career bureaucrats and “woke” professors, but when it comes to Iranian assassins, he is willing to walk away from men who carried out his orders. Milley, Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook all served in Trump’s first administration—he appointed them to their posts—and they were part of the Trump national-security team when the United States killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a strike in January 2020. In 2022, an Iranian national was arrested and charged with trying to arrange Bolton’s murder, and American intelligence believes that other officials—including Trump himself—have been targeted by Iran because of their involvement in killing Soleimani.

The Biden administration briefed the incoming Trump administration on these threats and on the security details it had authorized to protect Bolton and others. Last week, Trump removed the details protecting Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook; yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed the guards around Milley and announced that he would be investigating Milley for undermining the chain of command during Trump’s first term. Trump also revoked the security clearances held by all four men.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The revocation of security clearances is petty, but it harms the administration more than it does any of these men. Retaining a clearance helps former federal employees find work in the consulting world, and it is typical to hold on to them after leaving government service. (I was offered the opportunity to keep mine when I left the Naval War College.) But at more senior levels, clearances allow people in government to get advice from former leaders. Some of these people could have been of significant help to Trump’s staff during a crisis, although Trump himself is unlikely to care about that possibility.

Removing the security details, however, could have deadly consequences. The Iranians seem determined to seek revenge for the killing of Soleimani, and sooner or later, they might succeed. (“The Iranians are not good but they’re very enthusiastic,” a former Pentagon official said in October. “And of course, they’ve only got to get lucky once.”) And the Iranians aren’t the only threat out there; the Russians have no compunctions about attacking people in their home country, often using gruesome methods.

Trump takes such threats very seriously where he is concerned. When Biden officials alerted Trump to the danger from Iran, Trump asked for more security from the U.S. government, and during his campaign, according to The New York Times, he even asked that military assets be assigned to protect him, something usually provided only to sitting presidents.

Lesser mortals, however, must fend for themselves: Trump and Hegseth not only took away the security details of these former policy makers but did so with significant publicity, almost as if to broadcast to America’s enemies that anyone who wanted to settle scores with these officials would get no trouble from the current White House. (Trump also canceled protection for 84-year-old Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been the target of multiple threats from other Americans.) Trump despises critics such as Bolton and Milley, and it is unsurprising that he has no obvious issue subjecting them to physical danger. But even some Republicans —who should be used to this kind of vengefulness from the leader of their party—have been shocked, and are trying to get Trump to reverse course. They are particularly concerned about Pompeo and Hook, loyalists whose lives have been placed in jeopardy for sins that are known only to the president.

[Read: Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity]

In another time, Americans would rally to protect their own from the agents of one of their most dedicated enemies. Today, most citizens seem either unaware or unperturbed that the president of the United States is exposing his own former staff to immense risks. Nevertheless, it should be said clearly and without equivocation: President Trump will bear direct responsibility for any harm that could come to these people from foreign actors.

This is far more than Trump’s usual pettiness. He has always considered the oath of federal service to be little more than an oath of loyalty to him, and he has always been willing to threaten his opponents. (In 2018, he apparently considered handing Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, over to Moscow, a move that provoked a level of outrage that seems quaint today.) Trump’s message in this second term is that friends and subordinates are literally disposable if they cross him: He will not only humiliate and fire them, but he will also subject them to actual physical danger.

This escalation of Trump’s vindictiveness should serve as a very personal warning to anyone willing to work for him in his second term. Senior officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and other organizations are routinely asked to go head-to-head with representatives of some of the most dangerous nations on the planet, and to contribute to operations against those regimes. In the past, such officials could do so knowing that their own government would do everything it could to keep them—and their family—safe from foreign agents. As one of Bolton’s former deputies, Charles Kupperman, told the Times: “Trump’s national security team must provide guidance based on their assessment of what needs to be done to protect America without regard to their personal security.”

Good luck with that. No one who works in defense or national-security affairs can assume that, when Trump orders them to cross America’s many enemies in the world, he will protect them from foreign vengeance. Trump has now made clear that he will abandon people who have taken risks in the service of the United States—even those who were following his own orders—if they happen to displease him. (Or, in the case of Pompeo and Hook, for no apparent reason at all.) Hegseth, for his part, may have no real idea what he’s done, and may merely be courting favor from a boss who has elevated him far beyond his abilities. But Trump knows better; he is himself the survivor of an assassination attempt, and no level of security was enough when he thought the Iranians were gunning for him.

People still considering whether to serve Trump can have no illusions about what awaits them. True leaders take responsibility for their team. Trump is no such leader; he will, on a whim, place other Americans in danger and then, as he famously put it in his previous term, take no responsibility at all.

President Donald Trump intended his flood of executive orders to shock and awe his opponents. But on Monday night, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget instead shocked the Trump White House.

That memo, with its call for a “temporary pause” to all federal-government grants and loans, set off widespread panic and confusion within the federal government and among the millions of individuals and institutions reliant on federal funds. But it was released without going through the usual White House approval processes.

The memo was produced by the budget office alone, which failed to get proper sign-off from the White House, according to a senior White House official and a second person familiar with the memo. The team headed by Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, had requested to see the memo before it went out, but OMB never sent it over, these people said.

As a result, the White House was caught off guard as the memo sparked the sort of chaos that Trump’s team had hoped would be a vestige of his first term. Within 48 hours, OMB was forced to rescind the memo.

After the memo was initially released, White House staffers—knowing they faced a communications problem, if not also a policy one—prepared White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to handle questions on the funding freeze at her inaugural briefing yesterday.

As anticipated, reporters peppered her with questions about which federal programs might be affected by the freeze. “I have now been asked and answered this question four times,” a slightly exasperated Leavitt said. “To individuals at home who receive direct assistance from the federal government: You will not be impacted by this federal freeze.”

In response to the confusion, OMB sent out a clarification memo yesterday, insisting that the pause did “not apply across-the-board” and was intended to affect programs from the Biden administration that were not in sync with Trump’s day-one executive orders, such as DEI initiatives and “the green new deal”—which Republicans use as a catchall term for climate programs.

But if the OMB memo was not properly vetted, it should not have come as a complete surprise. A slide deck labeled “Office of Management and Budget” that outlines priorities and goals in line with Trump’s agenda—marked “confidential,” bearing the seal of the executive office of the president, and dated January 2025—has been circulating on Capitol Hill. The presentation, focused on what it calls “regulatory misalignment,” presents columns of problems paired with actions intended to address them.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, for instance, is listed as a problem because it undermines the president’s ability “to ensure fiscal responsibility.” The suggested action is restoring “impoundment authority” by challenging the act’s constitutionality in court. Both Trump and Russell Vought, his nominee to lead the budget office, have argued that the Watergate-era law—which generally prevents the executive branch from spending less than what Congress has appropriated for various programs and purposes—is unconstitutional.

Another problem, according to the presentation, is that “existing legal interpretations protect entrenched bureaucratic practices.” To solve that, it calls for the appointment of “a bold General Counsel at OMB with a mandate to challenge outdated legal precedents that protect the status quo.”

An OMB spokesperson, Rachel Cauley, told me that, despite outlining in detail many steps that Trump actually took once in office, the slide deck was not the work of Trump’s incoming team. “Trump officials have never seen this document before and it’s pretty apparent it was generated before Trump was in office,” Cauley wrote to me in a text message.

But whatever its origin, the slide deck seems to have been oddly prophetic. The source familiar with the OMB memo that touched off so much controversy this week said that it had been drafted by Mark Paoletta, who was appointed by Trump as the agency’s general counsel. OMB declined to comment on that claim.

Even after OMB rescinded its Monday memo, confusion reigned. This afternoon, Leavitt tried to clarify things with a post on X: “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” she wrote. “It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.”

Her post did little to resolve the lingering questions surrounding federal funds, but made it perfectly clear how the White House now feels about the memo.

Put on the spot, a lot of Americans might hesitate over the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. People who aren’t affected by one of these programs, which together enroll about 150 million people in the U.S., don’t generally have a need to be well versed in their intricacies, and the two programs sound quite similar. The names don’t really hint that Medicare is a federal program that covers older Americans and Americans with disabilities, and that Medicaid covers low-income people in the United States.

Most Americans, though, are not nominated to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is. And yet today, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he made clear that he also does not know very much about Medicare and Medicaid.

As HHS secretary, Kennedy would oversee a suite of government agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and National Institutes of Health, that are focused on improving American health. He also would oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which, as the name implies, manages those two programs. HHS services, in other words, touch the lives of every American—and Medicaid and Medicare are, in particular, two of the most common ways for people to directly benefit from the government’s services.

During the three-and-a-half-hour hearing, in which the Senate committee pressed Kennedy on a range of issues—his anti-vaccine views, endorsements of conspiracy theories, stance on abortion, potential financial conflicts—senators grilled Kennedy on various aspects of the two government programs. In his new role, Kennedy could be charged with overseeing substantial changes to one of them. Donald Trump has pledged to preserve Medicare. He has made no such promise about Medicaid, which health-policy experts anticipate may be targeted for spending cuts. (On Tuesday, Medicaid reimbursement portals abruptly stopped working after the Trump administration ordered a freeze on federal grants and loans; states have since regained access to the portals.) Some Republicans have argued that an increased focus on public-health insurance in the U.S. won’t make Americans healthier, and Kennedy appeared to echo that viewpoint today when he criticized Medicaid, saying “our people are getting sicker every single year,” and lamented the program’s expansion to people with higher incomes. “The poorest Americans are now being robbed,” he said.

But Kennedy also seemed to mix up the two programs when he described them. Part of the issue with Medicaid, he said, is that “the premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high.” The majority of people enrolled in Medicaid don’t pay premiums or deductibles; federal law actually prohibits premiums for the program’s lowest-income enrollees. (He did seem better versed in Medicare Advantage, a program that provides private insurance coverage for older Americans and that he himself is enrolled in.)

To be fair, Kennedy was in a high-pressure situation. But being HHS secretary is a high-pressure job. Kennedy had time to prepare in advance of today’s hearing. If confirmed, he won’t need to master every minute detail of Medicare and Medicaid, but he will need to be able to navigate both programs—their differences, their weaknesses, and how they might evolve. People who are eligible for both programs, for instance, have created sticking points in the health-care system, in part because coordinating coverage between the two is difficult and can complicate care. When pressed by Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana on how to deal with that issue, Kennedy suggested that the programs should be “consolidated” and “integrated”—but when asked how that might happen, said, “I’m not exactly sure.”

Kennedy struggled with other policy specifics, too. One of his goals, Kennedy said, is to fulfill Trump’s directive to improve the quality of care and lower the price of care for all Americans. But he was vague on any plans to reform Medicaid, explaining that he’d “increase transparency” and “increase accountability.” When pushed by Cassidy to clarify, Kennedy said, “Well, I don’t have a broad proposal for dismantling the program.”

Nor did Kennedy have a clear sense of how he would approach one of the more contentious and legally sensitive health questions of the past few years: whether women whose lives are threatened by pregnancy should be able to receive emergency abortions under EMTALA, the law that requires emergency rooms that receive Medicare funding to provide care to anyone in a life-threatening situation. The Biden administration argued that this federal law supersedes state abortion bans, and in 2024, after the Supreme Court demurred on the issue, the administration made clear to doctors, in a letter co-authored by Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, that abortions could qualify as emergency treatment. Kennedy admitted this morning that he didn’t know the scope of the authority he’d have to enforce the law in his new job.

Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, a clinical pharmacist at UC San Diego, told me that Kennedy's apparent failure to understand the intricacies of the two programs wasn’t just a harmless fumble. If the health secretary is not well versed in the programs he’s tasked to run, he might not appreciate the impacts of his decisions. Should health coverage for some of the most vulnerable Americans be altered—perhaps even taken away—then health disparities in this country would likely widen. And if any part of his agenda does include increasing transparency, as Kennedy described in today’s hearing, expertise will have to be a prerequisite. “You can’t increase transparency on something you don’t have clarity on,” Abdul-Mutakabbir told me. (Kennedy’s press team did not immediately return a request for comment on his performance at today’s hearing.)

During the hearing, Kennedy’s more radical views on vaccines and infectious disease did come up. He copped to describing Lyme disease as “highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon.” (The bacterium, which has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, is not.) He stood by his assertion that the measles vaccine killed two children in Samoa in 2018. (The vaccine did not; those children died following the administration of an improperly mixed vaccine by two nurses who were ultimately sentenced to five years in prison for the act.) He said that young children are at “basically … zero risk” from COVID-19. (Young children are at risk, especially babies under six months of age, who have similar hospitalization rates from the disease as adults 65 to 74 years old.) Kennedy’s falsehoods about infection and immunity were already well known, though. What the country learned today was that he may lack basic competency in some of the most wide-reaching aspects of his future job—and didn’t take the time to prepare answers for Congress, which he’ll ultimately have to answer to.

Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.

The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

At issue in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, is whether Tennessee’s ban on medical treatments for gender dysphoria—the medical diagnosis for someone who believes their gender does not match their biological sex—unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex. The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

[Read: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

Crucially, the law bans treatments—such as hormones and puberty blockers—only for the purpose of a minor’s gender transition; they remain legal to prescribe for any other reason. The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. The Biden administration’s position was that this kind of care can be regulated—then–Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar cited as a legitimate example a West Virginia law that requires two physicians to sign off—but that the regulation cannot be discriminatory. Not all measures that distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional—see, for instance, sex-specific bathrooms—but they are subject to greater legal scrutiny; Tennessee is denying that it is engaging in discrimination, and thus not subject to that level of scrutiny.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. A recent JAMA Pediatrics study found that fewer than 0.1 percent of young people with private insurance received hormone treatments or puberty blockers during a five-year period—a limited number of patients overall, but one for whom the stakes are very high. The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

Much depends on the nature of the justices’ ultimate decision and how far-reaching it is. The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.” As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

“One of the things that’s worth emphasizing is that for the people who brought the case, the movement that’s behind this litigation, there have long been anxieties about sex-discrimination jurisprudence, period,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, told me. “So if that’s the agenda that’s driving the litigation, and the Court is embracing the arguments behind that agenda, you have to wonder if this isn’t the end of the road.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

[Read: Anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination]

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests—especially when, as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the population at risk is so few as to be politically powerless.

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them. The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination. Trump has shut down the White House’s Spanish-language website, ended refugee- and humanitarian-parole programs, and unconstitutionally attempted to nullify birthright citizenship.   

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Even before Trump took office, Republican-controlled states passed laws that curtail women’s rights to free speech, privacy, and movement on the grounds that those restrictions are necessary to ban abortion—something that, as Justice Samuel Alito took pains to reiterate during oral argument in Skrmetti, neither he nor his colleagues in the conservative movement regard as sex-based discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss. One transgender congressional representative was enough for Republicans to demand that all of the Capitol’s bathrooms be restricted by “biological sex.” The tiny percentage of trans children receiving care is justification to ban them from accessing treatment they seek. A defense-funding bill passed with limited Democratic support and signed by President Joe Biden will ban gender-affirming care for the children of service members—for those with trans children, their reward for serving their country is that their children will be discriminated against. If they are stationed in states like Texas, which has no less than 15 military installations, they will have few options, if any, for care outside the military system.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

This is shameless bullying, but then, the president is himself a bully of the highest order, and presidents are moral exemplars, for better and worse. It is not necessary for one to approve of gender-affirming care in order to respect people’s right to make their own decisions about what medical care is best for them and their families, or to oppose this kind of outright, ideologically motivated state persecution.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”

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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset. She believes that someone in the United States Air Force decided to interpret President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear,” just the way it was written.

No one is quite sure what happened, but somehow this order resulted in the excision from a U.S. Air Force training course of some materials about the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black World War II fighter pilots known as the Red Tails because of their aircraft’s distinctive markings. Air Force officials confirmed on Saturday that a video had been removed from the training curriculum but only because it was “intertwined in courses now under review,” and it is now back in the curriculum.

Britt referred to this kind of action as “malicious compliance,” meaning a kind of opposition through aggressive and sometimes overly literal implementation of a command or policy. Rather than refuse to obey, the person or group engaging in malicious compliance takes a kind of “monkey’s paw” approach, implementing the directives as destructively as possible. (Every teenager who has loaded the dishwasher improperly on purpose, hoping never to be told to clear the table again, knows what malicious compliance means.)

Britt also tagged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on social media. Hegseth, who was nominated for his position in part because of his vow to root out wokeness and DEI and to replace them with “lethality,” responded enthusiastically: “Amen! We’re all over it Senator. This will not stand.”

Britt’s complaint about malicious compliance is a diversion. Trump’s wave of executive orders is designed to be performatively malicious. My colleague Adam Serwer years ago noted that, for the MAGA movement, “the cruelty is the point,” and now Trump’s orders make clear that the malice is the policy.

The series of presidential decrees is largely intended to delight the Republican base; unfortunately, government workers cannot divine what Trump really meant. The president has not given any cue that his orders should be interpreted in some more generous way. In fact, days before the Air Force kerfuffle, federal workers received an email from their supervisors (based on a template provided by the Office of Personnel Management) that could have come straight from a party apparatchik in the old Soviet Union. This memo not only told staff to be on the lookout for attempts to hide DEI-related ideological contamination, but warned them of their obligation to rat out colleagues who did so or face “adverse” job consequences themselves.

The advisory, which has since been taken off a government website, continued: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024”—that is, since Election Day—“to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies,” employees must report it to OPM within ten days.

This is not exactly language that encourages anyone to use common sense and good judgment to decide what constitutes DEI contraband. This is a command that says, in effect: This could mean anything; if you don’t report it, and we find it, you’re in trouble. When government employees get a memo like that, they are not inclined to sit around wondering what counts and what doesn’t.

Trump’s other executive orders are likewise designed to show the GOP base that the new administration is doing all of the things that Trump promised he’d do—even if they’re things that, legally, no president can do. Trump had pledged, for example, to eliminate birthright citizenship, so he sharpied out part of the Fourteenth Amendment and declared victory. He froze federal grants and loans—an order now temporarily blocked by a judge—which could have endangered any number of programs, including school lunches. (And about time, according to Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, who told CNN today that those indolent kids need to go get jobs—even, apparently, schoolchildren who aren’t old enough to work—instead of “spong[ing] off the government”).

What would non-malicious compliance with such a mandate even look like? Instead of a lunch, are schools supposed to hand poor kids a glass of water and then wish them luck in their job search?

Of course, the Trump administration knows that aid to states and localities will begin to flow again, that children will be getting lunches, and that babies born on U.S. soil are citizens. The goal of all these orders is not to implement policy, but to generate outrage, report the spasms of liberal apoplexy to the MAGA faithful, and then, when necessary, go to court. And why not? The president now has a politically sympathetic Supreme Court majority that worked hard to keep him out of prison while he was a candidate, and has functionally immunized him against almost any challenge now that he’s back in office. Trump’s people know that they cannot actually shake the Constitution like an Etch A Sketch and make birthright citizenship disappear, but why not give it a shot, especially if a trolling executive order makes the base happy?

Trump and his people may also believe that a sleet storm of executive orders, some of which might stick here and there while others melt on contact with reality, is a way to demonstrate competence. They are likely still stung by the fiasco over the 2017 travel ban that initially got swatted down in court, and this time they want to appear as if they know what they’re doing.

But this is merely mimicking competence and energy. The “return to work” order, for example, is a MAGA fan favorite, because it plays to a common stereotype among many Americans that federal employees who work from home are scamming goldbrickers plodding around the house in their bunny slippers and tapping the occasional key on a laptop. Although showing up to an office or worksite in-person is (and should be) a basic requirement of most jobs, remote work in many cases benefits the government and the taxpayer: It reduces congestion in cities, and it offloads a lot of overhead costs (heat, water, lighting, etc.) onto the worker. That’s why the government and private industry were trending toward remote arrangements long before the pandemic.

In any case, many federal offices don’t have enough space to bring everyone back, but Trump may be attempting to make government service onerous enough that some of them will leave anyway: All federal employees have until February 6 to accept a sizable buyout if they cannot or will not return to in-person work. In the end, the RTO power play isn’t really about trying to fill empty offices. Instead, Trump is telling federal employees that all of the arrangements they’ve made with their departments about schedules, child care, commutes, and staffing are now invalid, because their career and service matters less than making some red-state voter feel that the president finally stuck it to them and their co-workers.

Maybe a non-malicious way to enforce such orders exists. But that’s not the point.

Related:

The cruelty is the point. (From 2018) The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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