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.”

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

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

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until just moments before an American Airlines regional plane and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River last night, nothing in particular seemed amiss. Conditions were clear, Sean Duffy, the new secretary of transportation, noted in a press conference this morning. The passenger jet, coming from Wichita, Kansas, was about to arrive at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport—one in a succession of airliners landing about two minutes apart. The Black Hawk helicopter was on a training mission from Virginia’s Fort Belvoir. Both aircraft were in a “standard flight pattern,” Duffy said. Referring to the crowded and shared air space around D.C., he added, “This was not unusual.”

And that may turn out to be the problem. The precise immediate cause of the crash—which killed all 64 passengers and crew members aboard the airliner and all three people in the helicopter—will not become clear until investigators fully analyze recordings of air-traffic-control communications and the plane’s black box. But the accident follows a long string of alarming near collisions at airports across the country—a pattern suggesting that the aviation-safety systems upon which human life depends are under enormous strain.  

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t politicize aviation safety]

In 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration identified 19 “serious runway incursions,” the most in almost a decade. The causes of these events are varied: air-traffic-control staffing shortages, pilot inexperience, demand for air travel, outdated technology. The increase in near misses led the FAA to create a safety review team and issue a rare industrywide “safety call to action” demanding greater vigilance throughout the community. These incidents do not appear to have prompted any major changes in safety practices either nationally or in the Washington area. Last year, the number of serious incursions declined, making the issue seem less urgent.

Reagan National’s tight footprint and three intersecting runways, along with the presence of military and other government operations nearby, make the air space surrounding the facility relatively tricky for pilots to navigate. As the popular open-source intelligence account @OSINTtechnical noted on X once footage of the accident and its aftermath began spreading on social media, “For many in the DC-area flying community, the crash tonight wasn’t a matter of if, but when.” (This morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced an investigation of the Army helicopter’s role in the incident.)

In 2013, an airliner and a military helicopter flying at the same altitude near Reagan National came within 950 feet of each other. Last May, a Boston-bound jet traveling 100 miles an hour on the runway had to abort its takeoff because another plane had been cleared to land on an intersecting runway. Even so, the FAA added additional flight slots to Reagan National last year, over the objections of local politicians who worried about congestion and overburdening capacity.

[Read: Inside the busy, stressful world of air traffic control]

The crash near Reagan National was the first major aviation disaster involving a U.S. airline since 2009—long enough that nearly a generation of Americans are experiencing this crash as their first. Such incidents have become so rare that Americans come to assume that safety precautions automatically work.

Safety systems are vulnerable to a phenomenon known in the disaster-management world as the “near-miss fallacy”—an inability to interpret and act upon the warnings embedded in situations where catastrophe is only narrowly avoided. Paradoxically, people may come to see such events as signs that the system is working. In her groundbreaking research on NASA after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the American sociologist Diane Vaughan faulted the agency for its “normalization of deviance.” The direct culprits in the spacecraft’s fate were faulty booster-rocket parts known as “O-rings.” Vaughn noted that shuttle missions had been experiencing problems with the parts for years, but NASA had downplayed their importance. Engineers were able to normalize O-ring incidents and other safety issues because none had caused significant harm—until one did.

The immediate cause of the crash over the Potomac may turn out to be a single tragic mistake. But this deadly tragedy occurred within a broader context. For some time, our aviation system has been ignoring warning signs and normalizing deviance. Good luck can last only so long, and it ran out last night.

The first 10 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have seen such an onslaught of executive orders and implementing actions that Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone with shit” seems apt. But that characterization is incomplete, and it obscures a more frightening truth: The Trump administration’s actions have been not just voluminous but efficient and effective. Though Trump himself may not appreciate the depth of detail that has gone into these early days, his allies do appear to understand what they are doing, and they seem to have his unquestioning consent to do whatever they like.  

And what they want is very clear: to take full control of the federal government. Not in the way that typifies every change of administration but in a more extreme way designed to eradicate opposition, disempower federal authority, and cause federal bureaucrats to cower. It is an assault on basic governance.

A great deal of thought has gone into this effort already. The executive orders and sundry administrative directives and guidance that have been issued reflect a profound understanding of the federal government and exactly where the weak spots within the bureaucracy might lie.

Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

Consider, as a first example, the order that reassigned 20 senior career lawyers within the U.S. Department of Justice. Because of their career status, they could not be unilaterally fired, but Trump’s team did the next best thing by reassigning them to a newly created “Sanctuary Cities” task force. With one administrative act, the senior leaders of public-integrity investigations, counter-intelligence investigations, and crypto-currency investigations—individuals with immense experience in criminal law—were taken off the board and assigned to a body that is, apparently, tasked with taking legal actions against cities that do not assist in Trump’s immigration crackdown. Their former offices were effectively neutered.

As my friend, the former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, put it: “These are career people. They are not political. They are people who have been in these positions often many, many years or even decades. They have developed a real expertise, and that’s a great resource for the government.” A resource that is now lost.

But this is not merely an attack on expertise. This maneuver has a further effect: to disable opposition. Career employees with this degree of expertise and experience are exactly the type who would embody institutional norms and, thus, exactly the sort who could be expected, in their own way, to form a bulwark of institutional resistance to Trumpian excess. Moreover, three of the prosecuting sections of the DOJ that have been disrupted—public integrity (an anti-corruption unit), counterintelligence (combatting foreign influence), and crypto crime—are precisely the three units whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies.

The same playbook was also used last week to hamstring environmental enforcement, by reassigning four senior environmental lawyers at the DOJ to immigration matters. The leaders of these four litigating sections are four of the most experienced environmental lawyers in the nation. Additionally, the Trump administration has frozen action on all cases handled by the Justice Department’s Environmental Enforcement Section, with substantial practical disruption. Once again, expertise has been lost and the functionality of government institutions has been significantly impaired, with the inevitable result that companies subject to environmental regulation (including Trump’s big corporate supporters) will be less policed.

One could continue with a number of other examples, whether the wholesale reassignment of 160 staffers at the National Security Council (responsible for coordinating crucial national-security matters at the White House), the reassignment of DOJ civil-rights leadership (enforcing DEI mandates), or the appointment Ed Martin (a January 6 denier) as the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. But the themes are always the same: Long-standing expertise is discarded and institutional effectiveness diminished.  

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

More to the point, however, these actions are a “deep cut” reflecting significant planning and intent. The chiefs at DOJ’s public-integrity or environmental-enforcement sections are by no means household names. Nobody outside their immediate ambit of authority would know who they are. And yet the extent of knowledge demonstrated by Trump’s team in reassigning them is extensive. Trump’s team knows which high-value targets might offer internal resistance, and it has removed them.

A second pillar of Trump’s effort to take over the government can be seen in his steps to eliminate any independent oversight of his actions.

Here, the headline is his attempted purge of at least a dozen inspectors general.  Inspectors general, as an institution, are perhaps not so little-known as the DOJ section chiefs who were dismissed, but as individuals, they are mostly anonymous. IGs serve as an internal check on waste, fraud, and abuse at federal agencies. They were created by Congress in the 1970s as a semi-independent authority intended to be insulated from presidential control. They routinely report to Congress and the public about misconduct that they identify for corrective action.

Indeed, Congress so highly values the independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship of IGs that, following Trump’s first presidency, it passed a law strengthening that independence and limiting a president’s removal authority. No doubt recognizing the threat that independent oversight might pose to his planned actions, Trump’s (possibly illegal) removal order is a frontal assault on the careful monitoring Congress has sought to build into the government

To similar effect, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. That relatively obscure office (with a budget of only $7 million and 30 staff), little noticed outside the Army, is intended to study ways of reducing civilian harm during combat. But Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, thinks that “restrictive rules of engagement” make defeating the enemy harder, but the protection of civilians is all about careful rules of engagement. Again, the Trump administration’s action reflects both a substantive desire to diminish oversight and a depth of bureaucratic knowledge that is extensive.

That depth can also be seen in Trump’s announced intention to fire three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The PCLOB is an independent bipartisan oversight board reviewing executive-branch law-enforcement and intelligence surveillance activities. Yet, despite its crucial internal importance, the PCLOB is hardly a well-known institution. Save for those, like me, who work in that field, few, if any, outside observers could likely define the board’s role or name its members.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

And still, Trump’s team knew enough to identify an ingenious way of neutering the board. As an independent, statutorily created agency, it could not be eliminated. But the board does require a quorum to operate, and by firing three of its five members this past Monday, Trump effectively eliminated its oversight. As Senator Ron Wyden put it: “By purging the Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Trump is kneecapping one of the only independent watchdogs over government surveillance who could alert Congress and the public about surveillance abuses by his administration.” And he is doing so in a highly sophisticated manner.

Along with large-scale actions to reform government, Trump’s orders included a plethora of small-bore, petty-minded actions designed to implement his personal prejudices and desire for revenge. For example, he has stripped Anthony Fauci of his federal security detail. He has also dismissed Admiral Linda Fagan of the Coast Guard, the only woman who has ever led a military branch, on a transparently inaccurate claim of ineffectiveness. Likewise, he has stripped security protection from Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (both of whom are under affirmative threat from Iran). His administration’s ban on “activist” flags at U.S. embassies would be almost comical if it did not exemplify the coldhearted efficiency at the core of Trump’s new presidency. These actions are petty, but they also reflect the comprehensive nature of his purpose and the extent of his team’s planning.

Were it not so dangerous to democratic norms, the efficiency of these early days would almost be admirable, in the same way that one might admire a well-run play by an opposing football team. But politics is not a game, and this nation’s basic security and functioning are at risk. Those who oppose Trump’s actions do not have an incompetent opponent; Trump’s team is savvy and has been planning for this for years. They came ready.

Few of Donald Trump’s foibles have gone undissected, but one glaring thing remains underappreciated: He does not care about U.S. national security.

Once you consider Trump’s record from this perspective, many of his past and present actions become more coherent. (The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently made a version of this point on Substack.) Why else would a president—to choose a few examples—nominate Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard for his Cabinet, haphazardly store highly classified documents on a ballroom stage, or publicly call on Russia to hack a former secretary of state’s emails?

This is not to say, as some of Trump’s critics have, that he is against American national security. It doesn’t mean he’s a Manchurian candidate, a saboteur trying to tear down the United States on behalf of some foreign adversary—Trump appears to have come by his hostility to rule of law and the Constitution on his own. Rather, he’s simply indifferent, just as many of Trump’s most audacious lies are less intentionally misleading than completely uninterested in truth.

[David A. Graham: What Trump did in Osaka was worse than lying]

“Trump is the only thing he’s interested in,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during Trump’s first term, told me. “He’s not really interested in domestic security, either, or anything else.”

Nor is this to say that Trump’s appointees don’t care about American national security. Tulsi Gabbard, his nominee to be director of national intelligence, has a very strange collection of views that she seems to honestly feel would improve America’s position in the world. Her lengthy meeting with the now-deposed Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad appears to have been prompted by sincere but misguided convictions.

Other Trump appointees also hold views that may diverge from “the blob,” as detractors sometimes describe the foreign-policy establishment, but people like National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy–Designate Elbridge Colby are viewed as serious, thoughtful people with a command of their fields.

[Read: Trump’s plea for Russia to hack the U.S. government]

Pete Hegseth, too, seems to care a great deal about the future of the country—but Hegseth is plainly unqualified to be secretary of defense, and a president who cared about national security would not put him forward to lead the Defense Department. Hegseth has never run any organization near in size and complexity to the Pentagon; the ones he has run, he’s run into the ground. Many eyewitness accounts suggest he has, or has had, serious issues with alcohol abuse. (Hegseth denies any drinking problem and says he will not drink as secretary.) None of this even gets into his serial adultery and past accusations of sexual assault. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) His primary qualifications for the nomination are that he looks good on TV and that he’s been a consistent cheerleader for Donald Trump.

A president who cared about national security would not have publicly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said; Kremlin operatives promptly tried. Nor would he defer so egregiously to Vladimir Putin, blaming “U.S. foolishness and stupidity” for strained Russo-American relations. He would also not summarily dismiss DHS advisory committees and work to dismantle key cybersecurity bodies simply because he was angry that they undermined his lies about the 2020 election.

[Read: Trump blames bad relations with Russia on everything but Russia]

A president concerned foremost about national security does not systematically alienate key allies, attempt to intimidate them, or question whether he’d stand by basic treaty obligations, such as NATO’s Article 5. Nor would a president who was interested in national security withhold duly appropriated funds to a key ally like Ukraine in the hope of obtaining a personal political favor. He would not use the military as a prop, whether in creating a show at the border or cinematically calling off strikes on adversaries.

A president focused on national security would not abscond with dozens of boxes full of highly sensitive national-security documents, storing them mixed up with golf shirts and newspaper clippings and leaving them on a stage in Mar-a-Lago, unsecured. (He would also not, as federal prosecutors alleged, refuse to return them when subpoenaed. Trump denied this.) Nor would he pardon violent rioters convicted in an assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump has revoked security details for Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and his former adviser Brian Hook, all of whom worked in his first administration. Bolton told me he wasn’t shocked, because when he resigned from the White House in 2019, Trump immediately ordered protection removed. “Normally, somebody in that job gets protection for three months, six months—there’s no set formula,” he said. “But because you have information you don’t want your adversaries to get, it’s not a perquisite. It’s for the protection of the government.”

[Read: Why the president praises dictators]

Caring deeply about national security is not the same as being good at it. U.S. history is littered with examples of catastrophic choices made by conscientious officials. The architects of foreign policy in the George W. Bush administration truly believed that toppling Saddam Hussein would improve security in the Middle East and American interests. They were wrong. Conversely, Trump’s first term saw some foreign-policy wins, including the Abraham Accords and the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Other gambits that seemed more aimed at personal glorification—or a Nobel Peace Prize—such as his summit with Kim Jong Un flopped.

Even if Trump’s approach does sometimes produce wins, however, he is more motivated by pique, personal benefit, attraction to autocratic leaders, or pursuit of adulation. Those, more than a calculation about what’s best for the nation, are what guides Trump.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also orders investigation into Trump critic Milley's actions and military grade.

The staff was still setting up dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s outdoor patio on a balmy early-January evening when Donald Trump sat down. He was surrounded by several top advisers who would soon join him in the West Wing and who wanted to get his input before his attention shifted to his wealthy guests and Palm Beach club members.

Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, led the conversation, listing some of the dozens of executive orders that had been teed up for Trump’s signature once he reclaimed the presidency. She wanted to talk about sequencing, according to a Trump adviser present at the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. How would he like to stagger the orders over the first few weeks back in office?

“No,” Trump replied, this person told me. “I want to sign as many as possible as soon as we show up.”

“Day one,” he said.

Trump has followed through on the promise of an onslaught, unleashing in his first week more than two dozen executive orders, holding a nearly hour-long news conference and other question-and-answer-filled public appearances, and posting several times a day on social media. Some of this, of course, is in Trump’s nature. He is an inveterate showman whose instincts are to seek attention and dominate the discussion.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

But this time around, Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared “favorite” president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.

Trump’s actions in his first week have been a mix of signal and noise, of distraction and seriousness. He has taken some defeats. But Trump has succeeded, at least, in creating a stark contrast with the quiet of his predecessor, and in (yet again) shifting the nation’s political discourse back toward him. And compared with 2017, the resistance has been far more muted. The Democrats, without an obvious head of the party and still digging out from November’s election disappointment, have yet to make a focused counterargument to Trump, instead getting largely drowned out in the national discourse.

“This is four years in the making. It’s days of thunder. The scale and the depth of this has blown the Democrats out. It’s blown out the media,” Steve Bannon, a former senior White House aide who still informally advises Trump, told me. “He vowed to start fast and now knows what he’s doing. This is a totally different guy than in 2017.”

When Trump left office in disgrace after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, former administration officials, conservative lawyers, and think-tank researchers began drafting orders and legislation—most famously, the Heritage Foundation initiative known as Project 2025—that could act as the foundation of a Trump revival. And after he won, his inner circle made clear that this time the administration would be staffed with true loyalists.

Wiles, who also co-chaired Trump’s campaign, told a closed-door gathering of Republican donors in Las Vegas in the early days of the transition that the president’s first moves would be to reinstate some executive orders from his first term that President Joe Biden had revoked, according one of the Trump advisers and another person familiar with the meeting. Wiles told the private gathering, for a group called the Rockbridge Network, that Trump would begin by withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization. Trump, indeed, signed those orders on his first day back in office, but they were only two of the directives to which he affixed his signature—with a giant Sharpie—in ceremonies held at the Capitol; inside a sports arena in Washington, D.C.; and in the Oval Office during his inauguration festivities and in the days that followed.

His executive orders so far have covered immigration, trade, demographic diversity, civil rights, and the hiring of federal workers. Trump ordered DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs in the federal government to be eliminated. He curtailed the Department of Justice’s civil-rights investigations. Federal health agencies were ordered to halt public communications. And he moved to expand presidential power by eliminating protections for federal workers—so he could more easily staff agencies with supporters—and by refusing, without citing any legal authority, to uphold the U.S. ban on TikTok despite a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the ban’s favor.

“The EOs are so much better-executed now,” Bannon told me. “Back in 2017, we were writing things on the back of envelopes. It was like a playground game, shirts and skins. Now they have good people working, real lawyers.”

Some of Trump’s moves have been symbolic, such as one order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and another to insist that, even in national times of mourning, flags be flown at full staff on Inauguration Day. Others ordered government reviews—to examine China’s compliance with trade deals, for example, or the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs—but might not have real heft. If it was hard to tell the difference between what was real and what was for show, that was by design, the two advisers told me—to make it difficult for Trump’s opponents to focus their outrage.

His aides debated for weeks about how to enact his campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 rioters, whom the incoming president had declared “hostages.” Days before Trump took office, many advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, expected that pardons would be issued for many of the offenders but not, at least immediately, for those convicted of violent crimes, including assaulting police officers. But Trump overruled them, issuing a blanket pardon, and he included commutations for the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, each of whom had been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The two Trump advisers said that Trump thought leaving anyone out would invalidate the underpinning of the Capitol riot—his insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump also decided that any blowback would be manageable.

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

Not everything has worked out for Trump in his first week. Even some staunch Trump allies recoiled from the pardons for violent January 6 offenders; Senator Lindsey Graham called them “a mistake” on Meet the Press. Perhaps most notable, Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship generated a wave of legal action and was blocked by a federal judge. On his first day in office, Trump took on the Fourteenth Amendment by issuing a directive to federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country illegally or under temporary visas. The U.S. government has long interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that those born on American soil are citizens at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The U.S. district court judge who blocked the order, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and told a Trump administration attorney, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order.”

Trump has also struggled to achieve his goal of fast-tracking Cabinet confirmations in the early days of his administration. His choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, became the first Pentagon nominee to require the tie-breaking vote of the vice president to be confirmed. And Trump’s team is even more concerned about his pick for director of national intelligence, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard. The president’s aides are not certain that she has the needed support, and Trump himself has expressed some doubt that she’ll be confirmed, the two Trump advisers told me.

Despite these stumbles, the White House has reveled in Trump’s bombastic, over-the-top style, believing that his message is breaking through. Immigration officers have conducted raids in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; and other cities. A dozen Guatemalan men in shackles were boarded onto a military aircraft in El Paso, Texas, for the deportation flight to their native country, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia in a tiff, now seemingly resolved, over deportation flights. His advisers have also aimed to keep the media off-balance. The White House press office has not sent out a daily schedule to reporters, and has given little notice for Trump’s events. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has yet to hold a formal briefing (though the first is tentatively slated for later today).

The speed and volume of Trump’s orders so far seem to be scrambling the left. Millions of protesters marched in cities across the nation on January 21, 2017. Democratic civic groups exploded in popularity, liberals organized voter-registration drives, and cable-TV ratings and newspaper subscriptions soared. Late-night comics made Trump their top punch line. Trump’s hastily written travel ban on Muslim-majority countries went into effect seven days into his term in 2017, sending lawyers and even ordinary citizens sprinting to airports to assist those who were suddenly subject to detainment. That moment, in many ways, was the early high-water mark of the resistance and set a template for the Democrats’ defiance going forward.

Yesterday marked the first week of Trump’s second term. No large-scale protests have taken place. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued during last week’s caucus meeting that Democrats cannot chase every outrage, because the Trump administration will “flood the zone” with maddening changes, one person in the room told me. In a Saturday Night Live sketch this past weekend, the show’s Trump character shut down a performance based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which became a liberal totem a decade ago. The mood among Democrats, at least in some quarters, feels more like resignation than resistance.

So far, the action on the left has been centered more in the courtrooms than in the streets. Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me that the organization has filed lawsuits to contest a variety of Trump’s immigration orders and has worked to train volunteers in dozens of states to help local officials in responding to the administration’s plans.

“We’re in a different moment. People are not as surprised as the first time. But I would not mistake that for a lack of willingness to fight,” Schifeling said. “It seems like this first week is one giant test balloon—seeing what will stick, seeing what they can get away with. It’s incumbent on all of us to stay calm and firmly push back on them. Don’t give them an inch.”

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as White House communications director for Barack Obama and worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s campaigns, told me that Democrats “can’t stay demoralized” and must recognize that Trump proposed “an agenda that people bought into”—that even gave him a popular-vote victory.

“Now [we need] to stay most focused on those issues—like prices—which he is the most vulnerable on,” Palmieri said. Inflation was a core campaign issue, and Trump himself noted during the transition that he “won on groceries,” telling Meet the Press in December, “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

“It’s a tangible thing, and he needs to deliver,” Palmieri said.

That hasn’t started happening yet. For all the shock and awe of Trump’s first week, none of his initial actions directly took on inflation. But nor are Democrats making Trump look particularly vulnerable.

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.

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Updated on January 25, 2025 at 2:31 p.m. ET

Dear Mr. Secretary,

Tradition dictates that I begin by congratulating you on your confirmation. You seem like a man who appreciates frankness, and so I will spare you empty decorum: It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have been opposed to your nomination to lead the Department of Defense from the moment it was announced. But the Senate has voted, and you are now the leader of the most powerful military on the planet.

Rather than offer you insincere congratulations, I hope you will accept—in the spirit of the love of country that I know we both share—some unsolicited advice. You face unique challenges: You are among the least qualified major Cabinet nominees in modern American history, you have no background in leading a large organization, and you come into office with serious questions about your character and fitness, even from some in your own party. I must tell you that I believe you should have told Donald Trump last fall that you could not, in good conscience, accept his offer.

But you did accept it, and so I write to you today not as a critic, but as a fellow American. I know—as you do—that your success is essential to the security and safety of our nation, and so all of us with something to offer owe you our best efforts, including our direct and honest views.

I send these thoughts to you without partisanship or ill will: The time for that is over. We live in dangerous times and you cannot fail in your new duties. I have no interest in lecturing you about your personal life, or your reported use of alcohol. I have been through such struggles myself, and I believe that even—perhaps especially—in challenging moments, you will choose to approach your new responsibilities with both physical and intellectual sobriety.

I worked in national security and defense affairs for nearly 40 years, including a quarter-century in which my responsibility was to educate American officers. I do not know how to be a Secretary of Defense, but based on my experience, I have three recommendations for you that I hope will contribute to a successful tenure leading America’s military.

First, and most important, I implore you to listen to the men and women working for you who have served our nation. Listening is a sign of strength, Mr. Secretary, not weakness. Every bad senior leader I ever encountered in my career, including generals, admirals, and elected officials, all had the same flaw: Insecurity. They talked and opined and issued orders instead of listening. (From your own military days, you probably remember this expression: They only had Transmit Mode, no Receive Mode.) I know you’ve been charged with shaking up the Pentagon, but the dangerous world around us will not put their plans on pause if you get distracted by a superficial domestic culture war.

You will have the power of decision on almost anything that crosses your path, but you are not omniscient. You are surrounded by a wealth of experience and expertise. Yes, some of the people under you will not be happy about the election or your confirmation, but they respect the terrible burden you’re carrying, and they are there to help you. They share your love of country, and your sense of duty. Their success is your success. They are not the enemy. Hear them out.

Speaking of enemies, you must contend with the reality that you are entering office with almost no credibility with your opposite numbers in Moscow and Beijing (and elsewhere). I say this not as an insult, but to describe in plain terms the conditions you face abroad. I have long experience with the Russians, in particular, and while they will treat you with formal courtesy, make no mistake: These are hard and dangerous people who will have no respect for a former O-4 and talk-show host. I realize it is an uncomfortable truth, but defensiveness about this will only distract you from the work ahead.

You must cover a lot of distance with those opponents. Your previous skills as a public commentator will be of no help and in fact will prove counterproductive in such situations. You cannot bully and speechify your way to respect with such people; they are tough in a way that cannot be countered with macho posturing or rants about DEI. The facile charm that worked for you in public life will be a vulnerability in dealing with our enemies, who will seek to exploit every thoughtless word. The combative punditry that works so well on cable television in America might have helped you burn time during your confirmation hearing, but none of that will serve you well in negotiations or discussions with our dedicated foes. (It won’t do you much good talking to our allies, either.)

Instead, you will find that you must rely on people who have been in the rooms you’ve never seen until now. You are not required to take their advice, Mr. Secretary, but when your counterparts call you, your staff will be able to assist you in ways you might not have considered. They can warn you about your opponent’s strategies—and weaknesses—before you even pick up the phone. Your previous career has rewarded bombast and bluster; now you will have to master judiciousness, restraint, and the strategic use of silence.

Finally, I hope that you will leave behind the kind of rhetoric that brought you to prominence. I know that you gained this post by being a loyal soldier for President Trump. The truth is that most Americans—including the Americans who serve in the U.S. military—don’t really care nearly as much as you’d think about the cultural issues that brought you into the Trump administration. You are no longer a pundit or a provocateur: From today, your fellow citizens are trusting you with the lives of their children. (“Thank you for giving us your son,” a general told one of my friends whose boy, like you, went through ROTC. “We’ll take good care of him.”)  

The rest of us are trusting you with all our lives. You could well be the last person to speak to the president before he decides to go to war—or considers using nuclear weapons. Partisan attachments will be meaningless at such moments.

When I was barely 30 years old, I advised a Republican senator who was trying to decide whether to support President George H. W. Bush’s 1990 decision to go to war against Iraq in Kuwait. “Am I doing the right thing?” he asked me. At that moment, I felt as if the world had fallen on my shoulders. Nothing else mattered. “Yes, I think so,” I stammered. And then we spent hours in the gloom of a winter afternoon discussing his eventual vote to send young Americans into battle.

You will face decisions galactically greater than my one small moment with my boss 35 years ago. Some decisions you make will feel small to you, but they will have an impact on hundreds of thousands of people in the military community, and others will live with them long after you’ve left government service. More importantly, some of your answers may have existential consequences for humanity itself. The election and the speeches are over. The lives of millions—or perhaps billions—now depend on things you say that no one but the president might hear.

You are a man of faith, Mr. Secretary. We have that in common. And so I’ll close with my sincere wish that the Lord keep you and guide you in the days to come.

This article has been updated to correct Hegseth’s rank in the Army.