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Over the first two weeks of the second Donald Trump presidency, the narrative has swung back and forth abruptly. A flurry of executive orders to start the term: proof of a newly disciplined, regimented administration. The quick retreat from a federal funding freeze: evidence of the same chaos that dogged Trump’s first stint as president. Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg against USAID: Who can even be sure?

The first Trump administration conditioned many people to discount the seriousness of any effort. No matter what Trump promised, he was too mercurial a president and ineffective a manager to make it happen. He really did want to repeal Obamacare and build a border wall, but he just didn’t have the attention span to execute, and his staff was too consumed with internecine feuds to be useful. The result was perpetual disorder and underachievement.

More recently, Trumpworld has cultivated an impression of greater control. Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager Susie Wiles was credited with keeping him on track during the lead-up to the election (with some notable exceptions), and she’s now White House chief of staff. Project 2025, an outside effort led by past, current, and likely future White House staffers, also demonstrates careful thought about how to better execute during a second term. When Trump signed a series of executive orders along many fronts on January 20 and 21, it seemed to prove that something had changed, although sharp rebukes from federal judges and sloppy drafting errors have raised doubts since then.

But chaos versus strategy is a misleading and unhelpful binary for understanding this presidency. Chaos certainly helps Trump, because it makes coordinated resistance from Congress, outside advocates, or the public challenging. Many White House actions appear to be usurping legislative authority, but the speed of the moves has left members of Congress in both parties looking stunned and indecisive. His goal, however, is not simply to create confusion. Trump likes keeping his aides siloed—it allows him to play them off one another, and prevents any one faction from getting too strong. (His appreciation for checks and balances does not appear to extend to Congress and the courts.) Internal feuding isn’t a downside for Trump: It’s his way of settling disputes.

Moreover, the chaos does not evince a lack of strategy. As I wrote last week, the grant freeze by the Office of Management and Budget wasn’t some ad hoc move, but instead part of a long-running plan by conservative ideologues to challenge the law that prevents the president from withholding money that’s appropriated. That’s also why the White House’s retreat from the freeze is almost certainly only temporary.

Elon Musk’s moves, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, appear to be more improvisational. Unlike the OMB wonks, Musk has little knowledge of how the federal government works and little interest in the risk of his actions; his team reportedly includes inexperienced aides as young as 19. Nonetheless, the transformation of Twitter into X serves as a good model for how this might play out. After Musk’s aggressive takeover, refugees from the company made dire warnings about it collapsing entirely. More than two years later, the site is overrun with racist trolls, but it is still functional and has become a powerful political weapon for Musk.

If Musk is left to his own devices, we might expect something similar from DOGE. He’s already gotten nearly 1 percent of the federal workforce to resign, almost single-handledly brought USAID to the verge of death, and reportedly acquired access to reams of government data. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote yesterday, “It is nothing short of an administrative coup.” A Muskified federal government might not serve the public very well, but it could become an effective political tool for Musk and his allies.

And that might not be the only administrative coup in action. New staffers are joining the administration every day, and many of them have ties to Project 2025, the scheme to overhaul the federal government. Russell Vought, the intellectual leading light of Project 2025, passed a procedural vote yesterday and could be confirmed to lead OMB this week. Adam Candeub, another Project 2025 contributor, was just named general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. This group is far more methodical than Musk, preferring a careful and quiet plan to his blunt, noisy tack.

What unites Musk and the ideologues is a commitment to do whatever they can, and see what they can get away with it. If that looks like chaos, so be it. They know what it is they’re trying to do.

Related:

There is a strategy behind the chaos. Trump’s campaign to dismantle the government

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government The constitutional crisis is here. Elon Musk is president, Jonathan Lemire writes. The last days of American orange juice

Today’s News

China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. gas, coal, and other products, which will go into effect next Monday. Chinese regulators also began an anti-monopoly investigation into Google. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard passed key committee votes to advance their Cabinet nominations to the Senate floor. Several FBI employees sued the Justice Department over its order for the bureau to turn over a list of names of employees who worked on investigations related to the January 6 insurrection.

Evening Read

Chronicle / Alamy

What’s Up With All the Sex Parties?

By Xochitl Gonzalez

In the course of my research, I did not—I would like to be clear here—participate in any sex parties. I think it’s wise not to get that close to your sources. I learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: csa-archive / Getty.

Debate. When people say they “don’t like” kids, they’re expressing way more than a preference, Stephanie H. Murray writes.

Read. The novelist Ali Smith scrambles plotlines, upends characters, and flouts chronology—while telling propulsively readable stories, Adam Begley writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Courtesy of David A. Graham

I forgot one other thing I share with Tom: a love of cats. This is my irascible assistant and ombudscat, Mackerel (a.k.a. Mack, Mackintosh, Mackinac … or whatever my children come up with at any given moment). He’s almost a year old, and when he’s not hiding in a laundry hamper, harassing his big sister Nellie, or stealing food off the counter, he’s usually getting in my face or walking across my keyboard—so please direct any typo complaints his way.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Ron Johnson may be the most anti-vaccine lawmaker in Congress; he’s the kind of guy who says he’s “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated” while claiming without valid evidence that thousands have died from COVID shots. This morning, at the Capitol, Johnson walked over to his Senate Finance Committee colleague Bill Cassidy, a doctor and a passionate advocate for vaccination, and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. The two of them had just advanced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate floor.

The committee vote, which was held this morning in a room crammed to capacity with what appeared to be roughly equal numbers of Kennedy’s skeptics and devotees, certainly fit with the behavior of a compliant GOP. But it was still surprising in its way, if only because, until this morning, Cassidy had been so clearly wary of giving the nation’s highest role in public health to a prominent anti-vaccine activist. At last week’s confirmation hearings, he seemed like he might even be prepared to cast his vote with the opposition. That didn’t happen.

Whether you like Kennedy or not, the hearings showed that he lacks the basic qualifications to hold this office. He knows very little about the nearly $2 trillion behemoth that he would be tasked with running. He flubbed the basics of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and seemed wholly unaware of an important law that governs emergency abortions. The hearings also called attention to a passel of health-related conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. has floated in the past, including that Lyme disease was developed as a bioweapon, that COVID is “ethnically targeted” to infect Caucasians and Black people (and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people), and that standard childhood vaccinations are damaging or deadly.

As of last Thursday, Kennedy appeared to have unwavering support from the committee’s Republicans, who occupy 14 of its 27 seats—with one notable exception: Cassidy. Prior to taking office, the Louisiana senator had personally led a campaign to vaccinate 36,000 kids against hepatitis B. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. And in early 2021, Cassidy joined six other GOP senators in voting to convict Donald Trump on charges of “incitement of insurrection.” The doctor had voted his conscience before. It seemed possible that he would do so once again.

Cassidy made no attempt to hide his skepticism of RFK Jr. during Thursday’s hearing. He spoke up at one point to correct the record after his Republican colleague Rand Paul worked up the crowd of pro-Kennedy spectators by disparaging the practice of vaccinating babies for hep B. Later on, he paused to cite a meta-analysis disproving Kennedy’s often-stated belief that childhood vaccines may be a cause of autism. (Cassidy also explained the concept of a meta-analysis for those in the room and people watching at home.) When RFK Jr. cited his own evidence for being skeptical of vaccines, referring to a paper from a little-known journal, Cassidy put on his reading glasses, peered at his iPad, and reviewed the evidence firsthand. At the end of the hearing, he reported that he’d found “some issues” with the paper, and then implored Kennedy to disavow mistruths about vaccine safety. “As a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed in making America and Americans more secure, more prosperous, healthier. But if there’s someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease [...] It’ll be blown up in the press,” he warned. “So that’s my dilemma, man.”

Cassidy’s “dilemma” hardly went unnoticed by RFK Jr.’s supporters. Calley Means, a proponent of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, said last weekend on The Charlie Kirk Show that MAHA moms are now “camping out at [Cassidy’s] office.” (I did not see any tents or sleeping bags outside his door this morning.) Other MAHA leaders, including the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, have also issued political threats to any lawmakers who might try to stop Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone that votes in that direction, I think, is really burying themselves,” Bigtree told me and a group of other reporters last week.

Cassidy, for his part, wasn’t saying much about his personal deliberations. His only official social-media post from the weekend quoted a Bible verse from the Book of Joshua: “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged,” it read in part. “Be strong and courageous.”

When he arrived at the committee room this morning, Cassidy was somber. He stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed. He’d been verbose at last week’s hearings, but now he said only a single word—“aye”—and left the room. In a social-media post that went up this morning, Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems. “It’s been a long, intense process, but I’ve assessed it as I would assess a patient as a physician,” Cassidy said. “Ultimately, restoring trust in our public-health institution is too important, and I think Senator Kennedy can help get that done.”

Even if Cassidy had voted no, his vote may not have mattered in the end. Under normal circumstances, a nomination that got voted down by the Senate Finance Committee would be dead in the water—but these were not normal circumstances. Majority Leader John Thune could still have scheduled a vote by the full Senate, at which point Kennedy would have been kept from office only if at least three other Republicans had joined Cassidy in opposition.

It’s still not a sure thing that Kennedy will be confirmed by the full Senate. Other Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have raised concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. But the odds of RFK Jr.’s defeat are shrinking, and Cassidy’s thumbs-up may one day be remembered as the mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down from 2017, when that independent-minded senator doomed Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Faced with an opportunity to make the same sort of stand, Cassidy folded. Now the American public is at the whims of the administration’s promises.