Her departure comes less than a month after two House of Commons committees discussed her suitability to lead the NHS.

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.

A new president has taken office, elected in response to widespread economic dissatisfaction. Now he’s trying to make big changes to the government, and some voters are upset. They’re angry at the president’s party for backing the changes, and they’re angry at the opposition party for not doing more to stop it.

That’s a fitting description of what’s going on now, but I was thinking of 2009, when the Tea Party movement erupted amid Barack Obama’s attempt to pass major health-care reform. Over the past week, some signs have emerged of a shift in the national mood that feels similar to what the country experienced back then. As the effects of Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government are starting to be felt, some people are getting angry. Trump’s net approval rating is slipping slightly. Americans are upset that he’s not doing more to fight inflation. A small number of Republican elected officials are timidly voicing their concerns about certain Trump moves. And at town halls across the country, members of Congress are getting earfuls.

“How can you tell me that DOGE, with some college whiz kids from a computer terminal in Washington, D.C., without even getting into the field, after about a week or maybe two, have determined that it’s OK to cut veterans’ benefits?” a man who described himself as a Republican and an Army veteran asked Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma.

“Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?” a man asked Representative Rich McCormick of Georgia. (He’s the congressman who recently suggested that students should work to earn school lunches.)

“The executive can only enforce laws passed by Congress; they cannot make laws,” a lawyer from Huntsville, Texas, chided Representative Pete Sessions. “When are you going to wrest control back from the executive and stop hurting your constituents?”

All three of these districts are strongly Republican, but Republicans aren’t the only ones taking flak. Democratic voters’ frustration with their party’s leaders, who are widely seen as either flat-footed or acquiescent, is growing. At a town hall in New York, a man told Democratic Representative Paul Tonko that he was happy to see him demonstrating outside the Department of Education, but he wanted more. “I thought about Jimmy Carter and I thought about John Lewis, and I know what John Lewis would have done. He would have gotten arrested that day,” the man said. “Make them outlaw you. We will stand behind you; we will be there with you. I will get arrested with you.”

For anyone who was paying attention during the rise of the Tea Party, the echoes are unmistakable, although the screen resolution on cellphone videos of these encounters has improved in the past 16 years. With Democrats out of the White House and the minority in the House and Senate (and with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court), many on the left have been wallowing in despair. Now some are seeing signs of hope. The Tea Party helped Republicans gain six seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House in the 2010 election. It changed the trajectory of Obama’s presidency, launched the careers of current GOP stars including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and paved the way for Donald Trump.

If this is progressives’ 2009 moment, though, what would a Tea Party of the left look like? Simply attempting to create an inverse of the original Tea Party seems to me like a fairly obvious loser—no one wants a cheap dupe. In 2010, liberal activists formed something they called the “Coffee Party USA.” That got plenty of press attention but didn’t have nearly the impact (or organic reach) of the Tea Party.

To recover their mojo, Democrats need some sort of organizing principle, real or purported. The Tea Party claimed to be concerned with fiscal discipline and limited government—activists organized around the Affordable Care Act. In retrospect, that premise is hard to take at face value. Many Tea Party supporters and prominent politicians ended up being Trump supporters, even though he blew up the national deficit and has made dubious promises not to cut social-insurance programs. (More interesting are figures such as Senator Rand Paul, an early Tea Party star who continues to sometimes clash with Trump on topics including foreign policy, spending, and intelligence.) What connects the Tea Party and Trump is racial backlash to Obama, the first Black president. Polls and studies found a connection between Tea Party support and racial-status anxiety, resentment, and prejudice.

One challenge of creating a liberal version of the Tea Party is that what liberals want right now is so basic. The opposite of what Trump has done in his first month in office is good governance—careful, measured administration. But that doesn’t make a good bumper sticker, and it doesn’t inspire crowds.

Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, has warned against Democrats trying to offer voters a “Diet Coke” version of Trumpian populism. “Voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke,” he told the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently. “There are two different parties. We have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understanding who our voters could be—and go and try to win them over. If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration, or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter.” Auchincloss said Democrats need to focus instead on voters who are worried about the cost of living.

One possible rallying point for progressives is Elon Musk. Unlike Trump, he has no voter constituency, and polls show that he’s unpopular. Watching the world’s richest man sack park rangers, firefighters, and veterans in the name of bureaucratic efficiency is ripe for political messaging. Anecdotal evidence from town halls suggests widespread anger at Musk. But there are risks to homing in on Musk. Democrats’ attempts to paint Trump as a plutocrat haven’t done much to blunt his populist appeal. Besides, if Musk gets bored or Trump tires of him and pushes him out, the movement will have lost its focal point.

Another option is a revitalization of the anti-Trump resistance that defeated the president in 2020 and led to poor Republican performance in 2018 and 2022. Trump won the 2024 election not so much because the resistance failed but because it dissolved amid frustration with Joe Biden. Key constituencies—suburban white women, Latino voters—that moved toward Trump in the most recent election might turn back against him if they’re reminded of his flaws. Then again, voters who are disgusted with the Democratic Party aren’t guaranteed to return simply because they’re also disgusted with Trump.

Ultimately, Democrats will return to viability only if they’re able to learn from and absorb grassroots energy. One reason the Tea Party was so successful—electorally, at least—was that it capitalized on frustration with Republican leaders but ultimately became subsumed into the GOP. Old leaders such as House Speaker John Boehner were swept out; new candidates ran for offices from school board and dogcatcher up to senator, governor, and president. Democrats could certainly use an infusion of fresh ideas—and new leadership.

Related:

The opposition is already growing. Why isn’t Congress doing anything?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The great resegregation Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump. Anne Applebaum: Putin’s three years of humiliation The real goal of the Trump economy

Today’s News

Elon Musk requested on Saturday that federal workers email a bullet-point list of things they did last week. Donald Trump added today that workers who do not reply by the midnight deadline tonight will be “sort of semi-fired” or fired, though the Office of Personnel Management told agency leaders that responses are “voluntary.” America voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine. The Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a conservative German party led by Friedrich Merz, and its sister party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, won Germany’s snap election yesterday. The far-right party Alternative for Germany doubled its vote share from 2021, according to preliminary results.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiled Atlantic articles on the art of splitting up and what comes after heartache.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty; Stephane Cardinale / Corbis / Getty.

How to Lose an Oscar in 10 Days

By Shirley Li

For months, the actor Karla Sofía Gascón had been reaping the rewards of leading a prestigious film. She plays the title character in Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman and seeks to build a more virtuous life. The Spanish-language musical has faced waves of backlash since its release last year—but it has also found a devoted fan base among awards bodies …

But her momentum soon came to a halt.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The internet’s favorite sex researcher The obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk’s new order A man who actually stands up to Trump How America wasted its most powerful economic weapon COVID broke the rules of virus evolution.

Culture Break

Neon

Read. These six books were rescued from oblivion in recent years—and deserve their second life.

Watch. The Monkey (out now in theaters) is a horror movie that has fun with the inevitability of death, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”

President Donald Trump’s firing of the country’s most senior military officer on Friday night rattled the foundations of the armed forces. It also intensified an already furious game of “who’s next” among senior lawmakers and Washington officials, who have been trading information about the commander in chief’s likely targets.  

Trump fired Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., known as C. Q., who was only the second African American to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president then tapped a relatively unknown officer to replace him—retired three-star Air Force General Dan “Raizin” Caine, who reportedly impressed the president with his swagger and bravado when they met in Iraq in 2018.

Brown’s dismissal, coupled with Caine’s improbable elevation, added to a sense of bewilderment that has prevailed across the national-security establishment in recent days, as the administration purges the upper echelons of career officers and civil servants. Trump also appears poised to remove several other top military leaders—focusing on Black and women officers—and replace them with his handpicked successors. And at the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, senior officials, as well as personnel who had only been on the job a few years, were bracing to be fired, multiple officials have told us.  

Many of the personnel actions seemed aligned with the Trump administration’s pledge to rid the ranks of “woke” officials whom the president thinks were promoted not because of their credentials, but due to their race or gender.

At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was replacing Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who is the first woman to serve as the chief of naval operations, as well as General James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force. A draft list of other officers who might be fired circulated this week on Capitol Hill among a small number of lawmakers on the armed-services committees in the House and Senate. The list isn’t final and is subject to the whims of the president and the defense secretary, cautioned two people familiar with it, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters

Brown and Franchetti are on the list, as are other senior officers. A White House official told us that the futures of those officers were being evaluated but that the president hadn’t made a final decision.

A list has also circulated with the names of officers who might be promoted to replace those being removed. People who know those officers told us many were highly capable, and that they were serving in roles meant to groom them for promotion. But moving them up the ranks now was potentially premature and a break with military protocol.

If confirmed by the Senate, Caine’s appointment would break with a generation of norms and traditions governing promotion in the senior ranks of the military. In nearly 30 years, no one has risen to chairman without first serving as a member of the Joint Chiefs. Caine, who retired last year, would leapfrog all of the current members.  

Nothing in his résumé suggests that he was destined to become the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. armed forces. He has not commanded a large number of troops. He has never led a branch of the military. His last job was as associate director for military affairs for the CIA, from 2021 to 2024. The job is a liaison position that has more clout inside the Pentagon than it does at Langley. One thing Caine apparently did have going for him: a memorable encounter he reportedly had with Trump.

According to a New York Times profile, Caine impressed the president when they met, in 2018, because he claimed that the Islamic State could be defeated in a week, not two years, as Trump said his advisers had told him. Trump has told the story on different occasions, and while the details have changed, the conversation stuck in his memory. As, apparently, did Caine.

In a statement, Hegseth indicated that the military purge was not limited to top leaders, noting that the Pentagon was “requesting nominations” for judge advocates general—lawyers—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado and former Army Ranger, wrote on X that “the purge of senior officers at [the Department of Defense] is deeply troubling, but purging JAG officers worries me the most.” Those lawyers, he noted, interpret the law and determine the constitutionality of actions that commanders take.

Replacing those officers with “loyalists is so dangerous,” Crow said.

During his first term, Trump intervened in several military justice cases that revolved around the line between acceptable combat behavior and war crimes. In the most infamous, he reversed a decision to demote Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been convicted of posing with the dead body of an Islamic State prisoner. (Gallagher had been found not guilty of the prisoner’s murder.) Trump’s decision allowed Gallagher to retire as a SEAL.

Challenged by then–Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley about the importance of military ethics and laws to combat troops, Trump responded that he didn’t understand “the big deal,” according to Milley’s recounting of the conversation to The Atlantic.

“You guys are all just killers,” Trump said, according to Milley. “What’s the difference?”

What exactly is Donald Trump doing?

Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

Last year, two professors published a book that deserves wide attention. In The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, resurface a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

Seeking to make the world safe for gangsterism, Putin used propaganda, subversion, and other forms of influence to spread the model abroad. Over time, the patrimonial model gained ground in states as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and India. Gradually (as my colleague Anne Applebaum has documented), those states coordinated in something like a syndicate of crime families—“working out problems,” write Hanson and Kopstein in their book, “divvying up the spoils, sometimes quarreling, but helping each other when needed. Putin in this scheme occupied the position of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses.”

Until now. Move over, President Putin.

To understand the source of Trump’s hold on power, and its main weakness, one needs to understand what patrimonialism is not. It is not the same as classic authoritarianism. And it is not necessarily antidemocratic.

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features.

By contrast, patrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

Also unlike classic authoritarianism, patrimonialism can coexist with democracy, at least for a while. As Hanson and Kopstein write, “A leader may be democratically elected but still seek to legitimate his or her rule patrimonially. Increasingly, elected leaders have sought to demolish bureaucratic administrative states (‘deep states,’ they sometimes call them) built up over decades in favor of rule by family and friends.” India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Trump himself are examples of elected patrimonial leaders—and ones who have achieved substantial popular support and democratic legitimacy. Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the “unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government” be “responsive to the people.”

Nonetheless, as patrimonialism snips the government’s procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state. Over time, as it seeks to embed itself, many leaders attempt the transition to full-blown authoritarianism. “Electoral processes and constitutional norms cannot survive long when patrimonial legitimacy begins to dominate the political arena,” write Hanson and Kopstein.

Even if authoritarianism is averted, the damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor.

To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal. “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. As one prominent Republican politician recently told me, understanding Trump is simple: “If you’re his friend, he’s your friend. If you’re not his friend, he’s not your friend.” This official chose to be Trump’s friend. Otherwise, he said, his job would be nearly impossible for the next four years.

Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.

In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity.

Yet when Max Weber saw patrimonialism as obsolete in the era of the modern state, he was not daydreaming. As Hanson and Kopstein note, “Patrimonial regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by expert bureaucracies.” They still can’t. Patrimonialism suffers from two inherent and in many cases fatal shortcomings.

The first is incompetence. “The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies,” write Hanson and Kopstein. Patrimonial regimes are “simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance,” they write. “At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.” Already, the administration seems bent on debilitating as much of the government as it can. Some examples of incompetence, such as the reported firing of staffers who safeguard nuclear weapons and prevent bird flu, would be laughable if they were not so alarming.

Eventually, incompetence makes itself evident to the voting public without needing too much help from the opposition. But helping the public understand patrimonialism’s other, even greater vulnerability—corruption—requires relentless messaging.

[Read: This is what happens when the DOGE guys take over]

Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)

Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Photos

They weren’t wrong. “In the first three weeks of his administration,” reported the Associated Press, “President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.” The pace was eye-watering. Over the course of just a couple of days in February, for example, the Trump administration:

gutted enforcement of statutes against foreign influence, thus, according to the former White House counsel Bob Bauer, reducing “the legal risks faced by companies like the Trump Organization that interact with government officials to advance favorable conditions for business interests shared with foreign governments, and foreign-connected partners and counterparties”;

suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, further reducing, wrote Bauer, “legal risks and issues posed for the Trump Organization’s engagements with government officials both at home and abroad”;

fired, without cause, the head of the government’s ethics office, a supposedly independent agency overseeing anti-corruption rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch;

fired, also without cause, the inspector general of USAID after the official reported that outlay freezes and staff cuts had left oversight “largely nonoperational.”

By that point, Trump had already eviscerated conflict-of-interest rules, creating, according to Bauer, “ample space for foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work directly with the Trump Organization or an affiliate within the framework of existing agreements in ways highly beneficial to its business interests.” He had fired inspectors general in 19 agencies, without cause and probably illegally. One could go on—and Trump will.

Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative.

In the United States, anyone seeking evidence of the power of anti-corruption need look no further than Republicans’ attacks against Jim Wright and Hillary Clinton. In Clinton’s case, Republicans and Trump bootstrapped a minor procedural violation (the use of a private server for classified emails) into a world-class scandal. Trump and his allies continually lambasted her as the most corrupt candidate ever. Sheer repetition convinced many voters that where there was smoke, there must be fire.

Even more on point is Newt Gingrich’s successful campaign to bring down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright—a campaign that ended Wright’s career, launched Gingrich’s, and paved the way for the Republicans’ takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. In the late 1980s, Wright was a congressional titan and Gingrich an eccentric backbencher, but Gingrich had a plan. “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his [Wright’s] ethics,” he said in 1987. “There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies.” Gingrich used ethics complaints and relentless public messaging (not necessarily fact-based) to brand Wright and, by implication, the Democrats as corrupt. “In virtually every speech and every interview, he attacked Wright,” John M. Barry wrote in Politico. “He told his audiences to write letters to the editor of their local newspapers, to call in on talk shows, to demand answers from their local members of Congress in public meetings. In his travels, he also sought out local political and investigative reporters or editorial writers, and urged them to look into Wright. And Gingrich routinely repeated, ‘Jim Wright is the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century.’”

[Read: Why Meta is paying $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit]

Today, Gingrich’s campaign offers the Democrats a playbook. If they want to undermine Trump’s support, this model suggests that they should pursue a relentless, strategic, and thematic campaign branding Trump as America’s most corrupt president. Almost every development could provide fodder for such attacks, which would connect corruption not with generalities like the rule of law but with kitchen-table issues. Higher prices? Crony capitalism! Cuts to popular programs? Payoffs for Trump’s fat-cat clients! Tax cuts? A greedy raid on Social Security!

The best objection to this approach (perhaps the only objection, at this point) is that the corruption charge won’t stick against Trump. After all, the public has been hearing about his corruption for years and has priced it in or just doesn’t care. Besides, the public believes that all politicians are corrupt anyway.

But driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all.

Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world.

Do the Democrats need a positive message of their own? Sure, they should do that work. But right now, when they are out of power and Trump is the capo di tutti capi, the history of patrimonial rule suggests that their most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.

Andrew Gwynne is investigated over "actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the House".

White House national security adviser Mike Waltz also criticises Kyiv over 'insults' to US president.

Republican senators have confirmed a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter to lead the nation’s intelligence community and a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as its health secretary. This morning, however, they saved some of their sharpest questions for a Cabinet nominee who, until last month, served alongside them as a GOP member of Congress.

President Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary, former Oregon Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, knew she’d face a skeptical Republican audience during her Senate confirmation hearing. Last year she supported a major pro-union bill known as the PRO Act, a decision that has scrambled ideological alliances and thrown her nomination into doubt. The idea that a pro-union candidate might lead a Republican labor department was once unthinkable. But Trump’s nomination of Chavez-DeRemer comes at a time when the party’s base includes an unusually large number of union members. Her supporters have hailed her as a bridge between that new constituency and the GOP’s traditional business wing. Now, her fate could show how much Trump’s GOP is willing—or able—to bend Republican orthodoxy on organized labor.

[Read: The one Trump pick Democrats actually like]

When Trump picked her in November, Chavez-DeRemer initially won praise from Democrats while drawing criticism from conservative lawmakers. This morning, those Republican holdouts began grilling her right away. They pressed her to explain why, as a member of the House, she co-sponsored a bill that would make unionizing easier and undermine the GOP’s longstanding opposition to the labor movement. “Yes or no: Do you still support the PRO Act?” asked Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which is overseeing her nomination process.

Chavez-DeRemer didn’t answer directly. Instead, she distanced herself from the PRO Act without completely repudiating it; she had signed onto the bill, she maintained, in order to be “at the table” to help write labor laws that would affect her constituents. “The bill is imperfect,” Chavez-DeRemer said.

Her nomination has earned an unusual mix of endorsements. Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, is an enthusiastic backer of Chavez-DeRemer. So is Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Indiana, who once challenged O’Brien to a fight. The two have since bonded over their support for Chavez-DeRemer. Mullin told the committee this morning that she was “uniquely positioned in the center” of labor policy. “If Sean and I can come together on this, then if nothing else that should set some type of example.”

Chavez-DeRemer, whose father was a member of the Teamsters for decades, co-sponsored the PRO Act in July during her only term in the House. She was only the third House Republican to do so. Conservatives saw the move as an election-year ploy by a moderate trying to save her seat. (If it was, it didn’t work; she lost in November.) Democrats were pleasantly surprised by her nomination over conventional anti-union alternatives, and they signalled they might vote for her confirmation.

But Republicans such as Cassidy and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky made clear that Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act was a problem, even though the bill stands little chance of becoming law whether or not she gets confirmed. Both represent states with so-called right-to-work laws that would be threatened by its enactment. Chavez-DeRemer could win confirmation without their votes if Democrats provided some support, but not if Republicans decide to prevent her nomination from reaching the Senate floor. A few conservative advocacy groups, including one founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, urged the GOP to reject her. And Democratic backing is not guaranteed: Some in the party have vowed to oppose all Trump nominees to protest Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government, and others wanted to see whether Chavez-DeRemer would stand by her pro-union record.

[Annie Lowrey: The rise of the union right]

At this morning’s hearing, Chavez-DeRemer’s answer on the PRO Act initially didn’t seem to satisfy either party. Both Sanders, the committee’s top Democrat, and Paul repeated Cassidy’s question nearly verbatim. “Do you support the PRO Act?” Sanders asked her. “I support the American worker,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “I am gathering that you no longer support the PRO Act,” Sanders said in response.

Paul, who had previously said that he would oppose her nomination over her support of the PRO Act, got an answer more to his liking. When he asked Chavez-DeRemer whether she opposed a specific provision in the bill that would overturn anti-union laws in states such as Kentucky, she said yes. Paul later told reporters the response might make him reconsider her nomination.

By the end of the hearing, Chavez-DeRemer appeared to have solidified her chances at confirmation. Democrats had not turned en masse against her, and Republicans showed little indication that they were prepared to defeat a Trump Cabinet pick for the first time. “You did very well,” Cassidy told her. And with that, Chavez-DeRemer’s supporters in the room erupted in applause.

On the afternoon of Friday, February 7, as staff members were getting ready to leave the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, D.C., officials in the Office of Extramural Research received an unexpected memo. It came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and arrived with clear instructions: Post this announcement on your website immediately.

The memo announced a new policy that, for many universities and other institutions, would hamstring scientific research. It said that the NIH planned to cap so-called indirect costs funded by grants—overhead that covers the day-to-day administrative and logistical duties of research. Some NIH-grant recipients had negotiated rates as high as 75 percent; going forward, the memo said, they would now be limited to just 15 percent. And this new cap would apply even to grants that had already been awarded.

The announcement was written as if it had come from the NIH Office of the Director. It also directed all inquiries to the Office of Extramural Research’s policy branch. And yet, no one at the NIH had seen the text until that Friday afternoon, several current and former NIH officials with knowledge of the situation told me. “None of us had anything to do with that document,” one of them said. But the memo was dressed up in a way clearly intended to make it look like a homegrown NIH initiative. (Everyone I spoke with for this story requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. HHS did not respond to requests for comment.)

Over the next several days, the memo sparked confusion and chaos at the NIH, and across American universities and hospitals, as researchers tried to reckon with the likely upshot—that many of them would have to shut down their laboratories or fire administrative staff. A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the cap on indirect costs. But the memo’s abrupt arrival at the NIH, and the way it bulldozed through the agency, underscores how aggressively the Trump administration is exercising its authority and demanding compliance. “Their approach seems to be We go in; we bully; we say, ‘Do this; you have no choice,’” and shows little regard for the people or research affected, one former official told me.

Typically, a memo communicating a major decision related to grants would take months or years to put together, sometimes with public input, and released six months to a year before being implemented, one current NIH official told me—earlier, even, “if the impact will be more substantial.” In this case, though, Stefanie Spear, the HHS principal deputy chief of staff, told officials in the Office of Extramural Research, which oversees the awarding of grants, that this new memo needed to be posted to the NIH website no later than 5 p.m. that afternoon—within about an hour of the agency receiving it. Soon, the timeline tightened: The memo had to be published within 15 minutes. “It was designed to minimize the chance that anyone within an agency could even have time to respond,” another former NIH official told me.

Substantial changes are generally vetted through HHS leadership, and NIH officials have always “very much abided by the directives of the department,” the former official said. But in the past, drafting those sorts of directives has been collaborative, a former NIH official told me. If NIH officials disagreed with a policy that HHS proposed, a respectful discussion would ensue. Indirect-cost rates are controversial: The proportion of NIH funding that has gone to them has grown over time, and proponents of trimming overhead argue that doing so would make research more efficient. A cut this deep and sudden, though, would upend research nationwide. And to grant recipients and NIH officials, it seemed less an attempt to reform or improve the current system, and more an effort to blow it up entirely. Either way, a unilateral demand to publish unfamiliar content under the NIH’s byline was unprecedented in the experience of the NIH officials I spoke with. “It was completely inappropriate,” the former official told me.

But Spear and Heather Flick Melanson, the HHS chief of staff, insisted that the memo was to go live that evening. Officials immediately began to scramble to post the notice on the agency’s grants website, but they quickly hit some technical snares. Fifteen minutes passed, then 15 more. The two HHS officials began to badger NIH staff, contacting them as often as every five minutes, demanding an explanation for why the memo was still offline. The notice went live just before 5:45 p.m., and finally, the phone calls from HHS stopped.

Almost immediately, the academic world erupted in panic and rage. At the same time, the news was blazing through the NIH; staff members felt blindsided by the memo, which appeared to have come from within the agency but which they’d known nothing about. The notice’s formatting, tone, and abruptness also led many within the agency to suspect that it had not originated there or been vetted by NIH officials. “I’ve never seen anything so sloppy,” the current NIH official, who has written several NIH notices, told me. “We also don’t publish announcements after 5 p.m. on Friday, ever … I checked multiple times to be sure it was real.”

The NIH had already been caught in the Trump administration’s first salvo of initiatives. On January 27, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget froze the agency’s ability to fund grants. (In the following week, multiple federal judges issued orders that should have unpaused the funding halt, but many grants remained in limbo.) And in 2017, during Donald Trump’s first term, his administration went after indirect costs, proposing to cap them at 10 percent. That prompted the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to introduce a new provision that blocked the administration from altering those rates; Congress has since included language in its annual spending bills that prevents changes to indirect costs without legislative approval. On February 10 of this year—the Monday after the memo restricting those rates went up—yet another federal judge issued yet another temporary restraining order that again instructed the NIH to thaw its funding freeze.

Last week, the NIH told its staff to resume awarding grants, with prior indirect-cost rates intact. But “the damage is done,” the former NIH official said. Scientists across the nation have had their funding disrupted; many have had to halt studies. And at the NIH—where roughly 1,000 staff members recently received termination notices, amid a mass layoff of federal workers that stretched across HHS—those who remain fear for their job and the future of the agency. The nation’s leaders, NIH officials told me, seem entirely unwilling to consult the NIH about its own business. If the administration remains uninterested in maintaining the agency’s basic functions, the NIH’s purpose—supporting medical research in the United States—will crumble, or at least deteriorate past the point at which it resembles anything that the people who make up the agency can still recognize.

Official White House social media accounts posted what it called an ‘ASMR’ video of undocumented immigrant deportation.