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Two Truths of Trump’s Second Term

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › two-truths-of-trumps-second-term › 681569

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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.

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.

What Trump’s Nominees Revealed

found 31 Jan The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › rfk-jr-patel-gabbard-hearings › 681523

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Americans keeping close track of political news may have been toggling their screens today between Senate confirmation hearings: the second day of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of Health and Human Services, and the first for Tulsi Gabbard’s for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel’s for FBI director. But each of those three hearings deserves the public’s full attention: Donald Trump’s nominees offered new glimpses into their approaches to policy, truth, and loyalty to the president.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Day Two

Ahead of Kennedy’s first day of hearings, our colleague Nicholas Florko noted that the HHS nominee is no stranger to conspiracist statements: “RFK Jr. has insinuated that an attempt to assassinate members of Congress via anthrax-laced mail in 2001 may have been a ‘false flag’ attack orchestrated by ‘someone in our government’ to gin up interest in the government preparing for potential biological weapon threats. He has claimed that COVID was ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,’ and that 5G is being used to ‘harvest our data and control our behavior.’ He has suggested that the use of antidepressants might be linked to mass shootings.”

“If Republican senators skirt around [Kennedy’s] falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings,” Nicholas wrote, “it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights … He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality.” But Kennedy’s sleights didn’t serve him quite as well today as he might have hoped.

At several points, senators encouraged Kennedy to acknowledge that vaccines are not the cause of autism, but instead of confirming what numerous studies have shown to be true, Kennedy insisted that he would need to “look at all the data” before coming to any conclusions. “The room went silent today during Senator [Bill] Cassidy’s closing questions,” Nicholas noted when we spoke this afternoon. “Cassidy was practically begging Kennedy to recant his previous statements on vaccines. Kennedy, like everyone else in the room, had to know this was a make-or-break moment for his confirmation. But despite the potential fallout, Kennedy refused, promising only that he would look at any studies presented to him disproving a link between vaccines and autism.”

The nominee for HHS secretary also showed, for the second day in a row, his lack of understanding about basics of the Medicare system, fumbling his answers to a series of rapid-fire questions from Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. Hassan also shared that she is the mother of a 36-year-old with cerebral palsy, and accused Kennedy of relitigating settled science on the fact that vaccines do not cause autism. “It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place,” she argued.

Cassidy, whose vote could prove key to whether RFK Jr. is confirmed, said after today’s hearing that he is “struggling” over whether to confirm Kennedy.

Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard came into her confirmation process with a history that raises questions about her commitment to national security (she has, among other things, met with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and expressed sympathetic views toward Russian President Vladimir Putin). As our colleague Tom Nichols wrote in November, “Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.”

The topic that ultimately received much attention in her confirmation hearing today was her refusal to say whether Edward Snowden is a traitor. Despite pressure from Democratic and Republican senators, Gabbard refused to answer the question, repeating that Snowden had broken the law and that she would take steps to make sure whistleblowers know how to properly make a complaint. Gabbard also revealed that she was unable to extract any concessions in her 2017 meeting with Assad. “I didn’t expect to,” she said.

Gabbard’s potential confirmation will depend on how her somewhat incoherent set of policy views sits with Republican senators. Last week, our colleague Elaine Godfrey explored the one through line—besides ambition—that has guided Gabbard’s otherwise inconsistent political career.

Kash Patel

Donald Trump is not always clear about what he means when he refers to “DEI,” but presumably it involves how someone’s identity is taken into consideration during the hiring process. In this morning’s press conference addressing the tragic plane crash last night, Trump asserted, without evidence but crediting his “common sense,” that DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration was at fault.

It was odd, then, that a few hours later, Republican senators used Patel’s confirmation hearing to highlight his identity: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked about examples of racism Patel has experienced, and Senator Mike Lee of Utah acknowledged the struggles Patel and his father must have faced as racial minorities in the United States and Uganda, respectively. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as if he were reading from a book report about the Gujarati people, lauded the religious diversity in Gujarat, India, where Patel’s family is originally from, omitting the state’s extreme tensions and violent history. Patel opened his own remarks by acknowledging his family’s journey from abroad. He invoked the phrase Jai Shri Krishna, a standard greeting for a sect of Hindus seeking blessings.

Patel was calm and still—he became riled up only when questioned by Senator Amy Klobuchar about his past suggestion that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’” But he was walking a tightrope. Today’s hearing may be the rare instance when Patel has publicly broken with Trump, to whom he has otherwise been unequivocally loyal. He refused to explicitly state that Trump lost the 2020 election, but he also said, “I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement.”

Overall, Patel seemed to be trying to carefully toe a line, answering questions about the culture-war issues that Trump and congressional Republicans care about—Senator Marsha Blackburn, for example, asserted during the hearing that the FBI prioritizes DEI and “counting Swiftie bracelets” over conducting investigations—while attempting not to alienate the employees he hopes to lead. Pressed by Blackburn, Patel made a vague statement about the “high standards” FBI employees must meet.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The memo that shocked the White House The near misses at airports have been telling us something. Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold. Jonathan Lemire: “What I saw at Trump’s first press conference”

Today’s News

Officials announced that there are no survivors in the crash last night between a U.S.-military Black Hawk helicopter and a regional American Airlines passenger jet landing at an airport near Washington, D.C. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter, and 64 people were on the flight from Wichita, Kansas. Donald Trump appointed Christopher Rocheleau as the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency had not had an administrator since the start of Trump’s new term. Eight hostages were released from Gaza by Hamas, and Israel released 110 Palestinian prisoners.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Don Peck interviews Nicholas Carr about how online life has rewired our brains.

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