When Donald Trump first won the presidency, Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, angled for a senior position inside the White House, only to settle for an outside job as a political consultant.

Eight years later, Lewandowski set his sights lower. He lobbied to be named chief of staff to Kristi Noem, the incoming secretary of Homeland Security, whom he had spent years advising and promoting as a rising star within Trump’s orbit, two people familiar with the situation told us.

But again he was thwarted. Trump personally nixed the idea, said the people, who requested anonymity to describe private conversations. One added that the president was concerned by the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved. (Lewandowski and Noem have denied the claims of an affair.)

The president’s decision has not stopped Lewandowski from working closely with Noem in her new role, functioning as a traveling adviser while overseeing other employees in her office. The situation has alarmed some in Trump’s circle, who view Lewandowski as a chaotic presence, even by MAGA standards. Lewandowski has a record of feuding with others who are close to the president and creating controversy. He worked as Trump’s first campaign manager during the 2016 presidential race, before becoming a government-relations consultant and political adviser to Trump and other Republican politicians.

Trump remains personally close to Lewandowski, whom he has kept as a friend and ally throughout a range of scandals. But the president is also aware that many of his trusted aides and confidants deeply dislike the 51-year-old, especially after he argued last summer to Trump that he needed to make changes on his campaign. Trump eventually sided with his existing campaign leadership and asked Lewandowski to focus on New Hampshire, a long-shot state for the Republican nominee that Trump went on to lose by nearly three points. But Lewandowski continued to travel with Trump and attended his Election Night party.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said Lewandowski is working as a “special government employee,” a temporary designation that allows him to maintain his private businesses while working in the government. Noem has not named an official chief of staff, according to the department’s website.

In conversations with representatives of other government offices, Homeland Security staff have referred to Lewandowski as a supervisor of sorts. During a recent back-and-forth between Noem’s office and an aide to a governor, a DHS employee invoked Lewandowski’s name, saying, “I’m going to have to check with Corey,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Since Noem was confirmed to her post in late January, Lewandowski has appeared with her on Capitol Hill and traveled with her in New Orleans to prepare security for the Super Bowl. He previously advised Noem during the transition, according to various news reports, continuing his role as a top strategist, cheerleader, and loyalist from her time as South Dakota’s governor.

Lewandowski has told others that he is not interested in a government job, has no office at DHS, and is volunteering through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to do work across the administration. His visits to the Capitol and New Orleans, when Noem was also present, he has said, coincided with meetings he had with other friends and colleagues.

Lewandowski declined to comment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

This is not the first time Lewandowski has managed to stay in Noem’s orbit despite the efforts of those around her to create distance.

In 2021, Noem’s office announced that she was ending her professional relationship with Lewandowski, after the wife of a prominent Republican donor accused him of unwanted sexual advances and of stalking her at a Las Vegas charity event. Lewandowski was also removed from the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Action and lost other political clients. He subsequently agreed to a deferred adjudication deal with Las Vegas prosecutors that included impulse-control training and community service, but no admission of guilt.

A reporter for Breitbart News accused Lewandowski of grabbing her arm at a 2016 Trump event. Lewandowski initially responded by calling the reporter “delusional” and writing, “I never touched you,” on social media. When a video confirmed that Lewandowski had grabbed the reporter’s arm, he was charged by Palm Beach police with simple battery, though the charges were later dropped after Lewandowski argued that he was trying to keep the reporter away from Trump.

In each instance, Lewandowski succeeded in maintaining a level of influence among Trump allies and a direct relationship with the president. He also continued to advise Noem, despite the announcement from her spokesperson in 2021 that he would no longer be advising her after the Las Vegas incident.

“He never actually left the team,” one person who worked in her office at the time told us, requesting anonymity to discuss private information. “As well as continuing to advise her, he also continued to travel with her.”

For now, at least, Lewandowski seems firmly entrenched in both Noem’s and Trump’s circles, albeit from perhaps more of a remove. On Super Bowl Sunday, Lewandowski posted on social media various pictures from the day—riding in Trump’s large official motorcade, smiling with Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, looking down at the 50-yard line from his seats inside the Superdome.

But a postgame picture seemed to best capture Lewandowski’s place in Trumpworld. He shared a photo of the nose of Air Force One—its trademark blue, gold, and teal gleaming against the twilight of the city’s darkened sky—from a slight distance.

“So long New Orleans,” he wrote.

The former executive chairman of Estée Lauder Companies (EL) reportedly sold two vacant parcels of land on the Palm Beach waterfront for $200 million, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

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President Donald Trump’s promise—and subsequent executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America displayed a showman’s flair for branding.

Today Trump could take that showmanship a step further when Air Force One flies him across the Gulf of Mexico from his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, to New Orleans for the Super Bowl. Trump is considering a plan in which, as the plane crosses the gulf, he will bring the group of reporters traveling with him—known as the “pool”—up to a different cabin, where he plans to highlight his proposed name change, according to two people familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity to discuss closely held details.

No matter that Trump has already floated “Gulf of America” during the election, mentioned it during his inaugural address—“a short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he said to applause—and signed an executive order doing as much in his Day One batch of directives. He and his team are still discussing this as a Super Bowl Sunday stunt, like the producers of Rocky trying to squeeze one last sequel out of an aging franchise. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

During his first term, Trump regularly visited the press cabin of Air Force One, and occasionally brought the pool up to his personal cabin to chat, playing the role of consummate host. Once, he invited reporters to join him in watching a recording of a Democratic presidential primary debate, offering color commentary throughout.

And as Trump likely understands, the only way to compete with the Super Bowl and its color commentary this evening is to offer a little bit of a pre-game show himself.

Trump has generally offered an isolationist—“America First”—worldview. But since his return to the White House, the president has nodded to the idea of expansionism as well. In addition to promising to take back the Panama Canal, Trump has also talked about acquiring Greenland and teased about making Canada the 51st state. When pressed by reporters, he has refused to rule out the use of military or economic force in his efforts to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal.

But so far, at least, his decrees to rename the Gulf of Mexico have prompted as much mockery as they have intimidation. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat, yesterday posted on social media that while Trump “is busy unilaterally renaming bodies of water down south, thought we’d get started up in New England”—alongside a map of the eastern seaboard, with “Gulf of Rhode Island” crudely written across the Atlantic Ocean in black marker. And on Friday, Democrat JB Pritzker posted a faux-serious “important announcement from the Governor of Illinois,” in which he deadpanned that, after much study, the world’s finest geographers believe that a Great Lake needs to be named after a great state, which is why “hereinafter, Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois.”

With Trump, the line between jokes and true policy can be difficult to discern. But today, at least—and fittingly for Super Bowl Sunday—spectacle seems to be the point.   

Two weeks before Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States, his son Don Jr. paid a visit to Greenland, handing out free food and MAGA caps, and posing for photos. “Incredible people,” he said, of the random Greenlanders whom he met on the street. The trip seemed no more than a stunt, much like Trump’s first-term talk of buying the territory, which for centuries has been under the sovereignty of Denmark, a NATO partner and longtime ally of the United States. But within hours of Don Jr.’s departure, the president-elect held a press conference in which he said he was not ruling out the use of economic or military force to gain control of Greenland.

If I had pitched this scenario as the opening for a new season of Borgen, my TV drama series about Danish politics, which originally aired over four seasons in Denmark from 2010 until 2022 (and became available in the U.S. via Netflix in 2020), I probably would have been laughed out of the writers’ room. A small country of some 6 million inhabitants perched on a peninsula north of Germany, Denmark is a quiet, civilized constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system that tends to result in uncontroversial coalition governments. Our prime minister since 2019, Mette Frederiksen, is the leader of Denmark’s Social Democrats and the current government in coalition with the Moderates and the Liberal Party.

The hero of Borgen was also a woman: My prime minister was named Birgitte Nyborg, and she was played by Sidse Babett Knudsen—an actor perhaps more familiar to American viewers as Theresa Cullen on HBO’s Westworld. Borgen is set in the heart of government in Copenhagen, and the tension in the show often comes when people are forced to choose between political power and their personal beliefs and ideals. Nyborg faces many obstacles, at work and at home, but she is trying to govern Denmark in a consensual yet courageous way, against the odds.

That may be something more possible in a parliamentary system such as Denmark’s, which requires coalition building to form a government, but it was also something that seemed more possible in the earlier, more optimistic era when I was writing it: As political drama, Borgen was unashamedly idealistic. If you want an apt comparison to a U.S. show, think Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing.

The principal characters in Borgen believe in the values of respectful dialogue, democracy, and international law. Back in government, Trump seems bent on creating a new political reality, where objective truth no longer exists and can be replaced with pure fiction. Everything is reduced to the lingo of a real-estate deal, and there appear to be no limits to what kind of accusations and threats you can hurl around—even in the face of a loyal ally and NATO partner.

The last season of Borgen, which aired in Denmark and the U.S. in 2022, did in fact center on Greenland. The territory, considered the largest island in the world, has enjoyed home rule for close to five decades. Thanks to long-running and painstaking negotiations, the island’s 57,000 residents are now on a path toward independence. For now, Denmark remains in charge of its military security and foreign policy, in consultation with the Greenlandic government.

How much of this nuance Trump grasps is unclear. When he first floated the idea of buying Greenland, in 2019, he called the matter a “real-estate deal.” At the time, Frederiksen, who was already serving as prime minister, dismissed his suggestion as absurd; Trump took offense, calling her statement “nasty.” They later patched things up: Trump praised Frederiksen as “a wonderful woman,” and both sides left things as they were.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

President Trump has now returned to the fray, with a vengeance. Five days before his inauguration, a 45-minute phone call took place between Trump and Frederiksen. The exchange sounded brutal: Trump reiterated his demand to take ownership of Greenland; our prime minister repeated that it’s not for sale and is an autonomous territory under the Danish Kingdom. She also reminded the president that Denmark of course recognizes the strategic importance of Greenland to the Unites States—and has given the U.S. military access to Greenland for more than 80 years.

If I were writing that scene for Borgen, my prime minister would be desperately trying to control her temper while her chief of staff and aides would be listening in, trying to guide the conversation with silent gestures and notes. But I might have difficulty imagining a president so uninterested in the facts, let alone the history.

Greenland was colonized by the Danish priest Hans Egede in 1721. Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland was briefly contested in an international court by Norway in the 1930s, but Norway lost the case and withdrew its claims. When Denmark was occupied by the Nazis in 1940, Henrik Kauffmann, the visionary Danish ambassador to the U.S., signed, on behalf of Denmark’s king, an agreement with Washington allowing the U.S. to supply Greenland and establish bases there. The result was the air base at Kangerlussuaq, where U.S. bombers could refuel on their way to Europe.

In 1949, Denmark became a founding member of NATO, and the kingdom has been a loyal ally of the U.S. ever since. In 1952, the U.S. built the huge Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, which, at its height, housed more than 10,000 personnel. The Indigenous Inuit population in the area was forced to leave the vicinity, one of many colonial injustices. During the Cold War, Copenhagen maintained a pragmatic silence as nuclear-armed U.S. Air Force B-52s violated an official policy banning atomic weapons on Danish soil. In 1968, a B-52 crashed at Thule, and four atomic bombs rolled out of the wreckage. Not even that international embarrassment could make Denmark waver in its partnership with the United States. For eight decades, the two countries have been joined in close friendship, with a reciprocal recognition of territories, rights, and obligations.

Thanks in part to the stability provided by this arrangement, the Arctic has been a peaceful region. Denmark has been able to uphold Greenland’s security with a small number of naval ships and planes and—as you may recall if you watched the last season of Borgen—the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol. This border-guard force, a military tradition dating back decades, consists of a dozen sleds, each with a dog team directed by a special-forces soldier, that patrol the coastline of northern and northeastern Greenland.

[Read: Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark—and Europe]

Trump’s reelection has disturbed the mutual understanding between Copenhagen and Washington. In the days leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, Danish media reported that diplomats were working behind the scenes to keep Greenland out of the new president’s speech. That lobbying effort apparently succeeded. (Panama was not so lucky. Speaking of America’s “manifest destiny,” Trump brought up that country’s canal. “We’re taking it back,” he said.)

The uneasy truce over Greenland did not last long. Within days, Trump was talking to reporters aboard Air Force One about taking control of the island. “I think we’re going to have it,” he said. “And I think the people want to be with us.” As a writer, I have to admire the economy of Trump’s phrasing: In fewer than 20 words, he can upset decades of delicate, emotionally fraught colonial relations between Denmark and Greenland.

Currently, Greenland runs its own domestic affairs via its Parliament and an executive body known as the Naalakkersuisut, but is heavily subsidized by the Danish state. Pro-independence Greenlandic politicians are inviting the U.S. president to push ahead with his demands, believing that this will aid their cause. They may be disappointed: Trump has not embraced their call for independence. Frederiksen may take some heart from a recent poll showing that 85 percent of their countrymen do not want Greenland to be incorporated into the United States.

What will the president’s next move be? We are not in the world of Borgen. The drama we’re viewing today seems animated less by idealism than by divisiveness, cynicism, and loudmouthed ignorance. Trump is a businessman who sees Greenland as a potential transaction. (When asked about Gaza last month, Trump replied that it had “a phenomenal location” and “the best weather,” as if he had Palm Beach in mind, not a Middle East war zone; indeed, he’s now proposed taking it over and turning it into a beach resort.) War was once said to be too important to be left to the generals; now politics is too important to be left to the politicians. Enter the tycoons.

The last act of the Greenland plot has yet to unfold. Trump is in his final term and may be thinking about his legacy. He may want to be remembered as the president who took back the Panama Canal and, through the acquisition of Greenland, expanded U.S. territory by a quarter. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once said, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” I hope Greenlanders will not end up feeling the same way. But as a writer of political fiction, I may have to start dreaming up stranger, darker plots if I want to keep pace with Trump’s new world order.

As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.

The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.

Trump’s White House is in the business of deporting people, and bringing in a foreign national to help shrink the government’s American workforce would send a confusing message, one of these people said. (Neither Akis nor the White House responded to a request for comment.)

Musk and his team accepted the rejection and moved on, but the previously unreported exchange offers a glimpse into the complex dynamics of the Musk-Trump relationship, arguably the most consequential partnership in Washington. This story is based on interviews with six people who have worked closely with Trump or Musk or are directly familiar with their relationship, all of whom requested anonymity to describe private interactions.

The world’s richest man has established himself as a singular force in the administration’s effort to slash government programs, agencies, and federal employees. Yet as an unelected “special government employee,” Musk still relies on the president for his authority. Since sweeping into Washington alongside Trump, Musk has wielded enormous power. He has pressured federal employees into deferred resignations; dug into government data and financial systems; used his massive social-media platform, X, to pick fights and bully opponents; and fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the woodchipper,” as he boasted yesterday on X, or at least helped get the agency folded into the State Department. He believes that understanding and mastering the government’s computer systems is the key to overhauling and fixing the government. But he does so at Trump’s behest, at least for as long as he has the president’s blessing.

Trump has made a point in recent days of making clear his supremacy over Musk, and Musk, for all his influence, has found himself bending to the strictures of the White House. Musk’s private security team, for instance, must wait in the parking lot at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue campus when he goes to work in a conference room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building because of the building’s own security protocols, one of the people familiar with the arrangement told us.  

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we will give him the approval where appropriate, and where not appropriate we won’t,” Trump said yesterday during a signing event in the Oval Office. “Where we think there is a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.”

On Sunday, Trump exited Air Force One after arriving in Washington from Palm Beach, and praised Musk as a “cost-cutter” who was “doing a good job,” before establishing the hierarchy: “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go.”

Trump’s somewhat pointed comments on Musk “are important,” a longtime Trump confidant told us, explaining that “there’s one president.” This person said that Trump had learned about how to work within the government during his first term, but “that’s not true of Elon.”

But Musk nonetheless has threatened to steal the spotlight from Trump in recent days, becoming the public face of the administration’s most disruptive moves, including an effort to force thousands of voluntary resignations from the federal workforce. Inside the West Wing, he has found many allies, having ingratiated himself with mid-tier Trump aides early in the transition, when he moved down to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club and established himself as an accessible, if quirky, presence. He regularly shared his cellphone number, including with younger staff, and spent his days sending around memes and ideas about overhauling the government, according to a person who saw the texts but who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Musk has a group of loyalists he often brings with him to each of his various government projects—a cadre Trump today praised as “smart people.” But, unlike many people with his net worth and renown, Musk “travels pretty light,” one person told us. Two people told us that, during the time he spent at Mar-a-Lago, they most regularly saw him with his young son X—“just that kid on his shoulders,” one of the people said—and sometimes X’s nanny.

Musk preempted Trump shortly after midnight Monday in a live broadcast on X with the announcement that the Trump administration would seek to shutter USAID based on his own team’s investigation of the agency. “As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it,” Musk said. “What we have here is just a ball of worms.”

And he has continued to pick public fights with Democratic leaders despite his new day job as a government employee. He accused House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of wanting to continue “waste fraud and abuse” after Jeffries attacked Musk’s leadership of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which operates as a part of the Executive Office of the President. Musk also wrote on X that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was mad about his work “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.”

Musk’s decision to seek a special dispensation for a noncitizen adviser came after the Tesla CEO’s views on immigration policy became a flash point inside the president’s circle late last year. When Musk defended the practice of giving H-1B visas to highly skilled foreign workers, Trump allies including Steve Bannon attacked Musk as part of a group of “techno-feudalists” undermining American workers. Trump had previously been critical of the H-1B visa system, but eventually sided with Musk in the dispute. Musk also moderated his stance, calling for “major reform” to how the visas are granted.

Democrats, who have struggled to respond effectively to Trump in the first weeks of his second term, have become more focused on Musk as a potential weak point for the president, as polling has shown significant public concern about Musk. A late-January poll by Quinnipiac University found that 53 percent of voters disapproved of him playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, compared with 39 percent who approved. About one in five Republican voters disapproved of Musk’s role.

Because of his special-government-employee status, Musk’s time in government is expected to be limited. Employees under this status, who do not have to divest from outside conflicts of interest, are permitted to work no more than 130 days in a single year. Other members of Musk’s team, including Katie Miller, a Department of Government Efficiency adviser, are also working for the government under the temporary designation. (Musk is also close to Miller’s husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.)

Musk’s preferred work habits before entering the federal bureaucracy could provide a window into how he might continue to feed “into the woodchipper” programs and spending that he views as Washington bloat. During his time in the private sector, Musk tended to burrow into each of his companies on different days, a person familiar with his routine told us. Monday was for SpaceX, Tuesday was for Tesla, and Wednesday was for X.

This week, Sunday and Monday were clearly for USAID. By tomorrow and Thursday, however, he might be ready to turn his buzz saw elsewhere.

He did not receive a single vote. He did not get confirmed. He does not receive a government paycheck.

The world’s richest man has declared war on the federal government and, in a matter of days, has moved to slash its size and reach, while gaining access to some of its most sensitive secrets. He has shaped the public discourse by wielding the powerful social-media site he controls and has threatened to use his fortune to bankroll electoral challenges to anyone who opposes him.

Elon Musk’s influence appears unchecked, triggering cries of alarm from those who worry about conflicts of interest, security clearances, and a broad, ill-defined mandate. But the Republican-controlled Congress has shown no desire so far to rein Musk in. There has never been a private citizen like him.

“I think Elon is doing a good job. He’s a big cost-cutter,” Donald Trump told reporters last night after stepping off Air Force One returning to Washington from Palm Beach. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy. Very smart. And he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal budget.”

Musk’s assault on the government unfolded rapidly in recent days, as he used his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash spending. His stated goal: cut $500 billion in annual spending. DOGE has limited powers. It is not an actual government agency—one can only be created by an act of Congress; Musk’s task force was set up through a presidential executive order. And Congress has the authority to set spending.

[Read: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

His own role remains murky: A White House official told me today that Musk is working for Trump as a “special government employee,” formalizing a position in the administration but allowing him to sidestep federal disclosure rules. Musk is not being paid, the official said.

Musk lacks legal authority, but he is close to power. At times working from the White House campus, Musk plainly enjoys his position as the president’s most influential adviser. Trump famously turns on aides he believes eclipse him. But by his own account, he remains enamored of Musk, seeming to relish the fact that the world’s wealthiest person is working for him, the White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations. Trump, the official said, also believes that Musk has shown a willingness to take public pushback for controversial actions, allowing the president himself to avoid blame.

Over the weekend, Musk set his sights on the U.S. Agency for International Development, declaring in a series of tweets, without evidence, that USAID is “a criminal organization” that is “evil” and “must die.” The Trump administration, adopting a transactional, “America First” view of global engagement, has subjected the agency—the world’s largest provider of food assistance—to aid freezes, personnel purges, and mass confusion. Musk in recent days became the would-be executioner. In an X Spaces live chat early this morning, he said he had discussed USAID’s future with Trump “in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down.”

“And so we’re shutting it down,” Musk said.

Hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was assuming the role of acting director of the agency, which he said the White House wants to fold into the State Department. USAID’s proponents have long seen it as a useful tool of American soft power that acted as a bulwark against China and Russia; its apparent demise was cheered by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who wrote on X that Musk was making a “smart move” to “plug USAID’s Deep Throat. Let’s hope notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow him whole.”

Musk might not succeed in kneecapping the agency. Several Democrats denounced the plan to move it to the State Department, arguing that Congress established USAID as a separate agency and that moving or closing it would take a subsequent act of Congress. But Republicans on the Hill were muted, seemingly willing to sacrifice their power as a co-equal branch of government to appease Musk and Trump.

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

GOP lawmakers also do not seem to object to Musk’s installation of former staffers from Tesla, X, and the Boring Company at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate. Some of Musk’s lead aides, according to Wired, are between 19 and 24 years old. (When a user on X later posted the names of those aides, Musk replied, “You have committed a crime,” and suspended the account.)

Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted DOGE staffers access to the system that sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government, ceding to Musk—whose wealth is estimated at more than $325 billion—a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit federal spending. That move ended a standoff with a top Treasury official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, who was put on leave and then suddenly retired after he had tried to prevent Musk’s lieutenants from getting into the department’s payment system.

“The only way to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money is to follow the payment flows and pause suspicious transactions for review. Obviously,” Musk posted today on X. “Naturally, this causes those who have been aiding, abetting and receiving fraudulent payments very upset. Too bad.”

The department, in a process run by civil servants, disbursed more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the payment system is tightly held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds, and other payments from the federal government. Moreover, two of Musk’s companies—Tesla and SpaceX—have more than $15 billion in government contracts, and according to some Democrats, he might now have access to information about competitor businesses, creating conflicts of interest. Musk also has business interests overseas, including in China.

A group of Senate and House Democrats has vowed a court battle over Musk’s access to the payment system. “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don’t control the money of the American people,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said at a news conference today outside of USAID headquarters in Washington. “The U.S. Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution. We don’t have a fourth branch of government called ‘Elon Musk.’”

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

But this morning Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., released a letter he wrote to Musk declaring that his office would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone” who tried to impede DOGE’s work.

Last week, Musk was the driving force behind an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” demanding that millions of federal employees accept massive workplace changes or resign. The White House official told me that Musk came up with the email subject line, which was also the language he used in an email to Twitter employees shortly after he purchased the company in 2022.

After taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, Musk demolished the company’s value and sparked a mass exodus of users. But it gave him a powerful political platform—which he is also now using to try to influence European elections—and there are signs that business is improving. The site brought in $25 million in political advertising revenue in 2024, mostly from Republicans, and The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Amazon—owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital—was increasing its spending on X.

Last week, the only news story that competed with Trump’s takeover of the nation’s capital was the collision between a military aircraft and a civilian jet that killed 67 people. The National Transportation Safety Board took the lead on the investigation, as it always does. But as the nation looked for news on the devastating tragedy, the first major airline crash in the United States in 15 years, the government agency made clear where the American people would need to turn: “All NTSB updates about news conferences or other investigative information will be posted to this X account. We will not be distributing information via email.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.