Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts. 

Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.

The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.

Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.

Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.

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Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.

But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration. 

Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms. 

But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.

The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion. 

The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.

People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”

The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him. 

The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers. 

Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.

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The American presidency is one of the most stressful jobs there is. Presidents famously age during their terms, often starting off looking hale and hearty and, by the time they’re finished, appearing tired, more lined and a whole lot grayer than when they started. So it’s understandable they would need to recharge by getting away from Washington from time to time. 

Donald Trump has made a habit of this, regularly jetting to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for extended periods of time in lieu of Camp David, the famous presidential getaway nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Now, according to a recent report by the Washington Post, he is seeking to create a permanent official presidential retreat in Florida at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

This would be an unprecedented move, even though it isn’t unusual for presidents to crave time away from Washington. According to the White House Historical Association, many of the early presidents left the White House in the summer because they believed that the white fog that formed on the nearby marshes was a deadly white gas; they wanted to get away for their health. In fact, James K. Polk is the only president to have stayed in the White House for each of the three summers he was president, and since he died shortly after leaving office, his fate was attributed at the time to those white gases.

Presidents, of course, have to keep working wherever they are. Some have wanted to escape Washington’s notorious humid summers, while others longed to flee the cold and create a “winter White House” in warmer climes. Harry Truman reportedly liked his Key West winter home so much that he called it the “Little White House” and spent 175 days of his presidency there. Richard Nixon was also fond of Florida, but he also frequently jetted back to his native California, as did Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush spent as much time as possible at the West Texas ranch he bought just before assuming the presidency. 

The first official presidential retreat was the Old Soldiers Home, which was commandeered by President James Buchanan as a summer getaway since its location in leafy Northwest Washington was cooler and quieter than the White House. It was subsequently used by Abraham Lincoln and his family, and he was said to have written the Emancipation Proclamation there. Some subsequent presidents enjoyed the retreat as well, but it was soon out of fashion as they began to travel further afield for their vacations. 

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From 1880 until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter sold off the last one, there was always a presidential yacht for the chief executive to unwind on and entertain guests, but there wasn’t another official presidential retreat until 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt visited a Works Progress Administration project in Maryland called Camp Hi-Catoctin and selected it as the location for a future presidential retreat he dubbed Shangri-La. Roosevelt used the property to relax, but he also saw it as a perfect place for high-level diplomacy. His successor, Harry Truman, made it a permanent federal facility and then, after he took office in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David in honor of his young grandson. Since then, the property has been the site of many meetings with foreign leaders, including the diplomatic negotiations hosted in 1978 by Carter between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that culminated in the Camp David Accords. 

Its location — just a 30-minute helicopter ride but many spiritual miles away from the White House — makes it a convenient spot for important domestic matters to be dealt with outside the bustle of the White House. Richard Nixon famously fired his trusted aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at Camp David in 1973, while 12 years earlier John F. Kennedy received counsel there from Eisenhower after the Bay of Pigs disaster. 

While some presidents have clearly enjoyed Camp David more than others, Trump has made no secret of his deep dislike of it. He has used it only rarely, and the one time he has been known to propose having any high-level talks there was in 2019 when he inexplicably invited Taliban leadership to join him there just days before the anniversary of Sept. 11, a meeting which was mercifully cancelled after the group killed an American in a car bomb attack in Kabul. 

Trump only wants to visit his own properties. According to the independent watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), as of June the president has spent 37% of his second term at his own properties, with Mar-a-Lago receiving the most visits. Even on his official trips, if he’s unable to return home Trump will sleep at one of his own hotels, a move that is always profitable for him personally since the government pays for much of the huge entourage trailing the president. In fact, one of the perks Trump has given himself is that his various winter and summer retreats are also his commercial properties, and his visits not only promote the properties, they also provide opportunities for paying customers to have access to the president. His behavior has become so commonplace that few even remark anymore that the president lives a good part of the time at clubs with members who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend time in his presence. 

The grift will apparently continue even after he leaves office. Trump recently announced that his proposed presidential library in Miami will double as a hotel, making it yet another profit center for the family. (He is also being sued by various interested parties who are upset that he was given the valuable land, worth a reported $330 million, for only $10 by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with the understanding it would be used for a nonprofit organization.) Now he has big, unprecedented plans for the new Camp David.

According to the Washington Post, “a parcel” of his West Palm beach golf resort will “be designated a permanent, official sanctuary for foreign leaders and future U.S. presidents, designed to host international summits and house presidents when they take vacations in Florida.” Trump’s generosity is such that he also plans to throw in complimentary members for presidents. It’s obvious that there is a lot of money to be made, which will be accompanied by ongoing access to him and his family. If foreign dignitaries were there to meet with the president and take in some golf, you can imagine that Trump would be at the club next door waiting to hold court. As Rick Reilly, author of “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” told the Post, “I suppose he wants to make a power play with these people and show them who is the king of America.”

Trump claims there would be no cost to the government, since he plans to pay for the housing himself. But as we’ve seen with the rapidly increasing costs to American taxpayers for his ballroom money pit at the White House, that’s unlikely to be the case. Taxpayers will almost certainly be on the hook for many millions, if only for the enhanced security that would be necessary. After all, this is the golf course where a would-be assassin was caught last year hiding in the bushes.

Trump leases the land for the golf course from Palm Beach County, which is seriously considering his proposal. If it is approved, the only course of action for the administration that follows Trump is to offload it — just as the federal government did with Mar-a-Lago after the socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post left it to the government when she died in 1973 to serve as a winter White House. Eight years later, citing exorbitant annual maintenance costs, the government returned the property to the Post Foundation, which put it for sale in 1985 before it was bought by Trump.

No name has been chosen for the property. But I don’t think there’s any mystery about what it’s going to be, do you?

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The Supreme Court convened on Monday for another exciting round of “how far will they go?” and, as luck would have it, the putative leader of the conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito, is out on a book tour talking about the philosophy that will guide their decisions. 

“So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country” is a collection of essays adapted from speeches he has given since 2007, many with straightforward titles, including “Let Judges Be Judges.” While an associate justice, Alito’s power on the Court shouldn’t be undersold. While all the other conservatives justices — aside from Clarence Thomas — don’t openly identify as originalists, they have shown themselves happy to follow Alito’s lead when it suits their ends. In fact, the so-called Roberts Court, named by tradition after the chief justice, is a misnomer. It’s really the Alito Court, which should send a chill down your spine if you have any concerns about where America is heading.

Alito gave a long interview to CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford, addressing a wide range of issues. One wouldn’t call him a charming personality, but he is compelling in his absolute confidence in himself and his ideas. At 76, he seems to be just getting started. He admitted to Crawford that he thinks about retiring, as anyone his age would, but he doesn’t have any intention of doing so at the moment, a fact that must come as a disappointment to both President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans who are struggling to hold on to their majority. 

Considering the sad example of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both Alito and Thomas would have done conservatives and Trump a big favor if they had retired during these first two years of Trump domination. Had they done so, they would have been seen as heroes to their fellow right-wing activists. 

Trump may think his legacy is in the hideous monuments he’s building to himself, but the Court’s conservative majority will be the lasting mark of his reign. He has already appointed three — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — of the six conservative justices, and if he were able to appoint two more in the vein of Alito and Thomas, but 30 years younger, he would likely seal the nation’s future and benefit his wealthy cronies for generations to come. 

Even if the pair had merely hinted they might resign, it would have given the Republicans something to run on in the midterms. Should the Democrats win a majority in the Senate, as they are now increasingly expected to, come January any hopes of appointing a far-right conservative in Alito’s image are dead for at least the next two years. If a vacancy were to happen, presumably the Democrats would invoke the McConnell precedent and keep the seat open until a new president is elected. 

But right now Alito and Thomas are at the height of their power and influence — and they aren’t going anywhere. “I think I can still make a contribution,” Alito told Crawford. “And it’s hard to give up the opportunity to do something that I think will be good for the Constitution and good for the country as long as I’m able to do it.” As Kevin McMahon, a political science professor at Connecticut’s Trinity College, told Reuters, “They have been waiting for a long time to be in the position. So why leave?”

Why leave indeed? Crawford’s analysis of Alito’s power on the Court is that he is now the fulcrum on which its decisions are made. “Alito is especially skilled in bringing together five justices for a majority on some of the Court’s most difficult and contentious issues,” she observes. “The justice often publicly portrayed as unyielding and inflexible is, behind the scenes, the conservative who is uniquely adept at finding common ground on the most divisive issues.” 

Alito is certainly having some success with his signature issue, the unitary executive, having been a champion of the right-wing theory since the 1980s, when he worked for Ronald Reagan’s hyper-partisan Attorney General Ed Meese in the Justice Department. As Alito defined it back in 2000, before he was elevated to the high court, the “president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing.” He believes the president has the sole authority over federal agencies and sees presidential power as dominant — well, unless the Supreme Court disagrees and says otherwise. 

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All this may seem to be in conflict with Alito’s guiding philosophy of originalism, but he explains that away by calling himself a “practical originalist” who believes that the Constitution is a sort of sacred text that must be taken literally as it was understood at the time of its adoption — unless it just doesn’t seem right. Last week, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Even Originalists Make Mistakes,” in which he listed legal scholars and practitioners who, in his estimation, aren’t following the one true creed. But Alito admitted that he, too, must sometimes deviate from the path and make a “reasonable judgment call” that may require him to overturn precedents and that “conditions” may “militate against scholarly purity.” 

The justice goes to great lengths to deny that he has any partisan interest, but it’s clear throughout the interview and from his other comments over the last few years that he’s highly partisan and influenced by the right-wing hysteria over the “woke” left. Alito expressed grave concern about presidents criticizing the Court for its decisions, saying that Joe Biden was particularly harsh. But when pushed a bit, he admitted that Trump has been harsh too. That false equivalence is so fatuous it’s embarrassing that a Supreme Court justice would have the gall to utter it.

Biden condemned the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by calling it a “tragic error” and “an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.” The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision did, after all, overturn a constitutional right that had been in effect for 50 years, one that numerous conservative justices had told the Senate and country they considered to be settled law. Trump, on the other hand, has said that members of the Court, especially those he appointed, are “very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution,” when they vote against his wishes. But he hasn’t stopped there. They are also, he said, “an embarrassment to their families, if you want to know the truth” and a “disgrace to our nation.” But then Trump loves Alito and says he “wants to make America great again,” so perhaps the justice agrees with him about his brethren. And why not? They are aligned on virtually every issue. 

As the Court’s new term begins, Alito is clearly feeling his oats. He wants to have the influence and power to decide the radical cases that are coming before the court as a result of Trump’s unprecedented power grab under the unitary executive theory. The project is his life’s work. So he’s staying.

But that doesn’t mean that Democrats didn’t dodge a bullet when he refused to retire so Trump could name a young replacement. These days it may be hard to imagine anyone worse than Samuel Alito, but just think about who could have been next. How does Justice Todd Blanche or Justice Aileen Cannon sound?

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I suppose a Richard Nixon revival was inevitable. After all, the 37th president was the modern model of the corrupt, abusive presidency that is currently being perfected by Donald Trump and his corrupt administration. In fact, much of the legal theory of the unitary executive under which the current administration operates sprang from the bowels of right-wing think tanks smarting from Nixon’s fall from grace. 

Many of the norms, rules and laws that governed the executive branch until Trump and his loyalists systematically threw them in the White House dumpster originated in the aftermath of Watergate, so reimagining Nixon as the first victim of the so-called deep state serves as a perfect rationale for what is happening today. For conservatives, the long-awaited historical payback has finally come.

In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nixon is suddenly all the rage among young conservatives who are “Nixonmaxxing” all over social media and sporting merch with sayings like “Nixon now, more than ever” and “Pretty girls for Nixon.” One young fan mused, “Is Nixon pulling off the greatest posthumous political comeback in history?” 

Maybe so. This new interest among the Gen Z crowd is actually a well-designed public relations campaign by The Nixon Foundation, which used social media in 2018 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his presidency. Short-form videos featuring Nixon saying “I am not a crook” over gangster rap, along with clips from “Mad Men” showing Jon Hamm-as-Don Draper saying, “Kennedy, I see a silver spoon, Nixon, I see myself,” went viral. 

But the fandom is more than just vibes. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have both recently called Watergate a setup, never mind the evidence or admissions by Nixon’s accomplices like H.R. Haldeman in his diary. Even Vice President JD Vance is in on the act, comparing himself to Nixon in June during an event to promote his memoir at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum: “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media.” (He’s not wrong.) 

“I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” Vance said, calling him a political genius. The vice president praised Nixon’s foreign policy acumen, giving him props for the opening of China and the Vietnam peace process, while conveniently leaving out the part about bombing Cambodia. Vance also denigrated the Watergate hearings and investigations that eventually brought Nixon down, saying, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Sadly, he’s probably right. Nixon didn’t have the right-wing media machinery that now excuses Trump’s criminality and spreads conspiracy theories — like the trope that the “deep state” is out to get the president. That alone has managed to keep the MAGA base and Republican officials on board with Trump, which is why he was acquitted in two impeachment trials during his first term. After all, Nixon didn’t resign until he was told that he had lost his base in the Senate and faced certain conviction and removal from office. That wasn’t the case in February 2021, of course, when the Senate refused to convict Trump for “Incitement of Insurrection.”

But there is also evidence that even Nixon had his limits. Yes, he grossly abused the office of the presidency, treating the executive branch like his private fiefdom. He ordered the FBI and the CIA to commit crimes. He bribed, blackmailed and paid off potential witnesses against him. But he didn’t burn the tapes, and he dutifully turned them over when the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. And although there was that infamous “19-minute gap” on one of the tapes that would have sealed his fate, many of the conversations revealed a profane, corrupt president. 

But even as Nixon’s overall approval rating sank to 24% during the week before his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, Republicans — 62% of them — still supported him. These were undoubtedly some of the die-hards who eventually began pushing to roll back the reforms that were enacted in Nixon’s wake.

During a post-presidency with British television presenter David Frost, Nixon famously said, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Those words sounded then — and sound now — like an authoritarian gaffe. But in reality, the idea was based on a very real concept popular among right-wing Republicans, who believed that the president should have unfettered power to enact policies to “protect” the nation. 

After that interview, Nixon penned a 2,500-word essay explaining he didn’t believe the president is above the law, but that the nation’s executive must be granted “some faith in his judgment” and given “room for maneuver.” 

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“His powers are not unlimited,” Nixon wrote. “But neither can be existing law — in a limited way, and at times of special need — and still meet these larger responsibilities.” Apparently, “special need” could be defined as whatever the president says it is, and therein lies the unlimited power. 

This notion forms much of the logic of the unitary executive theory that has been growing among thinkers on the right for decades, and with court cases beginning in the early 1980s, the presidency has been granted more and more such power. This, of course, culminated in Trump v. United States, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that gave the president near total immunity from prosecution for anything done in office. (The president had already been granted immunity from civil liability by the Court in Nixon v. Fitzgerald in 1982.) Now, the idea that presidents are above the law is gaining steam with yet another “investigation of the investigation,” this time into the special prosecutors who scrutinized Nixon back in 1974.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Justice Department is now officially looking into that case based upon the conspiracy theories promulgated by Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned historical revisionist and conspiracy theorist who presented “a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters called ‘Watergate As Lawfare,’” making the argument that, you guessed it, the deep state took down Richard Nixon.

There’s a method to all this madness, and it’s best illustrated by the fact that Vance is the one leading the charge. Any ambitious Republican official thinking about the future has to find some way to excuse their complicity in Trump’s corrupt — and likely illegal — behavior. If they have any hope of being elected to national office, their only choice is to try to maintain these MAGA fictions and arcane conspiracy theories after Trump is gone by continuing to deny the reality of what he’s done. One way to do that is to convince people that it was never just about Trump; the deep state has been out to get Republicans ever since Nixon.

If they can’t convince people that their complicity was actually righteous resistance to a secret cabal of bureaucrats and dirty cops fighting to keep Republicans from enacting their righteous agenda, then potential GOP presidential candidates like Vance are likely going to have a hard time overcoming what is likely to be a massive revolt against Trumpism once he is out of office. 

We’re seeing the edge of it now — and it’s not just about the price of gas. The air is finally going out of MAGA, and every single Republican politician who took advantage of it will be held accountable by the voters for what they have done. The GOP’s only hope is to find a Republican somewhere who hasn’t been touched by Trump and MAGA. 

Good luck with that.

The post The dark reasons behind all the Richard Nixon worship appeared first on Salon.com.

It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

Trump probably wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t read it, but his advisers obviously believed he should keep his distance from the plan, which didn’t poll well, and when people found out what was in it, they were appalled. Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations. 

One such organization, the Heritage Foundation, had been publishing “Mandate for Leadership,” its so-called policy guide, since 1981 and updating it as necessary. But Project 2025 was different from the group’s previous effort. This time, the Heritage Foundation had organized a formal transition operation, created training sessions, personnel lists and a day-one playbook for Trump to hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders and personnel changes. 

This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump administration as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Having worked for years for the Republican Study Committee in the House, a group of far-right members dedicated to social conservatism, tax cuts and the destruction of the federal safety net, Vought was an experienced bureaucrat with a specific vision: to shrink the federal workforce and bring as much power under the direct auspices of the president as possible. As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.

(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, listens as President Donald Trump speaks during the America.gov launch event on Sept. 29, 2026.

Vought was an active member of a group formed after the 2012 election called Groundswell, which included an eclectic group of influencers and activists such as Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and far-right political operative Steve Bannon, who had come to believe that Republicans needed to be much more radical in their methods and their goals. Seeing the federal workforce as nothing more than sinecures for dangerous liberals, Vought and his comrades planned mass firings under new rules such as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal workers as at-will employees, making them exempt from civil service protections. And if they could not be fired, he would make their lives so difficult that they would quit. As Vought famously explained:

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. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Vought believed that the way to secure a mandate for this agenda, even under Democratic presidents, was to cut the federal workforce so massively that the government would be unable to function beyond the most basic services. We will have to see just how well that works out for them in the future. But the destruction is already monumental.

In the months after Trump returned to the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wreaked havoc on the federal government. Thousands were fired and departments were shuttered, leaving chaos everywhere. That’s the tech-bro style. 

But Vought is a different breed. He is a patient and methodical destroyer. Vought believes that we are living in a “post-constitutional” time in which the “precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years” must be thrown off. And even while Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapsing from the weight of historically low poll numbers, Vought is quietly accomplishing his mission of comprehensive deregulation mostly under the radar. 

On Tuesday, the administration ended Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, effectively allowing them to be bullied and discriminated against in America’s schools. But since this is a man who joyfully prescribes “trauma” as a political tactic, it’s not entirely surprising that his crusade would eventually reach schoolchildren.

Vought’s influence is also being felt on Capitol Hill. As the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has made her role a centerpiece of her reelection campaign. For years, she has argued to Mainers that her value lies in the seniority and influence she yields. But Collins should think again: One of Vought’s primary strategies for securing the unitary executive is through confrontation with the legislative and judicial branches. That conflict is currently playing out in the courts. But under a supine GOP congressional majority that has been willing to cede the powers granted to them by the Constitution, he is winning — and making more moves. 

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According to the New York Times, an Oval Office meeting grew heated when Vought attempted to have the president rescind National Institutes of Health grants to universities that did not align with the MAGA agenda. Trump was on board with the idea, since it would have targeted Harvard University, an institution he sees as his enemy. After fierce pushback from members of both parties, the pair pulled back. But that reprieve could be temporary; conventional wisdom says they are likely to try again after the November midterms are over, when Vought’s new initiative to confront Congress begins in earnest.

Then, on Wednesday, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., blocked a Democratic bill that would have stopped Vought’s recent pocket rescission of $810 million in domestic spending previously approved by Congress. (In a statement released days before the vote, Collins decried the move.) The money had been earmarked for programs focused on immigrants, refugees, civil rights, climate change and children. Johnson said the issue will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which approved Vought’s rescissions in 2025 because they pertained to national security. These funds do not, but it won’t be surprising if the Court’s conservative majority, which has been largely sympathetic to the unitary executive theory, finds another reason to allow it.

If Vought and the administration were to win at the Supreme Court, Congress might as well just go part-time to approve presidential appointments, name post-offices and pass one big pile of money for the presidential monarch to spend as he pleases. Article I of the Constitution will be effectively dead.

Under Vought’s leadership, the damage to the federal government is already overwhelming, and it’s unclear if a Democratic congressional majority or administration will be able to fix it. But then, that’s part of the plan too. Trump’s presidency may be faltering, but Vought’s dream is being realized every single day.

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Susan Collins is very concerned — and she should be. As a politician who has only run for one office in her life and held the same seat for nearly 30 years, the Maine senator is facing a possible loss in what looks more and more like a big blue wave coming in November’s midterm elections. As the rare GOP senator representing a blue state, she should be the first one caught in that undertow. But Collins is a rare creature: a virtual Houdini who has always managed to fend off defeat during tough elections. Whether she will somehow work her magic again is one of the biggest questions of 2026.

At the start of this election cycle, Democrats had two competing strategies about how to beat her. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was convinced that because more women than men vote in the state and Collins wins most of them, the answer was to find a Democratic woman that closely matched Collins’ profile. So he persuaded the popular Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, 79, to run for the seat. A progressive faction took the opposite approach, believing that a younger, male populist outsider would provide the contrast Mainers were looking for. So they recruited a oyster farmer, Graham Platner. It soon became clear that Schumer’s bet was the wrong one, and that Platner’s persona and message were more appealing. Mills’ heart wasn’t really in the race, and she dropped out fairly quickly. But then, after Platner was forced to withdraw from the race due to credible allegations of sexual assault, he was replaced with another salt-of-the-earth working man type. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who once served as president of the Main Senate, was well-known in the state and became something of a compromise candidate. Collins is currently trailing Jackson in most polls, although the revered New York Times/Portland Press/Siena poll, released Thursday, showed her with a small lead. 

While no one is counting their chickens, the environment appears to favor Democrats. This is the first election for Collins since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade and decades of access to abortion. Since the senator had effectively cast the deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, vouching for his mainstream credentials and assuring Americans he considered Roe “settled law,” the case also severely damaged her reputation as a moderate among many Maine voters, most of whom — remember — are women. Collins has since claimed she was “misled” by Kavanaugh, but she has refused to repudiate her vote. 

What had once been one of the senator’s selling points — her position on choice — is now a liability. But it doesn’t stop there. According to analysis by Planned Parenthood, Collins has subsequently supported 95% of Trump’s judicial nominees — to be fair, that percentage is roughly on par with her votes in previous administrations — including for anti-choice judges. She has also voted against the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights laws, legislation she had previously co-sponsored. For some voters who backed her before, this is a deal breaker. 

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Collins’ other selling point to Mainers of all political stripes has been her dedication to bringing home pork for the state as the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. While that power has been somewhat curtailed by both parties in recent years after revelations of such schemes as former GOP Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ infamous “bridge to nowhere,” Collins has managed to keep the tradition going, albeit with a more subtle application.

Throughout the campaign, Jackson has portrayed Collins as a tool of the corrupt GOP swamp, tying her to Trump and the party’s overwhelming corruption. While it’s hard to know how much traction Jackson has been getting on that issue, last week he was handed a gift in the form of a Pro Publica story alleging that Collins engaged in suspicious pay-to-play arrangements via a high-powered Washington lobbyist who is close to her and her husband. (Reporting by the New York Times supported the claim.)

In a nutshell, the former CEO of a defense contractor told the FBI that he created a shell company to hide a $150,000 donation to a super PAC supporting Collins in exchange for her help in obtaining millions in contracts, which he received. There is evidence that she not only knew about it, but worked with others to make it happen. After a preliminary FBI investigation in 2023 didn’t lead to any charges, new evidence was apparently leading the bureau to a larger investigation when the Trump Justice Department quashed it as part of their purge of the agents and lawyers who were working political corruption cases.

Collins maintains she was cleared of any wrongdoing, but there is a big cloud over her head at the exact moment voters are increasingly concerned about government corruption writ large. It doesn’t help that she has enabled Trump and his administration all along the way. She might vote with him less than other Republican senators, but that’s not saying much, since many of them are barely sentient rubber stamps. And Collins certainly hasn’t been a crusader against his unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’ power of the purse, which is only going to get worse now that the president is entering his lame duck period. Among her confirmation votes was one in favor of budget director Russell Vought, the main author of Project 2025, who continues to make the case that Trump has the power and right to cancel congressional appropriations he doesn’t like. 

Collins’ big pitch to the people of Maine is her perennial favorite — that she has seniority and power, and that she will use it for their benefit. But she has shown little appetite for using any of it to stop the worst consequences for Maine and the country-at-large. In the end, it may come down to whether Mainers care more about Collins’ record of bringing home the bacon or about saving the country from a malignant administration.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to reflect Graham Platner’s job as an oyster farmer.

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The big story coming out of the 2024 election was how Donald Trump orchestrated a realignment of American politics, bringing demographic groups that had long eschewed the Republican Party into the tent. Latinos, Black voters and young people, mostly males, had voted for him and the GOP in larger numbers than anyone could remember, and it was seen in some quarters as a sign that the party was embarking on a thousand-year reign. Conventional wisdom held that Trump was something of a magical figure who had defied the odds, defeated the majority of the legal and political efforts to hold him accountable, and triumphantly returned to power. 

Many attributed the president’s success to a new political power on the block — the so-called manosphere, consisting of male podcasters with millions of followers who had enthusiastically endorsed Trump. Many pundits said that Kamala Harris lost the race because she didn’t try hard enough to appeal to these influencers, even though many are heavily misogynistic and wouldn’t have been open to her candidacy in any case. Their juvenile humor and oppositional defiance also happened, incidentally, to be perfectly matched to Trump’s sophomoric style. 

However, like transgressive boys everywhere, they have a short attention span; Trump has not turned out to be as fun as they thought he would be. Although anecdotal evidence suggests they have been less fervent followers of the president for several months now, The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts to see if it was true. What they found was revealing: “Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.” Many are publicly unhappy with the economy and the war, both of which are seen as broken promises and could account for the decline in mentions, but the hosts are mostly spending their time trashing Democrats like James Talarico, the Texas state representative who is running for the Senate and may just win. (Significantly, the king of the manosphere, podcaster Joe Rogan, is actually a fan of Talarico.) 

There are some other big names in the podcasting world, like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who are now openly antagonistic toward Trump, mostly for opportunistic reasons. The pair are among the early crowd jostling for power within the post-Trump right-wing ecosystem. Kelly has railed against the Trump family’s alleged corruption, while Carlson appears to be positioning himself as a presidential candidate, with his iconoclastic takes on a number of issues and increasing talk of a third-party bid. He recently told NPR that Trump should be removed from office. 

But mainstream conservative media is still largely on board the Trump train, although Fox News’ firing of Maria Bartiromo for coordinating with the White House — hilarious as the network’s outrage is, considering the cozy relationships between the president and Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — and its decision to stand against Trump in support of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO has revealed a schism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has also been pulling no punches throughout the second term. 

But what of the Republican establishment? Since Trump’s exultant victory in 2024, they have behaved as if he were ordained by God to be America’s reigning monarch, omnipotent and infallible. Republican governors have largely abdicated their own roles as one of the Constitution’s checks and balances, agreeing to give up their own sovereignty to serve his agenda, while the GOP majorities in Congress have proven to be nothing more than trained seals happily signing on to the president’s usurpation of their own power. 

But you can’t really blame them. Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite. He actually inherited a recovering economy — dubbed “the envy of the world” in 2024 by The Economist — and newfound global respect. If Trump had done nothing and simply continued the policies that were already in place — and then taken credit for them, as he is wont to do — he would be in a different position today. But he surrounded himself with radicals and sycophants, and he believed his own hype. The results have been a disaster.

As Republicans prepare to face the voters in the November midterms, they are finding out that the “magical” Trump mystique was actually luck and hot air. Reality still exists, and it bites. Hard. 

As we head into the final month before the election, the polls appear very bad for Republicans. The House majority is almost certainly gone, and the Senate is increasingly in play, something that wasn’t seriously contemplated six months ago. The president’s approval ratings are in the low to mid-30s, and his ratings on the most important issues of the economy and the Iran war are even worse. Gasoline and diesel prices have turned the two big promises Trump made — to lower prices and keep the nation out of wars — into epic failures, and voters are livid. 

Suddenly, GOP candidates are running for the hills. Candidates in tight races in battleground and red states — including Mike Rogers, who is running for the Senate in Michigan against Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who faces Josh Turek, a Democrat, in Iowa — are saying the Iran war must end. (As the New York Times pointed out, Hinson was among seven House Republicans who recently supported a resolution calling on the president to stop or seek congressional approval for military action in Iran.) Others are scrubbing or downplaying endorsements by or mentions of the presidents on their campaign websites. According to The Washington Post, Mike Beltran, the Republican nominee running against Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., touted on his website earlier this year how he had “stood with President Trump every step of the way.” That language has now vanished, along with photos of Trump and references to “America First.” At least seven other GOP congressional candidates, reported the Post, are doing the same. One Florida Republican. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, has even publicly condemned the president for elements of his radical deportation policy.

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Historically, this is common. Midterms are notoriously hard on the party in power, and presidents usually take the blame. Often, the approved strategy is for candidates to go ahead and distance themselves from the president, and try to win their races by portraying themselves as independent thinkers who will not rubber-stamp the unpopular majority’s agenda. Whether it’s Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2014, close midterm races almost always feature some version of that same sales pitch. The only exception in recent years I can think of is 1998, when the GOP’s threats to impeach President Bill Clinton over the findings of the Starr Report with regard to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky blew back on them, costing them seats and resulting in the resignation of the House Speaker Newt Gingrich in disgrace. 

But this time it is especially jarring considering the fealty Republicans have been required to show their leader — and have willingly given him — until now. That loyalty ended up not helping Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary just a few months ago when Trump endorsed his opponent in retribution after Cornyn waited too long to endorse him in 2024. As the midterm campaign has unfolded, it’s belatedly become clear to many Republicans that standing with Trump may be riskier, even among the party’s base, than standing against him.

But they have a problem. The president won’t shut up. To the chagrin of most of his own party, he is insisting on making the midterms all about him. A narcissist to the core, Trump believes that the only way Republicans win in November is if he is out there bragging and blaming and lying as he always does, because that has been the secret sauce that brings out MAGA voters. He has even released a taxpayer-funded propaganda ad — which is illegal — touting his alleged accomplishments. 

No one should mistake the Republican retreat from Trump as a full-scale rebellion. Instead, it’s a tepid, last-minute attempt on the part of some desperate candidates to show independence, knowing they may lose anyway — and that the president will say it’s because they didn’t support him enough anyway. The Republican Senate had a chance to take a stand on one of the biggest issues in the campaign, and the one that’s causing the most pain for average voters: Iran. On Thursday they voted down a resolution to end the war. The tally was 50-49. When it comes to putting their votes where their mouths are, it’s clear they will default to Trump as always. Voters, though, are finally seeing through them.

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On Tuesday, Donald Trump stood before the United Nations General Assembly to give a speech in which he made it clear that the United States has now fully abandoned its last remaining fig leaf of decency and morality on the world stage, and has embarked on an imperialist model not seen since the 19th century. Since this was a Trump speech, filled with his usual bombast and braggadocio, it didn’t have quite the shock value it might have carried in the past. But there was a new atmosphere in the room. The world sees America as a threat now, and countries are making new arrangements.

The speech was the worst he’s given, and that’s saying something. Delivered with a bored, desultory tone, the obviously tired president spent 40 minutes rambling on and on with his usual litany of grievances and lies. He made it clear that he sees no limits on his power. Looking directly at the Iranian president, he mused aloud, “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival, and no hope of future greatness for generations?” It was outrageously provocative and insulting, and on Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian responded in his own U.N. speech by describing the Islamic Republic as “victims of terrorism” at the hands of the U.S., while claiming “we are ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force.”

In many ways, this was familiar ground for the president. But there was one portion of his speech that brought home just how far gone American foreign policy is today. Speaking of his policy of murder on the high seas in the Caribbean, Trump claimed that drug traffickers, whom he calls “terrorists,” must be “killed, exiled or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release, which is what we’re doing.” The Navy is routinely blowing up small boats and killing human beings based upon unproven claims that they are transporting drugs. No U.S. or international law sanctions such a thing. And according to a fact-check by the New York Times, Trump’s assertion that this operation has reduced the flow of drugs by 90% is a blatant lie. It has made no difference at all. The policy is an abomination, and it proves to the world that the United States has abandoned all fealty to the rule of law, not to mention common decency. 

(Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images) United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres during the speech of President Donald Trump during the 81st U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22, 2026.

But that wasn’t all. The president bragged about his actions in Venezuela, declaring that since his incursion in January, which deposed President Nicolás Maduro, Trump has now acquired “more than 60% of the oil in the world . . . it was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils. You’ve all heard that.” (The number is actually about 23%, according to the Times.) We have certainly heard that before — from him. The saying is one of his favorite maxims, but it hasn’t been uttered by any other world leader for centuries. He went on to proclaim, “Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.” What threat Venezuela posed to our “vital national interests” is unclear, unless it means simply having something we want to take.

To say this at the U.N., which was formed to prevent this very behavior, confirms every nation’s worst fears about what the United States has become under Trump. It is crude, antediluvian imperialism, and the assembled dignitaries did not applaud or even respond, although the Iranian and Cuban delegations did walk out when they were threatened. 

The U.S is obviously now seen by many as a rogue state, disrespected and disdained by allies and adversaries alike. All you had to do was look at the faces of those in attendance to see it. 

But many are realizing, even as Trump besmirched the U.S. and U.N. alike, there is a new “leader of the free world” on the scene. 

Mark Carney did not speak at the General Assembly, but he did hold bilateral meetings and a press conference. In the process, the Canadian prime minister gave some measure of hope to those — including many Americans themselves — who see the U.S. as a threat to world peace and yearn for something better. “This is, in many respects, a time that comes once or twice every century,” Carney told the media gathered in New York. “What comes ahead, it’s not wishful multilateralism, which defends only the status quo, nor a cold realpolitik that dismantles the status quo altogether. The alternative that Canada and many others are pursuing is values-based realism, an approach that’s both principled and pragmatic.”

The last few weeks have been productive for Carney, as he led a summit of big money investors and CEOs, partnering with former prime minister Steve Harper to make a bipartisan pitch for opportunities in manufacturing, natural gas, mining and ports on two oceans. Canada has a wealth of resources, including an educated workforce. You know, kind of like America — before it turned itself into a global pariah. 

Carney followed his U.N. appearance with a triumphant trip to Europe, where he was greeted like a rock star, obviously appreciated for his bold break with the U.S. that began with a visionary speech in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos that called for a new world order. On Sept. 16, at the meeting of the European Commission, President Ursula von der Leyen called for Canada to become the European Union’s first “associate member.” In making the case, she said, “We must urgently reimagine our partnerships. And build global coalitions for our resilience and democracies.” 

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In his speech, which was greeted ecstatically by E.U. members, Carney said “Put simply: we’re in a position where we need to pursue calibrated alliances, integrating deeply with those countries who share our values, remaining open-eyed with those who do not.” 

That vision was put into action this week in New York, when Carney and leaders from the European Union and six other nations announced “Partners for Multilateralism,” which he described as “a new forum that looks at universal institutions, practical coalitions and capacities that exist outside of governments to build trust and bring people together.” The prime minister explained that they do not see this as an attempt to form consensus among nations, an impossible task, but to instead create a new paradigm for countries “formed around problems rather than geography or size, not as an alternative to multilateralism, but as an instrument of it.”

I have written before that the post-World War II order has run its course. The end of the Cold War, and the burden of being the world’s policeman and guarantor of security, has warped America’s values. It was clearly time for something new, hopefully better, to emerge in the 21st century. But Trump’s bellicose “transactional” approach, aside from the clear corruption and immorality, exacerbates the problem at a time of serious global challenges that include nuclear threats, climate change and the emergence of artificial intelligence. These issues demand cooperation. But Trump prefers to blow everything up — and reap the financial rewards wherever he can find them.

Finally, someone is proposing something new to take its place. It’s still in the very nascent stages, and who knows where it will go? But it’s a serious proposal that seeks to find some stability and predictability in a modern, multi-polar world that requires both cooperation and flexibility. 

We can thank Carney for taking the president’s threats to Canadian sovereignty seriously and starting this overdue conversation. He is the man to whom those who believe in freedom and democracy now look for leadership, and we should all be grateful that he has willingly taken on the role. 

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There are always power centers in any White House. Certain people have their own little fiefdoms or specific knowledge of how government bureaucracy works, which gives them a leg up in internecine battles. Some offices or Cabinet posts are just imbued with more power than others. The Treasury secretary, for example, is always going to have more juice than the secretary of agriculture, just by virtue of their respective portfolios. But there is no job that has traditionally been more powerful than White House chief of staff.

The role of the position is multi-faceted, managing the flow of information to the Oval Office and keeping them from becoming distracted by people pushing their own agendas and distorting the president’s understanding of the facts. The chief of staff has hiring and firing power over the West Wing, basically running the day-to-day operation of the presidency. Mediating disputes among the executive branch’s advisers and officials before they reach the president is also an important part of the job. But most importantly, the chief of staff should be the president’s most trusted adviser, willing to provide an honest assessment and opinion on all the important issues that reach the Resolute Desk. 

No president has a more checkered past with chiefs of staff than Donald Trump. In 2017, as a complete political novice, he brought in a GOP party hack, Reince Priebus, who quickly proved himself to be completely unprepared to deal with an egomaniac like Trump. Priebus was fairly swiftly given the heave-ho in favor of retired Gen. John Kelly, who was serving as secretary of homeland security. He was expected to whip the White House and the chaotic president into shape. While Kelly tried his best, he proved to be no match for the force that was Javanka — Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter — and others who had forged a personal relationship with Trump and wielded influence, no matter how hard Kelly tried to discipline the operation. After the four-star general couldn’t tame the Trump White House, they ended up with a bucket of lukewarm chamomile tea by the name of Mark Meadows, who is probably best remembered as the man who sat on his couch scrolling through his phone while insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, simply saying the president wanted to be alone. 

“It used to be a fairly stiff competition for the worst chief of staff in history,” according to Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” the definitive book on the subject, “but Meadows absolutely owns it.” Still, there were others. Until Meadows, most people would have considered H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s very loyal chief of staff, to be the lowest rating. After all, Haldeman actually did time for his crimes in service of Nixon’s infamous abuses of power. George H.W. Bush’s right-hand man, John Sununu, was known to be a terrible manager and a terrible boss, while Don Regan, who served in the Reagan administration, handled the disastrous Iran-Contra scandal badly and alienated the very powerful Nancy Reagan, which in the end proved to be fatal to his employment in the West Wing. 

According to Whipple, the consensus is that Howard Baker, Reagan’s final chief of staff, and Dick Cheney, who served Gerald Ford, were considered competent, but the “gold standard” is James Baker, Reagan’s first chief, and Leon Panetta, who brought much-needed organization and discipline to the chaotic early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. 

Susie Wiles, Trump’s current chief of staff, won’t be included in that pantheon, even though the president’s second term is a very different operation than the first. Following his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump and his inner circle spent their four years in the wilderness figuring out what they wanted to do if they got back into power and devised a strategy to get it done. According to New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of the book “Regime Change,” the massive leaks that characterized the first term have given way to a tightly controlled administration run by a group of devoted loyalists. Their fealty appears to be voluntary, and Wiles will no doubt be credited with maintaining discipline among the staff far better than those who served in the first Trump White House. But the job is about more than discipline, and on that scale, Wiles is little better than Meadows. 

As the first female chief of staff in history, she does deserve credit for running, along with Chris LaCivita, Trump’s successful 2024 campaign, an operation that, at least for him, was relatively professional and buttoned up. After his win against Vice President Kamala Harris, Wiles was the logical choice to follow him into the White House. She seems to have found the key to managing Trump, which is to not manage him at all. (One imagines his mother reached the same conclusion around the time he reportedly gave his second-grade music teacher a black eye because “he didn’t know anything about music.”) 

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Whipple interviewed Wiles eleven times for a major feature in Vanity Fair, and she was incredibly frank, letting it be known that she didn’t think much of Vice President JD Vance, characterizing him as an opportunist and a “conspiracy theorist.” She also called Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget — and the author of much of Project 2025 — a “right-wing absolute zealot.” But Wiles also revealed that she doesn’t see her job as one in which she tries to help the president sort through all the options and do the hard job of offering her unvarnished advice, even when it’s something Trump doesn’t want to hear.

Wiles denies that she is an enabler, but it’s clear that Vance was right when he told Whipple that she sees her job as a “facilitator,” which simply means that she makes sure the president’s disordered trains of thought run on time. She even more or less admitted it herself when she said that she only has difficult conversations with the boss over “little things.” Wiles revealed that she doesn’t have “these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

That pretty much says it all. And one has to question whether Wiles challenges him on the little things either. After all, in addition to a list of cronies and sycophants, Trump appointed her to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. If she had any clout, you would think she could have talked him out of his petty obsession of adding his name to a living memorial to a revered, slain president — a disgusting act of desecration. But with Trump, there’s nothing too small on which to fixate and, in any case, this crusade to remake Washington, D.C., in his own image overwhelms all other concerns, including economic crises and war. 

In other words, Susie Wiles has no influence over Trump at all. Just like Mark Meadows, she’s essentially sitting on a couch and scrolling on her phone while the world burns.

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