Merely a day after his boss Diaper Don described inspecting Jon Husted's ass, JD Vance told a male supporter "I love you too" before urgently specifying that it was "totally platonic."
Polling suggests this clever new campaign strategy isn't working. Republicans appear poised to lose the House and quite possibly the Senate. — Read the rest
Federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, on Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation, following months of public accusations against the congresswoman by President Donald Trump and members of his administration.
Agents from Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant authorized by a federal judge, according to the Associated Press and The Washington Post.
“This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
The department did not disclose the scope of the investigation or what agents were seeking. Fox News reported, citing unidentified sources, that investigators were examining immigration paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.
The search follows repeated allegations of immigration fraud from Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, who previously said he discussed potential legal action against Omar with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Somalia, has repeatedly denied the allegations. Federal officials have not publicly presented evidence substantiating them.
Trump has frequently singled out Omar, an outspoken critic of his administration and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress. His attacks have included calls for her to leave the United States and repeated references to a Minnesota welfare fraud scandal in which Omar has not been accused of wrongdoing.
The search comes just three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections — and after voting has already begun in Minnesota.
Absentee voting in the state opened Sept. 18, according to the Minnesota secretary of state’s office. Omar is seeking reelection to Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis.
The Justice Department has longstanding policies discouraging investigative actions intended to influence elections. Federal officials have not explained whether election-related considerations factored into the timing of Monday’s search.
Omar’s office had not issued a public response to the search as of the latest reporting. No charges have been announced.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended the Trump administration’s proposal to livestream the execution of a convicted mass murderer Sunday, brushing aside concerns that the broadcast could turn him into a martyr, something the editorial board of the “New York Post” argued might result from a public viewing.
The proposal calls for publicly broadcasting the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting.
When CBS’ “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked whether broadcasting Hasan’s execution could encourage radicalization by turning him into a martyr, Mullin offered a blunt response: “No one has to watch it.”
“I don’t see an elevated risk at this point at all because of this,” Mullin said, arguing that the execution would demonstrate the consequences of attacking Americans.
“I give absolutely zero thought to the way that this man dies,” he added.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that Hasan would be executed by firing squad Dec. 3, with the proceedings livestreamed to the public. The execution would be the first carried out by the U.S. military since 1961.
Secretary Hegseth was asked about the execution of Nidal Hasan:
“No-brainer—execution by firing squad…
Of course we’re doing it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it at 1 o’clock—which is when he did it. It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad.”
The proposal has drawn objections from lawmakers in both parties. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, urged the Pentagon to reverse what she called a “gruesome decision,” warning that the broadcast could provide Hasan with the notoriety and martyrdom he seeks.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., also condemned the proposal, saying public executions belong to oppressive dictatorships, not the United States. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., said he supports Hasan’s death sentence but opposes broadcasting it.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., warned that livestreaming the execution could provide material for terrorist recruitment.
Others have defended the proposal. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas and a longtime Trump ally, argued that public executions demonstrate the sanctity of human life. Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., also expressed support.
Vice President JD Vance has questioned whether the livestream will actually happen, but won’t watch it if it does. And President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would ultimately decide.
The controversy comes less than two weeks after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike, who survived two doses of lethal injection drugs Sept. 30. Pike later regained consciousness, and her attorneys have sought to preserve evidence from the botched procedure.
As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.
The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”
He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”
The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”
Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”
“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”
Trump’s comments are reminiscent of the 2024 smear campaign JD Vance employed against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, seizing on an issue that, as TPM reported at the time, neo-Nazi groups including Blood Tribe and Patriot Front had sought to push to the fore. It’s tempting to predict this rhetoric will backfire in the midterms, but it’s hard to say whether that was the case in 2024: after grotesquely and falsely accusing Haitians of eating pets, Trump and Vance won all seven battleground states and won Ohio by 11 points.
I can imagine, however, that Minnesotans, at this point, are getting tired of this.
Trump Tries Last-Minute Gambit to Pay off Americans
A series of actions by the Republican-led Congress and the Trump administration have dealt significant blows to health care in America — specifically, to Obamacare and Medicaid which, in turn, support rural hospitals.
As a solution, the White House has unveiled two schemes to send Americans small checks — one for $90 to Medicare Part B enrollees and the other for $500 to Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace enrollees who do not receive premium assistance.
That first initiative seriously stretches the law, experts told TPM’s Emine Yücel, describing it to her as a “legally dubious” interpretation of how the executive branch may use the pool of funding it’s tapping into.
This all became an issue in last night’s debate between Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson. Emine reports:
Tabs
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) tore into Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) in last night’s Georgia Senate debate, deploying such lines as, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” Read Layla A. Jones’ recap for TPM here.
ICE agents shot a man in New York City multiple times Thursday while he was in his car. According to New York officials, a five-year-old child was in the back seat.
The Trump administration will livestream the killing by firing squad of the Fort Hood shooter, the first U.S. military execution since 1961. Pete Hegseth is super excited about it.
A New Chapter in Vance’s Effort to Police Who’s American
JD Vance visited Florida yesterday, stumping for candidates in races that for a few cycles have been safely red. Among them was Republicans’ candidate for U.S. Senate, Ashley Moody, who was appointed by governor Ron DeSantis (R) to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is now running for reelection against Angie Nixon, a Florida state legislator. Nixon is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who won a surprise primary victory over Trump impeachment figure Alexander Vindman.
As Vance attacked Nixon, he cast her as a dangerous radical. “When Angie Nixon calls herself a socialist, I think the right response is to say, ‘Then get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America,’” the vice president declared. The crowd cheered.
“The most ordinary man imaginable came to my home state to tell me to ‘get out of America’ while they enjoyed the comfort of buildings my ancestors built,” she wrote on social media. “Imagine standing on the shoulders of the ppl who built this country & then telling their descendants they don’t belong here,” said Nixon, who is Black.
“Wanting lower property insurance & healthcare for families isn’t un-American; it’s what working people deserve,” she continued. “They can take their tech-bro cash and their weird, intrusive agenda somewhere else, because I’m not going any damn place.”
Recent polls in Florida have shown Nixon running behind Moody, and Democrats’ candidate for Florida governor, David Jolly, neck-in-neck with Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Rep. Byron Donalds (R). Trump won Florida in 2024 by 13 points. Vance’s remarks Thursday were in Polk County, a reliable MAGA stronghold.
Vance, who, famously, once mused about whether Trump was merely a “cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful)” or “America’s Hitler,” has attempted a reinvention as a kind of MAGA intellectual. A key aspect of that has been policing who is truly American. He devoted much of his speech at Republicans’ midterm convention to discussing his view of the American “birthright,” and has articulated the idea that those whose ancestors have been in America for longer have greater claim to it.
Defining Americanism by its idealistic principals alone would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said in a 2024 speech to the Claremont Institute, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that as part of its work spreads information about hate groups.
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he added, seeming to suggest that peddlers of hate are more American than members of a group, founded by Jews to fight antisemitism, that denounces them.
Dems Propose to Slash Russ Vought’s Funding if Trump Continues to Violate Anti-Propaganda Laws
A new bill introduced by Senate Democrats seeks to penalize Trump for running campaign ads on the taxpayer’s dime.
Patty Murray (D-WA), the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Committee, introduced the bill, which would cut the White House Office of Management and Budget’s funding by $20 million each time the Trump administration violates laws prohibiting taxpayer funding of propaganda, as it has been in recent days by running campaign ads as “public service announcements.”
One such law violated by these ads is the 2026 appropriations bill, agreed to by members of both parties and signed by Trump, which includes the line: “No part of any appropriation contained in the act or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.”
Actions like this turn the spotlight to appropriations committee chair Susan Collins (R-ME) who has often critiqued the administration’s violation of appropriation laws, but done little to rein it in.
Collins, who is in a reelection fight, has acknowledged that the ads are being payed for with money appropriated to the Department of Homeland Security, and that running them goes “around the appropriations process.”
For more than a year, journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had been trying — and largely failing — to raise awareness about the very strange story of Donald Trump and his aide Natalie Harp. Shortly after the 2024 election, the New York Times journalists published a profile of the lithe blonde in her early 30s, complete with photos of her gazing at Trump adoringly, explaining how she left him love letters with language like, “You are all that matters to me.” On Aug. 16, Haberman was still trying to raise the issue during an appearance on MS NOW, describing Harp as Trump’s “human binky.”
But in the end, it was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who woke up much of the public to this disturbing relationship by mentioning Harp on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” the senator said of Trump, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The defensive reaction from the White House was so over-the-top that it backfired, drawing more attention to the relationship.
But a mystery remained. Haberman, Swan and many others had been talking about Harp, but it wasn’t until Ossoff said something that the White House truly lost their minds.
The reaction likely had little to do with Ossoff’s comments, as elegantly as they were constructed. No, this recoil was more about the messenger than the message. At 39, Ossoff isn’t just young. He is strikingly handsome. The boyish good looks of his early career have matured into something closer to the old-fashioned allure of a 1960s-era movie star, such as Gregory Peck or Warren Beatty. Broad-chested, with great hair and a winning smile, Ossoff has a cool demeanor, good sense of humor and moral seriousness in a proportion that’s rare in politics — and that hasn’t really been seen since Barack Obama. Ossoff, in other words, can get it.
I’m talking about votes.
Put another way, Ossoff is everything the 80-year-old president wishes he were, but isn’t. Harp’s presence is a touchy, daily reminder to both Trump and his staff of the president’s thick catalog failings as a human being. Having a young, handsome, talented man mock Trump for his emotional support aide had to have stung with a special precision. No one needs to tell the president or his staff that Ossoff feels just fine about himself — and doesn’t need a full-time emotional support aide to follow him around, praising his every move.
Considering how much the White House communications staff is extremely online, they are also likely to know that Ossoff has become quite the thirst trap, even among young women and gay men who otherwise aren’t especially political on social media. As Grace Panetta of The 19th recently explained, the senator is a reliable, if unwitting, model for light-hearted crush content, much like what creators generate in tribute to movie stars like Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.
“Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings,” Panetta wrote. Women jokingly call out Ossoff’s “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay” or predict that Ossoff will be “a hot president in my lifetime.” It’s reached the point where a reporter from TMZ asked Ossoff if he has “BDE,” which is not short for Big Dictionary Energy, despite the senator very much seeming like he’d be a fan of Oxford’s quintessential publication.
Ossoff’s sex appeal doesn’t just offer a striking contrast with Trump’s oversized suits and comical combover. He’s also very different than men in the Republican ranks who are closer to his own age and, like himself, are widely seen as potential 2028 presidential candidates. At 42, Vice President JD Vance is also the subject a lot of online content. But most of it portrays him in a comically unflattering manner, with tiny dead eyes, oversized cheeks and a maniacal grin. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, isn’t mocked for his looks, but he is often portrayed as a sad sack, a man too slow-witted and spineless to be much use beyond his role as Trump’s patsy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, is blessed with good looks that even three breakfast gin-and-tonics can’t take away. But with the help of Colin Jost on “Saturday Night Live,” he is mostly viewed like an overgrown frat boy crushing beer cans on his forehead. None come even close to the dreamboat treatment Ossoff receives.
This disparate treatment is especially amusing because the MAGA movement has insisted for years that they are bringing back a more virile masculinity — supposedly to cure all the allegedly poisonous feminism inflicted upon America by those WNBA-loving Democrats. No doubt there are some people impressed by all the workout videos posted by MAGA leaders, though that audience probably doesn’t have much crossover with people who get second dates. But what all the chest-thumping and push-up contests of the right really communicates is overcompensation rather than reclaiming some “lost” masculinity.
Beneath the right’s meltdown over Ossoff’s relatively tame comment about Harp was a molten layer of male insecurity. Steven Cheung, the volatile White House communications director, tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman David Ingle called the senator a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” Both unwisely lobbed these insults from X accounts featuring photos of themselves. The handy comparison left the observer to contemplate how, with MAGA, it’s typically true that every accusation is itself a confession. Similarly, Trump compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman, a reference to a film that is older than the senator and only served to underscore how old and out of touch the president is.
MAGA’s belief that masculinity is on the decline is more a reflection of their personal fears and resentments than an accurate picture of the world. Men who can just act normal continue to do fine, or as much as one can in this economy. As with many of the thirst-trap Democrats that are rising stars, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a large part of Ossoff’s charm is that he possesses an easy masculinity, one comfortable with women’s equality. MAGA influencers may deny it, but men who actually like and respect women tend to be more attractive to women and gay men.
Being chill with women’s power projects confidence. Insecure men are the ones who demand that women are forced into subservient roles, just so men can feel bigger. It speaks to an internal belief that they can’t win without cheating. That’s loser energy, not the Big Dictionary Energy being given off by Ossoff and this new crop of young, vigorous Democratic men.
“Saturday Night Live” imagined a Republican Party scrambling for a winning message ahead of the midterm elections and finding little help from some of its biggest names.
The show’s cold open featured Republican strategists trying to record campaign ads as the party’s prospects were described as “looking bleak,” cycling through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before President Donald Trump stepped in.
Marcello Hernández’s Rubio initially delivered his appeal in Spanish, only to abandon the pitch and admit that he, too, had been duped.
“Oh my God! He tricked us!” Rubio exclaimed, before rattling off Trump’s conflicts with Venezuela, Iran and Canada.
McConnell, played by Mikey Day, was wheeled onto the set and struggled to deliver his lines, while Jeremy Culhane’s Vance was quickly dismissed after introducing himself.
“We can just AI this,” one of the strategists concluded.
Colin Jost’s Hegseth then barged into the shoot and urged Republicans to “do the gayest thing ever and vote,” while parodying the defense secretary’s recent emphasis on religion and culture-war issues at the Pentagon.
“I’m putting God back in war and it’s working,” Jost said. “Our soldiers are praying a lot more than they used to.”
But James Austin Johnson’s Trump eventually decided he had the solution to Republicans’ problems.
“If the Republicans win, I’ll give everyone $5,000,” Johnson said. “And that is not a bribe because I have no intention of following through on that promise.”
Trump has repeatedly promised a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” for every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress in November. The proposal, which would require congressional approval, could cost more than $1 trillion.
White House’s After-the-Fact Justification For Ban Falls Apart
Overnight, U.S. district court judge Timothy Kelly granted the temporary restraining order sought by three news organizations — MS NOW, Politico and CNN — that President Donald Trump had “banned” from the White House.
Kelly, a first-term Trump appointee, found that the White House’s assertion that the stories either “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods,” left open “the possibility that all the stories fall into the later bucket, rather than the former.” The news organizations, he found, were likely to succeed in their arguments that the White House did not use any kind of process in deciding to revoke reporters’ access.
A further bit of absurdity surrounded the White House’s effort to show these reporters were up to no good. All three of the banned outlets got letters saying that they were “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues and publishing sensitive or classified information,” and noting their reliance on “anonymous sources”; the letters then included examples of stories it took issue with.
At least one of those stories, however, was based on a press call the White House set up, and that a White House aide told reporters to attribute to a “senior administration official.”
“The contents of this call are on background, attributable to a senior administration official,” an aide said, according to a recording of the call obtained by the Washington Post. “By remaining on the line, you agree to those terms.”
The media newsletter Status later reported that the “senior administration official” was none other than JD Vance himself.
This may seem odd, but this kind of stuff happens all the time. Government offices and agencies hold formal calls with the press, but ask that the information be kept on background — not attributed to a particular person. I’ve been on dozens of such calls. It’s a little weird that the vice president was the source in this case, and that he was described, somewhat misleadingly, as a “senior administration official.” But the relevant thing here is: These were not leaks jeopardizing national security. They were not leaks at all: the “anonymous source” was speaking at a carefully managed event set up by the White House itself.
This ridiculous twist is not mentioned in Kelly’s middle-of-the-night ruling, but it seems he was nonetheless unimpressed with the amount of due diligence that the White House put into its claims that reporters behaved inappropriately. He had a comical bit of analysis noting that the stories the White House deemed problematic don’t in any way support its solution of banning particular members of the White House Press Corps.
Defendants offer no declarations or other support—classified or unclassified—explaining how any of the reporting they identified in their letters to Plaintiffs damaged the national security. The declarations they do provide include general background about classified information, but the declarants are senior officials in the Department of Defense who have no direct knowledge of how reporters operate in the White House, or about any of the facts at issue here. And supplemental declarations filed by Plaintiffs show that, in most cases, the reporters who authored the stories Defendants identify in their letters did not even hold hard passes. In the remaining cases, Defendants afford no reason to believe that the reporter’s possession of the hard pass was integral to the stories identified.
ICE Operations in Kansas Become a Midterms Issue
UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 22: Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., arrives in the U.S. Capitol for the first vote of the week on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Increased ICE activity in Southwest Kansas is prompting backlash.
Agents in unmarked vans are staking out meat processing facilities and stopping traffic, NPR affiliate KCUR reports.
“A message sent from Dodge City Public Schools asked families to update contact information and alert the district if people not on a student’s emergency contact list would need to pick up children,” KCUR reports. “We may have students whose family members have been detained,” a message from school administrators obtained by the paper read. The message also noted some students may no longer have anyone to care for them, per the Wichita Eagle. “Please help us keep our students safe and cared for,” it said.
At least one meatpacking facility shifted its operation schedule, KCUR reports, and other local businesses closed entirely, according to local NBC affiliate KSNW. “We refuse to pretend it is business as usual,” one business noted by KSNW wrote on Facebook. “We refuse to pressure employees into risking separation from their families just so we can sell another plate of food.”
Democrat Adam Hamilton, the megachurch pastor running for Senate in Kansas, is doing surprisingly well in recent polls. Republican incumbent Roger Marshall addressed the ICE activity in a carefully calibrated X post yesterday, writing, “When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe.”
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.
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.
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.”)
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.
There’s something about JD Vance that makes him almost impossible to assess. Like Bigfoot, he’s a naturally blurry creature. His voice lands somewhere between the parents in Charlie Brown specials and those buzzers they put outside convenience stores to chase off teens. The vice president is hostile architecture in human form, a suit stuffed with charisma’s anti-matter.
This has served him well in his quest for political power. Being instantly forgettable is an asset for someone who made their name as a liberal hillbilly whisperer only to switch to an online edgelord identity at the behest of far-right backers. But if you’re willing to hold and rotate Vance’s recent statements in your mind, you’ll find something uncharacteristically interesting. He’s put the tiniest sliver of distance between himself and President Donald Trump on artificial intelligence, and it provides an inkling of how Republicans might move beyond a decade of Trumpism.
I’ll catch you up on the current AI conversation. Large-language models built by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic keep breaking out of their testing sandboxes. The companies actively promote that their products are breaking the law and hacking into other private businesses, showcasing their power while appearing somewhat concerned with safety. Recently, those same AI CEOs have started pleading for government regulation of artificial intelligence, a “stop me before I kill again” plea that many critics believe is meant to lock in their position at the top of the industry.
Trump has been incredulous about the ask. He has thrown his red hat in with AI boosters and reacted to the idea of slowing down as a slight against his discernment.
Trump has been incredulous about the ask. He has thrown his red hat in with AI boosters and reacted to the idea of slowing down as a slight against his discernment. In a day-long rant on Truth Social, the president said the only “guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart . . . president.” He said that there was a “sick conspiracy . . . against AI and data centers” and that slowing down AI development would leave us behind China on the global stage.
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he wrote. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
In the week since, Vance has taken a slightly more skeptical tone on AI development. On Monday he told reporters on Monday that the U.S. needs to be “careful” about AI. He looked sideways at CEOs’ request for industry regulation, saying that the move might be a “Trojan Horse” masking their true intentions.
“I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” he said. “Any technology has risks. Any new technology brings both risks and benefits . . . I don’t think Americans should be scared of anything.”
Vance kept up the narrowed-eyes view of AI companies during an event later in the week hosted by the “All-In,” comparing Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Victor Frankenstein, and laid the blame for their tinkering at their feet. “Why is it that the people who are at the frontier of the AI economy are throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Well, we’ve built Frankenstein,’ and the solution to Frankenstein apparently is to create a one world governance structure for artificial intelligence?” Vance said. “What I would say to those people: If you’re building Frankenstein, stop. If the cat is out of the bag, then build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein.”
The vice president’s words sound good — like a rap on the knuckles of the tech billionaires who can’t stop claiming they’re building doomsday devices. But a half-second of reflection shows that it’s all flash, no different in substance from what Trump was pushing on Truth Social. The end result of Vance’s “knock it off” grandstanding and Trump’s “eternal AI boom” rah-rahing is the same. AI continues to be unregulated. The money keeps flowing. The only thing that’s changed is a skosh of skepticism making the news.
The Vance pushback is the tip of an iceberg of AI wariness throughout the Trump White House. Per a Friday report from the New York Times, advisers are urging the president to be more cautious in his blanket statements around AI’s safety. Trump reportedly views AI as a “golden goose” and is desperate to keep up the building boom for data centers.
Vance is not the only one among the Republican Party’s 2028 presidential hopefuls trying this trick. Likely candidates such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have painted themselves as slightly wary of AI, but not so skeptical as to endanger the money flowing from the Silicon Valley spigot.
Cruz has been working to block a bill that would require AI companies to submit new models to the government for testing before wide release. He’s said that the idea of an AI-led extinction event is “scary stuff” and called for “some guardrails” on the technology, but he’s balked at extensive government intervention, warning that the market will disincentivize creating Skynet.
“If any company sells a product that causes massive harm, they’ll get sued into oblivion,” he shared on X. “That’s how companies go broke and rich people become poor people.”
Look for this half-twist away from Trump’s over-the-top enthusiasm to appear elsewhere in Republican ranks. Grocery bills and gas prices are rising. The president’s war in Iran, and America’s ongoing support of Israel in its multi-front war throughout the region, are increasingly unpopular. The fight against data centers and private surveillance cameras has crossed partisan lines, bringing erstwhile enemies together in the fight against creepy tech.
National candidates who previously toed the MAGA line will need to find a way to put breathing room between themselves and the agenda they supported, without risking the anger of Trump’s blindly loyal base. Side-eyeing the people responsible for the problem while dutifully stepping out of their way solves that tricky equation. It’s a neat trick — even when Vance does it.
Login
