Trump administration

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower and into political history. The press corps snickered. The consultant class rolled its eyes. Late-night comedians feasted on the spectacle. Most people thought it was a joke. What they missed – and still miss – is that Trump didn’t invent the anger that powered his campaign. He simply noticed it first. The pundits focused on Trump’s bombast. But voters were focused on something else entirely: someone, finally, was saying out loud what they’d been thinking for years. Take China. In 2015, Trump said, “They’re ripping us off.” It wasn’t elegant. But it was true.

Washington, DC “Every other country celebrates their victories, it’s about time America did too,” Donald Trump told a whooping, albeit smaller-than-anticipated crowd on the National Mall tonight. “We’re the hottest country in the world right now,” the President boasted. Temperature-wise, that’s debatable. But he’s right that the whole world has been watching on, as the President turned his plans for a military parade from conception into reality. If you gave a 79-year-old man some say in what he did for his birthday, he’d choose one of two things: nap, or pay a laudatory tribute to the US military that everyone had to watch.

It’s all war all the time inside Steve Bannon’s War Room in Capitol Hill.  "We're in the Third World War," he tells me. "And it's a battlefield that's everywhere, including in downtown Los Angeles." The weekend’s riots in LA, he insists, are part of an orchestrated push by nefarious forces in America to stoke civil unrest in America. The Democrats, he says, "allowed in 10 to 13 million illegal alien invaders into this country. They all must go home. All. Not some. All must go home. They must be deported. They must go home or we don't have a country, OK?" We’re in for another of summer of riots, says Bannon. "They just kicked it off," he says.

The Trump-Musk spat is not the sign of a new split between oligarchs and populists, as some have claimed – but of the growing pains involved in reassembling this old coalition.  Keeping capitalism going under mass suffrage is no small feat, and capitalists used to be much shrewder in how they went about it. Electorates wouldn’t reliably go for laissez-faire – except after a crisis – and so the only option for the capitalists was to hitch themselves to the wider lower-middle-class coalition for law and order, low taxes and national swagger. Musk’s attacks on Trump yesterday, which included a pitch for a new party “that actually represents the 80 percent in the middle,” represent something drawing to a close rather than being born.

There’s something admirable about Melania Trump’s commitment to doing absolutely nothing. While America obsesses over her husband’s latest provocations, the First Lady has opted for absence – and turned it into a pretty lucrative enterprise. Consider this month’s rare emergence from her self-imposed exile. As rumors swirled that Donald’s vendetta against Harvard stemmed from the university rejecting their son Barron, Melania was finally compelled to issue a public statement. The denial was characteristically terse: Barron never applied to Harvard, and all such assertions are “completely false.

It turns out that Joe Biden is one of the best things ever to happen to Donald Trump. Sure, Trump was so peeved by his loss to Biden in 2020 that he inspired an abortive insurrection against Congress, but his defeat gave him a grace period of four years to prepare for a fresh term. If the rapidity with which he is upending the federal government is anything to go by, Trump benefited immensely from his protracted exile in Mar-a-Lago, not to mention the welter of court cases, federal and state, that he endured. Now Trump is exploiting Biden once more to provide a further fillip to his political fortunes.

On the ground floor of Georgetown Park, Donald Trump Jr. is putting the finishing touches on his invitation-only club, the Executive Branch. When the doors open, reportedly in the next few weeks, it will become Washington’s new power hangout. Cabinet secretaries will mingle with tech billionaires and foreign investors, each having parted with $500,000 for the privilege. The launch party last month included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson. David Sacks, the President's crypto and AI czar, proudly announced himself as member number one. This tableau – celebrity, politics, profit – perfectly captures the Trump dynasty’s particular brand.

Few people can claim the mantle of being more identified with the anti-Deep State MAGA movement than Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the Director and Deputy Director of the FBI, who sat down for a lengthy conversation with Maria Bartiromo this weekend. Yet they responded with surprisingly out of character language to the continued conspiracizing around the death of Jeffrey Epstein – the New York financier – and the possibility of a wider plot to assassinate Donald Trump. If anyone was going to reveal hidden secrets of the Deep State, it would be these two, who have railed against its excesses on media platforms for years before taking their posts.

Now more than ever, Donald Trump appears to be channeling his inner Lord Palmerston. It was the 19th-century prime minister, after all, who went down in the history books for his declaration that England had no permanent enemies or allies. Generations of statesmen have recited that gelid precept, but Trump is one of the few who actually seems prepared to act upon it. Speaking in Riyadh, he implored Iran – the longtime bugbear of Washington hawks, including Trump’s defenestrated national security advisor Mike Waltz – to strike out upon a new course, vowing that there are no “permanent enemies” for America.

It was an emollient J.D. Vance who showed up at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington, DC. Gone was the Vance who dissed the Europeans in Munich on February 15 by complaining that they were practicing censorship of political views and who met with a representative of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Gone was the Cerberus who barked at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the Oval Office on February 24 that he had exhibited a dismaying lack of gratitude toward America for its assistance to his beleaguered nation. Gone was the Ohio senator who declared in July 2024 that he didn’t give a fig about Ukraine’s fate and was more interested in pursuing an Asia First policy.