Trump administration

National Harbor, Maryland President Donald Trump capstoned a three-day CPAC pep rally with a message of… well, Trump. To be fair, that’s what virtually everybody else at the conference was speaking about too. The ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort was packed. In the build-up members of the Trump administration and world leaders had taken the stage, but make no mistake: the attendees were here to see the president himself. Trump entered to rapturous applause. After his signature move of standing before the podium for the entirety of “God Bless the USA,” he addressed the audience. “We fought through hell together, but in the end, we achieved the great liberation of America,” he said. “Kamala?” Trump asked himself, as if searching for a forgotten memory.

National Harbor, Maryland Elon Musk made a surprise appearance at CPAC Thursday afternoon, where Argentinian president Javier Milei presented him with a chainsaw. “This is a chainsaw for bureaucracy!” Musk said, brandishing it before a whooping crowd. The Department of Government Efficiency chief took to the stage with Newsmax host Rob Schmitt. Musk wore his MAGA hat — “dark gothic MAGA!” as he said — a black jacket and mirror shades, which he kept on for the duration of his appearance. The X CEO called for America to “legalize comedy” and agreed with Schmitt that legacy media companies receiving USAID money from the federal government were becoming “mouthpieces for the state.

When your fiercest loyalists are accusing your government of being taken over by Elon Musk, who they brand a “parasitic illegal immigrant,” what’s the best way to respond? Donald Trump opted for a side-by-side interview with the X CEO on Fox News, speaking to Sean Hannity, the anchor with whom he remains friendliest.  And for all the attempts — both from inside and outside the conservative tent — to drive a wedge between Trump and tech billionaire Musk, the two seemed chummier than ever.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMbcMO5JgEo&ab_channel=FoxNews Responding to Hannity’s claim that the mainstream media wants to see the pair get a divorce, Trump was nonplussed.

I’ve managed to keep most of my liberal family relationships and friendships intact, even after going public about voting for Trump. Most of them shrugged and applied the principle our grandparents taught us — blood is thicker than politics. That is, until Elon Musk. He has proven to be the straw that broke the liberals’ back. Realizing that they’d rendered calling Trump “literally Hitler” ineffective, many normie Democrats and liberal commentators have redirected this energy toward the “Chief Twit." First there was the hand gesture at the post-inauguration rally.

Consider it the first tangible example of Donald Trump’s Western Hemisphere policy made real. The president’s day-one Executive Order calling for the “total elimination” of multiple cartels is now getting its teeth in the form of a list drawn up by the Department of State designating eight different groups based across Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations, according to the New York Times.

For the proponents of what they like to call realism and restraint in foreign affairs, it’s been a banner day. President Donald Trump has initiated peace talks with Russia by sidelining Ukraine. And Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed to become director of national intelligence — overseeing eighteen agencies — on a 52-48 vote. At the White House, where she was sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump declared that Gabbard is “an American of extraordinary courage and exceptional patriotism.”   The sole Republican to dissent from her nomination was Mitch McConnell who has vowed to uphold oldline Republican internationalism during what is more than likely his final term in the Senate.

With Donald Trump moving so rapidly on so many fronts, it is hard to grasp the big picture. What are his overriding goals, politically and electorally? What has he already accomplished?  Here is a summary in case you are keeping score. Trump has done more in a few weeks than any president in history. He took office with a coherent, detailed program and control of Congress (though a very narrow majority in the House). He is acting swiftly before his political capital dissipates.  Trump hopes to sustain his winning electoral coalition beyond his time in office. That’s why he chose a young populist, J.D. Vance, as his vice president and presumptive successor.

Fresh off guiding a series of President Trump’s nominees through the high-wire act of the cabinet approval process in the Senate, Vice President J.D. Vance has a new assignment: acting as sherpa for the even more difficult task of a potential sale of TikTok. Punchbowl reports today that Vance, along with national security advisor Mike Waltz, will be taking on the challenge of living up to one of Trump’s more audacious promises, given that they’re up against a ticking clock, an unwilling seller in ByteDance and very real security concerns about the power of the Chinese Communist Party that must be satisfied for any sale to take place.

Since 9/11, Washington has spent billions of dollars promoting “democratic norms” abroad. The policy mirrored the late Soviet Union's attempts to promote communism in countries outside Moscow’s direct control, as witnessed under the leadership Leonid Brezhnev. And now at last it appears to have ended, following Donald Trump's executive orders and yesterday’s State Department takeover of the United States Agency for International Development. This American Brezhnev policy has had a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland effect: democratically elected leaders such as Ukraine’s ill-fated Viktor Yanukovych could be violently overthrown in the name of democracy.

For the past month, the tone among Washington insiders was dour as it related to the confirmation prospects of Donald Trump’s edgier nominees. Sure, the argument went, Marco Rubio is a slam dunk, and no one takes issue with Doug Burgum or Sean Duffy. But the attitude toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health and human services secretary and Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as director of national intelligence were grim. More than a dozen Republican insiders in the past week assured me that one or both nominations were doomed, citing the opposition from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, legacy newspaper columnists such as David French and Marc Thiessen and the editors of National Review, who took a particularly aggressive stance against Gabbard. All of them lost.