Ben Domenech

From the moment you enter Donald J. Trump’s Oval Office, you are surrounded, not by staff or Secret Service, but by presidents. In his second term, he has chosen to envelop himself in Americana to an unprecedented degree. He faces Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his desk. Looking back are Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, McKinley, Polk, Jackson, Jefferson, and alone among them as a non-president, Franklin. Ronald Reagan looks over his shoulder for every decision he makes. “We took them out of the vaults. We have incredible vaults of things,” he tells me. “They have 3,900 paintings.” It’s a roster of the greatest American leaders assembled in an oval around him in their most sterling depictions. They serve as motivation.

The strangest thing happened last night: the Democratic Party, which has built its success in recent years thanks almost entirely to framing themselves as the candidates espousing normalcy versus the chaos offered by Republicans, showed up to Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress and cried havoc. Part of this may be due to institutional decay. The sight of a weakened Nancy Pelosi murmuring to Steny Hoyer in advance of the speech served as a reminder of the strongarm tactics from the Democratic leadership class that used to restrain their far-left wing from losing its shit in public with all the restraint of a toddler denied their binky.

Palm Beach, Florida Casey DeSantis is running for Florida governor. That is simply a matter of accepted knowledge for the West Palm Beach denizens gathered at the Flagler Museum on a breezy evening among the palm trees. But it's still astonishing to see how quickly she adapts to the role and inhabits it in a bright pink pantsuit. The far more telegenic half of the gubernatorial team, who benefits from a Myers-Briggs score that begins with "E" instead of "I," delivered a speech last week that put a strong emphasis on "we" at every juncture — what "we" accomplished for Florida, how "we" pushed back against Joe Biden's foolishness and how close "we" believe the loss of Florida's model could be should Democrats prevail in the state her husband helped turn bright flaming red.

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week. Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping.

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.

Despite frequent claims that Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to be director of national intelligence was in danger, repeated ad nauseam in the Washington press, ultimately she didn't even need J.D. Vance to come back to break a tie. Only Mitch McConnell broke with the rest of his Republican colleagues to oppose her confirmation, which — as I've previously written — was never in doubt once she got out of the Intelligence Committee.  Yet it's worth noting one of the untoward prices paid along the way, given the egregious nature of its violation of the separation of powers.

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.

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.

For the past several years, the air traffic I see out the windows of my office has been constant — a regularly occurring string of flights headed north up the Potomac toward Ronald Reagan International Airport, and others headed south after taking off. Yesterday morning was the first time I can remember seeing the skies utterly clear of traffic, as the ferry boats that normally take tourists and visitors from port to port along the river were instead repurposed as salvage vehicles for divers seeking out the remains of the passengers lost in the crash of American Eagle Flight 5342 and soldiers flying the Army Black Hawk it collided with a mere 400 feet above the water.

Tulsi Gabbard has been roundly described for weeks as the Trump cabinet nominee with the most narrow path to approval, with multiple media sources suggesting that she does not have the Republican votes to win should she even get out of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But if that is the case, it wasn’t on display in her performance before the committee today — not in her presentation, her chosen backers, nor in the lines of questioning from Republican members. It has been widely suggested that two senators, Todd Young of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine, could potentially break with Trump by siding against Gabbard in the behind-the-scenes vote on her nomination.

The temperatures at game time in Kansas City and Buffalo this weekend were in the high teens and the low 20s, respectively, before both sank even lower as day turned to night. The temperature in Washington on Capitol Hill when Donald Trump began to give his second inauguration address was -2ºC a far cry from the -14ºC that forced Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural indoors. It turns out more people find it far more important to root for their team even in the face of frigid wind and swirling snow than to cheer on the swearing in of a new/old president — which indicates to me that the American people have their priorities straight.

Pete Hegseth was the first cabinet nominee to the breach, leading Donald Trump’s collection of outsiders, populists and hellraisers into the Capitol Hill combat they can all expect to navigate in the coming weeks. And in terms of a first confrontation with the opponent, Hegseth handled his mission manfully — taking the slings and arrows from the Democratic side of the aisle with relative ease. At one point, exasperated Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal — you’ll remember him from not serving in Vietnam and falsely claiming that he did — said, “I don’t dispute your communication skills.” And how could he? Hegseth seemed more than ready to address the accusations from Senate Democrats head on, and the Republicans on the committee seemed unperturbed by their attacks.