It Is Happening Every Day, Every Where
In positioning himself as a junior partner to the president and doing his bidding on matters large and small, the Louisiana Republican is diminishing a job that involves leading a coequal branch of government.
During President Trump’s first term, demanding personal loyalty didn’t always work; stocking top jobs with loyalists is the tack now. At the F.B.I., this entails bucking its institutional history.
The president also ordered the Pentagon to end diversity programs, reinstate many service members dismissed for refusing the coronavirus vaccine and create a new missile defense system.
The termination of more than a dozen lawyers who worked with the special counsel, Jack Smith, came hours after the department’s most senior career official was reassigned.
The full extent of the order was not immediately clear, but the directive sent to government agencies on Monday threatened to paralyze a vast swath of federal programs.
Bessent, a hedge fund manager, becomes the nation’s 79th Treasury secretary. He will lead President Trump’s economic agenda.
The full scope of the Friday night mass firings was coming into sharper view as one fired watchdog official warned of “a never-ending cycle of politicization.”
The president’s confrontational foreign policy has created opportunity for his allies on K Street who are willing to take on clients he has targeted.
There were no Situation Room meetings and no quiet calls to de-escalate a dispute with an ally. Just threats, counterthreats, surrender and an indication of the president’s approach to Greenland and Panama.
Corey Amundson chose to leave the department after being told he was being reassigned by the Trump administration to a position related to immigration enforcement.