Photographs by Christopher Lee
The concerns about $4.14-a-gallon gas at the Lincoln Costco an hour and a half to the east? The worries about the war in Iran, the sort of Middle East conflagration this president promised to avoid? The disappointment over the Epstein files, which failed to bring down the alleged network of deep-state pedophiles?
This was not that sort of political event.
Once upon a time, it was practically de minimis for either political party to disavow a candidate facing allegations of domestic violence. But now is not that time.
At first, in the early days and weeks and even years of my dad’s struggle with dementia, he just seemed more deeply himself. Bruce Jay Parker had always been quirky, in ways that generally delighted his friends and acquaintances, and frequently embarrassed his wife and two daughters. Now he was, simply, more so.
After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George.
This story was updated on December 17 at 9:39 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump’s prime-time address tonight included an Oprah-style You get a car! And you get a car! reveal for members of the U.S. military. Specifically, he said that he was giving troops a “war dividend,” a onetime bonus check pegged to a sum with deep patriotic significance: $1,776.
“The checks are already on the way,” Trump said during his address, promising them to more than 1.4 million troops.
It’s hard to overstate just how much the conservative activist Charlie Kirk felt like family to many in Donald Trump’s inner circle, and to the president himself.
Kirk was close friends with Vice President J. D. Vance and with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., regularly texting on small-group threads with them and a coterie of young male aides and allies. He was a frequent and welcome presence at the White House and at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club.
Even the men and women of the National Guard seemed flummoxed, at times, over what exactly they were supposed to be doing in the nation’s capital.
“We’re the president’s patrol, ma’am,” one trio from South Carolina told us when we spotted them along the waterfront and asked what they were up to.
“Just walkin’ around,” replied another gaggle—also strolling along the Potomac.
“Smiling and waving,” a third group, up from West Virginia and stationed along the National Mall, told us.
As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president’s team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump’s regular prime-time pandemic appearances.
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Just before Election Day, a disturbing piece of information made its way to Donald Trump. Whenever he takes or makes calls on his personal cellphone, Trump learned, Chinese hackers could be listening and gathering intelligence.
President Donald Trump’s promised cultural renaissance will begin with misery—specifically, Les Misérables.
Trump plans to attend a showing of the musical at the Kennedy Center next month and host a private fundraising reception beforehand, marking the first performance he will attend at the center as president and his first effort to raise funds for the institution he now runs, two people familiar with the fundraiser told us.
In his first term, Trump rejected Washington, D.C.
In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany.
Long live the king!
Down with the king!
President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.
Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.
President Donald Trump’s promise—and subsequent executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America displayed a showman’s flair for branding.
Today Trump could take that showmanship a step further when Air Force One flies him across the Gulf of Mexico from his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, to New Orleans for the Super Bowl.
As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.
The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.
President Donald Trump intended his flood of executive orders to shock and awe his opponents. But on Monday night, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget instead shocked the Trump White House.
That memo, with its call for a “temporary pause” to all federal-government grants and loans, set off widespread panic and confusion within the federal government and among the millions of individuals and institutions reliant on federal funds.