Steve Witkoff emptied his backpack on the conference table in his second-floor office, in the West Wing. He wanted to show me a pager given to him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials of the Mossad. The pager commemorates the intricate operation in which Israel detonated handheld devices used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group, killing or maiming thousands of its operatives.
After Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief in a group chat about military attack plans on the Signal messaging app, he found himself on very thin ice with his boss.
But President Donald Trump and his advisers were loath to take a political hit by firing Waltz, especially within the first 100 days of the new administration. The 100-day mark passed yesterday.
The national security adviser seemed at a loss.
It fell to Michael Waltz to explain to handpicked members of his staff this month why the president had ordered their dismissal after a meeting with Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who rose to prominence by making incendiary anti-Muslim claims and who last year shared a video that labeled 9/11 an “inside job.”
“He was upset and couldn’t explain it,” a person familiar with Waltz’s reaction told me.
In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.”
The implication: Nothing to see here.
Last week, when the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison cut a deal with President Donald Trump to break free from an executive order that could have ruined its business, the powerhouse firm framed the concessions as a mere reaffirmation of its principles. Those principles include: “We refuse to be deterred by the unpopularity of a client or his cause.
On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.
The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.
Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”
The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.