Jonathan Chait

The world will little note, nor long remember, the Katie Zacharia era. Indeed, the tenure of the second White House press secretary of Donald Trump’s second term, which ended after five days and a single, 14-minute press conference, is already receding into memory.
Yet what matters more than her press-secretarial contributions, or the ideas she stood for, is the period Zacharia represents: the Trump administration’s reversion to the hapless chaos of the president’s first term.

A large majority of the Republican Party, including many officials who initially viewed Donald Trump with deep skepticism, decided early in Trump’s first term that the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election were the hysterical product of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the Deep State and the media. There was no mystery to solve, no scandal to uncover, in Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin. And yet this strange alliance continues to bedevil American foreign policy.

In February 2024, according to a former staff member who told the story to The New York Times, Representative Mary Peltola, an Alaska Democrat running for the Senate, pushed an aide. As the Times put it in a report published yesterday, Peltola “shoved a male employee in the chest with one hand, causing him to stumble backward.”
You might wonder why the paper of record is reporting this detail.

Donald Trump is presiding over a failing presidency and lashing out at the news media—most recently by banning CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House. There might seem to be a connection between these two things, but the causal link is not that Trump is punishing the press because he is failing; rather, it’s the opposite. His inability to govern is in part a consequence of his hatred for the news media.

The current New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has affronted one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, by taking the inflammatory step of deciding to attend the city’s 9/11 commemoration. “It offends me,” Giuliani proclaimed earlier this week on Newsmax.
One might suspect that the nature of Mamdani’s offense lay in his being a politician who is associating himself with a day that Giuliani prefers to associate with Giuliani. But the former mayor proceeded to lay out a much darker rationale.

Is Donald Trump trying to help Republicans win the midterm elections? The obvious answer to this question is yes, of course, simply because all political leaders benefit from their party winning elections. Yet several of Trump’s actions throw this normally perfunctory question into at least some doubt.
Traditionally, candidates laboring under the burden of an unpopular president seek to detach themselves from the national brand. Trump is making this impossible.

When J. D. Vance was asked at a press conference on Thursday about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, the media personality and ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist, he displayed a surprising side of himself: human, vulnerable, almost touchingly naive.
“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” the vice president said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.

“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Donald Trump said when he announced the capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. And lo and behold, it has come to pass.
Trump announced last week that he had made a deal with Venezuela to develop its oil reserves. Well, not so much a “deal” as a payment by Venezuela of tribute at gunpoint.

The lie is the elemental matter of the Trump administration. The value of lying is Donald Trump’s deepest belief. He built his celebrity image through shameless and constant deceit that permitted him to bounce from blunder to blunder while constantly reeling in new suckers. Lying is also what binds his loyalists to him: The highest calling of any figure in Trump world is to refuse any concessions to reality when Trump commands it, and the surest ticket to oblivion is to speak the truth.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.

Speaking to reporters today about the war with Iran, President Trump delivered an inspiring pep talk praising the courage and resilience of a brave nation retaining its fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Alas, the subject of his praise was the Iranians.
“Their entire navy is laying at the bottom of the sea,” he said. “They had 200 airplanes—they’re all gone. Every one. They don’t have one airplane. They had anti-aircraft weaponry, very good, but it didn’t work, and it’s all gone.

Last September, the progressive strategist Morris Katz confessed to The New Yorker that the process by which he decided that Graham Platner was qualified to run for U.S. Senate required less time than drinking a cup of coffee. Actually, it seems to have been less a confession than a boast. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” Katz recalled.

Donald Trump cares deeply about the Justice Department, and he appears to care about exactly one thing: an attorney general who will do whatever he says, specifically in the realm of trying to lock up as many of his political enemies as possible.
William Barr, a former attorney general under Trump and an esteemed legal mind within the conservative movement, also cares deeply about the Justice Department, but for different reasons.

Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”
Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.

An irony of the Iran war is that Donald Trump, whose patience for written texts and policy details is famously negligible, came to grasp the reality of the situation more quickly and clearly than his neoconservative supporters who spent years obsessing over the issue.

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The president of the United States announced last month that, in place of performances by Martina McBride, Young MC, the surviving members of the Commodores, one member of Poison, and other sought-after musicians who had dropped out after being recruited on apparently false pretenses, he would personally provide the entertainment for a 250th-anniversary celebration of American independence.

The most important outcome of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary may be that the Republican Party no longer accepts the legitimacy of election defeats. This reflex has spread up and down the party, to everyone including the trailing candidate, Spencer Pratt, and the president of the United States, who grew so enraged when the Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker challenged his election denial that he left the set mid-interview.
The refusal to accept the prospect of a Republican defeat in L.

Donald Trump’s most amusing habit is meting out casual abuse to his sycophants. His recent answer to a question about the wedding of Donald Trump Jr. may, depending on how deserving one deems Trump’s eldest son of mistreatment—poor Don Jr. was, after all, born into the Trump life—qualify as his most hilarious riff ever.
The scene is the Oval Office, today, midday. Trump is asked by a reporter whether he plans to attend Don Jr.’s wedding to the Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson this weekend.

Donald Trump, probably by mistake, said something honest the other day.
Appearing on the White House lawn Tuesday afternoon, Trump was asked by a reporter to what extent Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” Trump replied, before elaborating: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.

The model of an authoritarian leader that the 20th century instilled in the Western imagination is a master of lies. Big Brother commands a machinery of propaganda that bombards his subjects with relentless projections of strength, combined with savaging of enemies real or imagined.

The debate over Israel’s war with Hamas has been unusually vicious in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where pro-Palestine activists have vandalized, spat on, and menaced targets they deemed too Zionist.

President Trump welcomed the British monarch King Charles III to the White House yesterday and gave a speech that, on its surface, expressed warmth between the two countries. But its true purpose was darker. Trump’s speech stamped his imprimatur on an ascendant view of American history and politics—one that is controversial even on the American right, and that walks up to the edge of white nationalism.

Hasan Piker has attracted millions of followers across multiple social-media platforms, making him one of the most popular left-wing streamers. He has been the subject of several flattering magazine profiles that have lingered over what they describe as his handsome looks and bodybuilder physique. Some progressives see him as their long-sought entry point into alternative media that can reach a young, mainly male, audience.

Updated at 6:54 p.m. ET on March 17, 2026
In February 2025, Donald Trump nominated Joe Kent, a 2020-election conspiracy theorist with links to the Proud Boys and white supremacists, as head of the National Counterterrorism Center. What could possibly go wrong?
Kent’s beliefs did not complicate his tenure, during which Trump continued smearing minorities and insisting the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. The sticking point, rather, became the war in Iran.

Updated at 7:52 p.m. ET on March 5, 2026
Kristi Noem’s autobiography includes the harrowing story of her decision to put down her dog, Cricket. The ill-fated pet had first ruined a hunting foray by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and went on to kill several chickens belonging to a neighbor. Noem then decided she had to shoot Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she recounts, “but it had to be done.

When the government stomps on some once-inviolable right, it may be carrying out the next step in a concerted plan, or it may just be stumbling clumsily. The proper response in these moments is not to wax hysterical, but instead to draw clear moral lines. That is especially true for powerful people with the ability to make themselves heard.

On January 6, Donald Trump’s administration published an apologia for the Trump supporters whom he incited to storm the Capitol five years earlier. The next day, Stephen Miller, in response to news that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, lambasted the Democratic Party on X for “inciting a violent insurrection.”
The juxtaposition of the January 6 anniversary and the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota the next day is a coincidence of timing.

President Donald Trump’s fans like to cheer on his most audacious moves by declaring, “I voted for this.” It is safe to assume, though, that very few people who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 expected that he would soon announce that he had seized control over Venezuela. One of Trump’s most popular qualities has always been his supposed opposition to foreign wars, his anti-imperialist isolationism. Yet J. D.

In the opening scene of the black comedy The Death of Stalin, a violinist in Moscow is told her orchestra is giving a command performance for Joseph Stalin, and refuses to play on political grounds. A frantic radio director, fearing he will be arrested or shot if he fails to produce the concert in time, begs her to reconsider, finally prevailing with an offer of 20,000 rubles.
Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation.

The year is 2029. President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having spent years raging against Fox News as a propaganda organ whose very operation is illegal, has found a pressure point to control it. She enables its sale to owners who are friends of hers, and whose business depends on regulatory favors she has made a practice of doling out to allies. As the new editor in chief of Fox News, the owners install Tim Miller, a skeptic of conservatism who has never previously worked in television news.