Jonathan Lemire

It was supposed to be easy. In the weeks after President Trump authorized the military raid to snatch Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, he would tell pretty much any audience about how flawlessly the operation had gone. During a late-January phone call with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who was seething after federal immigration agents killed two of his residents, the president dominated the conversation by going into great detail about the Caracas incursion.

Here’s how much things have changed since Donald Trump last addressed Congress: A year ago, he shouted out a beaming Elon Musk, who was watching in the gallery.
At the time, Trump was triumphant. But tomorrow night, when he returns to the Capitol to deliver the State of the Union address, he will be trying to turn around a stumbling presidency. His prized tariffs have been sharply curtailed by the Supreme Court. His most visible immigration push—federal surges into U.S.

Republicans have had a tough stretch. They were defeated in elections in the fall and find themselves at risk of losing control of one or maybe both chambers of Congress later this year. Their standard-bearer, President Trump, has tumbled in the polls and finds himself underwater on his two signature issues, the economy and immigration. There has been unrest in a major American city, and blood shed by Trump’s federal agents.

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously illustrated with a simple metaphor the need for a healthy transatlantic alliance. Justifying his decision to lend Great Britain warships and other military supplies in the early days of World War II, Roosevelt likened it to loaning a neighbor a garden hose to put out the fire consuming his house. Sure, Roosevelt charitably wanted to help a neighbor in need. But it was self-interested too; if the neighbor could extinguish the blaze, it wouldn’t spread to FDR’s home.

Scarcely a week ago, U.S. warplanes and drones were streaking across the Caracas night sky to deliver a swift end to the reign of the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. The extraordinary display of kinetic violence delivered a stunning reminder about the reach of the world’s most powerful military—and symbolized the start of a new chapter for the man who commands it.
Donald Trump has been emboldened.

Hey, remember April?
When President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office at the end of that month, he was on a seemingly unstoppable roll. After taking four years out of office to prepare, he and his team returned to power with a blitz of more than 140 executive orders. He bent the Republican-controlled Congress to his will and dismantled much of the federal bureaucracy.

Susie Wiles styles herself as a White House chief of staff who avoids being in the headlines. When cameras come into the Oval Office, she tends to sit just out of frame. She rarely gives interviews. Unlike her predecessors, she seldom tries to curb President Donald Trump’s impulses.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election.
That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.

Since his return to office, President Donald Trump has missed few chances to flex the power he wields over the nation’s most formidable institutions and its wealthiest people. So when the White House announced that Trump would host the latest in a series of dinners with top business executives, this time including JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon and the chief executive of Nasdaq, reporters in the White House press pool prepared to watch Trump show off.
Nope.

Zohran Mamdani will be the unlikeliest mayor in New York City history. A 34-year-old backbench state assemblyman and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Mamdani ran on the promise of affordability and was declared the winner not long after polls closed tonight. On his path to victory, he thrilled young voters in a way that few Democrats have in years. But perhaps no one was more delighted by his election than President Donald Trump.

The week began with a diplomatic breakthrough and a (fragile) cease-fire in a years-long war. It ends with another conflict stuck in a bloody, frustrating rut. Donald Trump has made it his mission to achieve peace in both. But the deal to halt the fighting in Gaza and return the last living Israeli hostages came about in part because Trump used his leverage to push both sides to make concessions.

The week began with a diplomatic breakthrough and a (fragile) cease-fire in a years-long war. It ends with another conflict stuck in a bloody, frustrating rut. Donald Trump has made it his mission to achieve peace in both. But the deal to halt the fighting in Gaza and return the last living Israeli hostages came about in part because Trump used his leverage to push both sides to make concessions.

If the secret to understanding a strongman is to identify his greatest weakness, one place to start with Donald Trump is his obsession with his own eventual obituaries. Trump knows that they will mention his history-making presidencies, his ostentatious wealth, and his unusual charisma—but he also is aware that when he dies, people will remember his conviction on 34 felony counts, and that there is nothing he can do about it.

The world laughed at Donald Trump.
Seven years ago, Trump was just a few sentences into his annual United Nations General Assembly address when most of the gathered leaders of the 193 countries represented began to chuckle—and then outright guffaw. A visibly startled Trump had been boasting about his administration’s successes; he had long claimed that other nations mocked his presidential predecessors, and now it was happening to him. Trump later publicly downplayed the moment.

As Kamala Harris rushed to pick a running mate last year, her “first choice” was her close friend Pete Buttigieg, but she decided that it would be “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man.
Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.

So what was that all for?
President Donald Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say. Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage. But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting, Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed. Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference, he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska.

Donald Trump has almost certainly complained more about journalists than any of his predecessors have, maybe more than all of them combined. So when Trump deemed a query “the nastiest question” he’s ever gotten from a member of the press, it was notable.
The moment came in May, when CNBC’s Megan Cassella asked Trump about “TACO,” an acronym for “Trump always chickens out.

President Donald Trump is finally taking the fight to Vladimir Putin. Sort of. For now.
Trump’s deference to Russia’s authoritarian leader has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. But his frustration with Putin has grown. Last week, the president said the United States was taking “a lot of bullshit” from Putin. Today, he authorized a significant shipment of U.S.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is law. Now what?
Not quite six months into his new term, President Donald Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises. He has cut taxes, launched trade wars, frustrated longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and slashed the federal government. He steamrolled the opposition, including members of his own party, to push through Congress a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation that contains nearly his entire domestic agenda.

After its demoralizing defeat in November, the Democratic Party has undertaken an agonizing, months-long self-autopsy to determine how it lost some of its core voters and how to move past an entrenched, older generation of leaders. Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive winner of yesterday’s New York City mayoral primary, might provide some of the answers—to a point.

The MAGA movement usually displays remarkable unity in attacking the left. But Israel’s military assault on Iran has splintered President Donald Trump’s coalition, as rival factions fight over the true meaning of an “America First” foreign policy.
Right-wing figures have descended into vicious debate over whether the White House should take a more active role in Israel’s bombardment of Iran—one that, with American help, could dismantle Tehran’s nuclear program or even lead to regime change.

For once, President Donald Trump was trying to be the adult in the room.
Trump and Elon Musk, two billionaires with massive egos and combustible temperaments, had forged an unlikely friendship over the past year, one built on proximity, political expediency, and, yes, a touch of genuine warmth. Relations between the president and his top benefactor had grown somewhat strained in recent weeks, as Trump began to feel that Musk had overstayed his welcome in the West Wing.

Like so many stories about Donald Trump, this one begins with a tweet.
More than a decade ago, Trump mused about whether Vladimir Putin would attend a beauty pageant that Trump was sponsoring in Moscow and, if so, whether Putin would “become my new best friend.

For years, President Donald Trump has bragged that he, and only he, could bring an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. “I’ll have that done in 24 hours,” he said repeatedly during his most recent presidential campaign. Once back in the White House, he told advisers to plan for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the hope of creating a made-for-TV spectacle during which he could formally announce a resolution to the war, two administration officials and an outside adviser told me.

As Air Force One glided into Doha today, it was easy to imagine President Donald Trump having a case of jet envy.
Hamad International Airport, in Qatar’s capital, is sometimes home to the $400 million “palace in the sky,” a luxury liner that Trump is eyeing. Qatar’s royal family plans to give the plane to Trump as a temporary replacement for the aging Air Force One and then to his future presidential library after he leaves office.

President Donald Trump has long made “No retreat, no surrender” his guiding ethos, refusing to apologize or acknowledge mistakes and declaring that he’s the brawler in chief for the American people. His instinct to pump his fist and yell “Fight, fight” in the moments after being shot on the campaign trail became a defining image of his victory last year. He scowls in his official portraits—and in his mug shot—and has stared down world leaders most American presidents would deem friends.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared sensitive attack plans in a Signal group chat. No, not that one—a different one. Some of his top Pentagon aides have been ousted, but few in the building are sure what they were ousted for, or even by whom. And the talk in Washington revolves around who might be on the short list to replace him, even as President Donald Trump delivered a firm defense of Hegseth today while standing a few feet away from a giant bunny.

Ask President Donald Trump’s aides and allies, and they’ll tell you that the proclamation that jolted the stock market this afternoon was all part of the president’s grand plan to reset America’s trade imbalance. An aggressive push on tariffs had prompted dozens of countries to come begging Trump for mercy. Once they did, he offered them a 90-day reprieve while escalating the pressure on China. The decision sent the markets into a celebratory frenzy.

During Donald Trump’s first term, advisers who wanted to check his most dramatic impulses reliably turned to two places to act as guardrails: the stock market and cable news. If the markets reacted badly to something Trump did, they found, he would likely change course to match Wall Street’s moves.

President Donald Trump didn’t know what Signal was.
Shortly before facing reporters yesterday afternoon, Trump was told by aides about a story publishing in The Atlantic disclosing that the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been accidentally added to a group chat on the messaging app Signal, two White House officials told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.