Michael Scherer

They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world’s wealthiest online troll.
On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located.

Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is moving quickly.
On Friday night, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter informed board members that some of their colleagues had already received termination notices from the administration. And she said that Trump appears to have the legal authority to take the unprecedented step of firing them before their six-year terms expire.

Updated at 7:48 p.m. on February 7, 2025
Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he first came to Washington. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to let that happen again.

Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories as litigants rush to settle their cases. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest.

On the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a group of his top billionaire donors, including the casino magnate Miriam Adelson and the future Republican National Committee finance chair Todd Ricketts, hosted a small private party, away from the publicly advertised inaugural balls.
It was the sort of event that carried no interest at the time for the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.