Dear Dispatch readers,
Can the center of Donald Trump’s Washington keep on holding? In the short term, the answer is probably “yes,” but it’s likely a question we’ll keep asking, week after week, for the next few years. That’s because the Trump administration tends to stumble, like a drunk trying to maintain his footing, from one incident or scandal or upheaval to the next. It makes following the news, let alone covering it as a journalist, a dizzying endeavor.
There’s the ongoing back-and-forth in the courts, where lawsuits over just about everything—from the activities of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to the deportations of accused illegal immigrants to the implementation of tariffs—threaten to cut short Trump’s agenda while the administration is straight-up defying court orders. Speaking of those tariffs, this week’s apparent market rally, after several weeks of dramatic collapse in response to the announcement of those trade actions, appears to have been a response to a leaked closed-door assurance from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to investors that the trade war would soon be deescalating. That, and Trump backing off his threat to fire Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
Meanwhile, as I outlined in my Tuesday column, disarray reigns over in the Defense Department as Secretary Pete Hegseth has ground the Pentagon to a halt thanks to a lack of direction from the top. The scandal over Hegseth’s decision to share battle plans with other administration officials (and, unwittingly, a prominent journalist) over a nonsecure text chain deepened over the weekend when the New York Times reported Hegseth had shared the same plans over text with his wife, his brother (a Pentagon official), and his personal lawyer. That certainly hasn’t helped things, nor has the exodus of most of Hegseth’s inner circle of advisers, most of which were fired as the apparent result of an internal leak investigation.
It all makes my head spin.
Yet it’s important to keep up with what’s happening because despite the feeling of bedlam, Trump and his administration is likely to endure. This was my experience covering his first presidency, when weekly or even daily, it seemed as if the whole administration might collapse under the weight of the chaos, only for Trump and his team to wake up the next day and start all over again.
So stick with us as we try to cover it all and make sense of what’s happening here in Washington. At the very least, it’s never dull.
—Michael
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