Trump's Hundred Days of Shock and Awe

Wrecking Washington because that's the only way to change it

Feb 18, 2025

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week.

Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping. Some of them were real: withdrawal from climate treaties and the World Health Organization, an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the alphabet soup of genders in government documents — and sending troops to the border. Some of them were framed as a backwards look at government interference — on free speech, leaking, and the “weaponization of federal government.” Others were just because: renaming Alaska’s Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley and the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the forced declassification of records around the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. That’s what you get for your endorsement, Joe Rogan — enough podcast material for years.

Trump had repeatedly promised that his retribution would be victory and success for the country. But he also knows there’s no better time to kick a man than when he’s down. If you are, for instance, one of the fifty signatories of the notorious Hunter Biden laptop letter, your security clearance was forfeited.

If your name happens to be John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, James Clapper or John Bolton, you have the additional ignominy of being banned from federal government buildings. Are you a former high-level official who wants a security detail? Pay for it from your (doubtlessly) ill-gotten gains. The power on display from Elon Musk was apparent from day one, and not just because he took Vivek Ramaswamy out back and put two behind his ear for an ill-thought-through X thread bashing lazy Americans. There was never room for more than one ego at DoGE. The New Yorker cover for January 20, Inauguration Day, showed a laughing Musk with his hand on the Bible, getting side-eye from a sidelined Donald. I showed the magazine to one of the president’s closest advisors, who responded: “I worry that’s more true than I’d like to say.”

Nothing that has happened since would give you a reason to think otherwise. Musk has flitted about DC with his exuberance and manic energy for finding the weak points in decrepit mechanisms. His team of compatriots were roundly denounced as too young and inexperienced to be trusted with any power, even just the power to examine inefficiencies and recommend how to fix them. When WIRED magazine reported the names of several of his DoGe staffers, all under the age of twenty-four, Mike Solana wrote in his Pirate Wires newsletter (a must-read in the second age of Trump):

This much power (auditing government spending) in the hands of men this young (the age of our founding fathers) was unfathomable, we learned… from the same people who played block and tackle for a man with actual dementia. And that really is the question: would you rather have a 22-year-old engineer who designed an AI program that helped decipher one of the 2,000-year-old Herculaneum Papyri working for the government, or a much dumber old person?

The haughty tech-bro energy aside, the problem for the bureaucrats and their lifelong defenders in the Democratic Party is that they are the most unsympathetic figures in this entire storyline. They have brought their evisceration on themselves, having micromanaged the American people to such a degree during the pandemic that the citizenry no longer cares for their sky-is-falling complaints, especially when they’ve all been offered eight-month buyouts if they want to stop working. By the time a judge temporarily blocked the program in early February, more than 60,000 workers had signed up

When the Trump administration announced that every agency would have to go back to the office to work within thirty days, some of the crats took to public radio to complain. Here is one typical tale of woe related to Baltimore’s WYPR, from a federal worker who currently goes into an office twice a week — her middle name “Layne” is used out of “fear of reprisal”:

“The train ride is anywhere from about forty minutes to an hour. I wake up at 4:10, in the morning, and I get to work bright and early, between about 6 a.m. and 6:15,” she said. She leaves the office at 3 p.m. and gets home around 5. Most weeks she works in-person on back-to-back days.

“I’m so exhausted at the end of the day,” Layne continued. “By that third morning, when I’m waking up and teleworking, I am just so brain dead, it’s actually hard to focus… I cannot imagine trying to get in the car and go in a third day.”

Yes, in a time of people taking second jobs in the gig economy just to make ends meet, won’t someone think of the torturous conditions of our federally funded best and brightest, who, after spending years dutifully doing as little as possible while avoiding the attention of Congress and staying home five out of seven days a week, are suddenly commanded to commute for an hour to show up for something approximating a normal work schedule? Oh, the inhumanity.

Nothing is so motivating for elected Democrats as the screams of wronged bureaucrats, and when Musk and his DoGE team turned their sights on the United States Agency for International Development, it was a siren call for the politicians. A highly motivated group of the Congress-critters showed up at the USAID office to decry the “constitutional crisis,” including newly elected Congressman Eugene Vindman (technically of Virginia, but in reality representing the Deep State), who attempted to enter the locked headquarters and were denied.

The whole thing seemed a tad insurrectiony, albeit without velvet ropes for guidance. For Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, it was just pathetic: “To my friends who are upset, I would say with respect, call somebody who cares,” Kennedy told Fox News. “They better get used to this.”

Next up: the Department of Education, a longstanding target of Republican candidates for decades yet one they never had the stones to touch once elected. Referring to his choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, the president told reporters: “I want her to put herself out of a job.”

What this initial rush signals for the future of the Trump administration is that the lessons he took from his first go-round include the importance of power to drive momentum.

This dramatic surge of force is intended to overwhelm his enemies, giving them so many targets to attack that they can’t afford to give their full attention to any one of them. Doing battle across multiple legal fronts on all the executive orders, firings and steps announced both foreign and domestic leave Trump’s opponents exhausted, just running to stand still.

Susie Wiles, his new chief of staff, has held to a mantra of avoiding drama or delay. She displays an understanding that given the reality of the midterms, they have just eighteen months to get most of Trump’s ambitious agenda into the field before inevitably taking on all the weight of the unexpected that comes in every presidential term, particularly second terms. The narrow majorities in the House and Senate will have to hold firm, and there’s no time for Republicans who want plaudits from the New York Times.

For the moment, those Republicans seem to be keeping quiet. When the nominations of three of Trump’s more controversial choices — Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services, and Kash Patel to head the FBI — arose in the same week on Capitol Hill, Trump, J.D. Vance, and their allies made quick work of any nods toward party opposition. Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Todd Young of Indiana bowed to internal and external threats — sometimes just an Elon tweet — and the nominations rolled forward with party-line committee votes.

This time, everything is different. Mitch McConnell may have been leader of the Senate Republicans for the past eighteen years, but his opposition in his twilight period will be token votes at best. “I expect to support most of what this administration is trying to accomplish,” he told CBS’s 60 Minutes. “So, what happened in the past is irrelevant to me.”

When asked about his comment that January 6 was “evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office,” McConnell answered: “I said, shortly after January 6, that if he were the nominee for president, I would support him.” The resistance has gone out with a whimper. For Team Trump, it feels like the only thing that can stop them now is themselves.

Is The Case Against Eric Adams Strong?

Byron York.

For a while last week, it looked like it might become a major scandal. It still could, but with a few days’ perspective, the Trump Justice Department‘s decision to drop the public corruption indictment against New York Mayor Eric Adams seems more mismanagement than wrongdoing.
On Sept. 26, 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed the indictment of Adams on five counts of bribery and campaign finance offenses. The basic charge was that Adams did favors for the government of Turkey in return for campaign contributions, free or discounted airline tickets, free high-end hotel rooms, and fancy meals.
The big showpiece allegation against Adams was that in September 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan planned to visit New York for a United Nations meeting. The Turks wanted their newly constructed consulate in Manhattan to be open and ready for the visit, but it had not yet passed fire inspection, so they went to Adams. This is from the indictment:
In September 2021, the Turkish Official told Adams, the defendant, that is was his turn to repay the Turkish Official, by pressuring the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) to facilitate the opening of a new Turkish consular building — a 36-story skyscraper — without a fire inspection, in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey’s president. At the time, the building would have failed an FDNY inspection. In exchange for free travel and other travel-related bribes in 2021 and 2022 arranged by the Turkish official, Adams did as instructed. Because of Adams’s pressure on the FDNY, the FDNY official responsible for the FDNY’s assessment of the skyscraper’s fire safety was told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce, and, after Adams intervened, the skyscraper opened as requested by the Turkish Official.
Shortly after the indictment was released, some powerful New York Democrats began nudging Adams, a fellow Democrat, to resign. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) all made statements suggesting they’d like to see Adams leave. Adams pledged to stay and pleaded not guilty. His trial was scheduled to begin on April 21, 2025, when Adams planned to be running for reelection.
The months before and after Adams’s September 2024 indictment were, of course, the months of the presidential campaign. Candidate Donald Trump sometimes criticized the Adams indictment during campaign speeches, saying it was politically motivated. Some saw Trump’s remarks as an effort to highlight Adams’s dissent from Biden administration policy on illegal immigration — Adams had been complaining loudly about the burdens imposed on New York City by the arrival of thousands of illegal border crossers. For his part, Adams began saying that the indictment was a politically motivated move in retaliation for his criticism of the Biden border disaster.
Fast forward to Feb. 10. Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, sent a letter to the prosecutors of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Bove ordered them to dismiss the charges against Adams with the conditions that the charges could be brought again in the future and that the matter would be reviewed by the U.S. attorney “following the November 2025 mayoral election, based on consideration of all relevant factors.”
Bove stressed at the beginning that he made the decision “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Instead, the reasons Bove gave were that the original case was arguably politically motivated and that the prosecution “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.” Bove was particularly concerned that the prosecution would affect Adams’s ability to support Trump’s efforts “to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.”
To say the New York prosecutors reacted negatively would be an understatement. What followed might be called the battle of the indignant letters. On Wednesday, the acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, wrote a long memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi refusing to follow Bove’s instruction. Sassoon said she could not go to court and argue either of Bove’s two reasons, that the original case was politically motivated or that the prosecution would interfere with the enforcement of Trump’s immigration policy, in good faith. “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” Sassoon wrote. She said if the Justice Department did not change its position, “I am prepared to offer my resignation.”
Bove quickly responded Thursday with a long, indignant letter of his own. “First, your resignation is accepted,” he told Sassoon. “The decision is based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected president and a Senate-confirmed attorney general.”
Near the end of the letter, Bove told Sassoon she should have followed his directive based on the two reasons he gave but then added that beyond those two reasons, “I have many other concerns about this case.” The prosecution of Adams, Bove said, “turns on factual and legal theories that are, at best, extremely aggressive.” Bove said he was particularly concerned about the 2016 McDonnell v. United States case, in which federal prosecutors charged former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell with corruption, won a conviction, and then saw the verdict overturned by a 9-0 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case changed how prosecutors think about public corruption cases, essentially creating a higher standard for allegations of bribery involving public officials. If a quid pro quo is alleged, it has to be one in which the official performed an “official act” in return for money or some other reward. The court ruled that the definition of an “official act” does not include relatively casual activities such as “arranging a meeting … hosting an event, meeting with other officials, or speaking with interested parties … even if the event, meeting or speech is related to a pending question or matter.” Instead, the court continued, “Something more is required. … The public official must make a decision or take an action on that question or matter, or agree to do so.”
Given that, one can reasonably raise concerns about the Adams case. Indeed, some commentators raised such concerns when the case was originally filed. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Prosecutors Overreach in the Case Against Eric Adams,” lawyers James Burnham and Yaakov Roth, who represented McDonnell in the Supreme Court case, wrote that the Adams indictment “spends many paragraphs discussing benefits received — many of them travel and entertainment — but is light on official actions promised in return.” Specifically, in the case of the Turkish Consulate, the major crime was Adams “helping cut through red tape so [Turkey’s] official facility in New York City would be ready for a presidential visit.”

More: Hochul Signals She May Remove Eric Adams.

The Mar-a-Lago Face-Off

Ani Wilcenski

In all the post election danger-to-democracy commentary, one unexpected new peril has emerged: the “nationwide surge of Mar-a-Lago face”.
Best exemplified by demented far-right activist Laura Loomer and former Fox News host-slash-former Donald Trump Jr. squeeze Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mar-a-Lago face is a cosmetic look characterized by immense volumes of cheek filler, heavy eye shadow and enough Botox to petrify the face.
The male version could be seen when Florida congressman and attorney general-nominee-for-ten-seconds Matt Gaetz stepped out at the RNC with so much Botox and foundation that he instantly became a bipartisan meme.
I’d argue that Mar-a-Lago face is not taking over America anytime soon. It’s barely taking over the Republican Party. Most of the women wielding meaningful power in right-wing America these days are attractive and respectably dolled-up, from Attorney General Pam Bondi to first lady Melania and first daughter Ivanka Trump. The most conspicuously overfilled weirdos are marginalized to the undesirable fringes of the party. Gaetz was deposed from the administration before he ever joined it and will instead host a talk show. Laura Loomer had the odd stint on Trump’s plane before he got icked out and never invited her anywhere else.
Guilfoyle, meanwhile, has been banished from the seat of power to Greece, where she will serve as the American ambassador while Donald Trump Jr. struts around town with his new flame, a younger “Palm Beach socialite” called Bettina Anderson. If anything can be divined from the cosmetic habits of the incoming administration, it’s that Mar-a-Lago face and the broader Trumpian artifice represent the national id — not a sweeping trend, but an extreme distillation of the current permissive American attitude toward plastic surgery.
For years, cosmetic treatments were something people did under cover of darkness and politely avoided acknowledging. A subtle nose or boob job was sometimes acceptable but looking suspiciously shiny or incongruously curvaceous was considered gauche, or at the very least something for celebrities and television stars.
Over the past two decades, that has rapidly changed, with plastic surgery accelerated into overdrive by forces such as social media, beautifying filters, the pandemic and Kylie Jenner Lip Kits.
A recent global survey from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found that both surgical and non surgical procedures are at a worldwide all-time high, having increased by a whopping 40 percent over the past four years. Seventy-five percent of plastic surgeons reported an increase in the number of Gen Z patients — they’re between twenty and thirty years old — who demand cosmetic surgery or injectables.
There was an 18 percent increase over the past year in men seeking aesthetic treatments such as Botox and eyelid surgery. And these results don’t even account for the skyrocketing number of people radically changing their appearances with weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro.
The desired look changes with the times: currently, we’re in a shift away from years of Kardashian-inspired Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs), pillowy pouts and the “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic” facial features known as “Instagram face,” thanks to its origins in social media, artful photoshopping and celebrity plastic surgery.
Instead, Americans are currently seeking a more “discreet” look, which is achieved through laser skin treatments, spot liposuction, “preventative” Botox and smaller breast implants. The reasons for this shift have a lot to do with our nation’s move away from the hyper edited, meticulously curated Instagram to the less-filtered, more relatable TikTok, where people churn out content far too frequently to micromanage their look.
It may also have to do with another big internet craze, an aesthetic known as “quiet luxury,” which fuels the current trends in everything from minimalistic beige home decor to Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy-inspired clothing. In what feels like a reaction to the filler-and-logo-fueled excesses of the past few years, women are now being encouraged to emulate “old money” by paring back, reining in and signaling their status through subtlety instead of lavishness.
The days of Gucci belts and knock-off Angelina Jolie lips are no more. Women are spending their money on $500 drab gray cardigans and expensive skincare treatments. There are regional exceptions to this — women in Las Vegas, Miami and, of course, Mar-a-Lago won’t give up their fake eyelashes and conspicuous Chanel without a fight — but the continued trend setting power of online influencers means that subtlety is on the rise.