Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span.

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Although how the country is going to change after Donald Trump takes office remains uncertain, it’s clear that he will be one of the most powerful—and emboldened—U.S. presidents.

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In 2019, Sophie Knight reflected on the unusual way she and her husband tried to deal with the imbalance of time spent on home chores: He paid her for housework.

In 1783, George Washington faced a potential mutiny of the Army. Two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Congress still hadn’t paid American servicemen and was repudiating promised pensions. Alexander Hamilton, then in Congress, encouraged soldiers to rebel, because he thought the pressure would lead Congress to approve the taxing authority he sought. Washington reproached Hamilton in a letter: An army is “a dangerous instrument to play with,” he wrote.

For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, strength is everything. At home, that means repressing minorities and co-opting the press. Abroad, it means responding to any criticism of New Delhi with anger—and even, it seems, with political assassinations on friendly soil.
On September 18, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged that the Indian government had killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia over his useless push for Sikh separatism.