You may have never heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration, but its work is crucial to your safety—and to that of every other human being on the planet. If Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t yet come across the NNSA, it surely will before too long. What happens after that could be alarming.

Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

In the isolation of a Washington, D.C., office building, with a small team of acolytes, Elon Musk is dismantling the civil service and fulfilling an old dream. Deep within the folds of the Western brain resides a yearning for a savior: a master engineer who imposes reason and efficiency on the messiness of modern life, who can deploy his acumen to usher in a golden age of abundance and harmony. This is a fantasy of submission, where the genius takes charge.

Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:
American tariffs hurt Americans.

As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.
The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.

President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to put America first, just proposed the wildest and most improbable intervention by the United States in overseas affairs since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, more than 20 years ago.
At a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump promised that the U.S. would become the occupier of Gaza.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we’ll do a job with it, too. We’ll own it,” Trump said.

It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs.

Some presidents spend their first few weeks in office trying to make good on their central campaign promise; Donald Trump has instead done everything he can to avoid having to follow through on his. A controversial campaign pledge to enact big, universal tariffs that would transform the global-trade system and usher in American prosperity has been whittled down to a set of hollow threats designed to extract mostly symbolic concessions from America’s neighbors.

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