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When President Trump posted on Saturday that he’d asked Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to be the new White House press secretary, it felt like a callback to the freewheeling first-term Trump.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” the president wrote on Truth Social, adding that he needed White and his band of mixed-martial-arts fighters “to defend us against the Lunatic Left. Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!”
By weekend’s end, the possibility of the appointment had dissolved, though not without a subplot of speculation that Trump was confusing the impresario with another Dana White who had actually served as a Pentagon spokesperson during his first term. CNN reported that White had declined, and last night, Trump told reporters he never meant it anyway. “I was only kidding, but Dana loves the idea,” he said.
Perhaps. Trump has a long record of launching outlandish ideas and then playing them off as jokes when they don’t work out. If it was all a jape, then the weak stab at humor seems to underestimate the electorate’s frustration with his antics. If he was serious and got rejected, it’s even worse. An old maxim goes that when the president of the United States asks you to do something, you do it. But Trump no longer has the juice he did in the early days of this administration, when billionaire tech CEOs were showering him with attention and the odd bauble. Last Tuesday evening, as election results rolled in, my colleague Jonathan Lemire wrote that “Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly a lame duck.” Now we’re getting a glimpse of what that looks like in practice.
Start with the cool reception that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff received among Republicans. Representative Marlin Stutzman called it a “horrible decision.” Another legislator told Fox News that his reaction was “utter disbelief.” When a Politico reporter informed one member of the choice, they replied, “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.” Take these statements with a grain of salt—Republicans have often been happy to talk trash about Trump anonymously while going along with him publicly—but whether or not they acquiesce with the president matters less now that the GOP is so outnumbered in Congress.
One test of where House Republicans actually stand will come this week. Thomas Massie, a renegade GOP member who Trump helped defeat in a primary earlier this year, refiled articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. Although Speaker Mike Johnson (speaking of lame ducks) had temporarily stymied Massie’s impeachment efforts in September by sending members home until after the midterms, the House is now back in session. Rounding up enough Republican votes to move the articles forward will be difficult but not impossible; a significant number of GOP members lost their seats last week, including many of the more moderate representatives, which means they are less in Trump’s thrall. Assuming that Hegseth is not impeached this month, it seems all but inevitable once Democrats take over. This weekend, presumptive Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said he’s a “hard yes” on impeachment.
Republicans’ losses have produced infighting elsewhere in the party too. As Miller moves to take over, fallout from his predecessor Susie Wiles’s tenure continues. Calley Means, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he accused Wiles and James Blair, a top Trump political adviser, of selling the MAHA movement out to corporate interests. The Wall Street Journal reports that, ahead of their public social-media fight, Blair texted Means, “If you are gonna try to knife me, I’m happy to return the favor.” Meanwhile Senator Ron Johnson, a hard-right figure from Wisconsin, has picked up on Means’s comments to accuse the Trump administration of “corruption.”
One person in particular left somewhat unmoored by the results is Vice President Vance, who built his entire profile on closeness to a politician whose toxicity is now made plain. In a long post-election X post, Vance pinned the midterm defeat on the Iran war. This was widely seen as a swipe at the president and an attempt to position himself for 2028, but as The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle observed, Vance “didn’t so much throw Trump under the bus as try to bring him on board his bandwagon by essentially putting words in Trump’s mouth.”
But Trump does not seem inclined to cooperate. For one thing, he continues to defend the war. On 60 Minutes last night, he acknowledged the political fallout but said, “I think, historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.” Speaking with reporters last night, he once again declared victory in the unresolved war with Iran and then claimed, falsely and callously, that “we haven’t lost anybody. No soldiers.”
At other times, though, Trump has sounded unusually chastened since Election Day. He told The New York Times that he looks forward to working with the Democrats. He also acknowledged on 60 Minutes that his deportation policy, which “might be too tough,” could explain the GOP’s shellacking. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border,” he said, “but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.” A deescalation on immigration enforcement seems unlikely with Miller as chief of staff, given his role in implementing that policy, but the fact that Trump was willing to offer conciliatory remarks suggests that he is beginning to recognize the challenges of life as a lame duck.
Related:
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- The cover story: What constant surveillance is doing to children
- Tom Nichols: Pete Hegseth lashes out.
- Joe Biden: What Trump did on January 6 “should follow him to his grave.”
- An electoral mess in Mississippi
Today’s News
- Nvidia’s board is investigating whether the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, shared sensitive information with an executive suspected of having ties to Chinese intelligence. This comes after Huang confirmed yesterday that he had an affair with the executive, who worked for a Singapore-based data-center company. Nvidia said it has no reason to believe any secrets were compromised.
- Republican Representative Thomas Massie introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, setting up a House vote by Wednesday. Hegseth dismissed the effort and said he agreed with President Trump’s decision to launch the war with Iran and would “do it again.”
- Stephen Miller, a longtime Trump adviser and the architect of the administration’s mass-deportation campaign, officially became White House chief of staff today, replacing Susie Wiles.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores a collection of stories about the value of friendship.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
The One Source Bob Woodward Can’t Get to Talk
By George Packer
Bob Woodward has published a book roughly every two years since the Watergate scandal, 24 in all. Taken together, they comprise a running narrative of almost every administration from Richard Nixon’s to Donald Trump’s. The genre of the Washington book—a sequence of scenes inside rooms where important things happen, based on a convention called “deep background,” with riches of information traced to no sources—is so familiar that it’s easy to forget that Woodward practically invented it. Decade after decade, he has kept turning up in the Oval Office, at Georgetown parties, on the doorsteps of government officials—always on the job, the hunt. His approach from across a crowded room or the sudden appearance of his name on a cellphone screen has surely sunk the heart of countless sources. And yet, though they know better, they always talk, as if transfixed by a predatory stare—like the frog that agrees to carry the scorpion on its back across the lake. “Why?” the frog cries as it drowns from the inevitable sting, to which the scorpion replies: “It’s my nature.”
More From The Atlantic
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- Perhaps connecting fridges to the internet was a bad idea.
- The Democrats’ fight over Israel is just beginning.
- Alexandra Petri: How to talk to your child about the Cybertruck’s demise
Culture Break
Indulge. Every cook has an opinion about the right way to make mac and cheese. But Danyel Smith writes that her Aunt Louise’s beloved recipe ditched the traditional butter-and-flour roux for an unlikely ingredient that held everything together.
Watch. On last weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live (now streaming on Peacock), the show took on the midterm elections, one stolen scene at a time, Megan Garber writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post This Is What a Lame Duck Looks Like appeared first on The Atlantic.
