Politics & Policy

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

Over Democratic objections, Senate committees advanced the nominations of Mick Mulvaney for budget director and Scott Pruitt for director of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday.

Russell Berman
2:55 PM ET

Most Popular on The Atlantic

Jeffrey Smith

How to Build an Autocracy
- David Frum
The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.

It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

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Carlos Barria / Reuters

Donald Trump Declares a Vision of Religious Nationalism
- Emma Green
At the annual prayer breakfast in Washington, the president focused on the violent, ideological threats to America.

When Donald Trump looks out on the world, he sees a landscape of potential threats to the United States and its values. “Freedom of religion is a sacred right, but also a right under threat all around us,” the president said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. “The world is under serious, serious threat in so many different ways,” he went on, “but we’re going to straighten it out. That’s what I do. I fix things.”

He laid out a vision of what it means to end these threats to United States: Stop terrorism. End the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians. Defend the country’s borders from those who “would exploit that generosity to undermine the values we hold so dear.” Religious Americans also feel threatened within the U.S., he said: “That is why I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment,” a provision of the tax code that prohibits religious leaders and institutions endorsing or opposing political candidates, “and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” Repealing the Johnson Amendment would theoretically allow houses of worship and religious leaders to openly advocate for political candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status, while also allowing them to funnel religious donations into explicitly political efforts.

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Stephan Schmitz

Red State, Blue City
- David A. Graham
The United States is coming to resemble two countries, one rural and one urban. What happens when they go to war?

The United States now has its most metropolitan president in recent memory: a Queens-bred, skyscraper-building, apartment-dwelling Manhattanite. Yet it was rural America that carried Donald Trump to victory; the president got trounced in cities. Republican reliance on suburbs and the countryside isn’t new, of course, but in the presidential election, the gulf between urban and nonurban voters was wider than it had been in nearly a century. Hillary Clinton won 88 of the country’s 100 biggest counties, but still went down to defeat.

American cities seem to be cleaving from the rest of the country, and the temptation for liberals is to try to embrace that trend. With Republicans controlling the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most statehouses, Democrats are turning to local ordinances as their best hope on issues ranging from gun control to the minimum wage to transgender rights. Even before Inauguration Day, big-city mayors laid plans to nudge the new administration leftward, especially on immigration—and, should that fail, to join together in resisting its policies.

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Charlie Neibergall / AP

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters
- Olga Khazan
Multiple studies suggest social conservatives are more attuned to threats—even when they are not real.

One of the few comforts liberals had in the aftermath of the election was the anecdotal reporting that fake-news purveyors found it easier to get conservatives to believe their baloney.

As one such fake-news entrepreneur, responsible for articles with headlines like, “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide,” told NPR: "We’ve tried to do [fake news with] liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

No doubt this served as a signal, to some, that if fake news works better on Trump supporters, it must be because liberals are smarter than conservatives. “I can safely binge-drink the next four years away,” some liberals might have thought, “since I have all these extra brain cells to burn.”

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(Peter Frederick Rothermel / Library of Congress / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion
- Olga Khazan
Conservatives are more likely to support issues like immigration and Obamacare if the message is “morally reframed” to suit their values.

Ever since Donald Trump handed down his executive order temporarily halting all immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations for three months and barring refugees from Syria indefinitely, the social-media outpouring from liberals has focused, understandably, on how unfair the policy is to Muslims.

Yes, this is a refugee family in handcuffs, in America, for being muslim. That little girl? Handcuffed.

History will judge us very harshly. pic.twitter.com/KIR50K64ZO
— Amir (@amiraminiMD) January 31, 2017

Those who didn’t decry the injustice of it all instead highlighted how important it is to protect refugees from harm (myself included.) They point out that Anne Frank’s family tried in vain to secure asylum in the U.S. in the 1940s. “Anne Frank today is a Syrian girl,” The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote.

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Carlos Barria / Reuters

Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- David A. Graham
Marking Black History Month, the president made some strange observations about Douglass and Martin Luther King, but mostly talked about himself.

Does Donald Trump actually know who Frederick Douglass was? The president mentioned the great abolitionist, former slave, and suffrage campaigner during a Black History Month event Wednesday morning, but there’s little to indicate that Trump knows anything about his subject, based on the rambling, vacuous commentary he offered:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.” Within moments, he was off-topic, talking about some of his favorite subjects: CNN, himself, and his feud with CNN.

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Carlos Barria / Reuters

A Publicity Stunt at the National Prayer Breakfast?
- Jeremy Venook
In his speech at the annual event, the president went on a digression promoting The Apprentice, a show he co-produces.

The National Prayer Breakfast, held annually in Washington, D.C., is typically a scandal-free part of the president’s schedule. Since 1953, every commander-in-chief, usually alongside members of Congress, Cabinet officials, and a wide variety of prominent guests, has taken one morning a year to address the gathering, which the Christian organization The Fellowship hosts as an annual acknowledgement of the role of faith in American public life. The most notable story to arise out of the event in recent years was when Ben Carson, in a speech at the 2013 event, railed against “moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility” under the Obama administration, a moment that many say jump-started his eventual run for president in 2016.

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Joshua Roberts / Reuters

How Conservatives Can Save America
- Conor Friedersdorf
If properly understood and marshaled, they “can be a liberal democracy's strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements.”

Conservatives can save America in 2017.

That’s my takeaway from a passage that I haven’t stopped thinking about since Donald Trump’s election. It appears in a 2005 book about the forces that tear countries apart.

It’s impossible to read without thinking of the United States right now.

Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton University, studied places like the former Yugoslavia that descended into bloody civil war, as well as citizens of successful democracies in Europe and North America, and identified the conditions and political predispositions that make civil strife most likely. She found that across eras and countries, some humans, who she calls “libertarians,” strongly prefer individual freedom and diversity, while others, who she calls “authoritarians,” possess a perhaps innate discomfort with difference that causes them to prefer sameness and unity, even if coercive measures are needed to enforce it.

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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

A Clarifying Moment in American History
- Eliot A. Cohen
There should be nothing surprising about what Donald Trump has done in his first week—but he has underestimated the resilience of Americans and their institutions.

I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.

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Reuters

Donald Trump's Blunder Down Under
- Conor Friedersdorf
Citizens of an unusually close ally now regard the president as a volatile, vainglorious, untrustworthy bully after he needlessly disrespected their leader in a phone call.

Dishonor and distraction. That is what Donald Trump brought the United States Wednesday when news broke that he inexplicably lashed out at the prime minister of Australia in a phone call, tried to renege on an agreement between the two nations, and bragged as ever about himself. To add insult to insolence, he then took to Twitter to complain.

The Washington Post first reported on the self-indulgent outburst:

President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it. At one point, Trump informed Turnbull that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day — including Russian President Vladimir Putin — and that “this was the worst call by far.”

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

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A Publicity Stunt at the National Prayer Breakfast?

In his speech at the annual event, the president went on a digression promoting The Apprentice, a show he co-produces.

Jeremy Venook
1:37 PM ET

Science

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters

Multiple studies suggest social conservatives are more attuned to threats—even when they are not real.

Olga Khazan
12:01 PM ET

Executive

Donald Trump Declares a Vision of Religious Nationalism

At the annual prayer breakfast in Washington, the president focused on the violent, ideological threats to America.

Emma Green
11:07 AM ET

Newsletter

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Rex and Balances

The Senate confirmed Rex Tillerson to serve as secretary of state.

What Did Donald Trump Just Tweet?

A real-time snapshot of what the president is thinking, and why.

Andrew McGill
10:47 AM ET

Memo to the White House on the Contributions of Frederick Douglass

At an event marking the start of Black History Month, President Trump gave a very Trumpian shoutout to Frederick Douglass…

Matt Thompson
9:29 AM ET
Notes

Donald Trump's Blunder Down Under

Citizens of an unusually close ally now regard the president as a volatile, vainglorious, untrustworthy bully after he needlessly disrespected their leader in a phone call.

Conor Friedersdorf
8:30 AM ET

Writers

Russell Berman

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

2:55 PM ET
Emma Green

Donald Trump Declares a Vision of Religious Nationalism

11:07 AM ET
Andrew McGill

What Did Donald Trump Just Tweet?

10:47 AM ET
Conor Friedersdorf

Donald Trump's Blunder Down Under

8:30 AM ET
David A. Graham

Red State, Blue City

8:00 AM ET

All Writers

Red State, Blue City

The United States is coming to resemble two countries, one rural and one urban. What happens when they go to war?

Science

The Climate Scientist Who Became a Politician

Andrew Weaver abandoned a 26-year career in climatology to make a successful run for office in Canada.

Ed Yong
7:00 AM ET

How Trump Wants to Make America Exceptional Again

For his predecessors, American exceptionalism was rooted in the nation’s values and ideas. For this president, it means something very different.

Peter Beinart
5:00 AM ET

Are Republicans Taking a Gamble Supporting Trump on Immigration?

Immigrants in the United States are slowly moving from big-city melting pots into traditionally GOP territory—posing an electoral challenge to lawmakers who haven’t opposed the president’s policies.

Ronald Brownstein
4:50 AM ET

How Conservatives Can Save America

If properly understood and marshaled, they “can be a liberal democracy's strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements.”

Conor Friedersdorf
4:50 AM ET

Criminal Justice

First, They Excluded the Irish

President Trump may block entry to foreigners who need public benefits—a proposal rooted in 19^th century laws targeting a wave of impoverished immigrants.

Emma Green
4:00 AM ET

Supreme Court

The Most Important Questions for Trump's Justice Are About Democracy

Senators should press Neil Gorsuch on questions fundamental to democratic government.

Garrett Epps
4:00 AM ET

Congress

Will the Senate Block Betsy DeVos?

Two Republican senators announce their opposition to President Trump’s nominee for education secretary. If all Democrats vote no, just one more GOP defection would defeat her.

Russell Berman
Feb 1, 2017

Congress

How Progressives Are Forcing Senate Democrats Into Action

Lawmakers wanted to choose their battles against Trump’s Cabinet nominees carefully, but activists have a different plan: Fight them all.

Russell Berman
Feb 1, 2017

A Jeffersonian for the Supreme Court

Neil Gorsuch’s record suggests a willingness to transform the law and to enforce constitutional limitations on the excesses of Congress and the president.