The Old Dictator and His Young Henchmen

The tarps on the Kennedy Center, erected to hide the shame of a building that no longer bears Donald Trump’s name, are still in place, but we now know two things about them. One, as pictures taken from behind the tarp show, Trump’s name is now definitely, 100 percent gone. Two, Trump’s guys at the Kennedy Center are hilariously claiming that the tarps “will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” (This is somewhat true: Trump needs the marble and soffit panels to remain obscured from view, as it would be embarrassing if they weren’t.) Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew for Morning Shots Live on Substack and YouTube today at 10 a.m. EDT.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty)

Dictatorial Dementia

by William Kristol

Donald Trump is 80 years old. He’s lost a step. He’s even more willful and erratic than he once was. His self-indulgence and narcissism are even more out of control.

And it’s only getting worse. This may be in part because, to adapt Andrew Marvell’s famous lines a bit,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAt his back he always hears Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.

A sense of impending mortality seems to be making our president even more unhinged than ever.

So you look at him, and you try to reassure yourself: He doesn’t really have the patience to carry out a thoroughgoing subversion of the rule of law, of our political and civil liberties, or of our elections. He doesn’t really have the ability to execute a full-scale authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt he would like to see such a takeover.

And he does have young men with a lean and hungry look in positions of authority and power in the executive branch who are committed to making his dream of power without limits a reality.

Some of the men running the key national security agencies in the U.S. government are more competent than others. But they all have lots of energy. They’re all young men in a hurry to reshape our government and our country.

Bill Pulte, the new acting director of national intelligence, is 38. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is 40.1 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and FBI Director Kash Patel are all 46. OMB Director Russell Vought is 50. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is 51.

They’re young, but they’re as determined as the old man they work for not to hand their positions over to anyone other than fellow loyalists after their terms in office, if they intend to leave office at all. They’re as determined as the old man they work for not to step aside from their powers and allow political opponents to look into what they have done. And like the old man they work for, they aren’t committed to the peaceful and democratic transfer of power after an election, or to the political norms or lawful procedures of a liberal democracy.

None of these men should be in a position of power and authority in the government of the United States. Yet here they are, hiring and firing at will, abusing their authority and politicizing their agencies in unprecedented ways.

To respond to unprecedented threats, we have to come up with unprecedented solutions. That’s why The Bulwark has built the best pro-democracy community on the internet, and it’s still growing. Join us.

Pulte is probably the least impressive of the bunch. But he is an eager henchman. And during her tenure as DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, 45, had already begun to lay the predicate for involving the intelligence community in our domestic elections under the excuse of possible foreign interference. During his tenure at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte had shown an eagerness to weaponize his access to government information to go after Trump’s critics inside and outside of the federal government. And now Trump has gone to a lot of trouble to get Pulte in the position he’s now in as quickly as possible.

Gabbard announced her resignation as DNI on May 22, saying in her resignation letter that her last day would be June 30.

Trump announced Pulte’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence on June 2. When there was criticism even from Republicans of his lack of qualifications for the job, Trump tried two days later to reassure everyone that “It’s an acting position. It’s not permanent.” But the next day, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that the fact that Pulte would be acting director would leave him “less shackled” than someone who would have to go through Senate confirmation for the position.

Then on June 9, Trump announced Gabbard would be leaving and that Pulte would be taking over sooner than expected, on June 19. This led to another wave of criticism, which Trump tried to damp down by announcing on June 11 that he intended to nominate the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, for the job. The Senate moved to quickly schedule a confirmation hearing for Clayton on June 17, intending to prevent Pulte from ever serving as acting DNI. But Trump blew up that plan hours before the scheduled hearing, citing various improbable reasons why he wanted to postpone Clayton’s nomination. His true motivation was clear: Trump wanted to make sure Pulte had the job, at least for a while.

And so Pulte officially became acting director of national intelligence last Friday, June 19. Yesterday, June 22, as one source told CNN, “The deep state firings have begun.”

And so Pulte has begun to follow in the footsteps of what Hegseth has been doing at the Pentagon, and Blanche at Justice, and Patel at the FBI. Looking at their purges along with the mass hirings at ICE, one sees that we’re entering a period of maximum authoritarian threat, one that makes Watergate look like child’s play. And we’ll be in that era of threat for the next two and a half years.

Democrats in Congress aren’t happy. In a letter to Pulte yesterday, the top Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, wrote that they were “concerned” by the reports of mass firings, that “it is difficult to imagine” that the director could yet have fully informed views on his subordinates, and that this “is not an appropriate course of action for anyone in an acting capacity, let alone without consultation with Congress.”

These sentiments are correct. But maybe a tone of a little more alarm, a little more anger, a little more urgency would be good?

These Democratic solons might be reminded that they are allowed to be alarmed and angry and outraged about the Trump administration’s plot against our free government. And they should be bold and resolute about using all means at their power, such as blocking unrelated legislation and balking at usually routine appropriations and encouraging dissent and whistleblowing from within the executive, to thwart the pernicious schemes of the old autocrat and his younger henchmen.

Join now

We’re Still Living in Alan Greenspan’s World

by Catherine Rampell

[Editor’s note: Catherine Rampell wrote a reflection on the life and legacy of long-time Fed chair Alan Greenspan yesterday. Below is an excerpt of the full article, which you can read here.]

As Fed chair, Greenspan guided the economy through several bumpy patches, and presided over the longest economic expansion in American history. This record, plus his almost mythological dialect and musical background, helped earn him the nickname “Maestro.”

But his actual economic legacy is a bit messier than the name might imply.

That “Great Moderation” he oversaw also masked enormous market bubbles, an extremely laissez-faire approach to bank oversight, and of course a brewing global financial crisis that boiled over within a year after Greenspan’s departure from the Fed.

And thank God, in retrospect, for the timing of that particular changing of the guard.

After all, Greenspan was succeeded by Ben Bernanke, a scholar of financial crises who wrote his dissertation on the Great Depression. Relative to Greenspan, Bernanke favored more muscular monetary policy interventions that almost certainly rescued us from plunging into another global depression.

Bernanke also set the Fed on a path toward more open and more frequent public communication. He declared that the days of the dictum “Never explain, never excuse”, a line attributed to a pre-World War II Bank of England governor, were over. The logic was that increased visibility into the Fed’s actions and aims improves the central bank’s accountability, effectiveness, and (perhaps most critically) its speed.

“Ambiguity has its uses, but mostly in noncooperative games like poker,” Bernanke explained to his Fed colleagues a few years before getting the top job, while Greenspan was still chair. “Monetary policy is a cooperative game. The whole point is to get financial markets on our side and for them to do some of our work for us.” . . .

Over the past decade or so, Warsh has called for a rollback of Bernanke’s changes and a return to Greenspanian levels of evasiveness. When Warsh was sworn in as chair last month, Greenspan was the only former Fed chair to whom Warsh paid homage by name. Bernanke, the chair whom Warsh actually served under, was neither mentioned nor even on the guest list.

Last week, days before the Maestro passed, Warsh gave a taste of what this Greenspanian throwback might look like.

In his first Fed meeting as chair, Warsh slashed the length of the official Fed statement on interest rates, and punted on most reporter questions. (He declared that a future “task force” would resolve whatever issue they asked about.) He also announced that he had not participated in Fed officials’ standard practice of forecasting the path of interest rates, via an anonymized chart known as the “dot plot.”

This approach is consistent with Warsh’s stated preference for opacity, but also, conveniently, allows him to avoid publicly acknowledging that interest rates are going up, not down, contrary to Donald Trump’s demands.

Share

AROUND THE BULWARK

Still Radical, Still American… Gordon Wood chronicled America’s rambunctious democratic culture. It’s giving way to a new deference to authority, writes JOSHUA ZEITZ.

TMZ D.C. Knows It’s Not Above What It Covers… The gossip site’s early success in the capital shows that readers and audiences are hungry for political journalism that is as cynical as they are, observes KAIVAN SCHROFF.

Call the Pool Police… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss why Trump is so embarrassed by his own personal vandalism of the Reflecting Pool that he’s got the Justice Department investigating his latest conspiracy about bad guys that don’t exist.

Quick Hits

CASH-4-FARMERS, IRAN EDITION: Speaking to reporters in Switzerland yesterday, Vice President JD Vance test-launched a new argument to get the administration’s Iran-hawk critics off their backs about the unfreezing of Iranian funds: Iran won’t get a penny until we’re sure they are willing to play nice from now on, and when they do get the money, we’ll make them use it to buy American farm products. Win win!

“Jared Kushner actually came up with a very interesting solution,” Vance said. “If there is any frozen Iranian assets that are unfrozen, then we have approval over that process, the Qataris have approval over that process, and then the money would actually go to buy American soy, American corn, and American wheat for the benefit of the Iranian people.”

Unfortunately, overnight, Iranian Speaker Bagher Ghalibaf denied both points: In his telling, the United States agreed last night to release $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets at once, with “no obligation to buy agricultural products from the United States.” A bummer, but not to worry: We’re sure Jared has some more bangers up his sleeve. Maybe they’ll release the funds only after the money is converted into Trump crypto?

MISFIRES OF THE BRAIN: By now we’re all pretty used to the wild fantasyland of Donald Trump’s febrile imagination, which as president of the United States he gets to force us all to commute to every day. Even so, we’ve rarely seen, in terms of sheer surreal strangeness, a moment like Trump’s conversation with reporters yesterday at the White House about the sad state of his Reflecting Pool renovation. Trump continued to claim to have proof of a whole host of facts utterly unsupported by material reality: Specifically, that vile Dumocrat vandals had carved a football-field-length gash in the pool basin.

“We have a 290-, 300-foot slit right through it. Probably a knife of some kind,” Trump said. Later he revised his opinion: “I think it’s 350, not 250. A 350-foot slit from one end to the other.”2

But Mr. Trump, the bemused reporters replied, people have been down there checking the reflecting pool out. Some of the blue paint is peeling up, sure. But there’s no slit to be seen.3

“All you have to do is see the Parks Department. They’ll show it to you,” Trump insisted. “But I saw it. They cut it. They cut it very violently.” The president tried to continue, but was interrupted at this point by orderlies who suddenly burst into the room and bundled him into a padded van. (Just kidding! He’s still in charge as we speak!)

AMERICA GOES UNSAVED: Senate Republicans want Donald Trump to come down to their lunch tomorrow to hear some bad news: They’re not passing the SAVE America Act, and it’s time for him to stop commanding them to. Politico has more:

Donald Trump is about to come face to face with one of his frequent punching bags: Senate Republicans.

They might just be in a mood to punch back.

The president was invited to GOP senators’ Wednesday lunch to push for his No. 1 priority, the GOP election bill known as the SAVE America Act. But several outgoing Republicans who have clashed with Trump said Monday they will be there to deliver a reality check: The bill isn’t passing, and it’s time to move on.

“I’m going to be there front and center,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters. “It will be important if it actually is a constructive exchange of different opinions, and hopefully we can all get on the same page. Right now, we’re not in a great place.”

We’ll believe it when we see it. Read the whole thing.

Share

Cheap Shots

Share

1Correction (June 23 2026 9:50 a.m. EDT): As originally published, this story incorrectly stated White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is 46. He is 40 years old.

2Forget the Reflecting Pool for a second, do you think a 350-foot cut has ever been made by hand with a knife, by anyone, on any surface, in all of human history?

3Actually, what the reporter said was “Reporters have been down there today looking for that slit that you mentioned and there’s no evidence of it.” But I’m sick of this bloodless phrase, “no evidence!” It is not merely that there is “no evidence” for the slit! The slit has been fabricated, dreamed up, hallucinated, created from whole cloth! It doesn’t exist! What is with these people and “no evidence”?