“I’m getting really tired of winning,” a consultant said to me the weekend after Trump was sworn in. He had convened a mixer for aspiring Administration workers and D.C. newcomers; many in the room were hungover and sniffling, in the early stages of a post-Inauguration flu. A political strategist who attended one of the inaugural balls referred to half-joking speculation, stoked by the podcaster Shawn Ryan, that China had released a “brain-fog bioweapon” into the ballroom. “Everyone I know is suffering from this right now,” he said. Government Web sites were going dark, egg prices went so high they became a meme, and dead bodies were being pulled out of the river in Washington. But nothing would impede Trump’s “golden age,” as he kept calling it. Members of Congress ate smashburgers emblazoned with the word “TRUMP” at a Party retreat held at the President’s golf club in Doral, Florida; one lawmaker had proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow the President to seek a third term. Trump often raised the issue himself. “They say I can’t run again,” he had recently mused. “Then somebody said, ‘I don’t think you can.’ Ooh . . .” Trump’s rants often open with a brief gesture at unity. After taking the podium, he asked for a moment of silence for the victims and families. “Real tragedy,” he said. “This was a dark and excruciating night . . . that icy, icy Potomac. It was a cold, cold night, cold water.” He went on, “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.” He suggested that the crash had happened because people with “psychiatric disabilities,” “complete paralysis,” and “dwarfism” were being hired at the Federal Aviation Administration. “Not your fault!” he said to Sean Duffy, his newly confirmed Secretary of Transportation. The woman in front of me, who wore a sparkly pantsuit and sneakers, was making a shaky video on Facebook Live, occasionally switching to selfie view. She blew a kiss to her phone camera. “It’s nice to have a real President,” the guy next to her whispered. The man on my other side was texting, “Who are these bozos.” Trump’s press secretary had opened the briefing room to “new media,” such as podcasters and influencers. “I’m amidst the establishment,” Natalie Winters, the White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, told me. “It’s like segregation has ended. I’ve taken their sacred space.” Diver teams were still searching for bodies in the freezing river. “I can’t imagine people with 20/20 vision not seeing what’s happening up there,” Trump said. A half mile or so down the road, at the White House, Trump was in the East Room, sitting at a wooden desk, with rows of school-age girls and coaches standing behind him. He was preparing to sign an executive order called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which sought to ban trans student athletes from women’s and girls’ athletic programs. He asked the group to gather around him. “Every day, we’re ending the extremism of the last four years,” he said. He looked around at how crowded the room was. “I actually offered to build a ballroom for the White House. . . . I offered to do it to the Biden Administration,” he said. “I’m going to try and make the offer to myself.” The executive order, he said, was part of a “sweeping effort to reclaim our culture.” Everyone filed out as the Marine Corps band played “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” On February 6th, after an all-night vigil in the Senate, Democrats failed to prevent Russell Vought from being confirmed as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, which administers federal spending. Vought had previously led Project 2025, the staffing and policy program that Trump and his allies denied association with during the campaign. Meanwhile, teachers and federal workers who had supported Trump posted on TikTok and Facebook Live in distress—U.S.D.A. food inspectors and National Park Service staffers, among others, hadn’t realized how deep the cuts would be. Vought, in his policy writings and public speeches, has consistently promised to inflict “trauma” on the “administrative state.” The Constitution, he has written, is “a revered document that is no longer in effect. . . . The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years.” The potential limits of Presidential authority weren’t a concern. “Everything we do is legal,” he said recently. Before sunrise, when Democrats were still holding the Senate floor in protest of Vought, people under umbrellas were streaming into the National Prayer Breakfast. The event originated the year before Dwight Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Trump announced that the spirit of the country was up forty-nine per cent. “The spirit is as high as it’s been,” he said. “That’s the biggest increase in the history of whatever the poll was.” He said that, after he was nearly shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, his own son Don, Jr., had “gained some religion. . . . He went up twenty-five per cent. And, if you know him, that’s a lot.” Trump felt that the spirit of the country was “probably the hardest thing to get back.” He went on, “The rest is easy. The rest is easy.” Others seemed to welcome the old order being thrown to the wood chipper. “Trump may have saved my career,” a friend, who is a federal employee, texted me. She had wanted to leave her job forever. She sent the “resign” e-mail, and received a confirmation note addressed to another person’s name. “I hope she wanted to resign, too,” she laughed. Trump and Ishiba began their press conference, and a reporter asked, “Is there anything you’ve told Elon Musk he cannot touch?” Trump replied, “We haven’t discussed that much. . . . I think everything is fertile.” Democratic congressmen had just sent letters to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, expressing outrage that DOGE engineers had access to Treasury payment systems, which contain personal information such as Social Security numbers. Why did DOGE even need that? “Well, it doesn’t,” Trump said. “But they get it very easily. I mean, we don’t have very good security in our country, and they get it very easily.” The lingering question, ever since Musk showed up in the Trump family photo at Mar-a-Lago just after the election, has been when his new friendship with the President will go sour. (Musk spent much of the first weeks of the transition at Trump’s Palm Beach club; when he left, Trump wrote, on Truth Social, “Where are you? When are you coming to the 'Center of the Universe,' Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.”) In Trump’s first term, Bannon, then his chief strategist, appeared on the cover of Time. Trump was displeased; Bannon left the White House soon after. Now Musk was on the Time cover, cast as President Musk, behind the Resolute desk. Trump was in the Oval Office with Ishiba when a reporter asked how he felt about it. He paused. “Is Time magazine still in business?” he asked, despite having recently sat for a photo shoot with the publication. “Elon is doing a great job.” Musk tweeted, “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.” On February 11th, Musk joined Trump in the Oval Office. Musk had been holed up in the Secretary of War Suite of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for several weeks, communicating with the public mostly by posting online. Now Trump wanted him to meet the press. The President presided grandly from behind the Resolute desk, with Musk standing to the side, his hands clasped in front of his chest. Musk’s four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii (he goes by X), stood in front of him, in a tan coat. X was making sounds with his mouth. Trump turned to the boy. “X, are you O.K.? This is X, and he’s a great guy, high-I.Q. individual.” The President asked Musk to speak, like one member of a science-fair groupl project turning to his geek partner to explain the details. “At a high level, you say, What is the goal of DOGE? And I think a significant part of this Presidency is to restore democracy,” Musk said. “Are we in a democracy?” His son interrupted by burbling. “I tell you, gravitas can be difficult sometimes,” Musk joked to the reporters. “If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government,” he said, “and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Trump tried to nudge him toward some actual news items. “Could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers?” Musk’s favorite anecdote was about an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania that was now used by the contractor Iron Mountain to process retirement paperwork for the federal workforce. He started on what was almost his own version of the classic Trump weave, like when the President gets going on dishwashers or showerheads at a rally: We were told the most number of people that could retire, possibly in a month, is ten thousand. . . . Why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, on paper. It’s manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine. I’m like, “What do you mean, a mine?” Like, yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. You look at a picture of this mine. We’ll post some pictures afterwards. This mine looks like something out of the fifties because it was started in 1955. It looks like it’s, like, a time warp. And then the speed—the limiting factor is the speed—at which the mine-shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire. Doesn’t that sound crazy? Musk’s son made his way onto his shoulders, pulling at his father’s Dark MAGA cap. “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk said. “I thought my son might enjoy this, but he’s sticking his fingers in my ears and stuff.” After the meeting ended, Steve Cheung, the White House communications director, posted a collage of media coverage the meeting had generated: “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.” There was growing debate among legal scholars and journalists about whether the country was in a constitutional crisis. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, came to the briefing room to offer another view. “Many outlets in this room have been fearmongering the American people,” she said. “In fact, the real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district-court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority.” States were launching constant legal challenges against Trump’s actions, hoping to win nationwide injunctions. A conservative law clerk had told me, “It seems like the courts will have legitimate action. They can pause things for fourteen days. So it just messes up our momentum.” Early one morning, a Trump supporter posted a video of the White House: “He’s already up working. 5:30am. Oval Office lights on. Sun isn’t even up yet.” The lights in the video weren’t from the Oval Office. It almost didn’t matter that it wasn’t true—even supporters whose own lives had not materially improved in the way they’d hoped since Trump took office said that they loved what it all stood for. An R.N.C. delegate in Pennsylvania, whom I’d met early in the campaign, told me that he hadn’t been tracking the Presidency too closely, but he knew that Trump was going to release the Kennedy-assassination files, and that was enough. “Guess what? This country has not been told the truth,” he said. “It’s a new time for openness and transparency.” He went on, “Everything’s been on the up and up, other than the plane crashes.” A former Trump-caucus captain told me he just wished there were more mass deportations. On Presidents’ Day weekend, the crowd at the Daytona 500 cheered as Trump took a lap of the speedway in his motorcade. He had pinned a new post on Truth Social, a quotation sometimes attributed to Napoleon: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” At the one-month mark of his Presidency, Trump hosted a Black History Month event in the East Room. “Should I run again?” he asked the attendees. “What do you think?” They chanted, “Four more years.” The day before, Trump had written online, in reference to himself, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” ♦