The MAGA Faithful Eye the Exits

With polls suggesting a bleak midterms for the G.O.P., Trumpworld in D.C. is girding itself for congressional subpoenas and preparing pardon requests. There are fourteen hundred and sixty-one days in a Presidency. When I met a former White House official for coffee last week, he kept mentioning this number. It had been drilled into his brain during a training he had attended, at a conservative think tank, sometime before joining the Administration. "In the early days, you go really hard, really fast--you know, get rid of U.S.A.I.D., stuff like that," he said. We were in a sitting room at the St. Regis Hotel, in downtown D.C. He'd recently returned to the private sector, and that afternoon he fell into reminiscing about the "halcyon days," as he put it, at the start of Donald Trump's second term: "Getting the January 6th prisoners out; the kids kicking in the doors at the Institute of Peace; withdrawing from all these globalist organizations." He reached out to try to kill a mosquito with his hand. "That was early energy," he said. "We've lost a little bit of our initial vibe. But not everyday can be a dramatic showdown." This stage of the Presidency, he went on, was for a different kind of work: "competent government officials" enacting "five hundred tweaks the conservative agenda has wanted for years."