Sublime

In effect, the president, quite aware of his and his staff’s inexperience in drafting legislation (in fact, nobody on his senior staff had any experience at all), decided to outsource his agenda—and to a heretofore archenemy. Watching Ryan steal the legislative initiative during the transition,

WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON BECAME PRESIDENT, the executive departments had not yet been formed or their chieftains installed, so he placed unusual reliance on his personal secretaries, whom he dubbed “the gentlemen of the household.” 1 He put a premium on efficiency, good manners, discretion, and graceful writing. The staff mainstay was

More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a