Michael Scherer

He just had a better, clearer idea of who he could choose from.

And he was able then to make clear to all of them who they were working for.

I mean, he has this great litmus test because of January 6th and the disgrace with which he left the White House of who stuck around, of who was still willing to be seen with him at his worst moment, of who was still calling him after he'd done what he'd done.

We reported that in the first term, Stephen Miller would go over to the Department of Homeland Security and say, I think you should do this idea, and everyone would walk out of the room saying, no, we're not doing that.

That's a crazy idea.

This time, if Stephen Miller gets on the phone with them and says, I think you should do this idea, you have to meet this benchmark of deportations this month.

You have to go to Home Depot parking lots to pick people up.

Kristi Noem and her deputies are sort of saying, he said, jump.

We're going to jump as high as we can.

That's our role.

And I think you see that in every one of the

major cabinet positions.

You see in those cabinet meetings that Trump has started holding, it's fealty to the king.

I mean, it's very much like a royal court, and they are all answering to them, not to their own bureaucracies and their own traditions.

And that's just radically different than the first term, where he was constantly negotiating the interests of each one of these departments, the traditions of the Defense Department, the traditions of Homeland Security, the traditions of

the lawyers in the Justice Department.

He came in this time, he cleaned house, wherever he saw doubt, and literally imposed loyalty tests to replace those people.

Yeah, I don't think that's correct.

It's not the case that it's entirely a sort of yes-man White House.

Now, the person we haven't yet mentioned who's the most important person in this story is Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, who stepped into the role that no one had been able to handle before, right?