Michael Scherer

Informally, you know, I think the president's described him as being at the top of the totem pole.

And when he says that, he's talking about policy.

And that means he's involved in all the foreign policy discussions, or almost all of them.

He's involved in

basically leading the immigration policy discussion.

He was deeply involved in many of the disruptive executive orders from the first few months, the crackdown on universities.

You just list off a lot of the stuff that happened in those first 100 days that caught everybody off guard.

He was driving a lot of that.

He was writing a lot of those executive orders.

And then I think the other role he plays is he is the voice—

You know, he's this sort of accelerant in the White House, the voice that's always, like, adding more fuel to whatever fire is happening and saying, we have to go harder, we have to go tougher, we have to do more of this, we can't give up, we can't surrender, we have to push through this stuff.

And so, in that way, he influences a lot of things.

I mean, like, any discussion that's going on, he's going to add more fuel to that fire, more kindling.

He's going to go on and say something like...

ICE agents have total immunity.

And so suddenly, you know, CBP officers or ICE agents up in Minneapolis feel somehow freer to push the bounds of what is legal in their behavior.

And he's accelerated that tension.

I mean, I think the most jarring thing he's done was after the Charlie Kirk murder.

give, you know, a speech that everybody should watch at his funeral in which he basically described this like clash of civilizations, this like full-on war for the future of humanity between the left and, you know, his side.

It was like a call to war speech.