Yuval Levin

And people's attention spans, and particularly as we've gone down to social media, things are just flying by really quickly.

Whereas these deals, they kind of deal with NVIDIA.

They cut a deal with Japan.

They actually fit, not maybe everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable, right?

They made a deal with this university.

They intimidated this person.

They launched an investigation here.

Everything has the size of a news story, functionally.

I mean, I have never covered administration before

Where the problem was not that we have a communication problem where people don't know how much we're doing, right?

That is what every administration, Biden, Obama, Bush, right?

They all felt that way.

Whereas Trump, in a way, it's almost, at least in your telling, and I do want to complicate this eventually, but it's almost the opposite.

That the pace of events feels actually faster in some ways than the events themselves.

But deals and particularly deals, events, the decapitation of USAID, these retail moments that are graspable, that are in many cases spectacular.

They do serve to communicate things about how the country works now, how this regime works.

And I do wonder if looking at federal spending numbers or rules passed understates that.

Let's take Doge.

I mean, you touched on this actually, but I always understood Doge's actual purpose as the intimidation of the civil service, of the federal bureaucracy.

That there was a view among many Republicans that the federal bureaucracy was liberal and woke and opposed to them and it hampered them in Trump's first term.