Yuval Levin

Is it something different?

How do you see the actual management structure of all this activity?

I guess one reason, though, I'm a little skeptical of describing it so rationally is that

Yes, at some level, Donald Trump is a final decision maker, and he does say no to certain Stephen Miller ideas.

But if you listen to an interview with Donald Trump, if you watch him speak, if you read about or talk to people who brief him, Trump is a very erratic mind.

is one way to put it.

Somebody who used to brief him once, I've always remembered this description, they described briefing Donald Trump as chasing a squirrel around a garden.

And I don't want to say he's manipulated by his advisors because I don't think it's quite that.

But they do know which code words and intuitions and ideas excite him.

And he moves towards his own excitement.

There's something very intentional.

He's like his own Twitter algorithm.

And, you know, he brings conversations back to his victories or to, you know, renovating, you know, the East Wing of the White House.

There was reporting on how once Rubio figured out he could describe Maduro as a drug lord, like a crime kingpin, that seemed to trigger for Donald Trump.

And so you look at the way people in the White House and in the administration tweet, and sometimes it feels to me like a lot of people vying for the king's attention as much as anything else.

And yes, they're doing it based off of a theory of what he wants.

But he doesn't pay attention to dull, drab things.

You got to do something big to get his notice.

I did a conversation with my colleague at Times Opinion, Masha Gessen, and their frame of reference is Russia under Vladimir Putin and the turn to autocracy there.

And something they said to me is that there are democratic metrics for what is happening in a country and a system, and there are autocratic metrics for what is happening in a country and a system.