Every administration has a bad week, and most of them have the decency to have it one person at a time, so that the record shows a secretary who misspoke on a Tuesday and a president who cleaned it up by Friday. The current White House has approached the three weeks before a midterm election with the specific confidence of a group of people who have decided that the way to survive a bad news cycle is to produce so many of them at once that no single one can be identified as the story. What follows is the list, in roughly the order it happened, from September 16 to this morning, limited to the president and the people he employs, because the Senate has been doing its own stupid shit this month and has earned a separate inventory. Every entry is on the public record. Each of them was optional.
The Fed chair. On September 16, at the airport in Charlotte, the president told reporters that interest rates in the United States “should be 1%, or less,” and that he had phoned the chairman of the Federal Reserve, a man he appointed in May after a years-long campaign to install someone who would cut, and told him, “you might as well vote with the board because it’s not going to matter.” This is the president of the United States explaining that he instructed the head of the central bank how to vote while predicting the vote would go the other way, so that Kevin Warsh was told simultaneously what to do and that it would make no difference, which is the management style of a man who has spent his life in meetings he was free to leave. On September 17 the board voted 12 to 0 to raise rates. Warsh called it “a sober decision, serious decision, responsible decision.” The president said he still had confidence in him, which, given the instruction issued the day before, is the one statement in the sequence that cannot be checked against anything.
The health secretary. On September 17, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed the annual conference of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization he used to chair, and told the room, “You have a strong and steadfast friend in the White House.” He said this in a year in which the country has counted close to a thousand measles cases, in which Pennsylvania has recorded four deaths in its outbreak, and in which the Centers for Disease Control, which answers to him, has so far managed to count two of them, without saying which two. A scholar of this discipline observes that the secretary of health briefing the group he founded on how helpful he has been to it is, in any other department, called a conflict of interest, and in this one is called the keynote.
The summit. In the days before Xi Jinping arrived for a state visit the president himself described as made for television, he banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the building. The broadcast networks, who share pool camera coverage, suspended it for Xi’s first day rather than accept a pool with their colleagues cut out of it, so a summit designed as a global broadcast spent its opening day largely unfilmed, except by Chinese state media, who got exactly the pictures they came for. The president’s explanation, posted afterward, was that the event had been “Actually made for Television” and that the networks had “refused to be there,” which puts the admission that it was staged and the complaint about the turnout in the same post. An adviser to China’s foreign ministry called the missing coverage “regrettable,” which is a Communist Party official explaining a free press to the American president and wishing there had been more of it. Asked what the summit had accomplished, the president said “everything,” and stopped. He called Xi a “truly great friend” on the same day his own ambassador says he told him that Chinese help targeting American troops was “unacceptable.” He came home with a two-month extension of the truce he already had, and a phone line.
The United Nations. On September 22 he told the General Assembly that a deal with Iran would come “right after the election,” that Tehran was stalling to see how he did in the midterms, and that he would “not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran.” Those three statements were delivered in one speech, in that order, and the third contradicts the first two. A week later the Pentagon sent a third carrier toward Iran on a schedule that puts it on station the last week of October, and on Thursday he told Time that renewed strikes after the election were “possible.” He keeps attaching the war to the election in public while explaining that the election has nothing to do with it.
The FBI. On the same day as the UN speech, a hacking crew announced it had been through the bureau’s hiring portal, by way of a software hole for which a patch had existed since June 10, and claimed names, home addresses, and phone numbers for nearly every agent, every applicant, and their spouses. The crew is one the bureau had itself issued a public warning about in May, so that the FBI’s cyber division had, in the correct order, identified the burglars, published their description, been handed the lock, and left the door open through the summer. Four days later the bureau found the time to demote the two officials running counterterrorism at its Washington field office, during a war with Iran, because, per Bloomberg Law and CNN, headquarters was unhappy with the pace of an investigation into harassing phone calls to Katie Miller, who is married to the deputy chief of staff. Fourteen weeks to patch a website, one afternoon to reorganize a counterterrorism division over a phone complaint from the boss’s family, which tells you where the urgency in the building currently lives.
The press office. There is no press secretary. Karoline Leavitt left at the end of August and the post has been empty since, which means the administration has gone into the five weeks before a midterm, with a war, a rate hike, and a diesel record, without the one person whose job is to stand at a podium and absorb questions, and the Washington Times reported this week that the White House position is that the president is “the best messenger,” a theory tested daily below. When MS NOW published a piece on September 25 noting that people close to the administration thought the press ban would never have happened with Leavitt in the job, the White House’s official rapid-response account replied six minutes later, “All these clowns do lie,” which is a post a press secretary exists to prevent, and which went out because the job that prevents it is vacant.
The former press secretary. Leavitt, meanwhile, went on Sean Hannity’s show on September 27 and cheerfully recounted that at a private lunch the president had told the British prime minister, “Your policies here are extremely stupid,” and that he needed to close his borders. The outrage came from the right. Greg Kelly of Newsmax posted that this was “A BREACH of Trust: The President’s, and the Nation’s. So IMMATURE!!!!” with the four exclamation points, so that the record now shows the president’s former spokeswoman accused of leaking by the president’s favorite network, over a story in which the only person who called anyone’s policies stupid was the president, to an ally, over lunch.
The ad. For three weeks the federal government has been buying television time, including during NFL games, for a thirty-second spot in which the president, in his own voice, announces the final battle and promises to demolish the deep state and rout the fake news media, a passage he first delivered as a candidate at CPAC in March 2023. The screen says “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” The bill has passed $920,000, and NBC reported this week that the money came out of Customs and Border Protection, so the agency that is supposed to be paying for the border is paying for the president to walk down a hallway in black and white. The Senate majority leader, who is a Republican, said Monday that he liked the message but it “shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” The White House says the spot is “clearly not political,” on the grounds that the president is not on the ballot, which is a position it held for exactly as long as it took him to reach Oklahoma.
The trade adviser. On September 29, at a conference in Washington, Peter Navarro asked whether any Canadians were present and then addressed them: “please, if you’re on K Street, get the hell out of the country.” He went on. “Memo to Canada: you cannot do that. OK? That game is up.” And then, to the government of the closest ally the United States has, he said that “if you interfere in our elections in Maine or Michigan” Canada would “pay even more dearly,” which is a senior White House official accusing Canada of plotting against an American election, in advance, and naming the two states where his party is most nervous. The prime minister of Canada was asked about it the same afternoon in Vancouver and laughed out loud, on camera, before saying, “I take note of both comments, how’s that?” A scholar of this discipline notes that when a G7 head of government responds to a threat from the White House with audible laughter, the threat has not landed the way it was drawn up.
The secretary of war. On September 30, one year to the day after flying every general and admiral in the force to Quantico to tell them they were fat, Pete Hegseth returned to the same building to announce that one in five of them will be eliminated by January, roughly 160 people, as a matter of accountability. In the same speech he announced that the future of warfare would be studied by a commission led by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey, a rocket salesman, a former Speaker, and a man who got rich on virtual-reality headsets, none of whom has been in a war, who will replace for planning purposes the strategists the department has spent nineteen months firing. He invited all fifty states to bid for a new base the way cities once bid for an Amazon headquarters. And he told the room that the force would have “no fatties, no trannies,” a standard for the people he will send to die, delivered in the vocabulary of a middle-school hallway by a man whose largest command was a platoon.
The Justice Department. This week the department confirmed it had opened “a preliminary review” into whether the prosecutors in the Watergate investigation committed misconduct against Richard Nixon, at the request of a former Nixon aide, with a spokeswoman stressing that it “does not amount to a formal investigation,” which is what a department says when it wants credit from the people who asked and deniability from everyone else. Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia explained the thinking at a Nixon Foundation summit: “Richard Nixon was absolutely couped out of office and was framed.” He added that “all of this was fake.” The Justice Department, five weeks before an election, during a war, with no confirmed attorney general since April, is spending staff time on whether the one president in history to resign in disgrace was the victim, and the evidence it will have to get past is a set of tapes the victim recorded of himself.
The checkbox. Also this week the Democratic National Committee sued the Pentagon over a form. In late August the Department of War asked for emergency permission to delete, from the ballot application used by Americans overseas, the box that says “I have never lived in the United States,” which about 11,590 registered voters, many of them the children of service members stationed abroad, needed in order to fill the form out truthfully. It got the permission in two days, with no notice and no comment, nine weeks before the vote. The emergency, on the record, was that an election was coming. Elections are scheduled two years in advance, which is apparently the kind of warning the department needs more of.
The president, on tour. On Thursday, at a truck plant in Denton, Texas, the day before the Labor Department would report 29,000 jobs for September and revise July into a loss, he said, “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” and gave his own administration “an A-plus on the government, on economics, all of it.” He was there for Ken Paxton, the Senate candidate who had been secretly recorded telling donors that attending the president’s convention “dropped our numbers” and agreeing that the president was something of a drag. The endorsement, in full: “He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I’ll be honest.” Then, “Is he here, by the way?” Then, “Oh, there he is.” Then, “I didn’t even know if he was here!” Then, “I don’t care.” That evening in Durant, Oklahoma, he played the crowd the leaked Paxton audio, told them to vote for Paxton anyway, and then told them, “Pretend I’m running, please. If we don’t win, they’ll end up impeaching me,” which is the president asking voters to imagine him on a ballot the Constitution keeps him off, on the grounds that the alternative is his own impeachment, a few days after his staff explained that the ad with his face in it was not political because he is not running. Asked earlier in the week whether Iran was behind a FlyDubai copilot’s attempt to put an airliner into the ground, he said “they’ll be hit very hard, don’t worry,” and then, asked where, said he could not say, because “you’re asking, where are you going to bomb?” which confirms the target and withholds it in a single breath. The same day he said Iran was “ready to fold up” and the war would end “right after the election, maybe before,” so that the end of the war now has a date, and the date is the one on which he is not, he insists, running.
The vice president. The same Thursday, with the jobs number sitting in a locked drawer at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for one more night, JD Vance went on Fox News to deliver the closing argument, which was this: “This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things.” The little things, in his telling, were whatever a 2024 voter wished congressional Republicans had gone further on, and he conceded that every one of those voters could find something. By the AP-NORC poll taken the week before, the things voters are griping about are groceries, fuel, and the war, 65 percent of them blame the president’s policies, and the vice president’s advice to those people, five weeks out, was to stop.
A scholar of this discipline is obliged to note what the list has in common, which is that none of it was forced on anyone. Nobody required the president to phone his Fed chair, ban three networks from his own showcase, toast a rival’s leader as a great friend, or play a tape of his own candidate insulting him. Nobody made Navarro threaten Canada, Hegseth hire a headset salesman to plan the next war, Kennedy tell the anti-vaccine lobby it had a friend in the building, or the Justice Department reopen Watergate on behalf of the defendant. Each was a choice, made by an adult, in public, in the three weeks before an election, by the people who are at this moment running a war in its eighth month, an economy that added 29,000 jobs, and a bond market at a 24-year high. The jokes in this inventory arrived pre-written, because the subjects did the writing. Nowhere in the three weeks is there a sentence from any of them suggesting they noticed the pattern, and the voters, who are the ones paying for the ad, the summit, the carrier, and the diesel, have 31 days left to notice it for them.
This would all be humorous, except that it isn't satire. No way The Onion could come up with a sequence like this.