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Senate Confirms Man Who Thinks Wi-Fi Causes Leaky Brain as Nation’s Top Doctor

Nash Grayson
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Senate Confirms Man Who Thinks Wi-Fi Causes Leaky Brain as Nation’s Top Doctor

WASHINGTON — The United States Senate on Thursday voted 52-48 to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, entrusting the nation’s $1.7 trillion health apparatus to a man who, as recently as last summer, was photographed sawing the head off a dead whale and strapping it to the roof of a minivan.

The vote fell along predictably craven party lines, with Majority Leader John Thune declaring the new Secretary a “bold outsider” — the same phrase Republicans used for the dentist who tried to sell mercury fillings back to the FDA in 2009, and the same phrase they’ll use again in six months when the measles wing of Bethesda Naval runs out of beds.

Kennedy, who spent the morning of his confirmation vote explaining to a reporter that seed oils are “what happened to John F. Kennedy, really, if you think about it,” took the oath in a voice that has been medically described by three separate otolaryngologists as “a man trying to gargle a hornet.” He immediately pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan his own team admits was workshopped during a nine-hour cold plunge in somebody’s Vermont creek.

“This is a historic day for public health, assuming you define public health the way Bobby defines it, which is as a conspiracy run by the Rothschilds and Tony Fauci out of a bunker shaped like a syringe,” said Dr. Pritham Okafor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spent the entire phone call audibly typing his resume into LinkedIn. “I will say the man is genuinely charismatic. If you stop listening at word four.”

Senator Mitch McConnell was the lone Republican to vote against confirmation, citing his own history with polio and his presumably limited enthusiasm for reintroducing it as a lifestyle choice. His no vote was immediately dismissed by the White House as “the last gasp of a man who can no longer metabolize raw organ meat,” per a statement from a deputy press secretary who appears to be nineteen.

Kennedy’s first stated priority, according to a transition memo obtained through a staffer who is already looking for other work, is the creation of a “Wellness Audit” task force empowered to review every vaccine approved since 1986, every fluoridation program in the country, and — in what aides describe as a “passion project” — the molecular structure of Froot Loops. The memo includes a bullet point reading, verbatim, “Investigate whether bears are being poisoned on purpose.”

Insiders at HHS, which employs roughly 80,000 people who did not sign up to be managed by a man who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park as a prank, report widespread despair. One career official described the mood as “the week after a divorce, except the divorce was your job.” Another was seen at a Dupont Circle bar drinking something called a Double Merck and refusing to answer questions.

“Look, I understand the concerns,” said Brenna Halversen, a paid Kennedy spokeswoman whose LinkedIn lists her previous role as “lifestyle coach, crystal-adjacent.” “But the Secretary has always said that the cure for most ailments is sunlight, raw milk, and removing the word ‘doctor’ from your vocabulary. The American people voted for disruption. Well — the American people voted for a different guy, and then that guy lost a primary, and now here we are. But spiritually, they voted for this.”

Democrats mounted what observers are calling “the opposition equivalent of a firm email.” Senator Chuck Schumer delivered a floor speech in which he accused Kennedy of “playing fast and loose with the very science that keeps our children alive,” then voted present because a staffer handed him the wrong card. Senator John Fetterman voted yes and, when asked why, said the word “vibes” and walked into a coat closet.

The confirmation comes on the same week the Senate also installed Brooke Rollins atop the Department of Agriculture and greenlit a White House visit from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was reportedly briefed en route that America’s new top health official believes, with his whole chest, that chemicals in the water are turning frogs transgender. A source inside the Indian delegation described Modi’s facial expression during the briefing as “the face of a man calculating how much of his own bottled water he brought.”

Kennedy capped the day with a victory address delivered from the steps of HHS headquarters, in which he thanked his wife, his dog, his falcon, the ghost of his uncle, and “every American who has ever looked at a piece of broccoli and thought, that might be lying to me.” He then produced, from inside his jacket, what he identified as an unpasteurized cheese. He ate it on camera. Nobody stopped him.

By 6 p.m., the official HHS website had been updated to feature a rotating banner of Kennedy shirtless at various elevations. The CDC’s vaccine schedule page now redirects to a Substack. And somewhere in the bowels of the Humphrey Building, a 31-year career epidemiologist is quietly teaching herself to code.

The Senate Just Confirmed a Director of National Intelligence Who Spent the Last Four Years Calling the Intelligence Community a Cabal

Margaret Thorne
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The Senate Just Confirmed a Director of National Intelligence Who Spent the Last Four Years Calling the Intelligence Community a Cabal

Eliza brought a cheese board on Tuesday night, and by the time we got to the Manchego somebody said, with the cheerful finality of a woman closing a car trunk, that Tulsi Gabbard was going to be fine. Fine. That was the word. Not qualified, not prepared, not experienced. Fine. I put down my wine and asked what, exactly, fine meant in the context of a person who is now reading the President’s morning intelligence brief, and everyone at the table suddenly found their napkins deeply interesting.

Yesterday the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, which is the job that sits on top of eighteen separate intelligence agencies like a very small hat on a very large head. One Republican — Mitch McConnell, of all the ghosts to rise — voted no. Every other Republican, including several who had spent the previous three weeks telling reporters on background that they had grave concerns, decided that their grave concerns were, in the end, about the weight of a feather.

I want to be careful here. I have spent thirty years watching Washington confirm people I did not like for jobs they were not good at, and I am not in the business of pretending every appointment is the end of the republic. Most of them are just disappointing. But the DNI job is specifically, structurally, the job of telling the President what is true when the President would prefer it not be. That is the entire point of the position. It exists because after September 11th we decided somebody needed to stand in the doorway and say the quiet parts out loud.

Gabbard’s public record on the intelligence community she now leads is not ambiguous. She has called its leadership a cabal. She has described its work, repeatedly, as a threat to American democracy. She flew to Damascus in 2017 and sat across a table from Bashar al-Assad and came home to tell a skeptical press corps that she was skeptical he had gassed his own people, a skepticism that has survived, like a houseplant nobody waters but nobody throws away, every subsequent finding to the contrary. She has praised Edward Snowden as brave. She has, on a podcast whose name I will not dignify, suggested that the very agencies she now oversees were running a kind of shadow government.

These are not gotcha clips scraped off an intern’s laptop. These are on-the-record positions, delivered on camera, defended in print, and repeated in book form. The woman who now decides what intelligence the President sees spent the last four years telling anyone who would listen that the people collecting that intelligence are the problem.

I asked a friend of mine — a lobbyist I’ll describe only as bipartisan, in the sense that he will take anyone’s money — what he thought was going on. He chewed an almond for a long time. Then he said: Margaret, the fix is that the President doesn’t want the briefing anyway. He wants someone who’ll give him the version that makes him feel good on Tuesday. He said this like he was telling me the weather. He said this like it was a logistics problem. He said this and then asked if there was more wine.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have outlasted seven administrations and one fire, called me yesterday morning before the vote. Judy does not do politics on the phone. Judy does crossword clues and grandchildren and the occasional complaint about her knee. Yesterday Judy said, Maggie, the career people are not okay. That was the whole call. Maggie, the career people are not okay.

The defense of Gabbard, insofar as one was mounted on the Senate floor, amounted to three arguments, each flimsier than the last. One: she was a veteran, which she is, and which has almost nothing to do with whether she should run the intelligence community, a fact we all understood clearly the last six times this argument was deployed on behalf of someone we disagreed with. Two: she had evolved, a word that is doing Olympic-level heavy lifting in this town lately. Three — and this was the one Senator Lankford actually said out loud — that the President deserved his team. As though this were a cabinet post at a small PR firm and not the person who decides which threats the commander in chief is allowed to know about.

Here is what I keep turning over. For twenty years the bipartisan consensus in this city — a consensus I frankly found sanctimonious at times — was that the intelligence community, for all its sins, was one of the few institutions too serious to be turned into a loyalty test. You could argue about its methods. You could argue about Iraq, and many of us did, loudly. But you did not, as a matter of basic civic hygiene, install at the top of it someone whose stated view was that it needed to be brought to heel.

That consensus died on Wednesday. Fifty-two senators killed it, and forty-seven more shrugged, and a fiftieth — a former majority leader whose own legacy is not exactly a rose garden — was the only one who apparently remembered what the job was for. When the history of this week is written, and it will be written, the interesting number will not be 52. It will be 47: the senators who privately agreed Gabbard should not have this job and publicly helped her get it.

I said some version of this at dinner, and Eliza — who I love, and who has been my friend since the Clinton administration — told me I was being dramatic. She said the intelligence community would manage. She said the career people always figure it out. She said we had survived worse. And maybe she’s right. Maybe the professionals down the hall will keep the lights on, keep the briefings honest, keep the country intact through sheer inertia and muscle memory, the way they always have.

But I want to note, for the record, that this is now the argument. The argument is no longer that the people we confirm are qualified. The argument is that the institution will survive them. That is a different country than the one I started covering. That is a country that has decided the guardrails are somebody else’s problem.

I asked Eliza, on her way out, what she would say if her daughter — who is twenty-four and asks very good questions — wanted to know how this happened. Eliza stopped in the doorway. She said, I’d tell her we were tired. Then she took her Tupperware and went home, and I stood in my kitchen with the lights on for a long time, thinking about what it means when tired becomes a governing philosophy.

You Can Be Banned From the White House Now for Using the Wrong Map

Margaret Thorne
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You Can Be Banned From the White House Now for Using the Wrong Map

At dinner on Saturday, my friend Eliza asked what the Gulf of Mexico was called this week, and three people at the table laughed before they realized she was serious. The bipartisan lobbyist two seats down — you know the one, the kind of man whose business card lists a think tank and a distillery — smiled into his wine and said, “Whatever the briefing room is calling it, I guess.” Everyone chuckled. Nobody corrected him. The cheese course arrived. And that, more or less, is the entire story of how a country stops owning the names of its own coastline.

The news, in case you were busy pretending to care about the Super Bowl halftime show, is that the White House has threatened to ban the Associated Press from events because the AP declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” That is the sentence. I typed it twice to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated it. A press organization founded in 1846 is being told that its credentials depend on whether it will adopt, in its copy, the cartographic preferences of a single administration that has been in office for approximately three weeks.

I am old enough to remember when conservatives were the people who warned, in grave baritones at Federalist Society dinners, about the creeping politicization of language. I was in those rooms. I took notes. Someone once gave a forty-minute speech at the Mayflower about the tyranny of calling a tax a “revenue enhancement,” and the audience gave him a standing ovation and a plaque. I would like to know where those men are tonight. I suspect they are at a different dinner party, eating the same salmon, saying nothing.

Because this is not a fight about a gulf. A gulf does not care. The water off the coast of Galveston is indifferent to its own branding. This is a fight about whether the people who report on the government are allowed to use a word the government does not prefer, and whether the penalty for using that word is expulsion from the room. If that sentence does not alarm you, I would gently suggest you have not been paying attention, or you have been paying attention and decided you would prefer a cheerful evening.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has seen enough presidential paperwork to develop a permanent eye twitch, told me something over the holidays that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She said the thing that changes first is never the big thing. It is always the small administrative thing — the form, the letterhead, the footnote, the list of approved terminology. The big thing comes later, and by then the small thing has already done the work of making the big thing feel normal. I am paraphrasing. Judy is less polite.

I called an old colleague of mine, a retired press office veteran named Harlan Pettit who spent twenty-two years across three administrations and now raises heritage chickens in Virginia. He said what’s unusual isn’t that a White House is angry with a wire service. Every White House is angry with a wire service. He said what’s unusual is the demand. “Nobody ever told me what to call a body of water,” Harlan said. “You could yell about coverage. You couldn’t require a vocabulary.” Then he asked if I wanted half a dozen eggs and hung up.

This is the part of the column where I am supposed to remind you that the AP stylebook is not a sacred document and that naming conventions evolve and that, yes, “Denali” happened and the republic survived. Fine. Granted. Noted. The difference, which I shouldn’t have to point out but apparently do, is that those changes did not come with a threat attached. No one was told that their press pass depended on the vowels they used. There was no list of rooms you could be thrown out of for noncompliance. The word and the consequence were kept politely apart, which is, in fact, most of what a free press is.

What interests me most, and what I could not stop thinking about on the drive home from Eliza’s, is the silence of the other outlets. A few issued statements. Most did not. I understand the calculation — you do not want to be next, you do not want to lose the seat, you have a mortgage and a network and a mildly aggrieved spouse who wants you home by eleven. I understand. I have been in Washington for thirty years. The calculation is always the same calculation. It is also, cumulatively, how you end up in a country where the map is whatever the man at the podium says it is.

Someone at the table Saturday — I will not say who, because she reads this column and will call me — said that she thought the whole thing was “a distraction,” which is the word people in this town reach for when they would like permission to stop thinking about something. Everything is a distraction if you are distracted enough. A gulf is a distraction. A press ban is a distraction. A demand that reporters adopt the administration’s preferred nouns or be exiled from the building is, apparently, also a distraction. One wonders what, exactly, is not a distraction. The salad, possibly.

I am old-fashioned enough to believe that when the government tells a newsroom what to call a thing, and threatens punishment if the newsroom refuses, something has gone wrong that a cheese course cannot fix. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the other newsrooms, the ones quietly tightening their own copy tonight just in case, are participants in that wrong and not bystanders to it. And I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the lobbyist at the end of the table, smiling into his wine, is the most American figure in the room — the man who has decided, pleasantly, that it is not his job to notice.

We will know the gulf by several names in the coming years. That is not the part that should worry you. The part that should worry you is what else we will agree to rename, quietly, in rooms where the penalty for the old word is the door.

Domestic Steel Executives Celebrate 25% Tariff by Immediately Raising Their Own Prices 24%, Just to Be Polite

Cody Thompson
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Domestic Steel Executives Celebrate 25% Tariff by Immediately Raising Their Own Prices 24%, Just to Be Polite

PITTSBURGH, PA — Within ninety minutes of President Trump signing a 25% tariff on all foreign steel and aluminum imports Monday morning, executives at three of the largest American steel producers had reportedly convened, popped a bottle of Korbel, and revised their 2025 price sheets upward by 24%, a figure described internally as ‘respectful’ and ‘leaving the customer a little dignity.’

The tariff, announced as a decisive blow against foreign dumping and a historic rebirth for American heavy industry, will take effect in March. Domestic producers, who have spent the past decade insisting they can compete on price if only given a level playing field, announced a level playing field was exactly what they had received and that prices would now be going up anyway, for reasons related to the playing field.

‘What we’re seeing is a restoration of domestic pricing power,’ said Marcus Delahunt, an industrial metals analyst at Brenner & Kestrel Equity Research. ‘Which is Wall Street for ‘they can charge whatever they want now and the Home Depot guy buying rebar has nowhere else to go.’ This is, by every financial metric, a tremendous outcome. For roughly eleven people.’

U.S. Steel shares rose 7.4% on the news. Cleveland-Cliffs rose 9.1%. Nucor rose 6.3%. A spokesperson for one domestic mill, asked whether the company intended to pass any of the tariff-shielded margin along to American manufacturers, laughed for what sources described as ‘an uncomfortable amount of time’ before the call disconnected.

The tariff is the second such action in eight years, following Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs, which a Federal Reserve study later concluded had cost the American manufacturing sector roughly 75,000 jobs on net — a figure the administration dismissed Monday as ‘a study,’ and therefore suspect.

Downstream industries are preparing to absorb the increases the way they always do, which is by not absorbing them. Ford, GM, and Stellantis are each reportedly modeling vehicle price increases in the $400 to $1,100 range per unit, to be labeled on future earnings calls as ‘strategic pricing initiatives’ or, in more honest quarters, ‘the tariff thing.’

‘The beauty of a tariff is that everyone gets to blame someone else,’ explained Priya Coughlin, senior economist at the Shoreham Institute for Trade Policy. ‘Detroit blames Washington. Washington blames Beijing. Beijing blames the WTO. The WTO blames no one because it has effectively ceased functioning. And the guy buying a Silverado blames, somehow, the guy who used to work at a steel mill in 1974. The system is elegant.’

Canada, which supplies roughly 25% of U.S. steel imports and nearly 60% of U.S. aluminum imports, responded with what observers described as ‘aggressively polite indignation,’ threatening retaliatory tariffs on Kentucky bourbon, Wisconsin dairy, and — in a move widely interpreted as a warning shot — Florida orange juice. Prime Minister Trudeau issued a statement that used the word ‘disappointed’ four times in six sentences, which is considered, in Canadian, approximately equivalent to a declaration of war.

Complicating the rollout, roughly 70% of all U.S. aluminum imports come from Canada, and there is, at present, no meaningful domestic aluminum smelting capacity standing by to replace it. Industry sources confirmed that America does not currently possess the power grid, the trained workforce, or the five-to-seven-year construction runway required to build that capacity, but expressed cautious optimism that this would be addressed ‘at some point, by someone, probably.’

On the trading floor of the CME, aluminum futures spiked 14% in pre-market, then settled into what one trader described as ‘the shape of a man realizing his rent went up.’ Beer can manufacturers, who consume roughly 25% of all U.S. aluminum sheet, were reportedly on the phone by 9:15 a.m. with distillery lobbyists to determine whose price increase would be more politically survivable.

At a rally Monday evening, the President celebrated the tariff as ‘the end of foreign steel, believe me,’ and suggested that American consumers would not feel the impact because, in his words, ‘the foreign countries pay it, that’s how tariffs work, everyone knows this except the fake economists.’ The assembled crowd, many of whom will shortly be purchasing a washing machine, applauded.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the American Iron and Steel Institute thanked the administration for protecting American jobs, American workers, and American industrial sovereignty, before clarifying that layoffs at two domestic mills previously scheduled for Q2 would proceed on time, as those had been decided ‘for separate reasons, unrelated to steel.’

I Watched Fourteen Hours of Super Bowl LIX and Only Three of Them Involved Anyone Playing Football

Duke Holloway
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I Watched Fourteen Hours of Super Bowl LIX and Only Three of Them Involved Anyone Playing Football

Denise put the seven-layer dip out at eleven in the morning, which is the kind of structural decision you only make if you’ve accepted, in your bones, that the pregame show is going to outlast the sour cream. She has. I have. The dip did not. By the time Jalen Hurts took a snap that counted, the top layer had sweated through to the olives and an ESPN analyst in a powder-blue blazer had already used the word ‘journey’ eleven times. I counted. It was that kind of afternoon.

Super Bowl LIX kicked off at 6:30 Eastern. Coverage started at approximately the Truman administration. Somewhere in between, a man I’ve never seen before interviewed a different man I’ve never seen before about what it means to ‘show up in the moments,’ and then they cut to a package about a Chiefs offensive lineman’s dog. The dog seemed fine. The dog did not ask to be on television. The dog, I submit, had the best Sunday of anyone involved.

My old high school coach, Sal DiMaggio, used to say the most important thing about a football game was that it was a football game. He said this because in 1974 he once caught a JV quarterback combing his hair before a scrimmage and made him run until the comb fell out of his pocket on its own. Coach DiMaggio never watched a pregame show in his life. He did not know they existed. He would have regarded fourteen consecutive hours of pre-game anything the way a normal person regards a bathtub full of mayonnaise.

The sitting President of the United States attended Super Bowl LIX, which is a first, and which strikes me as one of those milestones we crossed without anybody asking if we should. The Super Bowl used to be big enough that the President stayed home out of something like professional courtesy. Now the President shows up, and the broadcast cuts to him in a suite, and a sideline reporter tries to wedge national politics into the space between a Gatorade commercial and a third-and-four. I’m old enough to remember when the game was the content. Now the game is what happens between the content.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at halftime, as he has every Super Bowl for thirty-one years, to confirm that yes, the halftime show was something, and no, he did not understand most of it. Ray is seventy-three and once sold insurance to half of Erie County. He asked me, with real seriousness, if Kendrick Lamar was mad at somebody specific or just mad in general. I told him I thought the answer was ‘yes.’ He said ‘well, good for him,’ and hung up, because Ray’s entire position on modern culture is that as long as the young man is working, the young man is welcome. Ray is a better American than most of us.

The football game, when it finally arrived, was terrific. I want to be clear about that, because the sin of sportswriting in 2025 is burying the thing itself under commentary about the commentary. The Philadelphia Eagles hit Patrick Mahomes like they were getting paid per snap, which, technically, they were. Saquon Barkley ran like a man who had read every piece written about him since September and decided, politely, to return the favor. Hurts played the kind of game you don’t write poetry about because the poetry would just get in the way.

The Chiefs lost 40 to 22, and somewhere in the third quarter the ‘dynasty’ talk, which had been stacked three pallets high in every studio in Bristol, Connecticut, quietly slid off the forklift. A dynasty is a thing you recognize after it’s over, not a thing you announce every nineteen minutes during a broadcast. The Chiefs were a very good football team that won three rings. That’s plenty. That’s a career. You didn’t need to slap a brand on it. You did anyway. The Eagles took the brand off with a shovel.

Somebody in my house — I am not naming names, but she is married to me — asked during the second quarter why there were so many commercials for other commercials. I didn’t have an answer. Then a streaming service ran a sixty-second spot that appeared to be about a horse, which cut to a different streaming service running a sixty-second spot that appeared to be about the same horse, which cut to a beer ad that was, unless I am losing my mind, narrated by a former quarterback’s voice memo. The Super Bowl ad, once an art form, is now a QR code with ambitions.

I want to say a word about the players, because the players are the only ones who came out of this week with their dignity unscratched. These are young men who got up every morning from August through February and did a job that breaks people for a living. They do not deserve to be packaged. They do not deserve to have their tenth-grade coach dug up for a sixty-second profile piece that ends with a piano sting. They played a football game on Sunday and they played it very, very hard, and for three hours the broadcast remembered what it was for.

Then the whistle blew and the postgame started, and the postgame, dear reader, is just the pregame turned around. Same blazers. Same words. Someone asked Jalen Hurts what this means for his legacy. He had been a Super Bowl champion for eleven minutes. His legacy at that point was a damp jersey and a baby he was holding slightly wrong. He answered the question the way a gentleman answers a question from a man who has already decided what the answer should be.

Petey Corrigan, a guy I used to know who umpired triple-A ball for sixteen years, once told me the trouble with modern sports was that every event now has to be two things: the event, and the explanation of the event. He said this in 2003, before podcasts, before parlay apps, before sideline reporters asked sixty-year-old men about their feelings. I do not know what Petey would say about 2025. I know he would say it loud, and I know he would say it with his hat on.

The Eagles won. The city of Philadelphia will now do to itself what the city of Philadelphia does. A grease pole somewhere is getting the tallow touched up as we speak. I hope Saquon gets a parade as long as the pregame show was. I hope Hurts gets a week of silence. I hope somebody, somewhere, watches the tape without the talk over the top of it and remembers what football looks like when you leave it alone.

Denise is bringing chili over on Tuesday. She says it’s from a podcast. I did not ask which one. I have had enough content for one week.

Kroger’s Heart-Shaped Boneless Wing Platter Confirms Valentine’s Day Is Just the Super Bowl With a Candle

Tara Sparks
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Kroger’s Heart-Shaped Boneless Wing Platter Confirms Valentine’s Day Is Just the Super Bowl With a Candle

CINCINNATI, OH — At 6:04 a.m. on Saturday, a Kroger deli manager named Dorene slid a forty-eight-count tray of boneless wings, arranged in the unmistakable silhouette of a human heart, into a refrigerated case already groaning under pigs-in-blankets shaped like roses. A handwritten sign above the case read, in glitter pen, “FOR THE ONE YOU LOVE (AND THE GAME YOU’RE WATCHING).” A man in a Bengals hoodie stopped, stared at the tray for a full eleven seconds, and then whispered, “finally,” like a hostage released.

The platter — officially branded the “Sweetheart Snack Stadium” — is Kroger’s attempt to formally acknowledge what American households have quietly admitted in private for years: Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl are no longer two distinct holidays but one extended emotional carbohydrate event stretching from kickoff to Hallmark’s return-by date. The retailer’s press release promised “romance you can dip,” which is the most honest sentence a grocery chain has produced since the pandemic.

“The modern American couple doesn’t want to choose between buffalo sauce and intimacy,” said Margo Henshaw, a retail trend forecaster at the Cincinnati-based firm ShelfScope Analytics. “They want both in the same bite, ideally while a commercial featuring a talking frog sells them an insurance policy. We’re calling it the ‘Queso Valentine.’ It tests extremely well with anyone who has given up.”

Within hours of Kroger’s announcement, Publix unveiled a heart-shaped meat-and-cheese board that doubles as a punt formation. Wegmans leaked a photo of a chocolate fountain shaped like a goalpost. Costco, never one to be out-escalated, released a single pallet-sized item: a forty-eight-inch pepperoni pizza cut into a heart, sold exclusively to members who present a marriage license or a fantasy football trophy. Sam’s Club followed with a flower bouquet where each rose is actually a mozzarella stick wrapped in prosciutto, which several customers have already been filmed weeping over.

Not everyone is delighted. The American Florists’ Coalition issued a statement Saturday afternoon accusing grocery chains of “actively disrespecting the emotional labor of the rose,” and a Vermont chocolatier named Piers threatened, via Instagram story, to “personally deliver a truffle to every man who thinks a celery stalk counts as a gesture.” A representative from the National Greeting Card Alliance said the organization was “monitoring the situation closely” and had not ruled out a heart-shaped card that smells like ranch.

Customer reaction has been, by retail standards, violently enthusiastic. A couple in Mason, Ohio, interviewed while wheeling two Sweetheart Snack Stadiums and a single dented rose toward the checkout, explained that they had been married eleven years and had not exchanged a card since 2019. “Last Valentine’s he got me a card that said ‘To My Wife’ in cursive,” said Brenda, 38. “This year he got me wings in the shape of my feelings. It’s growth.” Her husband, Dale, nodded and said nothing, because his mouth was already full.

Kroger’s internal memo, leaked to a local food blog called Skillet Dispatch, suggests the company has been preparing for this convergence since 2022, when data analysts noticed that 61% of shoppers who bought a heart-shaped box of chocolates on February 14 had, six days earlier, purchased an “emotional quantity” of Tostitos. “We stopped treating them as two trips,” the memo reads. “We started treating them as one long Sunday through Friday of a person trying to feel something.”

Competing theories about the phenomenon have emerged. Dr. Alistair Pembroke, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Northern Kentucky, argues the merger is “the inevitable endpoint of a society that has replaced ritual with snack.” A counter-paper, submitted Saturday morning to a Substack called The Checkout Line, proposes instead that Americans have simply noticed the two holidays share a color scheme and “decided to stop overthinking it.” Both writers appear to agree the situation is permanent.

Hallmark, blindsided, released a hastily designed card Saturday evening featuring a cartoon quarterback handing a cartoon woman a long-stemmed mozzarella stick, with the interior message “YOU’RE MY FAVORITE PLAY.” The card sold out at a Walgreens in Covington in under twenty minutes, purchased almost entirely by men who did not make eye contact with the cashier.

As of press time, Dorene the deli manager had restocked the Sweetheart Snack Stadium display four times and was beginning to suspect she had witnessed the birth of a new national holiday, one in which love is measured in ounces, expressed in ranch, and observed at roughly a 45-degree angle on the couch. She declined to comment further, citing a personal need to go microwave something.

The President Appointed Himself Chairman of the Kennedy Center and Nobody at Dinner Could Name a Single Thing Wrong With It

Margaret Thorne
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The President Appointed Himself Chairman of the Kennedy Center and Nobody at Dinner Could Name a Single Thing Wrong With It

At a dinner in Kalorama on Wednesday night — the kind where the host apologizes for the roast chicken because she’s already apologized for everything else — my friend Eliza turned to the table and asked, with the innocence she deploys when she wants a fight, whether anyone actually cared that the President had made himself chairman of the Kennedy Center. A bipartisan lobbyist I will not name, because he pays for his own wine and that is rare enough to protect, took a long sip and said what they always say. He said it was mostly symbolic. He said the Kennedy Center is a building with a gift shop. He said there are bigger fights.

There are always bigger fights. That is the thing they say in this town when they want you to stop paying attention to the fight in front of you.

So let us be clear about what happened, because clarity is apparently a partisan posture now. The President removed the existing chair of the Kennedy Center — a board that has, by statute and by decades of quiet practice, included Democrats, Republicans, donors, diplomats, and at least one person who could actually tell you what a mezzo-soprano is — and installed himself in the chair. Not a loyalist. Not a donor. Himself. The federally chartered national cultural center of the United States is now, in a formal sense, a personal fiefdom of the man who once called the Kennedy Center Honors “very, very boring” from Mar-a-Lago.

Symbolic, the lobbyist said. As if symbols have ever been the small thing in American life. As if the reason we put a marble building on the Potomac and named it after a dead president was that we had run out of parking lots.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some of the appointees at the Archives have been alive, has a phrase she uses when a thing happens that nobody wants to describe plainly. She calls it “a Tuesday item.” A Tuesday item is something that, if it had happened in any other administration, would have consumed a week of hearings and a Sunday show. Now it happens between the morning briefing and lunch, and by Tuesday evening the only people who remember it are the ones who worked in the building it just hollowed out.

The Kennedy Center is a Tuesday item now. So is the Pentagon deciding which news organizations get a desk. So is the revocation of a former president’s intelligence briefing, which used to be the sort of thing a country did to defectors. You can have one of these in a week and call it a skirmish. You cannot have all of them in a week and call it anything other than a pattern, unless your professional incentive is to not see patterns, in which case Washington has a corner office for you and a speaking fee to match.

I asked the lobbyist, because Eliza had gone quiet in the way she goes quiet when she wants me to take the swing, what he thought the board of the Kennedy Center was going to do. He laughed. Of course he laughed. The board of the Kennedy Center is going to do what boards of prestigious American institutions have been doing with impressive consistency since November: they are going to find something urgent to attend to in the Hamptons, or Jackson, or whatever compound currently substitutes for a spine. They will issue no statement. They will place no call. One of them, eventually, will give an interview to a magazine nobody reads and describe the whole episode as “complicated,” which is the word the well-dressed use when they mean they would like to keep their seat.

I have been writing this column for thirty years, and I have watched a great many people in this city discover, right on schedule, that the principle they were willing to resign over last administration is a nuance this administration. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. Hypocrisy requires that you remember what you used to say. This is something cleaner. This is a kind of civic forgetting, practiced at the level of the dinner party, where we agree, plate by plate, that the thing happening in front of us is not the thing it obviously is.

And here is what bothers me, and what should bother you, and what the lobbyist could not answer when I asked him directly over the pear tart: if the national cultural institution can be annexed by signature on a Wednesday, and the board will not say a word, and the donors will not say a word, and the press corps will cover it as a style-section curiosity because the real news is a tariff in Tokyo, then what exactly is the firewall? Name it. Point to it. Tell me which institution, which board, which nonprofit with a Rockefeller on its letterhead, is going to be the one that says no.

Because I have been to a lot of dinner parties this month, and I have not heard anybody rehearsing the word.

The Kennedy Center will reopen next week. The marquee will light up. Somebody expensive will sing something moving, and the cameras will find a senator’s wife dabbing at her eyes, and the program will thank the chairman. Read that sentence again and tell me it is symbolic. Symbols are how a country tells itself who it is. We just let ours be signed over, and we passed the salad, and we agreed there were bigger fights. There are always bigger fights. That is how you lose the small ones, which turn out, in the morning, to have been the only ones that mattered.

The Man Who Said He Wanted Civil Servants ‘In Trauma’ Got 53 Votes and a Corner Office

Margaret Thorne
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The Man Who Said He Wanted Civil Servants ‘In Trauma’ Got 53 Votes and a Corner Office

How do you confirm a man who said, on the record, into a microphone, that his goal was to put career civil servants ‘in trauma’ — and then go home and eat dinner like nothing happened? I ask because the Senate did exactly that on Thursday, installing Russell Vought as the director of the Office of Management and Budget by a vote of 53 to 47, and by Friday morning the city had already moved on to the next thing, which in Washington is always the next thing.

I had dinner Tuesday night at Eliza’s place in Kalorama. The usual crowd: a retired ambassador who still corrects your pronunciation of ‘Doha,’ a bipartisan lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, and a woman from the Hudson Institute who was very invested in the asparagus. Vought came up the way appointments always come up now, which is to say someone sighed and someone else poured more wine and a third person said, ‘Well, elections have consequences.’ That sentence is the civic equivalent of a shrug emoji, and it has been doing more heavy lifting in this town than the entire Architect of the Capitol’s office.

Here is what Russell Vought has actually written, in his own hand, under his own name, for anyone with a functioning search bar. He wants to revive ‘impoundment,’ which is the charming Nixon-era practice of the executive branch simply refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated, on the grounds that the Constitution said so if you squint at it sideways. He wants to purge the federal workforce. He wants agencies to answer to the president the way a retriever answers to a whistle. None of this was hidden. He went on podcasts. He gave speeches. He wrote a chapter. The man came with a user’s manual.

And the Senate read the manual, and then fifty-three senators voted yes.

I am old enough to remember when ‘advice and consent’ was supposed to mean something — not a hurdle, exactly, but at least a speed bump. A reason to slow down, ask a question, look a nominee in the eye and say, ‘Sir, you proposed putting the people who issue my mother’s Social Security check into a state of clinical distress — could you expand on that?’ Instead we got the usual performance: stern opening statements, pointed questions that the nominee graciously declined to answer, and a procedural vote scheduled for a Thursday because nothing bad ever happens on a Thursday.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for twenty-six years and has opinions about humidity that would frighten you, called me the morning after the vote. She wasn’t crying. Judy does not cry. She said, in the flat tone of a person describing weather, ‘They’re going to come for us, and the people who could have stopped it won’t remember they had the chance.’ Then she asked if I wanted her lasagna recipe, because Judy copes by feeding people, and I said yes, because I cope by writing columns no one in power will read.

The bipartisan lobbyist at Eliza’s table — and I want to be clear, he is bipartisan in the sense that he will take a check from anyone — leaned over the bread course and explained to me, patiently, that Vought is ‘actually very smart’ and ‘understands the machine.’ This is what passes for a defense in this city now. Not that a nominee is decent, or qualified in the old-fashioned sense, or even particularly competent. Just that he understands the machine. The problem, I wanted to say and did not say, because I am still occasionally invited to Eliza’s, is that understanding the machine is precisely the credential of the person who intends to break it.

What I find almost funnier than the vote is the surrounding theater. Democrats held the floor all night. They read from Vought’s writings. They wore their serious faces. They produced the kind of speeches that get excerpted on MSNBC and then aggressively ignored by the only people in a position to act on them, which is to say themselves. At no point did anyone threaten a single thing that might have cost a single colleague a single ounce of comfort. It was civic disapproval in its purest form: expressed, archived, and entirely non-binding.

And the Republicans who voted yes — including the handful who, in quieter rooms, will tell you privately that they have concerns — performed a different kind of theater. The theater of the inevitable. ‘The president is entitled to his team.’ ‘He’ll be constrained by the institution.’ ‘He’s not as extreme as his writing.’ Every one of those sentences is a door, and every one of those doors opens onto the same hallway, and at the end of the hallway is a man with a list and a legal theory.

I want to be precise about something, because precision is the last thing any of us have left. Vought is not unusual in this town for being radical. Washington is full of radicals; it’s a feature of the place. He is unusual for being radical out loud, in full paragraphs, with footnotes. He told us what he would do. The Senate was furnished with the documents. The press described them accurately. And then fifty-three grown adults, most of whom will send me a Christmas card, voted to give him the keys to the federal budget anyway.

This is the thing I keep trying to get people to see, and failing, and trying again. The danger in a moment like this one is not the ideologue. Ideologues are common as pigeons. The danger is the enabler who has convinced himself he is a moderate because he still wears a blue blazer and still goes to Eliza’s dinners and still says ‘well, elections have consequences’ while the fork travels from the plate to the mouth.

When the histories of this period are written — and they will be written, by people Judy is currently training — the question will not be what Russell Vought did with the Office of Management and Budget. We already know roughly what he intends. The question will be what the other ninety-nine senators were doing on February 6, 2025, while fifty-three of their colleagues handed him the office. And the answer, for most of them, is going to be: the dishes. They were doing the dishes. They were pouring the wine. They were passing the salad. They were, as ever, waiting for someone else to be the one who said the obvious thing out loud.

I’ll be the one, then. Again. You were warned. In writing. By him. This was not a surprise. It was an appointment, in both senses of the word, and we kept it.

The Cheapest Thing in Washington Is Still a Signature

Margaret Thorne
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The Cheapest Thing in Washington Is Still a Signature

There was a moment Wednesday night — somewhere between the endive salad and the second bottle of a Willamette Valley pinot my friend Eliza insists on bringing to every dinner whether or not it pairs — when the bipartisan lobbyist at the end of the table leaned back, dabbed his mouth with a linen napkin, and said, of the day’s signing ceremony: Well, that one was free. Nobody disagreed. Nobody followed up. A plate moved. The host asked about the dessert course. This is, I have come to understand, how things work now in the capital that used to at least pretend to govern.

The president signed an executive order Wednesday barring transgender women from participating in women’s sports. I watched the clip twice, because I am old enough to remember when a presidential signature was supposed to be a serious instrument and not a prop in a middle-school play about serious instruments. The pen came out. The cameras clicked. The men behind him arranged their faces into the expression Washington men have been practicing since the Bush administration — the one that says I am a grave person considering a grave matter — and then everyone went to lunch.

I am going to do something that used to be called journalism and ask a plain question: what, mechanically, does that order do? The NCAA already shifted its policy. The major women’s sports federations have been making their own rules for years. The actual population affected by this order, in the entire country, in any given competitive season, numbers somewhere between a rounding error and a statistical ghost. If the federal government were a household, it would be the equivalent of calling a family meeting to announce, with solemnity and a signed proclamation, that henceforth no one is allowed to put pickles in the blender.

And yet — and this is what my sister-in-law Judy, who has spent thirty years at the National Archives watching presidential paper come and go, keeps trying to tell anyone who will listen — the order is not for anything. The order is of something. It is of a new kind of governance where the document is the deliverable, where the news cycle is the constituency, where the point of the signature is to be photographed signing.

I have no patience for the argument that this is unprecedented. Every administration in my memory has reached for the executive order when Congress became too tedious to persuade, and every administration has been lectured about it by the party out of power and then done exactly the same thing upon returning to power. What has changed is the ratio. The orders used to at least pretend to be the last resort. Now they are the first, and often the only, move. The pen is not an instrument of executive authority anymore. It is a content-creation tool.

Eliza — who is, I should disclose, the sort of person who will tell you she voted for nobody in the last three elections and expects to be congratulated for it — asked the table a question I thought was worth the price of the pinot. Name one piece of actual legislation, she said, that has cleared both chambers and been signed into law in the last six weeks. The bipartisan lobbyist laughed. A woman from Treasury changed the subject to a restaurant on P Street. Nobody produced a name. I did not produce one either, and I read four newspapers before breakfast.

This is what I mean by civic cowardice, and I mean it in the precise, unflattering sense. It is not cowardice to sign a culture-war order; signing culture-war orders is in fact the opposite, a kind of cheap courage, the courage of knowing the cameras are already on. The cowardice is in the rest of it. The cowardice is in a Congress that has discovered it no longer has to do anything, because the executive branch will do the performance for them and the judiciary will sort out whatever survives. The cowardice is in a press corps that will cover the signing as news and the absence of legislation as gridlock, as if those were two separate weather systems and not the same storm.

I want to be careful here, because this column has a bad habit of being read by people looking for ammunition. I am not interested, today, in relitigating the sports question itself, which is a real question with real pain on more than one side of it and which deserves a seriousness that a twenty-second Oval Office photo op is structurally incapable of providing. I am interested in the instrument. I am interested in what it says about us that our government, such as it is, has decided the signature is the work.

Somebody at the table — I think it was Eliza’s husband, who is a lawyer of the kind who uses the word optics without irony — said the quiet thing. He said: It’s fine. The courts will handle it. And there it was, the whole theory of modern American governance in six words. The president signs. The courts handle it. Congress raises money. The voters are given a show. The show is the policy. The policy is the show.

I asked Judy, the next morning over the phone, whether any of this would look different a hundred years from now when some other archivist is pulling these orders out of a box. She said the orders themselves would look fine. They always look fine, she said. It’s the absence around them that tells you what was happening. I have been thinking about that sentence for two days.

So here is what I am sitting with, on a gray Wednesday in February, while Washington congratulates itself on another productive signing day. A country that has outsourced its legislature to its executive and its executive to its media operation is not a country that is governing itself. It is a country that is watching itself be governed, and clapping at the parts it recognizes, and going home.

The signatures are the cheapest thing in this city. They have always been cheap. What used to be expensive was the work underneath them. I do not know anyone, in or out of government, who could tell you with a straight face that the work is still being done. And the dinner parties, I notice, are getting quieter at exactly the moments they used to get loud.

The President Said We Would ‘Own’ Gaza, and the Dinner Party Kept Passing the Salad

Margaret Thorne
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The President Said We Would ‘Own’ Gaza, and the Dinner Party Kept Passing the Salad

When did we decide that a man could stand in the East Room, announce that the United States would ‘take over’ a strip of land currently occupied by two million people, suggest the permanent relocation of those people somewhere — anywhere, he wasn’t picky — and that the correct response was to file it between the tariff headline and the Super Bowl prop-bet roundup? Because that is what happened on Tuesday evening, and I would like somebody, anybody, to stand up and say it happened.

The President used the word ‘own.’ He used the word ‘level.’ At one point he said ‘clean it out,’ as if describing a garage. Standing next to him was the Prime Minister of Israel, wearing the face of a man who has just been handed a check he did not expect to clear. The cameras rolled. The transcript will exist forever. And somewhere between the announcement and the eleven o’clock hour, the whole thing was quietly reclassified in the national bloodstream as one of those things the President says.

I was at Eliza’s on Tuesday. Eliza hosts a standing Tuesday supper that has, over twenty-odd years, metabolized roughly every major foreign policy crisis of the post–Cold War era over braised short ribs. The television was on in the next room, muted, the way it always is — ambient prestige, like a fireplace. The chyron said what the chyron said. I watched a senior partner at a firm I will not name glance at it, glance away, and ask whether anyone had been to the new place on N Street.

Nobody at that table was stupid. Nobody at that table was uninformed. Two of them have security clearances I am not supposed to know about and one of them used to run a desk at State. And yet the only person who said the quiet part aloud was a bipartisan lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, who leaned toward me over the cheese course and said, flatly, ‘That’s ethnic cleansing with a ribbon on it,’ and then asked for the mustard.

He was not wrong. He was also not going to say it on a panel, or to a client, or into any device with a microphone in it. The thing I have learned in thirty years of writing this column is that Washington does not actually lack the vocabulary for what it sees. It simply rations the vocabulary. There are words you use in private and words you use in public and the gap between those two vocabularies is where a republic goes to die.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives longer than some of the documents she handles have been declassified, called me on Wednesday morning. She had one question. ‘What are we going to file this under?’ She meant it seriously. She meant: in fifty years, when some graduate student pulls the folder, what is the subject heading going to read? ‘Reconstruction Plan, Gaza, 2025’? ‘Proposal, Voluntary Relocation of Noncombatants’? Judy, who is not a sentimental woman, said the archive always tells you what a country could not bring itself to name in the moment.

Reconstruction. That’s the word they’re floating. Reconstruction is what you do to a downtown after a hurricane. It is not what you do to a population. But the vocabulary has already shifted, the way it always shifts — first in the press release, then in the wire copy, then in the mouth of the cable anchor who has been told to stay neutral, and finally at Eliza’s dinner table, where by the second bottle it has become ‘the Gaza situation,’ a phrase that launders everything it touches.

The opposition, meanwhile, issued statements. I read them. I read all of them. They were written by people who were clearly hoping that somebody braver would go first. The Senate Minority Leader used the phrase ‘deeply concerning,’ which is what we now say instead of ‘no.’ A handful of House members with safe seats managed the word ‘unacceptable,’ and one of them actually said ‘ethnic cleansing,’ for which he was immediately described in three different outlets as ‘going further than his colleagues,’ as if naming the thing were the provocation and not the thing itself.

I keep thinking about the smile on Netanyahu’s face. It was not a triumphant smile. It was the smile of a man who has watched an American President volunteer, on live television, to absorb the international legal consequences of something Israel has wanted for a long time and could not say out loud either. You could see him calculating, in real time, which cabinet members would have to be informed and which could learn about it on the plane home.

The Pam Bondi confirmation happened the same week. USAID personnel were placed on administrative leave — globally, a word I did not think I would ever see applied to a furlough. A ten percent tariff on Chinese goods went into effect and China fired back at our coal and our soybeans. Any one of these, in a different decade, would have been the story of the month. Stacked together, they become weather. That is the trick. That has always been the trick. Flood the zone and the zone stops being a zone.

And here is what I want to say, and what I suspect my Tuesday table would rather I didn’t. A country that cannot bring itself to name a proposal for the mass relocation of a civilian population — cannot name it in its papers of record, cannot name it at its dinner tables, cannot name it on the Senate floor — is not a country having a debate. It is a country practicing a silence. The silence is the policy. The silence is what gets filed in Judy’s folder.

I am told, by friends who mean well, that it will not actually happen. That the logistics are impossible, the allies will balk, the courts will intervene, the thing will collapse under the weight of its own unseriousness. Perhaps. I have been told a great many things will not happen, over thirty years, and a surprising number of them have. The useful question is never whether a thing will be executed. The useful question is what it costs a country to hear a thing proposed and decline to flinch.

We heard it. We declined. The salad kept moving around the table. Somebody, eventually, is going to have to explain to Judy’s graduate student what the heading should read, and I suspect the honest answer is going to be the one none of us wanted to write down on Tuesday night.

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