Who actually is the President of the United States right now?

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

We’ve seen two remarkable — and intriguing — developments in the last week that independently we might just chalk up to the “normal” chaos of a Trump administration but that together I think raise some intriguing questions about who is actually in charge and how decisions are being made in the Trump White House.

First, Trump is clearly tussling with his own administration — aka Stephen Miller — about the scale and scope of the mass deportations roiling the country. Several weeks ago, as a reminder, Trump appeared to announce a major shift after an appeal by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on behalf of business sectors like farming, hospitality, and construction that are being upended by ICE’s immigration raids. “Changes are coming,” Trump said. Within hours, new guidance went out to ICE officers: “Hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” Then, Stephen Miller intervened, saying instead full steam ahead. Trump lost the battle with his own advisor.

A week ago, Trump again raised the possibility that farm workers (and maybe others) would be exempted from the $200 billion deportation machine Miller is building. “If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people in some way, Kristi, I think we're going to have to just say that's going to be good, right?” he said, referencing DHS secretary Kristi Noem. “We don't want to do it where we take all of the workers off the farms.” Now, after biting backlash from within the MAGA coalition, Trump is backing down again.

Second, after a surprise pause in Ukrainian defense aid last week by the Pentagon, Trump in a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he didn’t know about the pause and overruled it. Weapons will flow again. Background briefings, presumably from the White House, have thrown Pentagon undersecretary for policy Elbridge Colby (“Bridge” to everyone in Washington defense circles) under the bus. In fact, in a very Washington fashion, days of headlines have made sure that the bus has backed up and driven over Colby multiple times. Like this lede from POLITICO: “Since joining the second Trump administration as the Pentagon’s top policy chief, Colby has made a series of rapid-fire moves that have blindsided parts of the White House and frustrated several of America’s foreign allies, according to seven people familiar with the situation.”

These are not trial balloons that are being floated and then denied — in both of these cases, policy actually was implemented and went out for action in the field. Then to be reversed — in one case where Trump himself decreed something, it was undone by his own aide. In the other, the aide’s action was undone by Trump.

Needless to say, this is not how high-stakes decisions are usually made inside administrations. In a normal presidency, there’s a careful interagency process — led by, say, the National Security Council or the Domestic Policy Council — and there are deputies meetings (“DCs”) followed by principal committee meetings (“PCs”).

Again, it’d be easy to say this is just standard Trump, but I think there’s a bigger lesson here.

Together, these episodes raise an obvious conclusion: There isn’t actually anyone in charge in this administration. Sure, Donald Trump has never been a details person — in fact, his sheer ignorance of most details is astounding. (He’s clearly never understood tariffs!) As I joke, we elected president the only human on the entire planet who isn’t interested in reading the President’s Daily Brief intelligence briefing. Just yesterday, Trump — clearly impressed — complimented the President of Liberia on his English, obviously ignorant of the fact that English is the African country’s official language.

Nevertheless, in the first administration, there was at least a sense that most key decisions were flowing through the Oval Office, albeit in a free-wheeling, party-bus kind of way.

This second time around — presumably due to his obviously diminished mental capacity, energy level, and attention span, a topic the press doesn’t talk nearly enough about — it’s clear he’s not even pretending to care about the details of his administration’s policy. He only engages on the details when he’s asked about something specifically in a press conference.

I’ve argued since January (alongside William Boot) that it’s worth thinking about this administration as one where Donald Trump is the ceremonial head of state and there’s a separate “head of government” — more akin to the king and prime minister of the UK than the normal US constitutional system. It was a role first filled by Elon Musk, who effectively ran the day-to-day government for the first few months of this administration and provoked what I called a “constitutional crash” back in March.

That Musk episode, though, helps inform what I think is a useful frame to think about how his presidency will unfold: Policy agendas, administration actions, and national politics are in for a continuous period of instability where different figures seize power as an “acting president” or “head of government” to drive their own pet agendas for a brief period of time until their political capital is expended and they’re reined in after negative news headlines. Trump, after all, doesn’t like anyone taking the attention away from him.

In fact, looking back now, we can recognize that even just by early July we’re actually living in the third “geologic era” of Trump’s “acting presidents,” episodes where Trump has been willing to let others drive “his” agenda until he tires of them. For the period from roughly inauguration in late January through mid-March, Elon Musk was the primary “acting president” as DOGE ran rampant. Then, beginning in April as Musk’s attention and energy waned and tensions grew with him inside government, Peter Navarro seized the controls and we were treated to the rollercoaster ride of the April “Liberation Day” tariffs and an intense globally destabilizing period of focus on trade.

Then, in late May, with the world roiled by trade tariffs, Stephen Miller visited ICE headquarters to demand ICE supercharge its detentions and removals. Now we’re clearly in a third epoch where ICE and mass deportations are the main focus and the driver of the country’s headlines.

We’re in the Miller Age of the Trump administration.

Now of course the lines between these epochs aren’t neat and clean; as a country, world, and government, we’re still wrestling with the downstream consequences of Musk’s DOGE cuts and Navarro’s tariffs, and even before May Miller was starting to assert himself immigration-wise and in September, we’ll still clearly be wrestling with deportations and immigration roundups. Zombie DOGE lives on, as WIRED reports this morning.

Nevertheless, the headlines and crises of recent weeks make clear there’s a new captain of the ship driving the nation’s agenda right now — and it’s not Donald Trump.

So far at least, it appears that the run-time of each “acting presidency” is about 60 to 90 days before a star begins to fade, Trump tires of the issue, and a new power vacuum is filled.

Who’s next?

I predict by late summer or September we’ll see some new administration figure emerge to hijack the agenda anew and drive attention in a new arena. There are two possibilities worth considering: First, I’d put money on the country having a “Vought Age” this fall at some point, as OMB Director Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, takes a spin in the president’s chair and leads remaking the government that Elon Musk wrecked earlier in the year. Who else might land a stint as “acting president” is an intriguing question itself? Does J.D. Vance get a turn in the driver’s seat at some point? Does chief of staff Susan Wiles seize on something that she actually cares about? Does Jared Kushner return at some point as a 90-day Boy Wonder? The truth is there aren’t that many officials this time around with either the juice or who care enough about a given policy outcome outside of whatever Trump cares about.

The second possibility is that the Bridge Colby episode is instructive of what’s to come: The Trump administration is beginning to fill out the lower roles across government — the deputy secretaries and under secretaries, like Colby, who oversee policy in most Cabinet departments. It’s possible that power in this administration might fracture even more than it already has and that you’re going to see fewer “acting presidents” like Musk and more “acting princelings” like Colby — sub-Cabinet and sub-sub-Cabinet officials who realize no one is paying attention and there’s no policy process and who just start acting independently within ever-smaller fiefdoms and kingdoms across government.

What’s almost as interesting is looking around and realizing who isn’t driving the agenda nor appears eligible to be “acting president”: Trump’s security team is so weak, incompetent, fractured, and undermined that none of his top Cabinet officials, the roles you’d most expect to be able to develop independent power centers, appear to have any power at all — both Defense’s Pete Hegseth nor Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were effectively sidelined from the conversation of going to war with Iran, and there’s no real sign that Marco Rubio is trying to turn (or capable of turning) his dual roles of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor into any kind of force for his own agenda, despite the fact that the last time the roles existed together Henry Kissinger did turn it into something akin to a “co-presidency” in the 1970s. No historian will pen a future “Donald and Marco: Partners in Power” book, as there was for Nixon and Kissinger.

Meanwhile Homeland Security LARP-er Kristi Noem is clearly fine letting Stephen Miller run her department from his White House desk, and Attorney General Pam Bondi — a position, again, that actually is supposed to have important independent power — seems so out of her depth that she’s rubber-stamping anything that comes her way. (It seems entirely possible, in fact, that the clock might already be ticking on Bondi as the MAGA movement turns on her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations.)

One of my friends has lived the last decade with the mantra “It’s only going to get crazier.” I think that’s good advice — and looking at these first three “epochs” of the Trump presidency it seems likely especially operative in this administration.

Thanks for reading — if you have any of your own thoughts or angles of this story — or nominees for who you think will be the next “acting president,” and/or want to add me to your own group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state.

GMG

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