On Not Losing Perspective In The Trump II Madness
Many thanks to Sarah Posner, John Light, and Nicole Lafond for keeping Morning Memo going so I could get away for a couple of weeks. It was a particularly bad time to be gone: the end of the Supreme Court term, the final passage of the centerpiece legislation of President Trump's second term, and the culminating rulings in some of the most important deportation cases threatening the rule of law.
Despite my personal frustration and a deep sense of FOMO, getting away for a bit was an important reset not just for all the usual reasons but because it's easy to lose perspective in this line of work, especially since Jan. 20. I have had my face pressed to the glass of the Trump II presidency in a way that felt necessary, but it inevitably distorted my own perspective on what you need and how to best reach you.
Morning Memo has from its inception been focused on providing you with a proportionate, sensible, measured rundown on only the day's essential political news. It has eschewed alarmism and regularly spared you from devoting your limited attention to news that didn't deserve it. It's also tried to maintain a consistent standard for what does deserve your attention, including some occasional reminders that politics is bigger than DC and life is bigger than politics.
But after Trump's second inauguration, my own curiosity and inability to make immediate sense of his rampage through the federal government prompted me to take Morning Memo in a somewhat different direction. The sheer volume of essential, often historic, political news that defied easy categorization forced some re-tooling of how to present the news to you. It felt important to come up with new buckets in which to place new kinds of stories. My ongoing focus on the three horseman of the Trump II apocalypse — retribution, destruction, and corruption — was an example of offering new categories for you to use.
More broadly, I was determined to come up with a new political taxonomy that accounted for the unprecedented changes in U.S. politics, like the DOGE infiltration and the White House attacks on the federal judiciary. It felt like malpractice merely to carry over the old-style political news coverage into the Trump II era. But coming up with a new taxonomy in real time meant grouping and continually re-grouping not just individual stories but entire categories of stories and that necessarily meant throwing a lot of news at you each day, much more than I had previously expected you to consume.
That was a big change from how I'd originally conceived of Morning Memo. I'd always wanted it to be breezy and succinct enough to be read in one quick sitting, but smart enough to make you feel like you'd checked off the box of being an informed citizen. That balance was hard to strike in the first half of 2025. I didn't feel breezy or succinct. In the onslaught of the first 100 days of Trump II, throwing more at you was easy to justify, but it got harder to defend as we moved into the summer.
It took a few days away from the daily grind to reassess how to re-position Morning Memo to best serve you. Spending time as a normal human, occasionally consuming some but not all political news, was a good reminder of what I find most helpful in a news site: context and explanation from a reliable narrator who is weaving together a big-picture story from the day's news fragments.
The sheer volume of lawlessness and historic political news remains high. It will remain challenging to make sense of it on a daily basis without overwhelming you. Where I've landed is to throw less at you in summary fashion and devote more time to explaining and contextualizing. That doesn't mean condescension or oversimplification. It does mean trying to tell the sweeping story of the Trump II presidency and America's descent into authoritarianism by pulling from multiple storylines to illustrate the larger dynamics in play.
Don't worry. It will still be a rundown of the day's political news, an anthology of the most important stories. But I want to get back to a breezier, tighter, more accessible version of Morning Memo that leaves you wanting more, not struggling to make it to the end.
See you here tomorrow as we dive back into it.
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