President Trump’s first 100 days

The United States, despite being the richest country in the world and a biopharmaceutical powerhouse, has long struggled with drug shortages. At any given time, up to 100 or more — sometimes many more — drugs are not readily available to American patients, largely because drug manufacturing operates with very little slack that leaves it vulnerable to disruptions. Sometimes, these are specialty drugs for, say, cancer patients who have certain genetics — potentially devastating for those individuals. Other times, as with the recent ADHD medication shortages, it can involve widely prescribed drugs with health impacts that can affect millions of people.

There are moments when these shortages can’t be helped. As I wrote in 2022, the pandemic’s supply chain disruption was the kind of natural emergency that creates unavoidable, acute drug shortages. Americans found it harder to find drugs like Tamiflu or inhalers with albuterol because the manufacturers were having a harder time getting their hands on the raw ingredients for those medicines, which can come from all over the world.

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Editor’s note, February 5, 10:30 am ET: On February 5, Gwynne Wilcox filed a lawsuit challenging her firing by Trump, setting up a vehicle the Supreme Court’s Republican majority could use to fully implement the unitary executive theory — and potentially give Trump full control over the Federal Reserve. The story below was originally published February 3.

President Donald Trump recently attempted to fire Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and its former chair. This attempted termination is just one of many similar actions Trump has taken, but it is also a singularly important move by Trump because it could trigger a legal fight that could significantly expand the powers of the presidency.

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About two and a half months ago, I wrote a piece about what foreign aid might look like in the second Trump term. Reading that piece now feels bizarre.

I thought that Trump’s second term would look much like his first: lots of proposals to cut foreign aid funding, pushed back on by Republicans in Congress who support foreign aid programs (often for geostrategic or religious reasons), resulting in not much change from the Biden years.

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Welcome to The Logoff. Today’s edition is about Donald Trump’s efforts to purge the Federal Bureau of Investigation of his perceived enemies — a power struggle with ramifications for the rule of law throughout the United States.

What’s happened so far? On Friday night, the Department of Justice moved to fire several senior FBI executives — including the head of the Washington field office. Additionally, DOJ is demanding a list of FBI personnel who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

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Things that, just a few years ago, would have been thought impossible in the American system of government are now happening.

Donald Trump is asserting the president’s power to remake the executive branch as he sees fit — empowering Elon Musk to push aside civil servants, wind down entire agencies, and generally strike terror into the federal workforce.

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It’s been 25 years since American Psycho slunk its way on to movie screens. Yet the film, starring Christian Bale as yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman, has never quite managed to die.

The satirical horror film, directed by filmmaker Mary Harron and adapted from a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, follows the exploits of a 26-year-old investment banker who spends his days competing with his friends about who has the coolest business cards and who can get into the nicest restaurants, and his nights wantonly murdering and torturing his victims.

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Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, China’s Xi Jinping made a call to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout, the two leaders pledged to deepen their “strategic coordination” and “practical cooperation” and “firmly support each other.”

Just a few days earlier on January 17, Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement, pledging a wide range of military cooperation.

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This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will mark an end to eight years of his critics’ hopes that he could be taken down through the legal process.

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Welcome to The Logoff. Today is a tough one: I want to focus on the Trump administration’s freeze of foreign aid, an issue that is a matter of life-and-death for vulnerable people around the world.

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The Logoff is a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff. DonaldTrump’s baseless accusations surrounding the Washington, DC, plane crash made headlines, but we promised you we’d focus on what he does that matters most, so today’s edition is about Trump’s plan to send detainees to Guantánamo.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be Donald Trump’s health secretary has been dogged by his long record of anti-vaccine and anti-science statements. Even as Republicans embrace him as an iconoclast, Democrats and other critics have lambasted Kennedy as a know-nothing without the scientific or bureaucratic experience to do the job effectively.

But in painting Kennedy as a clown, those criticisms miss something important. Kennedy has not only gained a public following for his outlandish claims, he has also made a lot of money broadcasting them. And he could stand to make more from his anti-vaccine crusade as America’s top health official — the kind of brazen self-dealing that’s become all but normalized in Trump’s America.

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Within days of taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump implemented a blanket ban on entry from seven Muslim-majority countries. It was met with furious pushback, public outcry, and a string of defeats in court.

This time around, despite signing an initial barrage of executive orders, Trump has not implemented a travel ban. But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming. One of his Day 1 executive orders, experts say, takes the first step toward a new travel ban — one that could be even more extensive than the first time around.

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The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is not, in the scheme of things, a big part of the federal government. It dispersed $43.8 billion in the last fiscal year. That adds up to just 0.7 percent of the $6.1 trillion federal budget. USAID isn’t even a full Cabinet agency.

But USAID is worth paying attention to, both because it does important work that belies its size and status, and because it’s become an early case study in how the second Trump administration plans to dismantle major parts of the federal bureaucracy.

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The Logoff is a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff. Today we’re focusing on Donald Trump’s (and Elon Musk’s) plan to purge the federal workforce, which has major implications for everyone — even if you don’t work in government.

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Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping effort to purge and reshape the federal government is underway.

Federal employees have arrived at a “fork in the road,” the new administration proclaimed in a Tuesday night announcement. Their offer is that employees can choose to voluntarily resign effective September 30, but receive full pay and be exempt from return-to-office requirements before then. Or, employees can choose to stay — but they’ll be subject to higher expectations and no guarantee of job security.

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The Logoff is a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff. Today’s edition is about Donald Trump’s attempt to freeze a huge portion of federal spending, a move that has implications for millions of Americans who depend on government programs and for the long-term balance of power.

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President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Monday barring transgender people from openly serving in the military. He claims that the ban, which discriminates against potential service members based on their gender identity, will support military preparedness and reduce taxpayer costs — but the evidence behind it remains as thin as it was when Trump instituted the same policy during his first administration.

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The presidential changeover last week was accompanied by a flurry of pardons — stretching the power of the pardon about as far as we’ve ever seen it go.

Outgoing President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned a group of people believed to be on the new administration’s “enemies list”: members of his family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, the Congressional Select Committee to Investigate January 6 Attack, and more.

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