The YOLO Phase

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

This sounds like a rhetorical question but I swear it isn’t: Is it just me or is the White House getting nuttier?

 

“It’s you” is a defensible answer. As I write this, for instance, one of the top stories on the New York Post’s website has to do with our Secretary of Health and Human Services interrupting a family road trip many years ago to sever and collect a dead raccoon’s penis for “study.”

 

Which, as others have noted, isn’t the most disturbing encounter he’s had with dead animals. Or the second-most.

 

To ask whether an administration that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is getting nuttier is to invite the response, “Nuttier than harvesting raccoon junk?”

 

The same goes for the president’s spat with the pope. Flaming the Vicar of Christ felt like an unhinged new low for Donald Trump, proof that a man who’s barely tethered to propriety on his best days had at last completely detached. But this wasn’t the first time he’s squabbled with a pontiff. In 2016 he called Pope Francis “disgraceful” and a “pawn” for Mexico after Francis opined that a person can’t truly be Christian if they think only of building walls, not bridges.

 

Beefing with the Vatican repeatedly is nutty enough that it feels absurd to debate the relative nuttiness of each episode.

 

All of which is to say that, if by “nuttier” we mean weirder, there’s a good case to be made that the White House isn’t getting nuttier. Arguably the opposite, as Trump just rid himself of a (married) Homeland Security secretary who was allegedly having a very public affair with her (married) top adviser and whose husband was recently exposed for having a “bimbo fetish.”

 

And not the sort of bimbo fetish we tend to associate with randy middle-aged men.

 

But if by “nuttier” we mean more fanatic about making the president happy, either by carrying out his vendettas more aggressively or by aping his worst impulses more doggedly, then yeah, I think there’s an equally strong case that the administration is getting nuttier. And not by coincidence.

 

There are reasons to believe we might be entering the YOLO phase of this presidency, which was already waaaay too YOLO-minded to begin with.

 

Retribution.

 

The easiest prediction in politics was that whoever followed the execrable Pam Bondi as attorney general would be worse than she was.

 

That’s because the president reportedly resented Bondi’s “inability to prosecute the people he hates” and made that resentment known to confidants, clarifying expectations for her successor. If the next AG wanted to avoid her fate, he or she would need to behave more execrably in harassing Trump’s political enemies.

 

So that’s what acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former defense lawyer for the president, has done.

 

With Blanche now at the helm, the Justice Department has launched an investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House staffer who testified against Trump before the House’s January 6 Committee. Days later, the DOJ moved to vacate the convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for plotting the insurrection. Their sentences had already been commuted by the president last year; vacating the convictions now is a symbolic statement that there’s no crime in trying to overthrow the U.S. government as long as you’re doing so on behalf of Donald Trump.

 

To all appearances, Blanche’s Justice Department will follow the friends/enemies ethos of this squalid postliberal kakistocracy even more ruthlessly than Bondi’s did. To signal his emphatic lack of independence, he mewled to reporters this month that if the president opted not to nominate him as AG and instead offered him some other position, he would respond, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.” Say what you want about Todd Blanche, he understands the assignment.

 

So does Tulsi Gabbard. Apart from J.D. Vance, the director of national intelligence is the most tragicomic figure in the Cabinet, an ardent dove who finds herself now having to grudgingly defend Bush-on-steroids interventions in Venezuela and Iran. The president’s surprising turn toward hawkishness placed her at a crossroads, forcing her to choose between resigning on dubious principle à la Joe Kent or biting her tongue while figuring out novel ways to stay in her boss’ good graces.

 

She chose door number two, as the power-worshipers around Trump nearly always do.

 

Gabbard’s strategy for proving her value to the White House is the same as Blanche’s, pursuing grievances that the president has nursed since his first term to demonstrate the depth of her loyalty. She was on scene in Fulton County, Georgia, in January when the FBI confiscated ballots from a storage facility as part of a probe into Joe Biden’s supposedly suspicious victory there in 2020. And yesterday her office confirmed that she’s issued a criminal referral to the DOJ for the whistleblower who exposed Trump’s 2019 “quid pro quo” phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, which led to his first impeachment.

 

Retribution is the name of the game in Trump 2.0 and Blanche and Gabbard—two of the most powerful figures in national security—are now conspicuously going all-in on it. Seems ominous!

 

Blind loyalty.

 

Also ominous is the reaction of certain presidential cronies to Trump sparring with Pope Leo XIV, which came packaged with a blasphemous image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. (The commander in chief de-escalated on Wednesday, publishing a new image of himself with Jesus instead.)

 

Not only did the first image offend some MAGA deplorables, a group previously deaf to their hero’s moral outrages, it caused a few to wonder whether the president might be the antichrist—which I doubt, for what it’s worth, and not just because I’m a nonbeliever. If Donald Trump has a divinely ordained mission, it’s surely the destruction of the American experiment and immolation of American global prestige, not ushering in the end times.

 

The (mild) right-wing backlash to the president’s blasphemy was important, though, insofar as it turned the episode with the pope into a litmus test for Republicans reminiscent of the 2016 Access Hollywood fiasco. Now, as then, Trump’s boorishness led him to do something so abhorrent that even members of his own party felt obliged to lash him for it; at such moments, when he’s besieged, the degree of us-versus-them loyalty he expects of his personality cult goes from “high” to “absolutely blind.”

 

Bad enough that a right-winger should join a pile-on of the president when he doesn’t deserve it. Much worse is joining a pile-on when he does.

 

There was only so much his toadies could say to spin his blasphemy, though. The best the highest-ranking Catholic in the administration could do was lolz, which was actually more dignified than the embarrassing lie evangelist Franklin Graham spun for his followers. So instead, Trump courtiers focused on the spat with Leo and dutifully took the president’s side in that. J.D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, presumed to lecture the pope about grounding his theological pronouncements in truth. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who isn’t Catholic, babbled at reporters about the church’s doctrine on “just wars.” (Which the Iran war is not.)

 

But most obsequious was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, unsurprisingly, who marched out to the podium at the Pentagon this morning with a prepared rant likening American media’s skepticism of the Iran conflict to … the Pharisees’ hostility to Jesus.

 

That seemed to be a gesture of defiance toward Leo, as the pope’s own outspokenness about the war was motivated in part by Hegseth’s Christian justifications for it. “Woe to those who bend religions and the very name of God to their own military, economic, and political objectives, dragging what is holy into what is most filthy and dark,” the pontiff declared this morning in Cameroon. For Hegseth, there could be no Trumpier response than extending a rhetorical middle finger by comparing naysayers about the war to those who persecuted Christ.

 

Except, I guess, lifting a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction instead of the Bible itself, which Hegseth apparently also did this week. That’s Trumpier.

 

“For the would-be Great Man of History, the final boss is always the pope,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat quipped earlier this week. That sums up the present moment nicely. For a megalomaniac like Trump, there can be no greater test of loyalty for devout Christians who support him than asking them to take his side in a moral dispute with the most authoritative Christian on Earth.

 

And, with no exceptions, the most powerful Christians in his orbit have. Seems ominous!

 

Why now?

 

If I’m right that the administration is getting nuttier—that is, more ruthless about abusing power and more fanatic about signaling allegiance to Trump—why is it happening now?

 

One would think it’d be the opposite. The president’s job approval dropped below 40 percent in March in Nate Silver’s poll aggregator and has been stuck there all month. Unpopular wars and high gas prices during a second term are usually cause for people in and around the White House to start peeling off, not to burrow in.

 

Answering the question “why now?” begins with a practical reason. After a full year of denying the media a “scalp” by firing underperforming Cabinet members, Trump axed two in the span of a month when he canned Kristi Noem and Bondi. He’s clearly gotten more comfortable lately with the prospect of future Senate confirmation fights, perhaps expecting that the chamber’s Republican majority will be more willing to rubber-stamp his nominees as the odds of a Democratic takeover grow. It can’t be long before the next axe falls.

 

It also can’t be a coincidence that the people around him who are straining the hardest to demonstrate loyalty lately are all on thin ice and facing the axe themselves. Blanche is a temp, reportedly at risk of being pushed aside as attorney general for Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. Gabbard continues to run afoul of Trump for her ambivalence about his foreign policy. Mike Johnson is the speaker in name only, with his hold on the job entirely contingent on sucking up to the president.

 

And Hegseth? You can see the terror in his eyes at his press conferences about potentially being scapegoated for a less-than-total victory over Iran. He’s allegedly paranoid about being replaced by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and probably has reason to be. My sense is that he’d do anything to retain the president’s favor, as being a buffoon with an impressive title whom no one takes seriously is preferable to being a buffoon to whom no one any longer pays any attention.

 

Shaky job security is a terrific incentive for an employee to work harder. Working harder in the Trump administration means being even more of a servile henchman and bootlicker than you were before.

 

A second reason that the administration is burrowing in is the decline in Trump’s political fortunes. It becomes plainer by the day that the political damage he’s caused himself is irreparable, something that might be mitigated by November (or might not!) but assuredly not undone. Per Politico, numerous White House allies are resigned to losing the House and now worry about saving the Senate, an outcome that seemed off the board six months ago given the difficulty of this fall’s map for Democrats.

 

Trump himself is reacting to the air of politician doom by behaving a little, well, nuttier than usual. Twice in the past week the Times has considered the question of the president’s mental health as the pressure of the war and his declining popularity weigh on him. When he jabs at the pope, threatens to end Iran’s civilization, and depicts himself as Jesus, is that just him being him—or is it a fragile mind straining to cope with a degree of psychological stress to which it’s never been exposed? (Since January 6, at least.)

 

As I’ve said, normally this would be the rats-off-the-ship stage of a presidency. Yet, paradoxically, the worse things get for Trump, the more tightly bound to him his cronies are apt to become. The cultish dynamic of strongman authoritarianism will encourage a siege mentality among many of his deputies at moments of political turmoil. And the command the president continues to wield over grassroots Republican opinion makes breaking with him politically risky for GOP apparatchiks even when the rest of the country is howling for change.

 

If you’re the sort who worries about crossing him during good times, how much more should you worry when his back is against the wall and he’s looking for ways to reassert his authority by making examples of enemies?

 

Turning Point, USA?

 

The final accelerant of the administration’s anxiety is of course the electoral fate of Viktor Orbán, the ur-Trump, in Hungary last weekend.

 

Orbán was the avatar of ascendant Western postliberalism, a man who wielded state power to bend public and private institutions in his country to his will in precisely the manner our president strives to. He became a test case for what we might call autocracy without autocracy: Rather than cancel or rig elections, Orbán pulled every lever of government available to him to advantage himself and disadvantage his opponents.

 

He failed spectacularly. Not only was he routed at the polls, but incoming Prime Minister Péter Magyar has undertaken this week to warn Orbán’s toadies—to their faces—that they’ll pay for their roles in turning Hungarian public life into an arm of his predecessor’s political machine.

 

Trump and his deputies are watching intently, no doubt.

 

The president has already reportedly “joked” with aides that he plans to pardon everyone who comes within 200 feet of the Oval Office before his term ends. Watching Orbán go down in flames and Magyar promise a reckoning for those who enabled him can only have made the administration that much more nervous about consequences down the line from America’s own retribution-minded opposition. If the backlash to Western postliberalism has arrived, the future suddenly looks quite frightening for Trump collaborators.

 

The obvious lesson they’ll take from Magyar’s victory is that autocracy without autocracy isn’t enough. They suspected as much already—that’s why meddling with the vote in November is such a priority for Republicans—but it seems clear from Hungary’s example that the president isn’t going to overcome a blue wave by, say, pressuring broadcast networks not to air interviews with Democrats or getting the DOJ to harass left-wing nonprofits that are working to get out the vote.

 

To protect their hold on power, he and his menagerie will need to be considerably more ruthless about challenges to it than Viktor Orbán was.

 

Put it all together and you can see how we might be about to embark on a YOLO phase of this presidency that puts what we’ve seen already to shame. As Trump and his aides become convinced that a Democratic midterm wipeout is a fait accompli, they may surmise that there’s nothing left to lose by leaning all the way in on unpopular autocratic gambits.

 

Why not ignore an adverse Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship? Why not fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell? Why not plan a new war with Cuba while the current war with Iran is still wreaking havoc on markets? Why not manufacture some sort of domestic crisis and declare that the emergency prevents the next election from being held as scheduled?

 

The Iran war looks to be a turning point for all sorts of things—Trump’s political support, U.S. alliances in Europe and the Persian Gulf, the long-term viability of our relationship with Israel, potentially even Chinese dominance of the Far East. That it might also be a turning point for how ruthlessly this lousy administration conducts itself seems only logical.