At least a hundred journalists crammed into a corner of the White House’s South Lawn in well-below-freezing temperatures on Friday to flood the newly minted president with questions. Donald Trump was leaving for his first ride on Marine One since taking his oath, and it was the first time all press — not just the reporters assigned to him for pool duty — had a chance to see and be seen by him since he stepped back into the Oval Office.
Gone were the days of Joe Biden, when reporters were barely phased by virtually all questions on the South Lawn going unanswered. In its place was the circus of the 45th and 47th president, who practices an information overload that often creates more questions than it answers.
Photojournalists yelled at reporters in the front to “put your phone down,” and the typically staid White House press corps engaged in some light shoving to get a better view of the man at the front of the frozen frenzy.
“I didn’t miss this shit,” one journalist said once Trump had his fill and made his way to the helicopter.
A flurry of detail and action has turned Washington upside down in just the first seven days of Trump’s new reign. The pace, efficiency and thus ability for Trump to claim “promises made and promises kept” have led people in the capital to question whether, in the four years that Trump was out of office, he and his once-shunned group of aides actually learned how to govern.
“This is just not random,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who now consults and influences from the outside. “In 2017, we were like a pickup basketball team. This is like a college basketball team — Top 10 — that’s been practicing for two or three years with each other.”
Trump’s top aides are clearly coordinated, after allied groups like the America First Policy Institute, Project 2025 and Center for Renewed Action spent years creating government-shifting policy. Leaders of those groups — like Stephen Miller, Trump’s implementer and closest aide; Brooke Rollins, Trump’s pick for agriculture secretary; Russell Vought, the soon-to-be head of the Office of Management and Budget — left their cushy positions to join Trump in office.
“He got to sit back and really understand who we can rely on, who’s good to put in positions of power, who can really be a game changer and not an obstructionist,” said one adviser who had been with him on and off during his years of banishment.
The result of that planning is a litany of executive orders: upending the immigration system, revoking scores of Biden-era executive actions on everything from energy to gun violence prevention, and undoing many of the DEI strides made in the federal government over the last 30-plus years. Trump has made it easier to fire federal employees, reassigned officials in the DOJ, fired at least a dozen agency inspector generals. In January 2017, Trump managed to sign only seven executive orders, with five happening within seven calendar days. This time around, he signed 26 on the first day. He’s mass pardoned nearly all the people charged with rioting in the Capitol — including those convicted of assaulting police officers. And he’s twisted the arm of Senate Republicans so far that he’s already pushed through one cabinet nominee who was nearly dead on arrival last month.
“The base is extremely happy. From the pardons to the aggressive immigration enforcement, the prevailing sentiment has genuinely been promises made and promises kept,” one Republican official said.
Trump is taking a prolonged victory lap. From the USA chants breaking out Saturday as he walked on a casino floor in Las Vegas to half-hugging California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a longtime rival turned warm friend, if only for a day. (“I decided to be nice,” Trump said later.) And he’s constantly taking questions from the press, one day engaging with them over eight times — at times asking out loud if the press could ever imagine his predecessor causally fielding questions from reporters for more than 45 minutes like he has now already done twice.
“He’s having a lot of fun. He certainly has his mojo,” a senior adviser said.
Journalists, for all their complaints, seemed to be having fun, too — or were at least riding a wave of adrenaline that’d been absent from the White House beat for months. Every day in the first week, the briefing room (which looks way bigger on TV than it is in reality) was filled with reporters with no or not enough dedicated space, working and waiting for something to happen.
“Jesus Christ, it’s fucking packed in here,” said one reporter who entered shocked.
Others wondered out loud when Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, would have her first official briefing. One never came — breaking with her recent predecessors like Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer, who held one on the first day. But Leavitt took brief questions from reporters outside the briefing room and held a gaggle Friday on Air Force One, though it was off camera.
Still, the question for some — detractors and allies alike — is how long this lasts.
The White House has been coordinated and without the palace intrigue stories that rocked his first term. But Week One was not without its bumps. Trump’s executive order to begin the process of ending birthright citizenship was halted by a federal judge who deemed it “blatantly unconstitutional” (Trump has vowed to appeal). Multiple lawsuits have questioned the legality of Elon Musk’s appointment to the Department of Government Efficiency, and whether it violates transparency laws. And one of the president’s most overarching promises on the campaign trail — his singular ability to quickly bring down prices for the average American — has been virtually absent from his first policy frenzy.
As is the case with any new administration, there has been at-times tense jockeying for desks. Some White House aides didn’t yet have badges that would give them freedom of movement around the complex. Others didn’t have their government email addresses, resulting in temporary use of their personal Gmails or college email addresses.
But if there’s any flashing alarm inside the campus after Week One, it’s the glacial pace of hiring for the federal government’s 4,000 appointments. Some Republicans who spoke with NOTUS say the slow start to hiring — partly because of rigid loyalty requirements and made worse by the transition team’s late background checks agreement with the FBI — has left a lot of empty desks around the government.
The delays have left people who thought they’d been promised jobs, particularly old campaign aides, without a clear sense of what’ll happen next.
“That has been really frustrating for some people, especially for those who’ve already moved here and are still awaiting instructions or direction as to what they’ll actually be doing,” one GOP official said. “They’ve given themselves a pretty gratuitous timeline though, until March, to fill the remaining positions that are available.”
A White House official said that any delay is not due to “a lack of hiring,” but “a delay in background checks.”
“We’ve had more applications than open positions,” said the official.
As of Thursday, the White House said it had filled 1,300 of the 4,000 roles available across the federal government. And some who have been told they’d have a position, but have no more details, haven’t even begun the background check process.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said the process is playing out how it’s meant to.
“Everything is going according to plan. The President and his entire Administration have been focused on implementing his America First agenda and working for the American people,” he told NOTUS in a statement.
The White House, though, isn’t waiting to fill existing roles before creating new ones. Trump’s team is already making drastic changes to which existing federal employees can be quickly fired, potentially reshaping the face of the federal government.
“We’re hiring incredible people and large amounts,” Sergio Gor, Trump’s director of personnel management in charge of staffing the White House and other parts of the government, said on Fox News. “On the flip side of that is we’re also cleaning house.”
Democrats were left particularly frustrated in Week One by Trump’s teardown of diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government, including the order to place DEI-based employees on paid leave until the higher-ups could decide their fate.
“The litany of EOs are designed to befuddle, exhaust and test the porosity of our constitution. Everyone will be impacted by this administration,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove said. “I hope the Republicans in Congress who are married to spouses from other countries, have mixed children and grandchildren or have businesses that have been made profitable and enduring because of a diverse workforce take stock in the silent patsies they are becoming.”
Reporters have kept a close eye on who has been in the Oval Office, the traditional way of quantifying who has access to the president. Billionaires were the big feature of Week One, with people like David Sacks, Sam Altman and Larry Ellison hopping in, either doing an event or watching. There’ve been other standbys, like Trump family members or longtime aides like Walt Nauta.
It’s hard for any of them, though, to outshine Musk, who tweeted that he worked out of the Oval this past week. He’s already drawn headlines for pushing for a West Wing office for more proximity to the president and undermining an investment rollout because of a beef with OpenAI’s Atlman.
“Feelings toward Elon are kind of mixed,” a source familiar with conversations said. “Staff is annoyed, but what is there to do about it?”
Musk has become such a source of intrigue for reporters that Trump had to deny twice that he would be given an office inside the building.
“It’s not Elon’s office,” he said to reporters on Saturday, according to a pool reporter. “We have an office that is set up for the purpose of when I do an executive order that the order is carried out, not that it sits around for three months. And we’ll have about 20 people, maybe more, working out of that office.”
Cheung denied tensions, saying, “the President’s team is working together and collaboratively which is why you have seen so much success in just 6 days. These sources simply have no idea what they are talking about because they aren’t in the room and aren’t in any conversations.”
But the last week has raised questions about what Musk’s role is within the White House. In his Fox interview, Gor credited DOGE for doing “an exceptional job” on personnel. And Musk was on hand throughout the transition to make staffing recommendations.
Bannon, Musk’s ideological nemesis, tried brushing him off. “He does have influence, but he doesn’t have power,” he said. “He doesn’t have the ability to really make a decision. He really doesn’t even have the power to even muscle guys into position. So right now, his power will come from the influence that he makes on this DOGE.”
The president’s second week in office will likely bring more executive orders — as one source told NOTUS, the White House is aware of Speaker Mike Johnson’s perilous position in the House and feels that it might be better to go it alone via executive power for now.
But this week will also be a true test of the president’s sway in the Senate, with Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FBI nominee Kash Patel and the likely most-at-risk candidate, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, all coming up for hearings. That, though, might just create more of a smoke screen while the executive branch moves to fundamentally change how government functions.
Bannon put it succinctly: “The intensity around the confirmation hearings is going to suck all the action out of the room while he’s signing more executive orders and doing more executive actions.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.