2026-08-22 23:25:00
U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed last night. Punitive Trump tariffs will now go into effect. Canada will reciprocate with retaliatory tariffs of its own.
The story may not be over. Donald Trump is notorious for issuing threats, then reversing them. Wars are on, off, on again, off again, then on a third time—but only as a “little detour.” This is not an administration that thinks even one move ahead. But without a supersized Trump TACO, the U.S.-Canada impasse likely won’t resolve soon.
The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.
Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.
To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.
The Canadian economy has definitely suffered because of Trump’s hostility. Exports were down last year, and growth slowed. But this year, Canada got an unexpected bailout: Trump’s Iran war and Trump’s inflation have boosted prices for Canadian oil, gas, minerals, and food products. Canadian incomes are rising again. Meanwhile, Canada’s low levels of public debt have kept inflation low. Whereas the U.S. government must pay 5.3 percent to borrow money for 30 years, Canada pays 4.2 percent.
By contrast, Trump is facing an omnishamble. “Trump’s Economic Challenge: $40tn Debt, 6.7% Mortgages and $5 Diesel.” That’s a headline in today’s Financial Times. The paper could have added one more: 33 percent job approval, and falling fast.
Trump’s tariffs are costing the typical American household $1,100 a year in both direct collections and indirectly in higher prices, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Although teasing out Canada-specific costs is tricky, one indicator is the price of aluminum. In 2024, about one-fourth of the aluminum consumed by Americans came from Canada, the U.S.’s single largest source of imported aluminum. Result: Whereas European and Japanese consumers now pay about $3,000 a ton for aluminum, Americans pay almost $5,000, driving up the cost of everything from a can of beer to the construction of a new hospital.
Although Canada’s economy is much smaller than the U.S.’s, Canada’s government has a more rational and intelligent leadership—and can therefore target its retaliation in ways that better serve national ends. U.S. alcohol exports to Canada have collapsed by 80 percent as Canadian provincial liquor stores ban U.S. wine and spirits. Canada’s booze boycott hurts more than one might expect given the comparatively small size of the Canadian market. Alcohol exporters to Canada prepare special labels for their products to meet Canadian legal requirements. More than 1 million bottles of wine intended for Canadian markets now slumber in U.S. warehouses, unsellable anywhere else without costly repackaging.
More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. With these states, may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.
Trump’s theory of his trade war, like his theory of his Iran war, is that the bigger bully always wins. Size counts for a lot, but not for everything.
As Trump has declared over and over again, his ultimate goal in this trade war is to add Canada as a 51st state. Why? To make the United States look bigger on the map. For that goal, which excites ultra-MAGA crackpots, Trump is hazarding not only America’s most important trading relationships, but very possibly every other political equity he holds, including avoiding investigations and accountability by a Democratic House and Senate after January 2027.
Against Canada, Trump is fighting a trade war that very few Americans support, under leadership that most Americans reject, to achieve results that virtually all Americans would dismiss as pointless if not crazy.
Against Trump, Canadians are fighting a trade war that the great majority support, under leadership that commands broad assent, to defend their independence and self-respect. That’s a war that even the weaker side can win, especially if it needs to hold on only a few months longer to survive.
2026-08-22 22:26:00
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
A few years ago, my colleague Faith Hill reported on what psychologists call the “Michelangelo phenomenon”: the idea that over time, romantic partners mold each other. “Some researchers have found that when that happens, the art tends to look conspicuously like the artist,” she wrote.
Researchers aren’t in agreement about why exactly people in relationships become more alike as time goes on. Couples might also just imagine that they’re becoming alike, Faith notes; we’d prefer to think that a long-term partner is developing in the same ways that we are, even if that’s not entirely true.
Whatever the precise explanation, that fact that partners can begin to resemble each other is a reminder of the power of love to change us—not just to change our lives, but to actually alter who we are at our core. Today’s newsletter rounds up stories about how relationships of all kinds can influence your personality.
On Personality
The Mystery of Partner ‘Convergence’
By Faith Hill
Couples’ personalities can become more similar over time—but the causes are still enigmatic. (From 2024)
The Personality Trait That Makes People Feel Comfortable Around You
By Julie Beck
People with positive “affective presence” are easy to be around and oil the gears of social interactions. (From 2019)
People Seek Out a Certain Kind of Person When They Are Happy
By Olga Khazan
Your mood might have a big influence on the type of companionship you want. (From 2019)
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
PS
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Every day for the last month this beautiful monarch butterfly has been visiting my balcony garden,” Maureen T., 76 , from Toronto, writes. “I sit and watch and wonder at its beauty. I even named him Fred.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel
2026-08-22 21:40:43
The national debt reached $40 trillion this week, but the president’s attention seemed directed elsewhere. Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss Donald Trump’s recent focuses, and more.
At a rally for Darline Graham in South Carolina last night, Trump opened the event and spoke about the White House ballroom, devoting several minutes to his project. “Not a day really goes by that he doesn’t talk about the ballroom or the Reflecting Pool or the Kennedy Center or the gold statues,” Matt Viser, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued last night. “I just don’t know that it resonates as deeply with voters across the country.”
Although residents in Washington, D.C., are watching changes to their city unfold, it’s not one of the “pocketbook issues that I think the midterms are probably going to be about,” Viser added.
Joining the guest moderator Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama to discuss this and more: Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; Mary Louise Kelly, the host of All Things Considered on NPR; Michelle Price, a White House reporter at the Associated Press; Viser.
Watch the full episode here.
2026-08-22 20:00:00
Kelly Killoren Bensimon is no stranger to a career pivot. In 2009, she joined the cast of the Real Housewives of New York after having worked as a model and jewelry designer. Two years later, she left the show and did what many people with a bit of fame and a lot of marketing savvy do: She wrote books. She launched a line of fragrances, then candles, then outerwear. But by 2017, she’d realized that her skills were suited to what might have once seemed like a more quotidian job. She could go into real estate.
The industry has always been a relationship-driven business, where agents are expected to bring in clients on their own. And in theory, this might be easier for, say, a former TV star with a lot of social-media followers and a group of socialite friends to do than for an average person. “I was like, Wait a minute; I have a massive social platform,” Bensimon told me. “I can get myself out there.” She had also recently completed an M.B.A. and knew how to negotiate, read a market, and brand a product. So she took two weeks of intensive classes (“from, like, 8 a.m. in the morning until 10 o’clock at night”) and acquired her real-estate license. In 2021, her third year at the brokerage Douglas Elliman, she said she sold $110 million worth of homes.
Lately, a whole new population of people has been getting into the real-estate business: sort-of-famous celebrities. New converts include the Catfish host Nēv Schulman, the rapper Vanilla Ice, the Dancing With the Stars pro Emma Slater, and various retired NFL and NBA players in need of an alternative career. Joseph Baena, a son of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has an Instagram bio that captures the lifestyle well: “Actor | Bodybuilder | Cook | Realtor.” Like Bensimon, some of these people might have traditional business experience. Others might not.
[Read: The unsettling rise of AI real-estate slop]
Nationally, the housing market has become oversaturated with agents, and not just with ones who used to be on TV. The membership of the National Association of Realtors, a trade group including agents and brokers that sets standards across the industry, more than doubled from 1995 to 2026. (Agents are lower-level real-estate salespeople who need to be sponsored by a broker; brokers are more advanced salespeople, who can work independently and hire their own agents—and only members of NAR can call themselves Realtors.) Currently, about 1.4 million people are in NAR, which means its membership now outnumbers homes for sale. These days, selling houses has become the well-connected person’s version of gig work, a flexible job that can require only a few weeks of schooling and that can be done without ditching other passions.
But for everybody else—renters, homebuyers, sellers—this surfeit has a cost. People want an agent who can get them the best deal possible on one of life’s biggest financial transactions. But with so many inexperienced agents flooding the industry, finding one who’s actually good has become a game of roulette.
This isn’t the first time the real-estate industry has had a population of potentially underqualified agents. In the early 1900s, newspaper readers encountered headlines like “Real Estate Man Swindles a Poor Widow!” Shoddy agents were nicknamed “curbstoners,” and Americans tended to think of them as scamsters who lurked at train stations and upsold homes to new arrivals in a city. Troubled by all the people besmirching the occupation, a group of agents formed a national trade group in 1908—the one eventually known as NAR. With a code of ethics and a membership requirement, the group raised professional standards, Chloe Thurston, a political-science professor at Northwestern University who researches the history of housing, told me. They “made it harder to call yourself a Realtor or to be a member of this small but trustworthy profession.”
But by the second half of the 20th century, NAR seemed to loosen up. From 1970 to 1980, its membership increased eightfold, to more than 700,000—bolstered by a push to include low-level sales associates in its membership and a rush of women joining. Popular brokerage firms, such as Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, also began embracing franchising, licensing their names to upstart brokers across the country and helping to drive recruitment of thousands of new salespeople.
Perhaps the primary reason for the influx of agents, however, was that it was no longer so expensive for brokerages to hire new ones. In the 1980s, many salespeople went from being full-time employees to independent contractors: Brokerages stopped paying them a salary, instead taking a cut of commissions. Agents, in some cases, even paid annual fees to their brokerage. Real-estate jobs became more popular, and less financially stable, than ever.
[Read: How private equity is changing housing]
Some agents thrust themselves into the spotlight. Elaine Young—the daughter of a Hollywood executive who was disappointed to discover, as she put it in her memoir, “I couldn’t sing or dance or act”—chose real estate as a way to keep the “glamor” of her childhood alive. She eventually sold homes to Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra, and by the end of the 1970s, she was one of the first real-estate agents drawing public intrigue in her own right. Young’s six marriages, feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, and penchant for draping herself in mink jackets made her as much of a tabloid fixture as some of her clients.
In the early 2000s, reality TV created a new class of real-estate celebrities—solo entrepreneurs who seemed to cobble together lucrative careers out of sheer force of will, all while attending luxe parties across Los Angeles and New York City. Million Dollar Listing debuted in 2006 and became a franchise. Ryan Serhant, a star of the New York edition starting in 2012, was struggling to earn a living as an actor when he turned to real estate. Less than a decade later, Chrishell Stause, a star of the Netflix hit Selling Sunset, detailed her youth growing up homeless; entering real estate, in part, allowed her to finally find financial stability. Among the successful agents, at least, the money really can be good. In exchange for selling a $1 million home, an agent might expect to earn about $20,000, after factoring in their commission to the brokerage. Closing a single home won’t make you rich, but selling more than a dozen each year can add up pretty quickly.
These TV agents helped make real estate aspirational for anyone wanting to change careers. A housing boom in the early 2000s led to more agents too, according to the NAR. For the stay-at-home parent trying to overcome the long employment gap on their résumé, or the laid-off worker or contractor who has watched job mobility in their chosen career stagnate, real estate might have looked like it could be a safety net—even if the reality is that most agents aren’t making huge salaries from it. “I think the shows made it seem like it was an easy career,” Alexander Ali, who runs the Society Group, a PR firm for high-end real-estate agents, told me. “It seemed like, Wow, you can do a little bit of work and make hundreds of thousands of dollars on one deal.”
Still, the downside to at least trying to become an agent is minimal. Almost anybody can get licensed within a few months. “It’s also very low-barrier-entry” compared with other professions, Sharon Cornelissen, the director of housing for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit that advocates for consumers, told me. Massachusetts, Vermont, and some other states require only 40 hours of real-estate schooling before licensure. In New York, real-estate agents need to complete 77 hours of education before they can take their licensing exam; by comparison, an aspiring cosmetologist must complete more than 1,000 hours of schooling before they can take an exam to do makeup and hair.
In fact, the hardest part about starting work as a real-estate agent is knowing enough people who might want you to sell their house. This may be why famous people—as well as less-than-famous people who have huge social networks—are flooding the market: Because they know more people, they have access to a bigger base of potential clients. After all, many people who hire real-estate agents choose somebody based on referrals from friends and family. “Oftentimes, there’s pressure to go with a real-estate agent just because they’re in your book club or something, or because your kids go to school together, or because they’re a family member,” Cornelissen said. A well-connected person is just going to start out with a lot more leads.
Yet being a successful agent requires more than just knowing a bunch of people. A good agent understands the local housing market (a ski town will have different seasonal sales trends than a beach town), a decent price to sell or buy for, and when to wait for a better price or to push ahead. They know what makes an appealing photo, which is perhaps an argument in favor of influencer agents (Cornelissen has encountered agents with very little awareness of how to market themselves online, and who take photos of homes at night, shrouded in darkness, with their iPhones). The best agents can handle the emotional work of buying a home—such as knowing whether somebody should heed or brush off their last-minute jitters.
[Read: Making America’s houses bigger may have been a mistake]
But before they actually work with someone, few homebuyers or sellers can tell the difference between a solid agent and a mediocre one. And the chances of hiring somebody subpar is higher than it used to be: Less experienced agents are now a significant part of the housing market. In 2023, the Consumer Federation of America studied three largely middle-class cities (Minneapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Albuquerque, New Mexico) and estimated that “marginal agents”—meaning those with fewer than five home sales a year—accounted for 25 to 30 percent of all commission money. Some of those agents might have been perfectly serviceable, but the likelihood of sellers getting less than they could, or buyers overpaying, goes up as more people hire novice agents. “If you work with an inexperienced agent,” Cornelissen said, “you may leave a lot of money on the table.”
When I asked NAR about all the influencer and semi-celebrity agents, the group’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun, said in a statement, “it’s natural that real estate professionals are highly visible.” The housing sector, he noted, is simply a significant part of the broader economy. (The organization did not respond to questions about quality control of agents.)
Consumers can, of course, do their own research on how to better choose an agent before selling or buying a home. But Cornelissen told me that states could have stricter licensing rules, and that she believes that brokerages should mandate continued supervision and training even after agents start their work. And the real-estate industry itself has raised the standards on agents in the past; in theory, it could do so again. Unlike the “curbstoners” of a century ago, today’s underqualified agents are at least probably less scammy than they are naive. Instead of lurking in railroad stations, they are touting their roster of homes on TikTok, making real estate look far more effortless than it actually is.
2026-08-22 19:00:00
When the news broke that a co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse paid for by his father, critics of the DSA had a field day. The New York Post jabbed at Gustavo Gordillo, a 38-year-old former Yale student, for benefiting from his dad’s largesse “while railing against the rich and property ownership.” The condemnation got even louder when the Post reported that Gordillo had dropped out of an electrician apprenticeship and never become fully credentialed. “So, this commie failed out of his apprentice program for not doing the work required,” Katie Pavlich, a host for cable’s NewsNation, wrote on X. Gordillo told me that leaving his electrician training was “a difficult choice” that he’d made so he could devote more time to his DSA role.
Gordillo is only the most recent prominent leftist to be accused of being a silver-spooned elite masquerading as a working-class radical. Until Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign exploded in disgrace, Platner was routinely cast as a son of privilege playing Carhartt dress-up. His grandfather was a famous architect and interior designer, his mom’s restaurant was his oyster farm’s primary customer, and his dad helped set him up with a house, just as Gordillo’s father did. Zohran Mamdani was likewise criticized during his mayoral run for being a socialist despite having been born to Hollywood-film-producing, Ugandan-villa-owning parents.
These charges of hypocrisy have only gotten louder as DSA candidates have won a string of Democratic primaries across the country. Conservative and moderate organs of opinion have described these progressive successes as being driven by white, wealthy, college-educated youngsters.
This observation-slash-accusation is substantiated by both national polling and the DSA’s most recent membership survey, which found that 77 percent of members were white and that more than 80 percent of members 25 years or older held at least an undergraduate degree. If the Democrats are having a Tea Party moment, as The New York Times recently suggested, it is a revolution powered largely by disaffected, college-educated people, many of whom are comparatively well-off. The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, with whom I co-host a podcast, has called these voters “Subaru socialists”: degree holders who have enough money to afford, say, mid-level cars and meals at nice restaurants but who may not own a home or feel fully secure. Republican Senator John Kennedy prefers the more biting moniker “Lulu Lenins.”
[Read: What Mamdani doesn’t know about tenants]
The aspersions cast at socialists such as Gordillo—who champion radical politics in public while contributing to the gentrification of Brooklyn in private, and whose commitments to being working-class seem dubious—are understandable and often amusing. But focusing on the many contradictions of rich-kid leftists is also a way of ignoring a more interesting and potentially more illuminating question: Why are so many “privileged” Americans drawn to a politics that seeks to dismantle the system that they have benefited from?
In a 1977 essay for the magazine Radical America, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined a term for America’s growing population of college-educated knowledge workers: the “professional managerial class.” The authors noted that members of the PMC tend to have jobs that create and maintain capitalist culture and its associated values. They have jobs in industries—such as the arts, education, medicine, entertainment, law, advertising, and technology—that could be seen as offering proof of capitalism’s ability to provide Americans with lives that are culturally rich, physically healthy, intellectually stimulating, and filled with technologies that make things easier. (Being a staff writer at The Atlantic is a great example of one such job.)
According to the Ehrenreichs, the 20th-century professional class played a crucial role, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in maintaining the public’s faith in the economic system. The present growing embrace of leftist politics among the professional class suggests that the PMC is no longer especially enthusiastic about that mission. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this month found that Democrats, who belong to a party dominated by the professional class, were almost twice as likely to view socialism favorably (58 percent) as they were to view capitalism favorably (32 percent). Among college-educated Democrats, support for socialism was 71 percent.
This is not entirely new. In 1977, the Ehrenreichs noted that radicalism and even anti-capitalism could be found among certain educated professionals, particularly those in academia. But the PMC’s current tilt toward the left is unprecedented in American history. Through the mid-2000s, college-educated voters were more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. Bachelor’s-degree holders broke for Ronald Reagan in 1984 at a margin that was higher than 2 to 1.
What is notable about the 21st-century PMC, then, is that the type of people who are tasked with championing capitalism to the public have lost their faith. Many members of today’s professional class are apostates, and this apostasy is worth taking seriously as a sign of an economic order that cannot seem to justify itself to its own public-relations arm. When a middle manager at a tobacco company refuses to smoke cigarettes, or a technology CEO sends his children to screen-free schools, or an employee in the meatpacking industry turns vegetarian, many people understand these choices to be the result not only of hypocrisy but also of insider insight.
According to its own demographic survey, the DSA is filled with people who are employed in or training for traditional PMC labor: teachers and professors, social workers, health-care professionals, government employees. That some people in these industries, including those who are well paid, would look at our economy and seek out other ways of doing things is neither hypocritical nor surprising.
[Read: Two futures for the American left]
A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a federal employee who watches lobbying groups kneecap safety regulations, a data engineer who helps make a product that gives teens suicide advice, a student who takes out burdensome loans to get a degree that is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a middle-class life—what should these people think of capitalism as it currently exists? What do you expect them to think? And why is it considered hypocrisy, rather than a defensible moral position, when some members of the PMC decide that the ugliness they encounter in their workplace, corporate office, and daily life is symptomatic of a system that deserves significant, even systemic, reform?
Some “Subaru socialists,” of course, might be drawn to progressive political movements because that’s what their friends are doing, or because they are bored with their own privilege. But many professional-class socialists are no doubt making an earnest moral judgment, born of firsthand experience, that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed. Explaining his own reasoning for being part of the DSA, Gordillo told me in a text: “I have experienced economic life in this country from many different vantages so I know that it is often luck that determines whether someone has financial stability. This is wrong.”
A political lesson could be learned from Mamdani, who, with his smart suits and easy eloquence, makes no effort to hide his social position or fancy liberal-arts degree. Rather than elevating leaders who pretend to be working-class, socialists and left-leaning populists might be better off unapologetically presenting themselves as what many of them are: worried, frustrated, and often justifiably angry members of the educated professional class.
2026-08-22 08:09:14
Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back. “That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.
The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant. In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives. He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that eliminated the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial. Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me.
[Read: Trump has a Bill Pulte problem]
The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved. The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.
One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason. “Mostly it was operational. We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters. “With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.
But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team. It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as a distracting and problematic troublemaker who appeals to Trump’s most reckless instincts. Last year, Pulte proposed a new standard 50-year mortgage, which Trump briefly embraced, prompting a bipartisan backlash from policy makers who worried that Americans would lose out on equity gains. During a single July day in 2025, Pulte posted 15 separate attacks on Jerome Powell, then the chair of the Federal Reserve. “As someone with deep experience in construction, I am requesting to tour the Fed building and the new, ridiculous ‘renovations’, which I believe are riddled with fraud,” read one.
The Government Accountability Office has opened an investigation into Pulte’s use of typically private mortgage data to accuse prominent Trump targets, such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, of mortgage fraud. Officials told me that Pulte had pushed Trump to replace the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, when he’d failed to indict a Trump foe on mortgage fraud. (The replacement, Lindsey Halligan, was later disqualified by a federal judge, and her major indictments have since been tossed.) When 61 former Fannie employees sued Pulte for defamation after he accused them without evidence of getting “kickbacks” for charitable donations, a judge tossed the case, finding that Pulte’s government position gave him legal immunity.
But Trump has long had a soft spot for the type of advisers he sometimes describes as “killers”—people defined by loyalty and a defiant focus on supporting the boss, even if they sometimes leave controversy in their wake. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who recently left the administration, and his legal adviser Boris Epshteyn both fit that bill. In this way, Pulte continues to wield power, even if he is unlikely to receive another profane dinosaur trophy while serving U.S. taxpayers.
Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.
