President Trump returns to the White House on Feb. 19 after spending the weekend and the first two days of the week in Florida.
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
We’ll be recapping what you need to know every Friday morning for the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Get more updates and analysis in the NPR Politics newsletter.
It’s now been a month since President Trump was sworn in, and the firehose of information coming from the administration continued this week, including:
Trump reshaping the U.S. position toward Ukraine, more civil service firings, more resignations amid allegations of a quid pro quo between Trump’s Justice Department and New York Mayor Eric Adams, confirmation of Kash Patel as FBI director, another handful of executive orders, the courts putting some speedbumps in the Trump administration’s way and the White House posting on X a fake Time magazine cover of Trump adorning a crown with the words, “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
Here is a closer look at three of the biggest themes of the week, followed by a day-by-day rundown of what happened:
1. Trump blames Ukraine for Russia’s invasion: Ukraine President Zelenskyy expressed frustration about being left out of U.S. negotiations with Russia in Saudi Arabia about the war. He said Trump is living in a “disinformation bubble,” and Trump then lashed out, calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” and blamed the country for “starting” the war with Russia (when it was Russia that invaded Ukraine three years ago). All of Trump’s accusations echo Russian propaganda.
2. Who is the top DOGE? A court filing about Elon Musk’s informal Department of Government Efficiency did not acknowledge him as its head. But DOGE was Musk’s idea, and Trump said Musk is in charge of it: “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” he said in Miami this week.
DOGE, now in its third week of finding drastic cuts to make to the federal government, continued to make abrupt firings, embedded itself at key agencies and signaled there’s more to come. (The head of the Social Security Administration resigned after a dispute with DOGE over access to recipient information.)
Musk has claimed big savings and even floated the idea of $5,000 “dividend” checks to people, but the math on Musk’s group’s claimed savings doesn’t add up, according to an NPR investigation. A lot of what DOGE is doing is provocative, and Trump is well aware of optics. Speaking of
