Trump Administration Highlights: Top Aides to Meet With Russian Officials About Ukraine Next Week (2025)

Planned U.S.-Russia talks would be the first substantive discussions since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine.

The meeting will most likely draw criticism from some top Ukrainian officials. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Thursday that his country must be involved in any talks over its own fate, a statement he made after learning about the Trump-Putin call. Ukrainian officials fear Mr. Trump could try to reach a deal with the Russians that would not have strong security guarantees or viable terms for an enduring peace for Ukraine, which has been trying to repel a full-scale Russian invasion for three years.

The top American officials who plan to attend are Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; Mike Waltz, the national security adviser; and Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy who also works on Ukraine-Russia issues, the person familiar with the schedule said.

When asked whether any Ukrainian officials would attend, the person did not say — a sign that Ukraine will probably not take part in the talks, despite Mr. Trump’s saying this week that Ukrainians would participate in discussions in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Rubio and Vice President JD Vance met with Mr. Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on Friday.

Mr. Rubio, the top American diplomat, spoke Saturday on the phone with Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, as Mr. Rubio traveled from Munich to Israel.

The call was the Trump administration’s latest step in reversing the Biden administration’s attempts to isolate Russia diplomatically.

Mr. Rubio “reaffirmed President Trump’s commitment to finding an end to the conflict in Ukraine,” a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said in a written summary of the call. “In addition, they discussed the opportunity to potentially work together on a number of other bilateral issues.”

The Russian summary of the call said the two top diplomats agreed to address barriers to cooperation on a range of issues that had been erected by the Biden administration. It also said the two diplomats would speak regularly and prepare for a summit between their presidents, and the governments would work to restore the work of each other’s diplomatic missions.

In addition, the Russian summary said, “a mutual commitment to interaction on current international issues was outlined, including the settlement around Ukraine, the situation around Palestine and in the Middle East as a whole and in other regional areas.”

Mr. Rubio planned to go to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after stopping in Israel on his first trip in the Middle East.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.

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Trump administration continues immigration court crackdown with judge firings.

There are more than 700 immigration judges, each of whom handles between 500 and 700 cases a year, Mr. Biggs said. Most of the cases are related to deportation, which is one of the top issues Mr. Trump is focused on.

“It’s inexplicable,” Mr. Biggs said in an interview on Saturday. “It’s contrary to what the president campaigned on, and it makes no sense at all.”

Immigration judges are part of the administrative court system and housed in the Justice Department. They make decisions about asylum claims and decide who should be removed from the country. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Immigration courts have been facing a growing backlog, which has contributed to the number of undocumented immigrants in the country. Because cases take so long to wind through the system, many of those waiting start putting down roots in their communities.

One of the immigration judges who were dismissed, Kerry E. Doyle, announced her firing on LinkedIn. She was among the incoming class of new judges and had not yet announced her new position on social media, she said.

“Unfortunately, I was unable to avoid the political pink slip,” Ms. Doyle wrote on LinkedIn. She served as the principal legal adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “This firing occurred despite the fact that among my peers in my court, I had the longest and most extensive experience in immigration law,” she wrote.

Ms. Doyle wrote a memo during the Biden administration, instructing lawyers at ICE to review cases and try to clear those considered low priority.

The Trump administration has been carrying out mass firings across the government. During Mr. Trump’s first administration, immigration judges were told to speed their decision-making, raising concerns about whether the immigrants received due process. In most cases, immigrants can appeal a judge’s decision.

Soon after Mr. Trump took office again last month, he fired the acting head of the U.S. immigration court system and three other top officials. The additional firings this week have left many judges wondering what Mr. Trump’s plans are for the court system.

“It begs the question: Is this administration going to try to unilaterally do away with that process?” Mr. Biggs said.

A national park guide was flying home from a work trip. She was fired midair.

“The department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department’s current needs,” read the email, which was sent to Ms. Dhue while she was in the air. (She later obtained a printed copy of the email from her boss.)

The department did not immediately provide comments for this article on Saturday.

The National Park Service firings came as the Trump administration escalated its efforts to cull the federal work force. Workers were also fired at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agriculture Department and the Energy Department, among other agencies, on Friday.

Many of the dismissals have targeted the roughly 200,000 federal workers who were on probationary status, generally because they had started their positions within the last year. Some fired employees, including some at the National Park Service, have already indicated that they will appeal.

Mr. Trump and his supporters have backed the moves as a way to cut what they see as unnecessary government spending. “President Trump was elected with a mandate to create a more effective and efficient federal government that serves all Americans, and we are doing just that,” said a spokesperson for the E.P.A. after that agency announced layoffs.

But Tim Whitehouse, executive director of the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said a shrinking work force, at least at the National Park Service, is “not going to save the government any money.”

“It’s going to degrade our parks, demoralize people that work very hard for very little money, and make the government a hostile place to be,” he said, adding that the layoffs at the park service were cruel and appeared random. “But I think that’s the intention.”

Mr. Whitehouse said his organization was in touch with affected workers and was exploring the possibility of litigation.

He added that even though the Trump administration had instructed the National Park Service to move forward with hiring 5,000 seasonal employees, whose positions had been frozen, the service was well behind schedule. And the additional seasonal workers would still fall short of the service’s needs, Mr. Whitehouse said.

Staffing shortfalls could hit hard during the spring and summer, peak seasons for visits to the parks and historic sites run by the agency, said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Visitor centers may be open only a few days a week, which means restrooms will be locked and won’t be cleaned as frequently. Long-delayed projects to fix potholes and remove mold from facilities will probably be delayed even more. And experienced guides may no longer be available to inform visitors about the wonders and nuances of a park system that draws 325 million visitors a year.

“That leaves people who are visiting with a bad taste in their mouths,” Ms. Brengel said.

The cuts could also strain the nearby communities that depend on park visitors to drive up business, she said.

“If someone has a terrible day and just looks at their family and says, ‘Forget about it,’ and leaves, that means the person who owns the hotel isn’t getting paid, the people who work in the hotel aren’t getting paid, the people who would make dinner and breakfast for these folks.”

It also means fewer enthusiastic park rangers like Ms. Dhue.

After working a couple of temporary jobs at parks in Mississippi and California, Ms. Dhue was thrilled to start a permanent position with the park service in Brownsville, Texas, in August. She helped run the front desk and chatted with visitors as they navigated Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park, which commemorates the first battle of the Mexican-American War.

“Parks build community,” she said. “I’m sad to see that that’s being threatened right now.”

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In a social media post, Trump says, ‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.’

By late afternoon, Mr. Trump had pinned the statement to the top of his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he wanted people to absorb. The official White House account on X posted his message in the evening.

The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.

Nonetheless, the sentiment was familiar: Mr. Trump, through his words and actions, has repeatedly suggested that surviving two assassination attempts is evidence that he has divine backing to enforce his will.

He has brought a far more aggressive attitude toward his use of power to the White House in his second term than he did at the start of his first. The powers of the presidency that he returned to were bolstered by last year’s Supreme Court ruling that he is presumptively immune from prosecution for any crimes he may commit using his official powers.

During his first weeks in office, Mr. Trump has signed numerous executive orders that pushed at the generally understood limits of presidential power, fired numerous officials and dismantled an agency in clear violation of statutory limits, and frozen spending authorized by Congress without clear authority. Many of his policy moves have been at least temporarily frozen by judges.

Such moves include trying to unilaterally rewrite the definition of birthright citizenship — a right enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment — to exclude babies born to undocumented mothers, and mass firings of public servants, ignoring civil service protection laws. He has all but shuttered the agency responsible for foreign aid, dismissed prosecutors who investigated him, and fired Senate-confirmed watchdogs without giving proper notice to Congress or justification.

Mr. Trump’s team has embraced an expansive version of the so-called unitary executive theory, a legal ideology that says that the Constitution should be understood as forbidding Congress from placing any limits on the president’s control of the executive branch, including by creating independent agencies or restricting the president’s ability to summarily fire any government official at will.

The Trump administration at first did not offer a public legal rationale for blowing through the statutes that provide various kinds of job protections to the officials that Mr. Trump has summarily fired, including members of independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board.

But last week, the administration offered something of an explanation. Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general at the Justice Department, sent a letter to Congress saying the department would not defend the constitutionality of statutes that limit firing members of independent agencies before their terms were up. Such laws say the president cannot remove such an official at will, but only for a specific cause like misconduct.

While not using the phrase “unitary executive theory,” Ms. Harris’s letter echoed its ideological tenet that the Constitution does not allow Congress to enact a law “which prevents the president from adequately supervising principal officers in the executive branch who execute the laws on the president’s behalf,” and said the Trump administration will try to get the Supreme Court to overturn a 1935 precedent to the contrary.

That, at least, is a theory under which at least some of what Mr. Trump has been doing is lawful: It is not illegal to disregard an unconstitutional statute.

But, taken at face value, Mr. Trump’s statement on Saturday went much further, suggesting that even if what he is doing unambiguously breaks an otherwise valid law, that would not matter if he says his motive is to save the country.

There are a handful of instances of other presidents claiming the power to override legal limits, but those have usually been limited to national security.

In the early days of the Civil War, for example, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus rights, called up troops and otherwise spent money that Congress, which was not in session, had not appropriated.

When Congress reconvened, Lincoln sent them a letter telling them what he had done and famously asking, “are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He also said that what he had done, “whether strictly legal or not,” had been necessary, and Congress retroactively ratified his actions.

More than a century later, after President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid being impeached in the Watergate scandal, he talked in an interview about wiretapping and other steps that might appear to be illegal but were undertaken to protect against foreign threats. Citing Lincoln’s example, Nixon said presidents have inherent power to authorize government officials to break laws if the president decides that doing so is in the national interest.

“When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” Nixon claimed.

And following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney took actions that violated statutory limits on issues like torture and surveillance based on an expansive and disputed vision of the power their lawyers said the Constitution gives the president in his role as commander in chief.

While national security cases rarely get litigated, when they have, the Supreme Court has been skeptical of sweeping theories of presidential power — striking down President Harry S. Truman’s attempted seizure of steel mills as a Korean War measure, for example.

In any case, Mr. Trump’s moves so far have largely not been in the realm of national security. Rather, he has been attempting to stamp out pockets of independence that Congress created within the executive branch in order to centralize greater power in the White House over issues that are largely ones of domestic policy.

Mr. Trump and some of his allies have pushed the political argument that the nation has been under siege from what they characterize as leftist policies and values, and has fallen into a spiral of decline that must be reversed by any means necessary.

Among them, Mr. Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, wrote an essay in 2022, declaring that the United States was already in a “post-Constitutional moment” and that to push back against liberals, it was necessary to be “radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”

Trump’s first month: Dizzying workweeks and a side of sports on the weekend.

Mr. Trump is spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., about 200 miles south of the Daytona International Speedway. The White House has not confirmed his attendance, but the Federal Aviation Administration issued “temporary flight restrictions for V.I.P. movement” for the area for part of Sunday. This year’s race already has a grand marshal, though: Anthony Mackie, the star of the film “Captain America: Brave New World.”

Mr. Trump’s appearance at Daytona on Sunday would cap a whirlwind week of mixing sports with politics. Last Sunday morning, the president played a few holes with the Hall of Fame golfer Tiger Woods in Florida, as they’ve been working on a merger between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit. In the afternoon, on Air Force One, he signed a proclamation making it “Gulf of America Day,” reinforcing his Jan. 20 executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And then, before attending the Super Bowl in New Orleans in the evening, he met with families of the victims of the New Year’s Day terror attack in the city.

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The call was the Trump administration’s latest step in reversing the Biden administration’s attempts to isolate Russia diplomatically. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the call was a follow-up to Wednesday’s conversation between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin. It said the two top diplomats would stay in touch, “including for the preparation of a Russian-American summit.”

Trump said in a Truth Social post earlier today that he would back whatever decision Israel made about how it should respond if Hamas failed to meet the noon deadline.

An unchecked Trump rapidly remakes U.S. government and foreign policy.

In the final days of his first presidency, Mr. Trump tried to hire a loyalist to help run the F.B.I., until Attorney General Bill Barr objected, Mr. Barr said in his book after he left office. Now that same loyalist, Kash Patel, is poised to lead the bureau.

At every step in his second term, Mr. Trump is demonstrating how unbound he is from prior restraints, dramatically remaking both domestic and foreign policy at a scale that has little parallel. His swift moves in his first month back in office underscore the confidence of an administration with a much firmer grip on the levers of government than during Mr. Trump’s last stint in the White House.

Long gone are the veterans of the Bush and Reagan administrations who pushed him to hew to more traditional conservative policies. In their place are a group of mostly America First Republicans helping Mr. Trump radically reset the country’s policies — as well as the billionaire Elon Musk, whom the president has unleashed to barrel through the bureaucracy.

“We’ve never seen anything on the scale of what Donald Trump’s new administration is doing,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, who leads the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “It’s not just a reversal of previous administration policies — which we always expect to see a little bit of — but a reversal of the fundamentals of American foreign policy since 1945.”

Consider Mr. Trump’s actions in the past week alone:

• He ended efforts to isolate Russia diplomatically after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago, speaking at length with President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Trump characterized the conversation as the opening of talks to end the war — with no clear role for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

• His administration began widespread layoffs across the government, targeting most of an estimated 200,000 federal workers on probation, a sharp escalation in the president’s drive to shrink the work force.

• Top Trump officials plunged the Justice Department deeper into chaos with its move to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, triggering a cascade of resignations from prosecutors.

• Mr. Trump proposed an aggressive global reworking of tariffs — devising what he calls “reciprocal tariffs” that could shatter the commitments the United States has made internationally through the World Trade Organization and potentially usher in a new era of trade wars.

Amid it all, the president continued to sign executive orders at a breakneck speed, taking moves to weaken the job protections of career diplomats and expand Mr. Musk’s power over the federal work force.

Mr. Trump’s allies say his actions show how fast he is moving to fulfill the promises he made voters.

“It’s been at a rapid pace,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the House. “If you compare Donald Trump’s first month in office in 2017 to what you’re seeing today, you’re watching a much more focused and aggressive president.”

He added: “He’s taking the lessons from his first term and delivering bigger results, faster results for the American people.”

So far, the upheaval caused by Mr. Trump’s early moves has not appeared to have brought a large shift in public opinion against him, though it remains to be seen how the spending freezes and cuts to the federal work force will resonate among his key constituencies once the impacts are clear.

“Most of the people that voted for him wanted change,” Mr. Engel said. “I would argue most of the people that voted for him were not really into the weeds of Page 632 of federal law. So the headlines are, ‘Trump did something’ and they sense action.”

The blitz of policy changes Mr. Trump has undertaken during his first month in office have little precedent, historians say.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a similar flurry of activity during his first 100 days in office, but those measures aimed to build up American institutions, not tear them down.

“In Roosevelt’s case, that was a revolution to create institutions,” Mr. Engel said. “This is not a construction site. It’s a wrecking ball.”

Unlike with other presidents, there appear to be few checks on Mr. Trump.

Congress, under Republican control, has cast off its traditional oversight and budgetary roles in deference to his agenda.

Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he is all too happy to cede the power of the purse to Musk’s team in the executive branch. He indicated he has no objection to Mr. Trump canceling or clawing back funds approved by Congress.

“I’ve been asked so many times, ‘Aren’t you uncomfortable with this?’” Mr. Johnson told reporters. “No, I’m not.” He added: “We the people are applauding what’s happening in the new administration.”

One of the few Republicans in Congress who has not moved in lock step with Mr. Trump has been Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who has declined to vote for some of the president’s more polarizing Cabinet nominees. But the former party leader’s “no” votes have not held back the confirmations of figures such as Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.

Where Mr. Trump had encountered resistance, it has been in the courts. Some federal judges have stepped in to block temporarily some of Mr. Trump’s actions — including his attempted repeal of birthright citizenship, his freeze on foreign aid and some of Mr. Musk’s intrusions into the federal government.

That has drawn Mr. Trump’s ire.

“Billions of Dollars of FRAUD, WASTE, AND ABUSE, has already been found in the investigation of our incompetently run Government,” the president posted on Truth Social, without providing evidence of specific misspending. “Now certain activists and highly political judges want us to slow down, or stop. Losing this momentum will be very detrimental to finding the TRUTH, which is turning out to be a disaster for those involved in running our Government. Much left to find. No Excuses!!!”

In some ways, Mr. Trump has adopted the philosophy of Silicon Valley and embraced by business executives such as his ally Mr. Musk, who has been slashing jobs and agencies at record pace: Move fast and break things.

Federal officials who have been pushed out in Mr. Trump’s rapid purges say he is systematically eroding any checks on his administration. He pushed out 19 inspectors general; the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission; the head of the Office of Special Counsel, a government watchdog agency, and the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which protects civil servants from unjustified disciplinary action. Many of those terminations are now being challenged in court.

Cathy Harris, the chairwoman of the merit board, has sued to get her job back, arguing her firing was illegal. She sees a pattern in how Mr. Trump is removing those who could hold him accountable.

“He’s taking widespread actions intended to gut the civil service,” Ms. Harris said. “The M.S.P.B. is one of the agencies that protects against actions taken against the civil service for partisan political reasons or other improper motives, and by diminishing the bipartisan nature of the board, I’m very fearful of what will happen to the civil service as a result.”

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Hegseth’s bruising 72-hour debut overseas was a crash course in geopolitical realities.

Facing fierce blowback the next day from European allies and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Hegseth backpedaled, denying that either he or Mr. Trump had sold out Ukraine or taken bargaining chips with Russia off the table. “There is no betrayal there,” Mr. Hegseth said.

That’s not how even Republican supporters of Mr. Hegseth saw it. “He made a rookie mistake in Brussels,” Senator Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, told Politico on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, referring to the secretary’s comment on Ukraine’s borders.

“I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool,” said Mr. Wicker, referring to the conservative media personality and former Fox News host.

Mr. Hegseth sought to recover on Friday, saying in Warsaw that his goal had simply been to “introduce realism into the expectations of our NATO allies.” How much territory Ukraine may cede to Russia would be decided in talks between Mr. Trump and the presidents of the warring countries, he said.

In all, it was a bruising, 72-hour crash course in the geopolitical realities of a job that critics complain Mr. Hegseth, a 44-year-old former National Guard infantryman and Fox News host, is unqualified to hold.

Mr. Hegseth’s trip to Europe, his first overseas visit since being sworn in on Jan. 25, started off on an unusual note.

On an Air Force cargo plane flying to Germany, he signed a memo renaming an Army base in North Carolina to Fort Bragg — skirting a 2021 federal law that banned the naming of bases in honor of soldiers who rebelled against the Union during the Civil War. The previous honoree was Braxton Bragg, an incompetent Confederate general. Mr. Hegseth chose to rename the base for an obscure private, Roland L. Bragg, who earned the Silver Star in World War II.

“Bragg is back,” Mr. Hegseth said in a video of himself signing the memo that he quickly posted on social media.

After a few hours of sleep, Mr. Hegseth joined an early-morning workout with Army Green Berets on Tuesday, and posted photos of himself running and lifting weights with them.

At a base in Stuttgart, Germany, that houses the Pentagon’s commands overseeing operations in Europe and Africa, the secretary took his first questions from reporters and offered the main themes for the trip: European countries must boost military spending and weapons production, and the main national security threat facing the United States is the unchecked flow of migrants across its southwestern border.

The next day in Brussels, Mr. Hegseth spoke at the first Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting of the Trump administration, though not as its leader.

On Feb. 6, the Pentagon announced that Mr. Hegseth had relinquished America’s leadership of the Contact Group — a collection of more than 50 nations that his predecessor formed shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to coordinate shipments of military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv.

According to data compiled by The New York Times, the United States has provided approximately $67 billion in military assistance to Kyiv since the February 2022 invasion, roughly half in shipments of weaponry from the Pentagon’s existing stockpile and half in funds to allow Ukraine to buy military hardware directly from the U.S. defense industry.

Mr. Hegseth, sitting three seats from Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said the idea of Ukraine retaking its land occupied by Russian forces since Moscow’s first invasion in 2014 was “an unrealistic objective” and “an illusionary goal.”

Those remarks, which signaled the White House’s willingness to cede occupied Crimea and Ukraine’s Donbas region to Mr. Putin before cease-fire negotiations even began, stunned officials in Washington, as well in Kyiv and European capitals.

Former Pentagon officials said it was highly unlikely that Mr. Hegseth’s prepared remarks had not been cleared and coordinated with the White House’s National Security Council before delivery, given his relative inexperience and that he was leading off an important foreign policy week for the Trump administration.

John Ullyot, a Pentagon spokesman, said in email on Saturday that Mr. Hegseth’s comments were coordinated with other senior administration national security officials. When asked by reporters on Friday if he was aware of what Mr. Hegseth was going to say to the Contact Group, Mr. Trump said, “Generally speaking, I was.”

After meeting with NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday, Mr. Hegseth appeared to soften his earlier statements, saying that “simply pointing out realism, like the borders won’t be rolled back to what everybody would like them to be in 2014, is not a concession to Vladimir Putin.”

“It’s a recognition of the hard power realities on the ground,” he added.

But the secretary repeated his call for European allies to increase military spending and ease their reliance on Washington to safeguard the continent’s security. “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker,” he said.

On Friday, when Mr. Hegseth visited Poland, he appeared to tack yet again, this time closer to his original remarks on Wednesday, seeking to align himself with Mr. Trump and the president’s national security team. He said that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was “unlikely” in the peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia that Mr. Trump sought to broker.

Mr. Hegseth also pushed back against concerns that a cease-fire mediated by Mr. Trump would embolden Mr. Putin. “He’s going to declare victory no matter what,” Mr. Hegseth said at a news conference in Poland, which he praised as a “model ally on the continent” for its security spending and military preparedness on Europe’s eastern flank.

Mr. Hegseth also repeated his earlier assessment that U.S. troops were unlikely to serve on the ground in Ukraine as part of any cease-fire buffer force. That contradicted Vice President JD Vance, who told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained “on the table.”

Mr. Hegseth insisted there was no daylight between himself and Mr. Vance, and that the entire Trump national security team was “on the same page.” And his back-and-forth stances were not visible in a video compilation of trip highlights that the Pentagon posted on X Saturday morning.

Outside the halls of NATO headquarters and American military commands, Mr. Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer Rauchet Hegseth, also had an uneven experience.

At a Defense Department middle school in Stuttgart, Germany, students walked out in protest when the Hegseths visited earlier in the week, Jessica Tackaberry, the communications director for the department’s education system in Europe, confirmed.

Over the past two weeks, the Defense Department’s education system in Europe has been vetting its instructional materials and libraries to comply with Mr. Trump’s recent executive orders focused on stamping out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from schools, federal programs and the military.

Of all of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries, Mr. Hegseth has been among the most enthusiastic enforcers of those orders.

Here’s what 6 Americans think of Trump, Elon Musk and Gaza.

In some ways, the flurry of striking changes has hardened the fault lines dividing those who strongly support and those who strongly oppose the president. Many more in the middle have adopted a wait-and-see approach.

During Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, we will be keeping in touch with a small group of voters — who have diverse political ideologies — to document their impressions of his second term. Here’s what six had to say.

— Audra D. S. Burch

‘Sometimes you don’t know who is talking — it feels like a tantrum of a 4-year-old boy.’

Tali Jackont, 57, from Los Angeles

Tali Jackont put aside her liberal beliefs to vote for Mr. Trump, but now she worries.

After four years away from the White House, Mr. Trump seems less temperate than ever.

“Too much ego,” she said on Thursday, adding, “It feels like a tantrum of a four-year-old boy.”

Speaking from her home in the Los Angeles area, Ms. Jackont said that while she understands Mr. Trump’s desire to cut the federal work force and surround himself with loyalists, his tactics do not feel right. Too many experts will lose their jobs, she said. Mr. Trump, she believes, is making moves that make him seem one step removed from being “a type of dictator.”

Ms. Jackont is an educator, a married mother of three sons and an immigrant from Israel. She hoped that Mr. Trump could navigate issues in the Middle East better than his predecessor. But she has watched with bewilderment as he proposed the United States take over Gaza and permanently move the Palestinians living there to other countries.

“Not realistic,” she called Mr. Trump’s idea.

The president has also threatened “all hell” if every hostage is not released.

“It makes me super concerned,” she said. “It makes me feel my heart beat.” If even one of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas is killed because of such rhetoric, she added, “then it does not work for me.”

Elon Musk’s influence with the new administration, his access to federal databases, and the lack of transparency surrounding both give her pause. “It’s like airport security,” she said. “You go through the scanners, they see everything. You’re naked before them, and you don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Despite her concerns, she still has hope for Mr. Trump’s presidency. But she underscored how long she is willing to wait.

One hundred days.

“One hundred days of charity,” she said.

— Kurt Streeter

‘This is exactly what I expected — that unexpected things would happen.’

Hamid Chaudhry, 53, from Reading, Pa.

“Look, canceling the penny is the smartest thing he has done,” said Hamid Chaudhry, who owns a farmer’s market in Reading, Pa.

This sort of presidential action — directing the mint to stop making the penny, citing the costs of production — is exactly why Mr. Chaudhry, 53, voted for Mr. Trump last year in the first place. He saw Mr. Trump as a savvy businessman who would save taxpayer money.

Along those lines, Mr. Chaudhry said he supported the plans to bring federal workers back to the office and to cut the size of government. He considers Mr. Musk a smart and accomplished businessman as well.

If Mr. Chaudhry is generally on board with the fiscal decisions of the new administration, he is a little nervous about the speed of some of this cutting. “As a private businessman, they all make sense, but I’m not sure all the changes can be made or should be made too fast,” he said. “I hope we don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”

Still, he remains cautiously optimistic. Not because he agrees with everything Mr. Trump has done — he doesn’t — but because he believes Mr. Trump is bringing a much-needed shake-up to the way things have been done. He is hopeful that Mr. Trump’s approach may pay off, even if there are mistakes along the way.

“When I started making doughnuts in my full-service restaurant, people said, ‘Oh, doughnuts are not going to work and fried chicken is not going to work,’” Mr. Chaudhry said. “The two most popular items in my restaurant are fried chicken and doughnuts. So sometimes you have to think outside the box.”

— Campbell Robertson

Mr. Musk ‘seemed like he was almost a guy directly in control of the White House.’

Dave Abdallah, 59, from Dearborn Heights, Mich.

With so much rapid change coming from the White House in the first weeks of Mr. Trump’s administration, one figure has become a particularly influential presence: Mr. Musk.

Dave Abdallah, a Detroit-area real estate broker, is no fan of Mr. Musk’s level of influence. He believes the tech mogul is brazenly crossing ethical lines. Mr. Musk, he says, should not have access to the private information of everyday citizens without their consent.

The image of Mr. Musk holding court in the Oval Office this week, standing with his young son while Mr. Trump looked up from his desk, felt particularly off-putting to Mr. Abdallah.

Mr. Musk, he said, “seemed like he was almost a guy directly in control of the White House.”

Mr. Abdallah, who voted for a third-party candidate in the 2024 election, voiced strong opposition to Mr. Trump’s recent proposals to take over the Gaza war zone, move the Palestinians there to other countries and keep them from returning.

Those are ridiculous ideas, “on every level,” Mr. Abdallah said.

Mr. Abdallah said that whenever he had heard Mr. Trump talk up the newly revealed Gaza plan, he had the same stunned reaction: “I think I must be drinking or smoking something to be listening to this.”

“Honestly,” he said, “I can’t comprehend it.”

When asked what advice he would give to Mr. Trump, Mr. Abdallah said, “Treat the Palestinians like humans and give them equality and give them their land back. Or, at the very minimum, a two-state solution. That’s my number one priority, even forget the fact that I’m Arab American, just in terms of a human being.”

— Kurt Streeter

‘With Trump, it seems to be like, boom, boom, boom.’

Jaime Escobar Jr., 46, from Roma, Texas

Jaime Escobar Jr., the mayor of a small town on the Texas border, is dazzled by the speed of the president’s administrative moves.

“The wheels of government, I’ve always been told, run very slowly,” he said. “But with Trump, it seems to be like, boom, boom, boom.”

It sharply contrasts what he experienced as mayor of Roma, population 11,000, as it struggled with the migrant crisis under the Biden administration. That experience alone prompted Mr. Escobar, a lifelong Democrat, to switch parties. In 2024, he voted for Mr. Trump. The surrounding Starr County, a formerly Democratic area, also flipped for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Escobar is upbeat about most of what he is seeing from the White House, including Mr. Musk’s barn-burning approach to cutting the federal work force.

“I think he’s one of our smartest people in our planet,” Mr. Escobar said. “I’m kind of excited to see if he can really help cut the wasteful spending.”

For all his enthusiasm, Mr. Escobar, 46, does have a few requests. “I do believe in checks and balances,” he explained. If Mr. Musk “has an opportunity to maybe present himself in front of Congress and answer questions, I think that would be great for the American people.”

Tariffs may be Mr. Escobar’s greatest worry. Mr. Trump has announced stiff tariffs on imported aluminum and steel, and others may be in the offing.

“Is that going to happen?” he asked. “Mexico is our biggest trading partner, and we definitely want to have a good relationship with our neighbors.”

— Edgar Sandoval

‘Right now, everything feels so up in the air.’

Isaiah Thompson, 22, from Washington, D.C.

Isaiah Thompson is not sure what to make of Mr. Trump’s uncharted mission to downsize and remake the federal government.

To Mr. Thompson, a college student, the decisions to impose tariffs or dismantle the Department of Education or fire federal workers has felt like overreach, coming too fast and without enough explanation or justification.

But none of those actions are as frightening to Mr. Thompson as the president handing Mr. Musk a powerful, unorthodox agency job. The billionaire is charged with rooting out wasteful federal spending as the leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency. While Mr. Thompson appreciates Mr. Musk’s prowess as a businessman, he can’t understand how a private citizen could be given so much access to the federal government and internal data without clear boundaries.

“It’s very in character that Donald Trump would bring Elon Musk on board with him,” said Mr. Thompson, 22, who is studying chemical engineering at Howard University. “Who wouldn’t want to be allied with the richest man in the world? So I think that’s smart.”

But, he said, there are “no checks and balances.”

“An unelected position means that the people of this country, the democratic principles that this country was founded on, was not included in putting this man in that position,” said Mr. Thompson, who supports the Green Party but believed it was more practical to vote for Kamala Harris.

Mr. Thompson is holding out hope that Mr. Trump’s grand plan will somehow start to make sense to him. “Right now, everything feels so up in the air.”

— Audra D. S. Burch

‘When someone’s trying to cut spending, which is going to help me in the long run, I take him at face value.’

Perry Hunter, 55, from Sellersburg, Ind.

Despite the controversy over Mr. Musk’s role in the new administration, Perry Hunter, a teacher, is all for it. Why not, he asked, have the world’s richest man use his business prowess to tackle the United States’ $36 trillion debt, a huge problem that so many past administrations could not handle? Rising debt, he worries, will spur inflation and make everyday items even more costly. “We’ve got to tighten our belts for the next few years to get this under control,” he said.

“Maybe I’m putting my trust in the wrong person,” Mr. Hunter said. “But when someone’s trying to cut spending, which is going to help me in the long run, I take him at face value. Everyone seemed to trust him and like him before he supported Donald Trump.”

Mr. Hunter remains in awe of the speed of Mr. Trump’s changes, though he is wondering how many of them will last. “A lot of the things that he’s doing, they’re questionable constitutionally,” he said. Mr. Hunter is watching how the courts rule on various issues, including on Mr. Trump’s effort to bar transgender girls and women from women’s sports.

Mr. Hunter, the father of two athletes, is in favor of a ban, and said it would have been unfair if his daughter, who played volleyball in high school and college, had competed against a transgender player.

“I don’t see how you can support biological women not having their own sports, their own locker rooms, their own bathrooms,” he said.

— Juliet Macur

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In Trump’s cuts to aid and refugees, there’s a clash over Christian values.

Throughout the decades, these faith-based groups worked hand in hand with the federal government. Agencies like the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services eventually funded them with hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Many of these groups believed helping the poor and vulnerable expressed their values not only as Christians, but also as Americans.

Now, that legacy — and the very survival of these organizations and the values they represent — is in existential crisis.

Over only a few weeks, President Trump has frozen foreign aid, tried to place thousands of U.S.A.I.D. workers on administrative leave and pushed ahead with his mass deportation plans. Elon Musk bragged he was “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper” and claimed without evidence that it was a “criminal organization.”

The sudden upheaval has left faith-based humanitarian groups with gaping funding deficits, hastily shuttered programs and unfolding layoffs.

Last week, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops laid off 50 people, or about a third of its office for migration and refugee services. The group sent a memo to bishops, informing them that subcontractors and local Catholic Charities groups will face delayed payments until further notice.

Catholic Relief Services expects layoffs and cuts to programs of up to 50 percent, according to the National Catholic Reporter. The group received about 64 percent of its nearly $1.5 billion revenue from government contributions in 2022.

“We are experiencing immediate and critical gaps in our ability to bring lifesaving programs across all areas of our work,” the organization said in an online plea for private funding.

World Vision, an evangelical group that seeks to alleviate poverty, is working to keep its programs alive. In 2022, government contributions made up about 44 percent of its $1.5 billion revenue.

Neither relief organization made leaders available for interviews.

At a congressional hearing on Thursday, Andrew Natsios, who led U.S.A.I.D. during the George W. Bush administration, testified to the dire situation of Christian aid groups. He asked Congress to restore funding for Christian nonprofits doing humanitarian work, and to keep them out of political culture wars.

“All those programs are now frozen, they’ve laid off the staff,” he said. “It is damaging the church’s mission in the world.”

Mr. Trump’s priorities have for years now split churches, as many conservatives fuse their faith and religious values with his political mission.

Mr. Trump’s vow to fight “anti-Christian bias,” has been most visible in his support for faith-based anti-abortion groups and others who believe there are only two sexes, male and female.

Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, has criticized some humanitarian groups. At the International Religious Freedom Summit on Feb. 5, he accused them of “spreading atheism all over the globe.” He later suggested without evidence that the Catholic bishops whose work supports immigrants may be prioritizing their bottom lines instead of humanitarian aid.

And Mr. Vance has defended Mr. Trump’s agenda with what he described as an ancient Christian principle.

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country,” he said in a recent Fox News interview. “And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

He defended his positions on X: “Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” he wrote, using a Latin phrase that translates to “order of love” or “order of charity.”

Pope Francis on Tuesday appeared to correct Mr. Vance’s theology in an open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops. The true ordo amoris is found in the parable of the good Samaritan, he said, “by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Pope Francis wrote.

This division has existed within conservative Christian circles for nearly a decade. When Mr. Trump won the presidency in 2016, many evangelicals doing mission work abroad saw his America First agenda and vulgar description of Africa as harmful to their cause. There were even some splits between missionaries and their sponsor churches stateside, where many congregants were attracted to Mr. Trump’s vow to give Christians power in his administration.

One faith-based aid group that appears to be surviving Mr. Trump’s drastic cuts is Samaritan’s Purse, the behemoth evangelical disaster-relief organization run by Franklin Graham, a longtime defender of Mr. Trump. Samaritan’s Purse sees humanitarian work as a project to share the gospel.

Unlike the groups facing steep losses, Samaritan’s Purse received only about 5 percent of its revenue in 2023 from government contributions — more than a billion dollars came from private sources.

Mr. Graham recommends that Christian groups “look to the churches, not the government” for funding.

Government money, he said, can corrupt the faith of Christian groups.

“It’s probably good for things to be shaken up,” Mr. Graham said of the U.S.A.I.D. cuts. “I’m not saying it all needs to be thrown out, but it needs to be reviewed.”

Some Christian organizations that were founded as explicitly religious have grown more ecumenical and interfaith throughout the decades.

Global Refuge, for instance, was formerly known as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. It started as a Lutheran group in 1939, helping German Lutheran refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. Around 1972, it expanded to become an independent, immigrant-focused organization separate from church bodies.

In 2023, nearly all of Global Refuge’s revenue — about 95 percent, or $221 million — came from government funding.

But the nonprofit’s work “couldn’t be done without support of congregations and faith leaders,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of Global Refuge.

Her group funds smaller, explicitly faith-based groups like Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, which helps resettle refugees in the Washington, D.C., region.

That local group has helped welcome some 6,500 Afghans since the fall of Kabul, and in 2023 provided assistance to 3,000 others fleeing persecution from 46 countries, like Cameroon and Syria.

But by Wednesday, it had laid off 42 workers, and furloughed another 26, totaling a quarter of its staff.

Kristyn Peck, the group’s chief executive, said the freeze left them waiting for $2.5 million in reimbursements. On Friday, they were unable to make payroll for their 117 salaried employees.

“These decisions,” Ms. Peck, a Unitarian Universalist, said, “seem really out of line with our country’s legacy and heritage.”

A judge allows Elon Musk’s team to keep access to personal records at some U.S. agencies, for now.

But, he added, the case made by the plaintiffs — led by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., an umbrella group of unions that represent many federal workers — did not meet the high legal bar necessary for him to immediately block the initiative’s access while the case proceeded.

“The record indicates,” Judge Bates wrote, that members of Mr. Musk’s team are federal employees “who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties.”

The ruling was a victory for the Trump administration and Mr. Musk in their efforts to scrutinize the activities and spending of federal agencies, which have faced several setbacks in the courts. For example, DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems was halted by a federal judge last week.

Unions representing federal workers, like the American Federation of Government Employees, have led many of the lawsuits against the Trump administration.