The DHS shutdown was supposed to be a Washington story—a standoff between two parties over immigration enforcement tactics, playing out in Senate cloakrooms and Sunday shows while Transport Security Administration (TSA) officers quietly sold plasma to cover rent.
Then spring break hit, security lines snaked into parking garages, a plane hit a fire truck in a deadly runway collision at LaGuardia and the whole thing became impossible to ignore.
In a week when Congress managed only to confirm a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary and leave town for Easter, the most decisive policy actor wasn’t in Washington at all.
⬆ ‘Linda from Arizona’
Last Friday, a caller named Linda phoned into The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show and proposed deploying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to fix the TSA staffing crisis.
Travis pitched the idea on Jesse Watters Primetime that same evening; on Saturday it was on Trump’s Truth Social; by Monday, hundreds of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were deployed to airports across the country.
Congress has had six weeks. Linda needed a weekend.
By the time a talk radio caller’s idea had become White House policy, the job of explaining on CNN why U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents can’t actually run X-ray machines fell to the border czar.
The most feared deportation official in a generation spent his Sunday laying out why his agents aren’t qualified for much more than guarding the exit door.
At February’s State of the Union, Mullin rushed across the chamber to snatch Rep. Al Green’s protest sign and shield Trump from embarrassment. His reward: the DHS secretary job with an agency unfunded since February, a TSA chief calling the situation “dire” and a Congress leaving for Easter recess.
His stated six-month goal was for DHS to stop being “in the lead story every single day.” He’s been secretary for 24 hours.
When Rand Paul blocked Mullin’s nomination from advancing out of committee, the Trump administration needed a Democrat to rescue it, and Fetterman provided the decisive vote, then backed Mullin again in the full Senate, 54-45.
The former Bernie Sanders endorsee is now Washington’s most reliable Democratic crossover. Kyrsten Sinema at least pretended it hurt.
⬇ Gianni Infantino
To guarantee smooth sailing for his $11 billion World Cup, the FIFA president moved the tournament draw to Washington so Trump could appear on stage, then created the FIFA Peace Prize (which hadn’t existed five weeks earlier) to drape around his neck at the Kennedy Center.
This week the TSA’s acting chief told Congress that new screeners won’t be trained in time for the tournament, now fewer than 80 days away. He gave Trump a prize he invented and couldn’t get functioning airports in return.
Originally a staple of Newsweek‘s print edition, Conventional Wisdom used arrows to track whose stock was rising or falling in the political circus. We’re reviving it in the digital age because the problem it lampooned—hyperbole and partisan certainty masquerading as insight—has only intensified.
CW assigns arrows—up, down, or sideways—to the figures and forces shaping current events. The arrows don’t predict the future or claim special insight. They capture the prevailing winds of the moment, uncluttered by tribal howling. In an era when partisan media reinforces rather than questions assumptions, CW operates from the center—skeptical of left and right alike, committed to puncturing inflated reputations and recognizing overlooked truths.
Do you agree with our editors on which way the political winds are blowing? Send us a message here.
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