The Orbit is Fracturing
Watch the hands, not the face.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have a book coming out. The book is called Time Change, and Simon & Schuster has put substantial weight behind it, and the New York Times Magazine has run the set-piece excerpt this morning. The piece is framed, with the careful gentleness of the trade, as an inside look at the White House freakout over the Epstein files. The frame is not what the piece is.
What the piece is is a scene. The scene is the John F. Kennedy Conference Room inside the White House Situation Room complex, on the evening of July 17, 2025, at approximately six in the evening. The Vice President of the United States is in the chair. Around the table are the Chief of Staff, the Counsel, the Press Secretary, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, the Communications Director, the Deputy Attorney General, a personal attorney to the President, another personal attorney to the President, and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Political, and Public Affairs. On speakerphone — on speakerphone, the detail to which I will return — are the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The President is not in the room. The President is not in the building.
The Vice President says, this is a significant issue. He is described by people who were present as visibly anxious. He is, according to the reporting, advocating internally for the full release of all Epstein-related files held by the Justice Department, and for a congressional inquiry. The Chief of Staff has told colleagues, in some venue or other that Haberman and Swan have access to, that the Vice President has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories. Another senior official has told the reporters that the Vice President has been aggressively pursuing the Epstein issue since the memo’s release.
That is the scene. That is what we are looking at.
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I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil, and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to be where it is. I asked, in that piece, why anybody around him is tolerating the insanity. I am writing this piece because today’s excerpt is the beginning of an answer, and the answer is not what some readers wanted to hear. The answer is that some of them are, in fact, no longer tolerating it. They are positioning. They are leaking. They are sitting for interviews. They are, in private rooms, telling Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan things that they know will appear in books published by Simon & Schuster and excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. They are, in other words, beginning the work of constructing the record by which they will, later, explain what they were doing in the room.
The orbit is not monolithic. The orbit was never monolithic. The orbit was always composed of human beings making individual human choices, and the choices are now beginning to diverge. The piece in this morning’s Magazine is the documentary trace of that divergence, and it is worth reading it as such, with attention, and without pretending it is a story about something else.
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Notice the speakerphone.
The Attorney General of the United States is not in the room. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not in the room. They are on a conference line. This is the senior leadership of the Department of Justice and the senior leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called into a Situation Room meeting about a federal investigation, and they are joining by phone. The Vice President is at the head of the table. The Chief of Staff is in the room. The White House Counsel is in the room. The President’s personal attorneys are in the room. The political and communications staff are in the room. The two figures who actually run the institutions that hold the files are on speakerphone.
There is no version of that arrangement in which the people in the room consider the people on the phone to be peers. There is no version of that arrangement in which the people on the phone are part of the decision. They are being told, by an arrangement that announces itself in its very architecture, that they will hear what the decision is. The architecture of the speakerphone is the architecture of an instruction. The political leadership of the executive branch and the personal legal team of the President are deciding what the senior officers of the Justice Department will be allowed to do about a federal investigation into a man with whom the President has been associated, and the senior officers of the Justice Department are being looped in by phone so they can be told.
That is not, by itself, news. We have known for a year what the Justice Department has become. But the speakerphone is the visible documentary fact of it, captured in a book that will be on the Times bestseller list in two weeks. It is part of the record now. Pam Bondi was on the phone. Kash Patel was on the phone. Susie Wiles, David Warrington, and the rest were in the room.
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Notice who is leaking.
Susie Wiles is the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. If Susie Wiles has told colleagues that the Vice President of the United States has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories, and if that characterization has made it into a book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, then either Susie Wiles wanted it in the book or someone in her direct orbit wanted it in the book or her conversations with colleagues are being leaked by colleagues she trusted and the leakers wanted it in the book. There are no other options. Chiefs of staff do not have private conversations about the Vice President that appear in Magazine excerpts by accident. The characterization is in the book because someone with access to her decided it should be in the book.
That tells you where the loyalty lines are running. The Chief of Staff’s office is, by some mechanism direct or indirect, on the record characterizing the Vice President as a conspiracist. The Vice President is, by some mechanism direct or indirect, on the record advocating for the disclosure of the files the President cannot afford to have disclosed. These two characterizations did not appear in the same book by accident. The book is documenting a fracture, and the fracture is between the West Wing and the Office of the Vice President, and it is on the Epstein file specifically, and it is happening now.
There is a third party to the fracture, and the third party is the Justice Department. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI are on speakerphone. They are not, in the scene as reported, leaking. They are not, in the scene as reported, positioning. But the people in the room are positioning around them, and the people in the room are positioning around the question of whether the institutions they nominally lead will be made to do what those institutions are being asked to do. The Justice Department is the silent party to the meeting. Its silence in the reporting is itself reporting.
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I have written, in these pages, about the political project of the tech and finance orbit that placed the Vice President where he is. I have written, in these pages, about the donor class whose preferences run through both wings of the present administration. I have written, in these pages, about the legal and commentariat class that makes its living laundering the indefensible and that will, in due course, need to launder the post-administration narratives of the men currently in the room. Each of these pieces is part of one argument. The argument is that the orbit is composed of human beings who have made themselves available for this work, and that their choices to be available will, sooner or later, require an accounting.
The accounting has begun. It has not begun in the courts and it has not begun in the Congress and it has not begun in any official venue that has the authority to compel the truth. It has begun in the most American venue possible: in a book deal, in a Magazine excerpt, in the careful curation of which scenes get told by which sources to which reporters under which conditions of attribution. The accounting that has begun is not justice. It is the dress rehearsal for the explanations that the men in the room will, later, offer for what they were doing there.
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The Vice President will say, when the time comes, that he was the one in the room who advocated for disclosure. He will say that he pushed for a congressional inquiry. He will say, through the lips of his friends and the pens of his sympathetic biographers, that he understood the issue was significant, that he was visibly anxious because he was a man of conscience, that he had been aggressively pursuing the matter against the obstruction of the West Wing. He will have, by the time he needs them, on-the-record sources who placed him in the chair at the head of the table on the evening of July 17, 2025, in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room, doing the right thing.
The Chief of Staff will say, when the time comes, that the Vice President was a conspiracist, that the West Wing was trying to manage a difficult situation responsibly, that the aggressive pursuit of the Epstein issue by the Vice President was itself a danger to the orderly conduct of the administration. She will have, by the time she needs them, on-the-record sources of her own.
The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI will say, when the time comes, that they were on speakerphone, that they were not in the room, that the decisions made about the federal investigation were made by people other than them, that they were following the chain of command as they understood it. They will have, in their defense, the documentary fact of the speakerphone.
Each of these explanations is being prepared now. Each of them is being seeded into the record now. Each of them will be deployed, at the appropriate time, by the appropriate person, through the appropriate journalistic intermediary, with the appropriate degree of plausible deniability. This is what an orbit does when it begins to anticipate that it will have to answer.
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I have written, in these pages, about the older categories the present moment is recovering. One of those categories is the one we are watching this morning. Regimes do not, as a rule, collapse from the outside. Regimes fracture from the inside, slowly, in private rooms, through the gradual recognition by the men and women around the central figure that the central figure cannot, finally, be defended, and that the only remaining question is who will be on the record as having tried.
The orbit is fracturing. It is fracturing in a book deal, in a Magazine excerpt, in the choreography of leaks and counter-leaks by which the most senior officials of an administration begin to prepare their separate exits. It is not yet fracturing in the open. It is not yet fracturing in any way that a citizen of this republic could vote on, or sue over, or compel testimony about. It is fracturing where it can be fractured first: in the curated record being built for the day when the central figure is no longer the central figure, and the orbit will have to explain itself.
We should not mistake this for justice. We should not mistake this for opposition. We should not mistake this for the system working. What we are watching is the orbit of an evil man preparing the documentary record by which the men and women in his orbit will, later, claim not to have been part of it. The record they are building is for their benefit, not ours. The accounting they are arranging is to themselves, in advance, in their own preferred terms, through their own preferred journalists.
We are, all of us, allowed to refuse the terms. We are allowed to read the Magazine piece and notice the speakerphone. We are allowed to notice who is leaking and who is leaked about. We are allowed to remember, when the time comes and the Vice President is being praised in some respectable venue for his retrospective conscience, that he sat at the head of the table on the evening of July 17, 2025, while the Attorney General of the United States listened in by phone, and that he did not, in any meaningful sense, do anything to stop what he was, by his own account, anxiously aware was happening.
Notice the speakerphone. Notice who is leaking. Notice the orbit.
Facts reveal, and the sources of those facts are key....This is elegantly and brilliantly written, Mike. Your prose will echo on, as well!
“The accounting that has begun is not justice. It is the dress rehearsal for the explanations that the men in the room will, later, offer for what they were doing there.” Susie Wiles is a woman, correct?