Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, recently started making videos from his office on Capitol Hill. Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member in his second term, often films himself in front of a reproduction of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” the painting by Emanuel Leutze. “What you have here is a moment in time that comes along once in a century,” he says in a clip called “The Case for Trump 2028,” in which he proposes that the President run for a third term. In another video, he walks through his office, with a chyron introducing him as “Judge Impeacher/Congressman.” Ogles recently filed articles of impeachment against several judges who have blocked executive orders issued by Trump. “Political hacks and their decisions belong in my SHREDDER,” he writes in a post promoting the video. Toward the end, he feeds a judicial ruling into an actual paper shredder. “Sicko Mode,” by Travis Scott, plays in the background.

Ogles began the year under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics and the F.B.I. They were looking into allegations that he had violated federal campaign-finance laws by falsely reporting a three-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar loan to himself, something Ogles maintained was an “honest mistake.” (He had also allegedly raised nearly twenty-five thousand dollars on GoFundMe for a “burial garden” for stillborn babies—a project that donors say never materialized.) Before Inauguration Day, when Trump first displayed an interest in Greenland, Ogles proposed the Make Greenland Great Again Act, a bill authorizing the President to try to acquire it from Denmark. (The U.S. is a “dominant predator,” Ogles said.) Ten days later, just after Trump was sworn in, Ogles announced his bid to allow the President to serve a third term, by changing the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution. “If the man who created the disastrous ‘New Deal’ gets more than two terms, then the man who created ‘The Art of the Deal’ should get the same,” he said. The following week, in a Fox Business appearance, he echoed an assertion by Trump that D.E.I. might have caused a fatal plane crash over the Potomac River. Federal prosecutors withdrew their investigation into Ogles the next day.

Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington. “Shame is for sissies,” the late lobbyist Edward von Kloberg used to say. (He referred to his clients, among them Saddam Hussein, as “the damned.”) In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been more plain: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself. “You are the leader of the world,” Archbishop Elpidophoros, of the Greek Orthodox Church, said, at a recent celebration in the White House’s East Room. “You remind me of the great Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” The crowd cheered. Elpidophoros presented Trump with a gold cross—the symbol, he remarked, that led Constantine to victory. “Wow,” Trump replied, as he cradled the cross. “I didn’t know that was going to happen, but I’ll take it.”

The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State). Jeff Bezos, whose business empire can easily be affected by the favor or disdain of the White House, announced that the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, would no longer welcome opinion columns outside certain boundaries. He redoubled his bow by licensing Trump’s reality-TV show, “The Apprentice,” in order to make reruns of it available to stream on Amazon. (Amazon also paid forty million dollars for the rights to two forthcoming documentary projects on Trump’s wife, Melania.) Senator Ted Cruz, who had once called Trump a “snivelling coward,” “utterly immoral,” “nuts,” and “a pathological liar,” now rushes to compliment the President, along with his main campaign funder and close adviser, Elon Musk; Cruz recently tweeted a photograph of himself with a red Tesla parked on the grounds of the White House. “This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he wrote.

The list goes on. When Trump complained about an unflattering portrait that hung in the Colorado state capitol—“Truly the worst,” he said—the state’s Republican-led legislature swiftly removed it. In Minnesota, Republicans in the state senate introduced a bill to codify “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—defined as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump”—as a mental illness. Law firms are offering pro-bono services to Trump so that he will reverse executive orders that target them; in a memo, the U.S. Attorney in D.C. referred to his staff as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, wears a gold lapel pin in the shape of Trump’s head.

At the beginning of April, Trump instituted a tariff regime that sent markets plunging across the world. As losses in the S. & P. 500 neared six trillion dollars, he gloated about the many nations that wanted to negotiate with him. “These countries are calling us up and kissing my ass,” he told the National Republican Congressional Committee. “ ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything, sir.’ ” He was also eager to remind any members of Congress who were opposed to his “big beautiful bill,” which called for tax breaks, spending cuts, and stepped-up immigration enforcement, to “stop grandstanding” and just vote for it. “Close your eyes and get there,” he said.

These days, they almost always do. “There’s never been anybody who has controlled that much of the base of any party,” Steve Cohen, a longtime Democratic congressman from Memphis, told me. “I don’t even think Franklin Roosevelt had that much power.” A person close to the Administration said, “Trump’s dealmaking often comes through a public assault.” Ralph Norman, a Freedom Caucus member from South Carolina, told me, “This is a blood sport now, more so than I’ve ever seen it.” Or, as a person close to Trump put it, “Republicans have an authority problem. Donald Trump is teaching them how to respect order.”

“NO DISSENT,” Trump recently posted on Truth Social. He was addressing House Republicans ahead of a vote on a stopgap funding bill. A lack of dissent is not what the Founders envisioned for the deliberative branch. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson assumed that Congress would be the strongest arm of the federal government. Madison wrote, in Federalist No. 48, that “the legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” In 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate Majority Leader, initially balked at an offer to be John F. Kennedy’s running mate, because he felt it would be a downgrade from the role he already had.

And yet it now seems that Congress—with both houses controlled by Republicans—exists to do little else but flatter the man who lives at the other end of the Mall, and ratify his edicts. A week after Trump was inaugurated, Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, proposed legislation that would direct the Secretary of the Interior “to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.” “Let’s get carving,” she tweeted. The freshman congressman Brandon Gill’s third piece of legislation, the Golden Age Act of 2025, would require all hundred-dollar bills to feature an image of Trump. (This violates an 1866 law that forbids the Treasury to put the likeness of a living person on currency.) Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday, June 14th, a federal holiday. “Just as George Washington’s birthday is codified as a federal holiday, President Trump’s birthday should also be celebrated to recognize him as the founder of America’s Golden Age,” she posted. Addison McDowell, of North Carolina, wants a new name for Washington’s Dulles Airport: Trump International. Last month, Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, announced that he was nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. “No one deserves it more,” Issa said.

In late March, I sat in on a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her bill would require Trump’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico to be implemented across the government’s vast bureaucracy. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democratic member, leaned into the microphone. “There is crazy, destructive, incompetent, corrupt things happening in the executive branch of our government right now, and the independent branch of government, the Article One branch that our Founders created in order to serve as a check on Presidential abuses of power, as a check on corruption and incompetence, is totally missing in action,” he said.

As a staffer positioned a map of the “Gulf of America” behind Greene, I noticed a man slip quietly into the hearing room—this was Brian Glenn, Greene’s boyfriend and a pro-Trump TV anchor. Glenn got his start at Right Side Broadcasting Network, which emerged in 2015 by marketing itself as a channel that truthfully showed the size of Trump’s campaign crowds. (He is now the White House correspondent for Real America’s Voice, another right-wing media outlet.) Greene smiled at him, then introduced a slate of expert witnesses she had brought in to speak about how renaming the Gulf of Mexico would bolster national security.

Huffman’s mood seemed to darken further. “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump.” This, he said, would amount to skating “where the puck is going.”) Discussion in the committee room turned to a bill authorizing the purchase of tracking devices for fish living in the Great Lakes, and another to remove the gray wolf from the federal endangered-species list. Groups of touring schoolchildren occasionally filtered in and out.

Later, I caught up with Glenn at the White House. He was standing around waiting to go on air from “Pebble Beach,” the long driveway leading up to the West Wing, where the various networks have little green cabanas from which anchors and officials broadcast. Glenn is tan and has a puffy face. (He addressed his puffiness on a recently televised segment about the drinking habits of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “It’s called allergies,” Glenn said. “And it’s called testosterone. That’s why my face gets puffy. I’m not an alcoholic.”) He sees himself as a sort of self-declared liaison between the President and Congress, helping the latter to more efficiently follow the former’s instructions. “Part of my job is to put pressure on Congress,” he told me. “We have to sell the President’s message to them. I want a carrier pigeon to fly straight from Trump’s desk to Speaker Johnson. Like a bank slot where you just put it in here and it comes out there.”