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Jeanine Pirro ⬇
Why oh why did she give up her cushy Fox News chair? After dropping Reflecting Pool felony vandalism charges against an Olympic canoeist, the U.S. attorney for D.C. tried to blame Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for hiring an incompetent contractor and not telling her prosecutors on the case.
But President Donald Trump blamed Pirro, saying she "folded like an umbrella." Turns out you can’t throw someone under the bus if your boss is the one driving.
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Todd Blanche ⬆
Technically, of course, the acting attorney general is Pirro’s boss, and he ran the department through the entire Reflecting Pool meltdown.
The same week he was asked if Trump should fire her—all he'd offer was "he's allowed to do that"—the Judiciary Committee advanced his confirmation. It’s good to be the boss who never has to be one.
Markwayne Mullin ⬇
The homeland security secretary floated expanding farm-labor visas, then tried to cover himself on X: "NO amnesty for illegal aliens. Ever." Too late. Steve Bannon called him "the wrong guy at the wrong time for the wrong job." Laura Loomer demanded his head.
His shop has deported and arrested more people than Kristi Noem's ever did, but in MAGA math, one sentence about dairy farms beats a million arrests.
Laura Loomer ⬆
Speaking of the MAGA gadfly, she holds no title, no clearance, no office, just a track record of turning grievances into staff dismissals. Now she's running point on Mullin, "so fed up" and saying so loudly.
The appointments clause is in the Constitution; the org chart is in Loomer's replies.
Kash Patel ⬆
The FBI director spent July as "Keystone Kash," dodging questions about using an FBI jet to take his girlfriend to a concert and accepting access to a luxury suite. The White House then had him oversee a leak probe into New York Times reporters from the West Wing—subpoenas a judge later killed over DOJ "errors" that kept "piling up."
The case never survived a courtroom, but by the time it collapsed, nobody was asking about the jet.
Lee Zeldin ⬇
A year and a half into running the EPA, Zeldin is so forgettable that pollsters mostly skip him—the same invisibility that kept him out of the ousters that took down former officials Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi. It's also why Trump picked Blanche, not Zeldin, to replace Bondi as AG.
In an administration that runs on combat, Zeldin has found the ceiling on playing it safe: nobody gets promoted for quietly surviving.
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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