The “new phase” of Israel’s war on Hamas, explained.
Israel has begun a prolonged ground operation in northern Gaza, accompanied by aerial bombardments throughout the territory and a communications blackout that lasted almost two days.
Since Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, conducted a brutal terror attack on Israel three weeks ago that killed more than 1,400 people, Israel has been expected to launch a ground invasion meant to eliminate the group. That ground incursion is now underway — though for now it looks less like a full-on invasion and more like a phased assault.
While it may take some time for the assault’s full scope to become clear, this conflict has already dramatically exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza, who for years have been subjected by Israel to living conditions likened to an “open-air prison,” and to political repression from Hamas, are weathering Israel’s devastating bombardment campaign. That bombardment, human rights groups say, has likely included war crimes.
Israel has thus far declined to call the new operation an invasion (though, to be sure, it has both political and tactical reasons to obfuscate). Instead, leaders have described this as a “new phase.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address Saturday that the war had entered a “second phase,” and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would “destroy the enemy above ground and below ground,” referring to Hamas. He warned the country to prepare for a “long and difficult” war.
The IDF described the operation on X (formerly Twitter), saying that combat forces including infantry had been involved in a ground operation in northern Gaza since Friday night local time. “This is a war with multiple stages,” IDF Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said in a video address posted to X. “Today we move to the next one.”
Hamas confirmed that members of its armed wing were fighting IDF forces in the northern city of Beit Hanoun and in Al-Bureij in central Gaza, according to Reuters, and intended to fight the Israeli forces. “Al-Qassam Brigades and all Palestinian resistance forces are fully prepared to confront the aggression with full force and thwart the incursions,” Hamas’s armed wing said.
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Dawood Nemer/AFP via Getty Images
The escalation follows Israel’s highly criticized effort to evacuate civilians from northern Gaza and a weeks-long bombing campaign; then, earlier this week, a series of nighttime raids indicated that a ground assault was growing closer. The ground assault appears to be a phased assault, in which the IDF will push increasing numbers of soldiers into Gaza over time to accomplish different military objectives.
At the same time, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening; Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 7,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. And supplies like fuel and clean water are running perilously low because so few aid trucks — 94 since the beginning of the war, compared with hundreds each day prior to the current conflict — have been able to enter the territory Israel has blockaded for 16 years.
This war will have lasting impacts on the relationship between Israel and the Gaza Strip, a 140-square-mile territory of more than 2 million people that Israel has occupied in an outright or de facto capacity since claiming the territory after a 1967 war with Egypt and Syria.
Why details about the operation are so hard to come by
Israeli military and political leaders have been circumspect about the details of the new operation, and that might not change anytime soon. “Israel has [an] interest to keep it vague,” Natan Sachs, director of the Middle East program at the Brookings Institution, told Vox.
After Hamas’s attack, which included widespread targeting of civilians, the mutilation of dead bodies, and the taking of over 200 hostages, Israeli officials repeatedly vowed to “destroy” Hamas. Netanyahu said Israel would turn Gaza into a “deserted island,” for example; Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said they would wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth.” That rhetoric and goals had not just human rights groups alarmed about the devastating consequences for civilians, but even reportedly US officials who worried that Israel was not adequately planning for a long-term stable future.
On Saturday, in his first press conference since the October 7 attack, Netanyahu continued to frame the war in existential terms, calling the operation Israel’s “second war for independence.” Even as he specified the goal was to destroy Hamas’s “military and political capabilities,” he still at other times used sweeping language, saying “our objective is singular: to defeat the murderous enemy. We declared ‘never again’, and we reiterate: ‘never again, now.’” Eventually, the Israeli government’s goal is to create “a new security regime in the Gaza Strip, the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip, and the creation of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel and the residents of” the area surrounding Gaza, Gallant told a meeting of the Knesset’s foreign affairs committee on October 20.
In the short term, though, “Israeli leaders have publicly stated their goals are to destroy Hamas’s capacity to govern Gaza and attack Israel (which is not the same as destroying Hamas, of course), and to release the hostages,” Sachs said.
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Abir Sultan/AFP via Getty Images
How the military plans to accomplish those objectives is tightly under wraps, though some details are emerging and analysts are better able to deduce the military’s activities, as well as short-term goals.
So far, we know that the ground effort has grown since Friday. “We are gradually expanding the ground activity and the scope of our forces in the Gaza Strip,” IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari told reporters Sunday. Analysts told the Washington Post that forces in northern Gaza are likely moving slowly, dismantling booby traps, destroying Hamas’s tunnel network, and creating pathways for tanks and other military vehicles to get to Gaza City. They are also likely gathering intelligence about Hamas’s improved capabilities and tactics.
Mobile, landline, and internet services in Gaza were shut off starting Friday evening local time, not long before the invasion began, though service has been sporadically restored as of Sunday. But the blackout has made it extremely difficult for information not filtered through either the IDF or Hamas to get out, and the Israeli government announced Friday that it could not guarantee the safety of journalists in Gaza who are covering the conflict. Thus far in the war, 29 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The ambiguity caused by the communications blackout and the IDF’s circumspection also serves Israel internationally — in terms of both security and public perception.
“It’s not meeting … the media threshold of a ‘new Normandy invasion,’” James Jeffrey, former US special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, told Vox in an interview. That strategy “poses a problem for Iran,” he said, as Iran threatened to take hostile action against Israel in the case of a ground invasion. By not calling the operation in Gaza an invasion outright, Jeffrey said, Israel could ostensibly keep Iran guessing whether something bigger — the “real” invasion — is yet to come.
“They’re now doing it by stealth,” Jeffrey said of the Israeli invasion, “and it’s going to be hard for Iran to put a finger on things.” The communications blackout further complicates Iran’s calculus; without non-IDF images and video of the ground operation, it’s hard to tell the scale. “It’s going to be harder for Iran to say, ‘This is the moment.’”
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Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
According to a New York Times analysis based on open source information, Israeli troops entered Gaza in two areas far to the northwest of the territory, as well as in central Gaza near the village of Juhor ad Dik, just north of the evacuation boundary. IDF troops remain in Gaza as of Sunday, according to IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht.
According to Hecht, “the IDF struck over 450 terror targets over the past day, including operational command centers, observation posts, and anti-tank missile launch posts.” Hecht also said that combined forces — ground and air — identified and struck Hamas fighters that “attempted to attack the forces. They also targeted terrorist cells planning to execute anti-tank missile launches.”
Fighting is also intensifying somewhat between Israel and Hezbollah in the north. The IAF also announced Sunday that “warplanes attacked military infrastructure of the Hezbollah terrorist organization in response to launches carried out from Lebanese territory earlier today.” UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, announced via Telegram that shells have hit its facilities in southern Lebanon twice in recent days, and urged an immediate ceasefire.
No matter what, the humanitarian consequences will be massive
Israel sees this war, and eliminating Hamas’s military capabilities, as an existential requirement — and trying to do that before Iran and Hezbollah open up a second front in the north or international calls for a ceasefire become difficult to ignore will be a challenge.
What Israel has to balance is “as much military success as necessary to restore deterrence, to restore Israeli security — and within that necessity, as much hostage return and managing civilian casualties, and keeping … the Arab countries under control, and avoiding escalation as possible,” Jeffrey said.
But there are also experts who argue that framing it as an existential fight is counterproductive.
“What led to October 7 had more to do with failures of Israeli intelligence and defenses than it did with Hamas,” Richard Haass, the former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Financial Times. “These failures can and should be learned from and rectified. Hamas will not change its ways, but what can and must change is Israel’s ability to curtail the ability of Hamas to inflict meaningful harm.”
Moreover, Netanyahu’s existential framing — and statements from Israeli politicians and officials both before and after the October 7 attack — raises fears among Palestinians that this war will lead to their permanent displacement. As Vox’s Sigal Samuel explained, the three factors together are leading to discussions of a “second Nakba.” (The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from “their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war that led to the country’s creation.”)
Though Netanyahu and the Israeli government have declined to call this operation a ground invasion, it will still have dire consequences for Palestinians in Gaza. The lack of fuel in Gaza — which Israel has cut off during the siege because Hamas could use it for military purposes — means that hospital generators will soon be unable to power facilities where people are sheltering and the injured and sick desperately need care. People are already drinking untreated water with a high salinity, which could spread diseases like cholera, because there’s not enough fuel for the territory’s six water filtration facilities. Some facilities have been able to operate in a limited capacity, and Israel has restored access to some of the clean water it pipes in to the region and said it will allow the flow of aid trucks into the territory to “increase significantly”— but it may not be enough to meet people’s basic needs.
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Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Hamas likely has hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel, as well as stocks of weapons, food, medicine, and water hidden in its network of tunnels. It is probably using these supplies sparingly, in the hopes that its armed wing can sustain three or four months of fighting, a senior Lebanese official told the New York Times, and would not consider giving them to civilians facing humanitarian catastrophe, or to the aid organizations desperately trying to save people’s lives in shelters and hospitals.
“The Hamas movement cares only about the Hamas movement,” Samir Ghattas, an Egyptian strategic analyst focusing on Gaza, told the Times. “The public of Gaza mean absolutely nothing for Hamas.”
The humanitarian situation in Gaza could potentially affect Israel’s ability to fight this war, Jeffrey said, because public opinion about the humanitarian toll on Gaza, as well as the safety of the more than 200 hostages Hamas is holding there, “is very important for Washington.”
Israel must, he said, “really care, as a strategic military issue, [about] civilian casualties and humanitarian issues because that will determine how long you have American support. They only have so much time, even if it’s an existential battle.”
Already, the images and stories trickling out of Gaza over the weekend are devastating. Emergency services said the communications blackout had prevented ambulances from effectively reaching the injured; Palestinians resorted to digging through demolished buildings with their bare hands to search for those trapped under the rubble; and people around the world mourned loved ones they found out had been killed only after communications were restored.
US President Joe Biden called Netanyahu Sunday, reiterating the US’s firm support of Israel’s “right and responsibility” to pursue this war against Hamas, according to a White House summary of the call. Biden also “underscored the need to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law that prioritizes the protection of civilians.”
While the Israeli military is carrying out this attack, much of the world views Israel’s assault on Gaza as enabled by the United States.
Even before Israel began its heavier ground incursion into Gaza on October 27, accompanied by accelerated bombings of the occupied territory, the situation on the ground was already severe.
According to the Gaza-based Ministry of Health, as of Saturday midday, there are 7,703 fatalities, 1.4 million internally displaced people, and more than 19,700 injuries. At least 29 journalists have died, along with at least 53 United Nations employees. The “complete siege” Israel declared on the already blockaded territory after Hamas’s October 7 attacks has resulted in three weeks rationing of food, water, medicine, and fuel for a population of 2.2 million people. As a Mercy Corps staffer in Gaza said earlier this week, “know that we are dying here; if we are not dead physically, we are dead on the inside.”
The toll from what Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the war’s “new phase” is only starting to become clear. Israel appeared to have shut off communications in Gaza. International aid groups and press organizations lost contact with their staff, creating a vacuum.
Beyond the numbers of the dead and wounded, the extent of the bombardment and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is best expressed so far by a handful of firsthand accounts that were able to reach outside the territory. “The amount of explosions is massive. Endless explosions. We’re talking about an explosion every single minute. The sky is orange,” journalist Hind Khoury said in a voice note from Gaza City shared with Vox via the nonprofit Institute for Middle East Understanding.
Israel suffered tremendous atrocities at the hands of Hamas, with more than 1,400 people killed, while the militant group holds 229 hostages in Gaza. Rocket fire from the territory continues to target Israel. But the degree of Israel’s shelling of Gaza and the first indications of what may become a lengthy, intensive ground operation poses critical risks for the Middle East and the world. And among those dangers is a political one for the White House: It’s becoming clear that while the Israeli military is carrying out this attack, much of the world views Israel’s assault on Gaza as enabled by the United States — as President Joe Biden’s war.
Biden has reportedly counseled Israel behind the scenes to delay a ground assault, and in recent days the administration has been more forward in its warnings that an open-ended full-scale invasion would be disastrous. America doesn’t have boots on the ground in Israel, and it’s not clear under what, if any, conditions the US would get involved. Marine Gen. James Glynn had been advising Israel’s operations and departed the country on the 27th. “Make no mistake: what is, has or will unfold in Gaza is purely an Israeli decision,” he told reporters.
But that is clearly not how the Middle East, and much of the world, sees it. The focus instead is on the decades of US backing for Israel, across administrations. It’s on the US-provided weapons that Israel is using, much of it purchased with the $3.8 billion of annual aid Washington provides, on the symbolism of two US aircraft carriers being dispatched to the Middle East, on how the US has used its veto to shield Israel from United Nations resolutions. Most striking is the image of the giant bear hug, both actual and metaphorical, that President Biden gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Israel on October 18.
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GPO/Anadolu via Getty Images
The perception of Biden’s ownership of this war will only grow as Israel expands and extends its siege of Gaza. That’s bad for Biden’s electability with so many young American voters increasingly critical of his unfettered backing of Israel. It’s bad for US influence when it comes to other hot and cold wars where the US seeks the support of traditional allies, including Ukraine. And it’s especially bad for Arab and Muslim states, as well as countries across the Global South, where massive protests against Israel’s military campaign have also singled out the president.
“From the US point of view, I think the real dilemma is, the Biden administration is effectively backing a partner state, an ally, who is facing this no-win situation,” Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center think tank said recently. “Whatever the Israeli government ends up doing, the US government is going to be tied to that.”
Why the world sees this as Biden’s war
The perception of US support for Israel has been built over a half-century of substantial American military and diplomatic backing.
The United States has given Israel about $243.9 billion over time, adjusted for inflation. The advanced weaponry that the US has given Israel and the fact that it’s the single biggest beneficiary of US foreign aid contributes to the idea of the two countries being in lockstep.
The US arms industry that enables the ongoing siege of Gaza is particularly close to Israel. On quarterly earnings calls this week, executives from the military contracting giants RTX, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman acknowledged the heinous attacks on Israel and obliquely mentioned how geopolitical developments would contribute to bigger Pentagon budgets and product orders, but made no mention of the situation in Gaza other than anodyne calls for peace or vague concerns about the humanitarian situation. Wes Kremer, the president of RTX subsidiary Raytheon, announced this week the construction of a new facility in Arkansas to build missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system.
It’s also the years of largely unquestioned US support for Israel, across administrations from both parties, while the country has engaged in policies in the occupied West Bank that human rights organizations describe as apartheid and has squeezed Gaza with severe limits on aid. The US-led process toward a Palestinian state has been in formaldehyde since 2014.
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Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A prime example of how the US has supported Israel has played out at the UN Security Council. Numerous presidential administrations have used their veto over the years to protect Israel from resolutions that condemn its policies. Most recently, on October 18, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed a Brazil-led resolution that called for a humanitarian pause.
On Friday, as Israel held Gaza in the dark, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution that called for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.” There were 120 countries voting in favor of the measure led by Arab states, while the US was among the 14 votes against. (Others included Hungary, Austria, Czechia, and several Pacific Island countries.) The Biden administration said it was because the resolution did not condemn Hamas’s initial attack or mention the ongoing hostage situation.
Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi of Jordan, one of the US’s closest Middle East partners, put it bluntly: that voting against the resolution “means approving this senseless war.”
Massive protests against Israel’s actions — 3,000 people marching to the US Embassy in Jakarta, tens of thousands in London on Saturday, and widespread protests in the Arab world and in the occupied West Bank — don’t typically separate Israel from the US role. Arab leaders may say they support Israel’s destruction of Hamas behind closed doors but are less likely to make such declarations aloud, because public attitudes count in undemocratic countries, too.
The US is seen above and beyond as Israel’s most crucial backer. Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj drew Netanyahu as a fighter jet dropping bombs on mosques, hospitals, and civilians in Gaza, with Biden in aviators spreading his arms as if he were the plane’s wings.
Could the US policy approach change from within or without?
While Biden’s core team of advisers appear in alignment, signs of dissent within the Biden administration grow each day Israel’s intensive bombardment of Gaza continues. Josh Paul, a senior State Department official in the bureau that signs off on arms sales, resigned in protest on October 18. He acknowledged Biden’s efforts to deescalate Israel’s response and expressed frustration with “rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.”
Other senior State Department employees reportedly plan to convey their concerns through the dissent channel. The White House has hosted listening sessions, and senior administration leaders have started to adjust their rhetoric. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is tweeting about Palestinian rights. “As hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace,” President Biden posted. “We cannot give up on a two-state solution.”
But how the administration is actually handling the situation in Gaza — not calling for a ceasefire and largely unable to ensure that even the basic minimum of humanitarian aid enters the territory — offers a more accurate display of its policy. The US may have pushed for a narrower ground assault, but it’s not opposed to one in general. Biden, for example, has said Israel has a right and an obligation to respond to Hamas’s October 7 attack. And the current policy has been criticized by the UN, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, Save the Children, and other groups, which have urged a ceasefire.
Even leaders of loyal Democratic Party institutions in Washington have criticized Biden’s approach. “There’s nothing complicated about being able to say killing innocent people is wrong and needs to stop,” Patrick Gaspard, the president of the Center for American Progress, posted. “We said it when it was Hamas. We can say it now that it’s Israel. This is wrong. This needs to stop.”
In foreign policy, perception can be reality, and at some point, US support for Israel will be seen as active participation. It may not matter that the US is not directly involved, or that Biden has taken steps to try to reduce the toll, or that a President Donald Trump would likely be putting no restraints on Israel, much as current Republican candidates have called for. There’s something different now that transcends US support for Israel over decades and several Gaza wars, with longtime US negotiator Aaron David Miller having famously called Washington “Israel’s lawyer.” The scale of this invasion will almost certainly be lethal beyond the scope of previous wars, and many critics will say that the US has not done enough to stop the killing.
The billions of dollars of high-tech weaponry has been thought to have bought the US some leverage over Israel. Now the limits of that influence are apparent. “If such leverage exists, yet isn’t employed to halt civilian bombings, it signals complicity, demanding accountability from those responsible,” Nancy Okail, the executive director of the Center for International Policy, a progressive foreign policy think tank, posted.
Of course, the Biden administration does not want to be drawn into a larger war. The president has repeatedly warned the militant group Hezbollah and countries like Iran to stay out of it, and much of his focus in the moment is likely in employing US power in the region to ensure that remains the case.
Last week, the US’s military bases in Iraq and Syria, and its aircraft carrier passing by Yemen, came under rocket fire from militants. In response, Biden authorized “narrowly tailored” strikes on Iran-backed militias in Syria. Such tit-for-tats have happened with some frequency in recent years, but the context of Israel’s Gaza incursion raises the stakes considerably.
As Sarah Leah Whitson, a human rights lawyer who directs Democracy for the Arab World Now, put it, “This is now Biden’s war.”
Correction, 9:15 pm ET: An earlier version of this story misstated Ukraine’s response on the UN General Assembly resolution. The country abstained from the vote.
New House Speaker Mike Johnson faces a long to-do list and a caucus with short patience for compromise.
On Wednesday, Congress finally reopened. After more than three weeks without a speaker, the elevation of the previously obscure Mike Johnson of Louisiana to lead the House was a signal that finally the chamber could get back to governing. In the next day, members forced votes next week on two resolutions of censure and one of expulsion. In other words, things aren’t getting less weird anytime soon.
But they won’t be returning to the status quo under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, either. There will now be a new normal as Congress has to deal with pressing issues. The government will shut down at midnight on November 18, Israel and Hamas are at war after the horrific attack Hamas launched on October 7, much of Ukraine is still occupied by Russia, and lawmakers are grappling with how to address the near-record numbers of undocumented immigrants entering the country.
The House will face this new normal with a weak speaker in a scenario that one veteran Republican insider compared to “Lord of the Flies” after the defenestration spree of the past three weeks that led not only to McCarthy’s ouster but to Republicans electing and then rejecting three speaker-designates in turn.
Pat Fallon of Texas expressed the hope that Johnson — whom he praised as having “a lot of likability, a lot of authenticity, he is honest, he’s talented”— would be successful. In his view, “if Mike Johnson succeeds, America succeeds. You know, we have a functioning House and a functioning government. We have a divided government, so nobody’s gonna get everything they want. But, you know, we need some conservative wins to make sure that the taxpayers’ money is well accounted for.”
Then again, it could be argued under those circumstances that McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal in the spring was a win, as Republicans won spending caps and permitting reform in exchange for allowing the United States to pay its debts for the next 18 months. The result prompted an immediate right-wing rebellion and set the table for the California Republican’s ultimate downfall earlier in October.
The challenge for Johnson is that he is going to face one tripwire with his conference even before he’s fully moved into his new office: the matter of Ukraine aid, opposition to which has become a shibboleth for many on the MAGA right. The Biden administration has proposed a major funding bill that would combine aid to Israel and Ukraine as well as funding for border security.
Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate in the Republican conference, thought Johnson could win support for aid to the European nation from the House despite the widespread opposition from many House Republicans, including Johnson himself. “I think he’s gonna do it,” said Bacon. “But there’s gonna have to be some good take on the border. And I think the president just can’t say, ‘I want X amount of money.’ … He’s got to say why he wants it and make the case.”
However, it seemed likely that, at the very least, the House would separate the aid to each individual US ally rather than combining, as the Biden administration proposed. Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday, “Our consensus among House Republicans is that we need to bifurcate those issues.”
Johnson insisted that “we’re not going to abandon [Ukraine,] but we have a responsibility, a stewardship responsibility over the precious treasure of the American people, and we have to make sure that the White House is providing the people with some accountability for the dollars.”
Already, he seemed to be getting slightly more breathing room from Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who was the leader of the effort to oust McCarthy and has been an implacable opponent of aid to Ukraine. Gaetz left some wiggle room about whether it should receive a vote, saying, “They should definitely be separate questions. We have a lot of members who want to vote for Ukraine funding. And so that may be a vote that they are able to bring to bear through regular order.”
However, Gaetz cautioned that because a recent amendment on Ukraine aid did not receive the support of a majority of House Republicans, future legislation on aid to the Eastern European country should not receive any consideration in the House because it violated the Hastert Rule, the recent tradition among House Republicans that all legislation should have the support of “a majority of the majority.” He noted that “the last time Ukraine funding was on the floor of the House … [a] majority of the majority voted against it. That usually ends a measure’s prospects for consideration.”
Yet despite the drama around Ukraine, the fight over government funding is likely to be far less dramatic than past ones. McCarthy’s ouster was the result of his efforts to avoid a government shutdown by simply continuing current funding levels for the next six weeks at the beginning of October. Not only is Johnson enjoying a honeymoon period among his colleagues after the weeks of internecine warfare among House Republicans, he also starts off with fresh credibility among those who were most opposed to McCarthy to keep the government open for at least a few more months.
As Gaetz, the leader of the hard-right bloc that was opposed to the former speaker, put it, “Kevin McCarthy wanted to govern by continuing resolution to get us to the next continuing resolution. I think Mike Johnson has a lot more credibility [as a] … bridge to single-subject spending bills, not a bridge to just the old ways of Washington.”
But, for whatever criticism that there was of the “old ways of Washington,” at least everyone knew what they were. Everyone was working from the same playbook, and there was at least a basic set of agreed-upon norms. All of that has frayed after the last few chaotic weeks, and the challenges have only grown more complex. It’s a recipe for more weirdness to come.