Nearly every day, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles meets with Meghan Bauer, a presidential assistant who coordinates with Cabinet members, to review who’s recently traveled where, who’s heading out into the country, and—perhaps most important—who’s in a swing district at that very moment. The debrief is part of the administration’s unofficial Cabinet Travel Competition, overseen by Bauer, in which the White House encourages Cabinet secretaries to traverse the country to promote President Trump’s agenda and tracks their visits to politically competitive congressional districts or states ahead of the midterm elections. We first found out about the competition when chatting with a Cabinet secretary about an event that person had declined to attend in Manhattan, in part for fear of being docked points in the White House contest for going to a solidly blue area. (Several White House officials said that no one ever loses points, and two added that a trip to New York for a cable-news hit praising the administration’s policies, for instance, would still count toward the contest.) When we talked …

The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president in the Oval Office for the signing of an executive order on psychedelic therapies. “It was literally that quick.” But it wasn’t that simple. After hearing from Rogan, the president told his team at the Department of Health and Human Services to change the policy, and the team sent a draft executive order to the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s when things got messy. In the days that followed, Rogan’s allies engaged in battle with a mid-level White House health adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton. As a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on health policy, Overton ran a process …