The press has remained a near-daily punching bag for the President and his team, which is not in itself unusual. What is not typical is the extent to which the administration seem to be questioning not just the tone and substance of press coverage, but the traditional role of the press in American society, a view colorfully and troublingly illustrated by White House strategist Steve Bannon's statement to The New York Times that the press should just "keep its mouth shut."

The latest harbinger came Friday evening, when the White House emailed a note to its press corps "for planning purposes only," that issued guidance to "hard pass holders," reporters who are permanently assigned to cover the President. The note alerted press that “All hard hard-pass holders, current and prospective, are currently being reviewed. You will be notified in the coming weeks on the status of your hard pass." Absent further explanation, and in the context of their ongoing besiegement, reporters were understandably left wondering whether this was a routine administrative step or if the White House intended to chill negative coverage while press credentials are under review.

Now Trump seems to be adding new institutions to his expanding hit list. The third institution Trump is increasingly treating as an enemy is the federal bureaucracy, the workforce that serves administrations of both political parties. Already Trump has all but removed career professionals from decision-making and asking others to simply resign.

The administration also dismissed a slew of senior State Department officials from jobs generally considered beyond the reach of politics, including functions central to the mission, such as passport production, visa issuance and helping evacuate Americans during oversees crises. After firing Acting Attorney General Sally Yates when she disputed the legality of the immigration executive order, Trump even sent a tweet that seemed (perhaps unintentionally) to question the strategy being employed by his own Justice Department attorneys, asking “Why aren’t the lawyers looking into the Federal Court decision in Boston…”

Meanwhile, as other administrations have done more sporadically, they have reportedly assigned to the front office of many executive branch departments political appointees with limited expertise or experience in government, and close relationships not to the relevant agency head but to the White House (career professionals quietly refer to them as “minders” or “commissars”).

They also seem to have replaced what has been, for decades, a regimented and inclusive national security decision-making process (which, while cumbersome, is designed to lead to informed outcomes and smooth policy rollouts), with a flurry of fiats, drafted by a few of the President's close confidantes and issued publicly before most relevant experts have seen them.