During the past week of impeachment drama, Attorney General William Barr traveled abroad again to advance an investigation meant to discredit the U.S. intelligence consensus that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump, the State Department restarted an investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged State Department employees to defy House impeachment subpoenas. The impeachment inquiry itself is based on Trump asking Ukraine's president to investigate a top 2020 political rival while withholding much-needed military aid. Vice President Mike Pence relayed a subtler version of that message early last month.

Trump, his allies, and top officials say these activities are "proper and above board," The Washington Post reports. "But taken together, they illustrate the sweeping reach of Trump's power and the culture he has spawned inside the government. The president's personal concerns have become priorities of departments that traditionally have operated with some degree of political independence from the White House — and their leaders are engaging their boss's obsessions."

Trump has achieved this by pushing out institutionalists and replacing them with yes-men "who prove their loyalty by following his orders" and "enthusiastically wade into Trump's riptide of grievances and personal pursuits," the Post reports. "I'm not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten, and persuade — or even advise in many cases," a former senior White House official tells the Post. "There's a new ethos: This is a presidency of one."

That's not normal for the U.S., historians say. Barr and Pompeo "seem captives of the president's perverse worldview," Timothy Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, tells the Post. "Authoritarian regimes have this problem all the time ... when all government activity is the product of the id of the leader. But in a republic, that's unusual." Read more, including a sobering assessment of Barr, at The Washington Post. Peter Weber