Three weeks after saying there was "zero chance" he would remove his chief of staff, Trump gave the job to the aide who pledged "total devotion."

…(cont) Susie Wiles is out. She was the first woman to hold the job, and the history books keep that whatever else they keep. Stephen Miller is in. He has been with the President, in The Hill's words, "since he launched his first campaign," which in this town is the credential that has ever meant anything, and he opened by telling the Guardian he brings "total devotion" to the President. Sit with the phrase total devotion a moment. I have been in rooms where a man said less and got a subpoena.

Now, you are going to raise October, so let us get October over with. On the 15th the President called reports of trouble "TOTAL FAKE." On the 16th he put the odds of her leaving at "zero chance" and said she was "going to be here for a long time." Zero chance, in this setting, is a term of art. It expresses confidence in the moment. It does not carry a date. It does not — it carried a date. The date was October 16. Three weeks. You people like to count.

People on our own side have put the word megalomaniac in print about the incoming chief of staff, and somebody reached for terrifying. Neither word is in the job description, and neither one triggers a Senate vote, because the job doesn't take one. No hearing, no confirmation, no roll call. The chambers the voters just flipped have exactly the say in who runs this building that they had on Thursday.

On the war, the record is clean. The Pentagon has fully accounted for the Iran war. I have the accounting right here. In July the Congressional Budget Office priced it at nearly forty billion dollars and called its own number conservative. On August 13 the Pentagon gave Congress just over forty-two billion. In September every Senate Democrat but one signed a letter to the Secretary of Defense asking for a cost breakdown. And last week the Pentagon's figure stood at forty-seven point one billion dollars — five billion more in under three months, with no line items. So the request was answered. A request for an itemization does not itself oblige an itemiz— no. Let me take that again. They asked what the war cost. We sent a bigger number and no list.

The promise that the war ends soon turned forty days old on Saturday, with no details added to it. Seventy-one percent in a Fox News poll think this administration lacks a plan to end it. We don't govern by poll. It was Fox.

And the pump is a global market, which is exactly why I am not going to stand up here and connect — gas slid toward four dollars a gallon on Friday and came back up the same day Iran claimed new attacks on ships. In August, for the first time, AAA logged gas above four dollars every day of the month, averaging four-oh-eight, ninety cents over the year before. Social Security goes up about seventy-five dollars a month in January. That is the figure I would lead with, if the arithmetic ran the other way.

So: the voters instructed, the President promoted, the war costs five billion more than it did in August, and the devotion is total. I stand behind all of it. I would like the record to show which parts I said.