David A. Graham | The Atlantic

The Parable of the President

2026-04-13T14:15:00-04:00

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Many people get the Sunday scaries, but most of them are not a sitting president facing self-inflicted global chaos and the growing possibility of a bruising midterm election in a few months. What feels like a weekly social-media crashout from the president of the United States usually starts some time on Sunday and continues into the early hours of the next morning. Given the failure of negotiations with Iran on Saturday, the likelihood of elevated gas prices for months, and the resounding defeat of Trump’s ally and role model Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump had plenty of fuel for a freakout last night.

But the most notable subject in this week’s edition was Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and war in Iran. The posts illustrate that Trump views religion much the way he views everything else: as something that can serve him but does not create any obligations on him.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, kicking off a lengthy jeremiad. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump claimed that Leo XIV was elected only because the cardinals believed he’d be good at dealing with the current administration. Trump is also upset that Leo met with David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and commentator. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” Trump said.

Forty-six minutes later, Trump posted an illustration of himself as a Jesus-like figure, reaching out to heal a man in bed while a nurse, a soldier, and others look on, and with a background of patriotic bric-a-brac (flag, eagles, fighter jets). The image has been circulating for at least a couple of months, during which time an angel near the top of the image has somehow transformed into a creepy monstrosity, presumably through the wonders of generative AI. The illustration drew claims of blasphemy and even demonic possession from some usual Trump allies on the right; the president has since deleted it, telling reporters he believed that the picture depicted him as a doctor.

Too many contradictions appear here to list them all. For example, Trump insists that Leo renounce politics yet also complains about the pope’s policy stance on crime. What he’s referring to here is a mystery. (The Catholic Church could be said to have a decarceral agenda: Jesus, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, said that he had been sent to preach freedom to prisoners, and the first pope, Peter, was imprisoned at least once and likely executed for professing Jesus. Then again, the Vatican City has, by some accounts, the highest per-capita crime rate in the world, due mainly to pickpocketing.)

Another contradiction is that Trump doesn’t actually seem to have any problem with the intermingling of religion and politics—as the Christlike image shows, and as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s aggressive rhetoric about the war demonstrates. The president’s reflexive response to criticism (or perceived criticism) from any public figure is to unleash a social-media barrage against them, without much thought about who the person is or what their role in society might be. This black-and-white view of the world owes more to Mani, another religious leader whose death was depicted as a crucifixion, than to Jesus of Nazareth.

The tirade at Leo is the latest escalation of anti-Catholic sentiment among some figures on the MAGA right. Trump has a number of devout Catholics in his administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J. D. Vance, although some, like Vance, have sometimes disagreed with the Holy See under Leo and his predecessor, Francis. The Free Press reported last week that the Pentagon had summoned a Vatican official, the first known time such a meeting had been held. It didn’t go well, with administration officials reportedly invoking the Avignon papacy, the 14th century domination of the role by the French crown. Both sides downplayed the report, but Trump’s post makes it hard to dismiss the friction between them.

Speaking with reporters as he flew to Algeria today, Leo said, “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message in the Gospel.” And though more restrained than Trump, he showed that he can dish it out as well as take it, quipping about Truth Social, “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

But although Leo separated himself from involvement in electoral politics in the way that Trump meant it, he defended his claim to speak on social issues, citing Jesus’s statement that “blessed are the peacemakers.” Matters of peace, poverty, and privilege are central to Christianity, and navigating how and how much to take on these issues is a challenge to any secular leader—indeed, any individual—who professes the religion.

Trump’s theological vision shares much with, and may have come from, Norman Vincent Peale, a popular Protestant minister of the mid-20th century. Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, attracted congregants including the Trump family with a version of Christianity that emphasized happiness and material wealth but perhaps asked less of its followers, even though Jesus repeatedly says in the Gospels that following him is not a casual endeavor.

As an adult, Trump showed few signs of religiosity or familiarity with scripture even as he courted Christians in the 2016 election. Since surviving an assassination attempt in 2024, Trump has sounded more overtly religious, and has publicly mused about his chances to get into heaven. But his rhetoric has not been matched by any clear change in behavior, quest for absolution for past sins, or increased attendance at church. Matters of peace, poverty, and privilege do not seem front of mind: After briefly portraying himself as a peacemaker in pursuit of the Nobel Prize, Trump has now embraced military adventure; he has shrugged at economic tumult; and he has brushed aside faith leaders’ concerns about his immigration enforcement. Trump well understands the iconographic and organizational power of Christianity, but he seems to reject the idea that it should create any constraints on him.

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The Trump Administration Is Trying to Erase Its Own History

2026-04-08T15:22:00-04:00

Legal opinions tend to be dry, wordy, and intentionally vague. One issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel earlier this month is none of these.

“You have asked whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (‘PRA’ or ‘Act’) is constitutional. We conclude that it is not,” Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser declares. The law, passed after Watergate, is designed to ensure a reliable and accessible public record. It makes presidential documents public by law, and governs how and when they must be preserved.

If the opinion stands, it will allow Trump to destroy the records of his administration’s actions, or take records with him at the end of his term. Combined with alleged violations of PRA in his first term, this could make Trump the most poorly documented president since at least Richard Nixon, and perhaps going back even further. (As my colleague Henry Grabar writes, the actual library part of his planned presidential library is an afterthought at best.) Yet Trump’s habit of making policy without deliberation, and often with stream-of-consciousness speeches and posts on social media, means that his administration is a paradox: simultaneously one of the most transparent and most opaque in American history.

The Office of Legal Counsel exists to issue sophisticated legal guidance to the White House, and in effect is frequently asked to provide justification for an administration’s actions; perhaps the most infamous instance was the “Torture Memos,” many produced by the OLC’s John Yoo during the George W. Bush administration to justify the use of, well, torture during the War on Terror. And guessing why the Trump administration would want to be rid of PRA isn’t difficult.

Trump and his aides have reportedly broken the law on many occasions. During his first term, he was reported to routinely tear up documents, despite staffers imploring him not to. (Some aides were tasked with painstakingly taping them back together to comply with the law.) In other cases, he flushed papers down toilets. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reportedly fed documents into fireplaces at the end of the presidency. Trump’s staffers then took boxes and boxes of surviving documents, many of them highly sensitive, when they left the White House. He refused to return them upon request from the federal government, then allegedly attempted to obstruct their recovery. According to photographs included in a federal indictment, Trump haphazardly stored documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and a ballroom stage. Trump pleaded not guilty, and his election led to the case being dismissed, which meant he was never tried on charges of obstructing the investigation, but now he would like to erase the accusation entirely by eliminating PRA.

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated the documents case, also believed that Trump wanted to use documents his team took from the White House to further his business interests, according to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who obtained Smith’s memo—in other words, stealing public records to make a private fortune. (Absurdly, Trump’s Justice Department returned to Trump the documents that had been collected from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.)

The Trump presidency is in some ways unusually transparent. The president takes questions from reporters regularly—sometimes in a gaggle, sometimes in cold calls on his phone. The president is temperamentally unable to keep his own counsel, to the point that French President Emmanuel Macron scolded him last week: “Perhaps you shouldn’t talk every day.” There’s simply less policy process to be recorded in preserved documents, because Trump has drastically shrunk bodies like the National Security Council and replaced them with his id and instincts, chronicled in real time on Truth Social.

Yet if Trump is allowed to destroy or remove documents, the American Historical Association argues in a new lawsuit challenging the OLC opinion, historians “would be left with an incomplete historical record by which to professionally research, produce scholarship on, and teach U.S. history.” They add, “Once lost, this information is irretrievable and thus the harm irreparable.” The suit notes that federal courts rejected similar arguments about the law’s constitutionality immediately after its enactment, when Nixon sued to block it.

The history of Nixon’s presidential record also shows the value of the law, even long after a president leaves office. Nixon loyalists controlled the former president’s library for years, and presented a whitewashed version of Watergate to the public. But the law required that the warts-and-all records be preserved, and when control of the library was finally wrested away and handed to Tim Naftali, a professional historian, in 2006, the library began presenting a more accurate account and providing access to historians, who have in turn presented more complete chronicles of Nixon’s career.

Trump is the most corrupt and scandal-plagued president since Nixon; indeed, his fiascoes eclipse Nixon’s, but many of them remain mostly or somewhat hidden, thanks in part to a much more acquiescent Republican Congress than the one Nixon had. In Watergate, the crimes were known; the question was, in the words of Senator Howard Baker Jr., “What did the president know and when did he know it?” With the Trump administration, the situation is perhaps the reverse: We know much about the president’s stated motivations and beliefs, but we do not have a full accounting of what he and his aides have done. Keeping a record would allow the nation to fully understand his actions and their consequences—if not now, then at least later.

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Today’s News

President Trump agreed to a two-week cease-fire with Iran last night, pausing planned U.S. strikes. Iran released a 10-point cease-fire proposal that includes demands for U.S.-troop withdrawal, sanctions relief, and the right to nuclear enrichment, many of which conflict with Washington’s position.
Iran said it would restrict ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz during the cease-fire, requiring vessels to coordinate with its military and pay tolls, signaling that Tehran plans to maintain control over the key oil route.
Republicans won a Georgia special election, but the district shifted sharply toward Democrats, and liberal candidates secured another decisive victory in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race last night.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic

The Literary Job AI Can’t Replace

By Rebecca Ackermann

Nothing seems to make literary-minded people angrier than an author taking credit for writing they didn’t do. A few weeks ago, Hachette canceled the U.S. release of a novel, Shy Girl, following a barrage of online accusations that it had been written with the unacknowledged help of AI …

The collective outrage overlooks a fact that the publishing industry acknowledged long before the rise of artificial intelligence: Not everyone with a great idea or unique story has the skill, experience, or time to write a book—or even a book review. Right now, AI tools are cheap and widespread, ready to tap in with a service that some people do need. But these models have been trained on uncompensated creative labor. They plagiarize. They lie, and they lie about lying. So instead, I’d like to make the case for a frequently maligned profession—one I’ve participated in—that rewards good writing, helps authors survive in an ever more challenging field, and allows remarkable perspectives to reach an audience they otherwise wouldn’t. That’s right: Ghostwriting is good, actually—when it’s done by humans.

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Last month, I wrote about the many instances of waste, fraud, and abuse popping up across the Trump administration. One prime example was a $70 million jet that the Department of Homeland Security had leased and wanted to buy—supposedly for immigrant deportations, even though it included a luxe bedroom cabin. The purchase was too ostentatious even for Trump, and it reportedly played a role in Secretary Kristi Noem’s ouster. But that doesn’t mean the administration is letting the plane go. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the government will hold on to the jet, making it available to First Lady Melania Trump, among others. Noem, it seems, was more a symptom than a cause of the administration living the high life on taxpayer dollars.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump Threatens to Destroy an Entire Nation

2026-04-07T11:44:00-04:00

This morning, as his 8 p.m. eastern deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and make other concessions looms, President Trump threatened to wipe the country out entirely.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump declared on Truth Social. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” The president did express hope that “different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail,” which would prevent such an attack. Bizarrely, he ended with a benediction for the same people he had just threatened to slaughter: “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Though Trump rarely speaks clearly, this threat would appear to meet the definition of genocide under the 1948 United Nations convention: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The president has spent the past few days warning that he would attack civilian infrastructure, which most experts agree would constitute a war crime, but an apparently explicit threat of civilizational erasure is unheard of outside of cartoon villains; even most real-world génocidaires have denied that’s what they’re doing.

But Trump’s message this morning is also notable for the autocratic view that underpins it. His position is that if he wants to wipe out “a whole civilization,” then that is his decision to make—unconstrained by American law, international law, Congress, or public opinion. “Only President Trump knows what he will do, and the entire world will find out tomorrow night if bridges and electric plants are annihilated,” the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Wall Street Journal.

This view is legally, morally, and practically disastrous. Such action by the president is not what the Framers of the Constitution laid out. They granted the power to declare war to Congress alone, as my colleague Quinta Jurecic has written: “That design choice represented a radical break from the monarchies of Europe, where kings and queens had the ability to decide when to mobilize their countries to war.” That separation of powers has gradually eroded over decades, but Trump’s war in Iran goes a step beyond what previous presidents have done. The unilateral decision to erase a civilization would go a huge step past that.

Members of the military are required to refuse an illegal order, including a violation of international law, but any individual soldier, sailor, or airman is poorly equipped to assess the law—and most do not realistically feel empowered to refuse an order. When several Democratic members of Congress made a video reminding service members that they can and must refuse unlawful orders, the Trump administration sought to punish them through legal and military justice processes.

Although the Founders could scarcely have imagined the military might the United States would one day possess, the division of powers was intended in part as a check on the ethical compass of a single individual. Trump has previously said he is bound only by his own “morality,” which is not reassuring, given his track record of fraud, dishonesty, racism, and misogyny.

But granting such power to a single individual is also impractical, because it prevents adversaries from negotiating effectively. Iran has given no public indication that it will make concessions, and Tehran appears emboldened and in some ways strategically stronger than when the war began. But even if the Iranian government wanted to reach an agreement, it would struggle to do so. Trump has failed to clearly articulate his aims for the war—to the American public, to Congress, or to the world. His demands can’t be met, because they change almost daily, and none of his advisers has obvious influence over him. During a press conference yesterday about the war, in which top officials spent much time fawning over the president, Trump declared, “I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is.”

Trump also claimed in the same press conference that Iranian civilians are eager for his attacks to continue, and although many Iranians do detest the regime, even some who welcome American intervention have pleaded for strikes on civilians to cease.

Trump’s threats today were quickly denounced, not only by Democrats and progressives but also by some on the anti-war right. The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones declared that “Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!!” Tucker Carlson, another conspiracist voice who is one of the most influential MAGA media figures, said that officials should refuse to grant Trump access to nuclear weapons: “It’s time to say no, absolutely not, and say it directly to the president, no.”

Some GOP members of Congress have also expressed discomfort with attacks on civilians, but overall, the reaction among Republican elected officials has been muted—throughout the war and especially today. But because so many people on the right have worked to consolidate Trump’s power, insulate him from repercussions for his actions, and discredit his critics, it’s not clear how much the president would care even if he did receive more criticism. He doesn’t believe anyone has the right to stand in his way.

What Happens When Trump Feels Cornered

2026-04-06T18:44:00-04:00

In an earlier, somewhat more innocent era of Donald Trump’s social-media posting, one could still chuckle darkly at his 2017 declaration that his approach “is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.” But as the war in Iran bogs down, his communication has far surpassed the merely bizarre and become entirely unhinged. When Trump feels cornered, I have written, he lashes out most fiercely—which might explain the wild statements and actions emanating from the White House over the past few days.

The nadir (for now) was an Easter-morning Truth Social missive in which Trump threatened that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Trump reiterated the threat during a press conference this afternoon, saying, “The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” Targeting civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges is likely illegal. Trump would not be the first U.S. president to flout international law, but he would be the first to advertise it ahead of time on a social-media site he owns. The threat is also strategically dubious. Installing a more pro-American regime in Tehran would require the existence of some authority that is both able to govern and willing to work with Washington; these sorts of strikes, or even threats, make that less likely. (Trump insisted that he’s heard pleas from inside Iran to continue bombing.) And using the threat of martyrdom to scare the religious zealots currently in charge seems possibly counterproductive.

Topping that post will be hard, but this morning the president tried. In a vague and threatening new post, he shared a short clip of a crowd of shoppers—most of whom were people of color, some of whom wore hijab. They were minding their own business and indulging in the quintessentially modern, capitalist American pastime of hanging out at what appears to be Minnesota’s Mall of America, soundtracked with Gary Jules’s rendition of “Mad World” from the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

These outbursts come as the administration finds that military might alone is not enough to win a war. Trump is now threatening to attack civilian infrastructure, because nothing else has forced the Iranian government to buckle. At the start of the war, he seemed to be feeling smug, emboldened by his quick success in Venezuela, but any sense of joy has evaporated fast. Last week, the president delivered a White House address in which he could have attempted to either deescalate the war or else define what victory would look like. Instead, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, Trump did neither.

American wars in the Middle East have backfired before, but the negative effects of this one have become apparent at record speed. American and Israeli strikes have killed many top Iranian figures, but the regime remains ensconced—and its control of the Strait of Hormuz suggests that Iran may actually be in a strategically stronger position than at the start of the war. (Iranian leaders today rejected a proposal for a cease-fire.) The U.S. military is burning through ammunition reserves. The likely next step, Thomas Wright argued in The Atlantic last week, is a ground war.

A frantic search for an airman shot down in an F-15E inside Iran ended happily yesterday, with a rescue. But the operation resulted in the destruction of two MC-130J transport planes and some MH-6 helicopters, in addition to an A-10 shot down separately—an expensive tab, especially given that the Trump administration claimed to have destroyed Iran’s air defenses.

These setbacks might have instilled humility in other presidents, but they have instead led Trump to lash out. His frustration may even be leading him to imagine things. Last month, he claimed that a former president had privately expressed regret about not striking Iran. This seems unlikely. Trump said the predecessor was not George W. Bush, and the other three living presidents—the Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—have all had public acrimony with Trump; The New York Times reported that people close to all three denied they had spoken with him recently. This makes Trump’s claim reminiscent of a different former president: Richard Nixon, who had paranoid conversations with portraits on the White House walls as his presidency collapsed.

The frenzy is seeping into other areas of the administration too. Embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army chief of staff and top chaplain (among others) in the midst of an active war. Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi last week, just after attending a Supreme Court argument in which justices whom he appointed expressed skepticism about the outré claims that Bondi’s Justice Department lawyers were forced to make in defense of Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.

The president’s behavior usually calms down slightly when he no longer feels cornered. Predicting when that might happen is challenging. Trump has shown he has no good answer for exiting the conflict with Iran, and even if he does, he may find—with apologies to Trotsky—that although he may no longer be interested in war, war remains interested in him. The American and global economies appear shaky. Each week brings new polling that suggests a poor result for Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump may be in for a long stretch in the corner, which means a rough ride for everyone else.

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Today’s News

President Trump said at a White House news conference that the U.S. jet downed over Iran was hit by a shoulder-fired missile, as he detailed the weekend rescue of an American airman. He also warned Iran that it could face strikes on key infrastructure if it fails to meet a Tuesday deadline.
Iran rejected a U.S.-backed 45-day cease-fire proposal tied to reopening the Strait of Hormuz and put forth a permanent counteroffer that Trump said was “not good enough,” though it was “a significant step.”
Four astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission traveled farther from Earth than any humans had in history and are set to pass behind the moon later today.

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Erica Lauren

Wrestling’s Newest Star Is Massive, Bearded, and Ready to Piledrive ICE

By Jeremy Gordon

If you attend a pro-wrestling show, the first thing you’ll notice is that most of the fans are wearing a T-shirt of their favorite wrestler. On March 25, the hallways of the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul, Minnesota, resembled an informal straw poll about All Elite Wrestling (AEW), one of the largest wrestling companies in the United States. Most of the night’s advertised talent—names such as Swerve Strickland, Kenny Omega, Orange Cassidy, Darby Allin, Thekla—were represented on the assembled torsos, allowing one to instantly clock the crowd’s favorites.

But plenty of shirts were worn in support of a wrestler who wasn’t on the evening’s schedule: Brody King. The performer, whose given name is Nathan Blauvelt, is an imposing man, billed at 6 foot 5 and close to 300 pounds, with a long, scraggly beard and a body covered in gnarly tattoos. You could imagine him bouncing at a motorcycle bar or tossing strangers in a mosh pit. King has been a good guy, and he has been a bad guy, but mostly he’s a tough guy—someone who always seems like a threat.

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Critics Have a New Way to Describe the Trump Administration

2026-03-26T17:51:00-04:00

Critics have used many phrases to describe Donald Trump’s presidency, some of them unprintable. Scholars and journalists have debated whether Trump’s approach is “authoritarian,” “white supremacist,” or “fascist.” More recently, however, a growing number of people have begun referring to the “Trump regime.”

“The Trump regime has proven over and over,” The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote, that its morality is “the advantage of the stronger.” A fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute complained that oversight tools “were effectively destroyed by the Trump regime last year.” And a writer for The Nation called for Democrats to “launch a ‘Nuremberg Caucus’ to investigate the crimes of the Trump regime.”

Google Trends shows that although the phrase was occasionally deployed during Trump’s first term, it has become far more common over the past year. These usages are meant to tell us something about the state of contemporary politics in the United States—although exactly what is not always clear.

Ambrose Bierce, the sardonic author of The Devil’s Dictionary, might have observed that a “regime” is any government that one doesn’t like. Those referring to the “Trump regime” this way seem to be implying that the administration is rapacious and authoritarian. But few of them are explicit about that, and their counterparts in the academy indulge in the same vagueness. “Very rarely do regime analysts stop to define what they mean by political regime,” the political scientist Gerardo L. Munck complained in 1996. The word was popularized in American politics as a sort of euphemism: During the George W. Bush presidency, regime change was a bloodless, technocratic term for the bloody, chaotic effort to topple Saddam Hussein and install a democratic system of government in Iraq.

A good working definition, Munck told me in an email, is “the set of rules that regulate how people come to occupy government offices and how government decisions are made.” But even scholars often employ the term as a pejorative, used to describe authoritarian government. These “regimes” tend to have two main characteristics, sometimes overlapping though also in tension: first, the personalization of government around a single individual, and second, a set of informal power structures, such as business oligarchs or a “deep state,” that operate outside of the formal system of government.

One could argue that the U.S. has had the same “regime” since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president. Alternatively, one could look to moments such as the post–Civil War amendments or the New Deal as shifts in the regime. Either way, to state that Trump oversees a regime is to suggest an epochal change.

That’s how Robert Reich sees it. Reich, a commentator and professor who served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, has been one of the most consistent and prominent users of the phrase. “I began referring to the Trump ‘regime’ rather than ‘administration’ because, especially in his second term, Trump has acted more like an authoritarian ruler than a president in a constitutional system of governance,” he wrote to me in an email. “This is no ‘administration’ that manages the executive branch by implementing the will of Congress, as expressed by the citizens of the United States.”

I thought that perhaps scholars of regime systems would push back on using the label for Trump’s government, but the ones I spoke with cautiously endorsed it. “In the past, it was common to refer to the Pinochet regime in Chile or the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq,” Munck said. He told me that the use of Trump regime “is a correct appreciation, that highlights a key weakness in the current state of democracy in the U.S.” And Licia Cianetti, a political scientist who recently co-authored a paper on defining the word, wrote to me that “the personalisation of Trump’s style of rule, and some features like its oligarchization, make the use of ‘regime’ in this pejorative sense expedient to express what seems to be happening to American democracy.”

Without downplaying the dangers that Trump poses to the American way of government (perils that The Atlantic has been aggressive in describing), I am not ready to join the “Trump regime” crew yet. One reason is that regimes can be resilient—a point that, ironically, Trump’s actions have demonstrated. “We have, really, regime change,” Trump said about Iran this week. “This is a change in the regime because the leaders are all very different.” That’s nonsense. Although American forces have arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and killed several Iranian leaders, removing the dictators has not dislodged the dictatorships in either Caracas or Tehran.

The 250-year-old democracy in Washington might also be stronger than those who wish to undermine it believe. Trump may hope to topple the laws and checks that constrain him, but he has not yet fully succeeded. Polls show widespread voter disapproval of Trump’s presidency and suggest trouble for the president’s allies in the midterm elections. Fair elections in 2026 and 2028 would not undo all of the damage Trump has done, but they would show that some observers have overstated his ability to demolish the constitutional system. Long live the regime!

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Today’s News

Iran allowed several Pakistan-flagged oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a move President Trump described as a “present” to the U.S. that signals Iran’s openness to negotiations.
Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, appeared in New York federal court for the first time since their seizure by U.S. authorities in January, as Maduro’s lawyer pushed to dismiss drug-trafficking charges, arguing that U.S. restrictions are preventing them from funding their defense. The couple—who have pleaded not guilty—remain in custody.
Several Senate Republicans are urging the White House to invoke the National Emergency Act and temporarily pay TSA officers if the Department of Homeland Security funding standoff over immigration enforcement continues, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: clavicular0 / Instagram

What Was Clavicular?

By Will Gottsegen

Clav, as he’s known, has had a moment this year. Seemingly overnight, he became wildly popular among the lost boys of the internet—the kinds of people who spend their time watching Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, and Andrew Tate, the proudly misogynistic elder statesman of the manosphere, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking (he has denied the allegations). In January, Clavicular joined Tate, Fuentes, and the extremist podcaster Myron Gaines at a nightclub in Miami. Videos of the group listening to the Kanye West song “Heil Hitler” went viral; Clavicular was singing along.

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Trump Is Asking to Be Bailed Out Again

2026-03-25T17:15:00-04:00

A popular joke in the 1850s concerned a man who, upon being convicted for the murder of his parents, throws himself at the judge’s feet and begs for mercy on a poor orphan.

The tale came to mind recently as I read about a hearing challenging President Trump’s authority to build a new ballroom where the White House’s East Wing had stood until Trump abruptly demolished it last fall. The president had been insisting for some time that any work would not “interfere with the current building,” then razed it so quickly that no one had any time to intervene legally. In court this month, a Justice Department lawyer echoed the parricide orphan, pleading with a judge not to halt construction and arguing that it is necessary due to unspecified security concerns—even if he agreed with a suit brought by preservationists. “It does not benefit the public,” DOJ’s Yaakov Roth said, “to have this site dormant.”

Perhaps the administration should have considered this before it demolished the bustling building that used to be there. (U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon has not ruled but has said that he hopes to issue a decision by the end of this month.) The Trump team has discovered that acting fast can prevent anyone from stepping in to stop them—the “You can just do things” ethos. But the president still doesn’t understand why it might be unwise to do something, even if you can. His hasty actions keep producing crises that the administration then insists require everyone to accept further exercises of executive power.

Trump’s war—sorry, “operation”—in Iran is a perfect example. The president didn’t ask Congress to declare war, and he did not receive, or request, an authorization for use of military force. The administration briefed the “Gang of Eight” (the leaders of the House, Senate, and each body’s intelligence committees from both parties) just before the strikes but, according to The New York Times, misled them about the scope of the attack. Trump did not work to build support for war with Iran among the American people, and he did not attempt to assemble a coalition of allies other than Israel to take part.

Now that the operation has hit difficulty, though, Trump wants exactly the same people he ignored—Congress, the American people, and allies—to bail him out. The administration has asked for an astonishing $200 billion to fund a war that the president also sporadically claims is over, giving legislators an unappetizing choice between funding a quagmire or else walking away and leaving a mess behind. Administration officials have also called on citizens to make sacrifices to handle higher gas and energy prices in the service of a war they don’t support, whose aims the president can’t articulate. And Trump has alternatingly pleaded with and raged at allies who, having avoided a war they didn’t want—and having endured years of scorn from Trump—are now unwilling to put their own troops in danger to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

This logic of escalation has also appeared in domestic affairs. Having effected a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, Trump now finds himself insisting that the venue close for two years, reportedly in part because it has failed to book enough artists or sell enough tickets to remain open.

Or take Operation Metro Surge. In late 2025, Trump decided to send a contingent of immigration officers to Minnesota, ostensibly to respond to cases of benefit fraud among the state’s Somali population. The Justice Department was already prosecuting the matter, and it wasn’t clear what exactly Department of Homeland Security officers were going to do. Once they arrived and began patrolling neighborhoods, however, residents protested; the administration responded by expanding its deployment. Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and dispatch active-duty soldiers, though he ultimately did not. By the time the administration pulled back, agents had arrested at least 3,000 people, but only 23 of them were Somali and none was connected to the fraud allegations, according to the Star Tribune. Meanwhile, two American citizens were shot and killed by federal agents.

The Minnesota operation was not only a tactical flop; it was a political blunder. The administration sacked Greg Bovino, the Customs and Border Protection official who had become the front man for aggressive enforcement. Most agents were yanked from Minnesota. Trump’s ratings on immigration, once his signature issue, turned hard against him.

This is ironic, because the original intention was a quick political win. Trump had hoped to spotlight the benefit fraud both to bolster his case for immigration enforcement and also because of his outspoken bigotry toward Somalis. He seems to have thought the same about the Iran operation, expecting as quick a win there as he (appears to have) notched in Venezuela. Instead, he has ended up worse off as a matter of his stated goals and political interests alike.

Following protocol might have deprived Trump of the splashiness of these sudden actions, or even prevented him from doing these things—but it might also have helped him avoid the missteps that are plaguing him. Trump doesn’t recognize that although rules can limit him, they also protect him. A lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is challenging the ballroom, made the same point more pithily during the hearing last week. Thaddeus Heuer noted that the administration could have consulted with relevant authorities before demolition but had declined.

“They have forgotten the proverbial first law of holes,” he said. “When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”

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A jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing addictive features that harmed a young user, ordering them to pay $3 million in damages. The ruling could pave the way for more lawsuits over social media’s impact on users’ mental health.
The U.S. sent Iran a 15-point proposal to end the war, but Tehran rejected it and outlined its own conditions, including reparations and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats had sent Republicans a proposal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, including funding for TSA workers and proposed limits on ICE operations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

How AI Is Creeping Into The New York Times

By Vauhini Vara

On Sunday, a writer named Becky Tuch posted an excerpt on X from a months-old New York Times “Modern Love” column that had given her pause. “I don’t want to falsely accuse writers” of using AI, she wrote. “But this reads EXACTLY like AI slop.” The excerpt—from an essay by a mother who had lost custody of her son—described the son’s feelings, at one point, toward his mother: “Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying.”

Among the 100-plus replies to Tuch’s post was one by an AI researcher, Tuhin Chakrabarty. He’d run the snippet from “Modern Love” through an AI-detection tool from the start-up Pangram Labs, which flagged it as likely having been AI-generated.

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American Aviation Is Near Collapse

2026-03-23T11:37:00-04:00

The American commercial-aviation system is a modern marvel. On any day of the week, a passenger can get to and from nearly any two cities of decent size and to destinations on five other continents, for a relatively affordable price and with exceptional safety.

Or at least all of that was true until recently. Today, the system seems near collapse.

Travelers around the country are facing long security lines: two to three hours at New York airports, three in Atlanta, two in Houston. Checkpoints are staffed by the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has not been paying TSA workers since Valentine’s Day because of a partial government shutdown.

Meanwhile, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, one of the nation’s busiest, all flights are paused until at least this afternoon after an Air Canada jet collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of other people. Nearly 1,000 flights leave from or arrive at LGA every day, and hundreds have been canceled.

A closure at LaGuardia puts pressure on other airports in the area, and they might not be prepared to handle any redirects. This morning, reports of smoke in the air-traffic-control tower at Newark Liberty International Airport, just across the Hudson River from New York City, caused a brief ground stop. Officials determined the problem was a burning smell in an elevator and reopened the tower, but this is only the latest sign of how broken Newark airport is. Last week, an Alaska Airlines plane nearly crashed into a FedEx plane on a runway at Newark, missing by just 300 to 325 feet, after pilots were instructed to avoid a collision. And earlier this month, a Singapore Airlines plane clipped the wing of a Spirit Airlines jet while pushing back from a gate. Last spring, air-traffic controllers lost the ability to track planes at Newark for two brief intervals, causing such stress that some of them took leave.

Each of these situations had its own specific causes, but what unites them is years of disinvestment capped by political dysfunction. Modern air travel was a classic postwar American triumph: a big, complicated system built with lots of money and careful tracking. Deregulation of the airlines in the 1970s made flying cheaper and more widely available. A careful, iterative process of safety regulation culminated in a 16-year period, from 2009 to 2025, when no U.S. airline had a fatal crash.

Yet the system was quietly eroding from within. For many passengers, the most visible sign was the deterioration of airports themselves. In 2014, then–Vice President Biden said that LaGuardia resembled “some third-world country.” Although LGA has since been renovated, other, more essential parts of the system have continued to get worse.

The federal government has been trying to run air traffic control on the cheap for decades, which has resulted in staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment. Many towers are operating below recommended capacity. After the outages last spring, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy panned the infrastructure used to keep flyers safe. “We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” Duffy said. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.” Yet despite warnings from airlines and regulators, successive congressional sessions and presidential administrations have failed to fix the problem. The FAA has also seen what’s known as “regulatory capture”: Cozy relationships with Boeing, for example, helped problems with the 737 Max escape notice until a pair of fatal crashes abroad in 2018 and 2019.

More recently, the FAA abruptly closed the El Paso, Texas, airport in a standoff with the Defense Department over laser weaponry. The FAA appears to have made the move as a desperate step after its safety worries weren’t taken seriously. The ploy worked: The FAA drew attention to its concerns and the airport reopened, but in any functional administration, this would have been resolved behind closed doors much earlier.

When an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last January, President Trump immediately jumped to blame DEI, a claim as nonsensical as it was repellent. Following multiple investigations, the FAA has changed some rules to prevent a similar incident, but Congress couldn’t agree on an air-safety bill that offered broader fixes.

A different sort of political dysfunction has snarled passenger experiences. TSA is charged with keeping travelers safe not from aviation failures but from threats of violence. While its approach has often been more security theater than essential, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported in 2008, some screening is necessary. But DHS is unable to pay agents for this work because of the partial shutdown. Following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have demanded reforms in exchange for funding the department, and neither they nor Trump have been willing to budge. TSA agents, who are not well paid in the first place, have not received paychecks since February, and the situation seems to have hit a breaking point in the past few days. (Some airports have begged people to donate gift cards or food for TSA agents.)

Over the weekend, Trump said that he would “move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.” (DHS has moved funds so that ICE agents, unlike TSA, are being paid.) Administration “border czar” Tom Homan has since said that ICE won’t be doing screening but will take on other, unspecified roles. The administration has insisted that border security is an emergency, so pulling agents off their jobs to do something else seems odd. More broadly, the administration is deploying ICE agents outside of their training in a dubious attempt to ease a political crisis created by ICE agents who had been deployed outside of their standard role in Minnesota. (Trump said today that he would deploy the National Guard to assist if ICE agents could not alleviate wait times.)

The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed “kludgeocracy,” in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. “‘Clumsy but temporarily effective,’” Teles has written, “also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.” The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.

The State That Decided to Topple a Political Giant

2026-03-20T17:02:00-04:00

To national audiences, the news that a North Carolina state senator had apparently lost a Republican primary race by two—yes, two—votes seemed like one of those quirky election stories that come around every year, such as when the mayor of Boca Raton, Florida, recently won by five votes.

But in North Carolina, where I live, it was an earthquake. State Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger has been the most powerful person in the state for years, through both Republican and Democratic governors. Like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he is the kind of politician whom opponents detest yet begrudgingly recognize for their effectiveness. But Berger appears to have been ousted by Sam Page, the sheriff of Rockingham County, which makes up most of the contested district. With provisional ballots counted, Page’s lead grew to 23 votes out of some 26,000 cast. An initial machine recount completed this week didn’t change the tally, but Berger asked today for a partial hand recount.

Page overcame a series of disadvantages: Berger and his allies spent about $10 million; Page raised less than $100,000. Berger had the endorsement of Donald Trump and a long record of delivering conservative policy and local benefits. (In another sign of how pervasive Berger’s influence is, a member of the State Board of Elections, which will oversee a recount, was forced to resign amid questions about his close ties to Berger.) Beyond the tight margin, the dynamics of Berger’s loss seem relevant to national politics in two ways: the power of anti-incumbent sentiment and the contested status of gambling in modern America.

Berger has led the state Senate since Republicans recaptured it in the 2010 elections, and although he hasn’t always gotten his way—former Governor Roy Cooper eventually won a fight over expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, for example—he has over time remade North Carolina as a national laboratory for conservative policy. Berger has slashed taxes, installed conservative figures atop the state university system, reversed progressive laws, and stripped powers from Democratic governors. Berger’s son and namesake is a justice on the deeply polarized state supreme court, from which he has helped advance his father’s political agenda. Whereas Berger’s former counterparts in the state House, Thom Tillis and Tim Moore, have moved on to the U.S. Senate and House respectively, he has stayed put in Raleigh. After all, why would he want to take a step down in power?

Berger may dominate North Carolina politics, but this is not the same as being the most popular politician in the state. Berger has never won statewide office, and instead relies on a map that Republicans have ruthlessly gerrymandered to keep him atop the senate. But he has also never sought much attention. I once ended an interview with Berger with the standard reporter’s question asking if he wanted to add anything. He politely declined. “I’ve had a practice since long ago that if you ask me a question, I’ll answer your question, but I generally don’t know that that does me any good,” he told me.

His answer has stuck with me ever since as an encapsulation of his quiet approach. When the GOP succeeded in passing a major bill, his skilled press office would make sure that the senators who sponsored it got the attention, which no doubt helped build relationships inside this caucus—thus enabling more successes later. This approach meant Berger notched a long list of policy wins, but he didn’t necessarily win much affection with the general public.

Page, Berger’s challenger, has been the sheriff in Rockingham County (which is in central North Carolina, on the Virginia border) since 1998. With his trademark cowboy hats, he’s a visible and large personality. The race wasn’t strictly ideological. Page is also very conservative and MAGA-oriented, and he’s no good-governance activist. His tenure as sheriff has been beset by scandal, as Berger reminded voters in campaign ads. Even as preelection polls suggested a close race, I was skeptical. Polling in small races like this is frequently unreliable. And besides, I thought, Phil Berger wasn’t going to lose.

The immediate cause for Berger’s defeat seems to have been a bad bet on a casino. Legalized gambling has swept the nation, as my colleague McKay Coppins writes in our April cover story, and that includes North Carolina, where I am blanketed with ads for sportsbooks. But signs of backlash have begun to gather, both nationally and at the grassroots level. In 2023, Berger attempted to pass a law establishing four casinos, including one in Rockingham. A prospective operator had already bought 187 acres in Rockingham and contributed generously to Berger and his allies’ campaigns. The effort failed amid opposition from social conservatives in the area—led by Sam Page, who railed against a range of efforts to legalize gambling.

More broadly, Berger fell victim to another national dynamic: fury at incumbents. The past few years have been bad times for leaders in power, who keep getting beaten in general elections, but both parties have also seen internal revolts against their existing leadership. Democrats belatedly forced Joe Biden out of the 2024 race; Mitch McConnell finds himself the villain of the GOP primary to replace him; Chuck Schumer can hear footsteps behind him; even the hard-line Mike Johnson has critics who deem him a squish.

Berger delivered a long list of right-wing wins over the years, but many voters either don’t remember, don’t like the results, or don’t care. “He’s been in power so long, he’s become almost an emblem of the Republican political establishment,” Carter Wrenn, a veteran GOP operative, told The Assembly. “And that’s not popular anymore.”

If Page claims the seat when the race is certified on March 25, he will just be another senator, and his lack of experience suggests that he’ll be nowhere near as effective at delivering on conservative policy as Berger, but he will better reflect his constituents’ attitude on gambling and their mood overall. Like their counterparts around the country, North Carolina voters—at least a bare majority of them—decided that was more important to them than policy gains right now.

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The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry

By Alex Reisner

In April 2024, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a current AI evangelist, gave a closed-door lecture to a group of Stanford students. If these young people hoped to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Schmidt explained, then they should be prepared to breach some ethical boundaries.

At that point, 19 lawsuits had been filed against generative-AI companies for copyright infringement, alleging that Anthropic, OpenAI, and others had stolen books and other media to train their generative models. Yet Schmidt told the students to go ahead and download whatever they need to build an accurate “test” version of their AI product. If the product takes off, “then you hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up,” he said. “If nobody uses your product, then it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”

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J. D. Vance Learns What Mike Pence Already Knows

2026-03-16T18:46:00-04:00

Mike Pence should have been a warning to J. D. Vance about the inevitable abasement in store once you join a ticket with Donald Trump. Before he became Trump’s running mate a decade ago, conservative Christian values were the center of Pence’s political identity, but in October 2016, he reluctantly stood by Trump after the release of the tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy.” It was a sign of things to come. Pence became vice president, and for the next four years, he defended his boss through moral abominations and deficit explosions that cut against his fiscal conservatism, flinching only when Trump asked him to help steal an election. His reward? Trump did nothing while a mob threatened to hang Pence.

All of this was common knowledge when Vance agreed to run with Trump in 2024. No one lands on a presidential ticket if they’re not outrageously ambitious—nearly every veep for at least a century has fancied themselves a future president—but Vance is particularly brazen. Becoming Trump’s running mate required a yearslong effort to ingratiate himself with a guy whom Vance had, in the pages of this magazine, referred to as “cultural heroin” and elsewhere called “America’s Hitler.” Maybe Vance’s ambition blinded him to Pence’s lesson, but the war in Iran is teaching it to him the hard way.

For the first year of Trump’s presidency, Vance’s Faustian bargain looked like just that: a bargain. Though smart, Vance is not an especially talented politician. He won election to the Senate from Ohio only with Trump’s endorsement, and he lacks anything like Trump’s charisma. By signing on with Trump, however, he not only ended up one heartbeat from the presidency but also became the heir apparent to Trump’s political movement and the presumptive GOP nominee in 2028. Trump has often lavished praise on Vance, and Vance’s clearest rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Vanity Fair that he won’t run if Vance does. (Vance isn’t taking any chances. “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” Vance joked to the magazine’s photographer. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”)

But Trump’s recent military policy has complicated this easy ascent. Vance has built a political profile around his opposition to foreign intervention, which he traces to his own disillusionment while serving as a Marine in Iraq. That meshed well with Trump’s first-term image (if not his reality), but it clashes with the imperial ambitions of his second. Vance was conspicuously missing when Trump launched the January raid to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He’s also been scarce since the start of the Iran war, which threatens to turn into a quagmire with record speed.

The Iran campaign shows, as my colleague Idrees Kahloon wrote recently, that “within the Trump administration, Vance’s opinions seem to matter less and less.” Even worse for Vance, Rubio is ascendant. MAGA gadfly Laura Loomer noted that when Trump spoke in Vance’s home region last week, the secretary of state received gushing acclaim from the president. All Vance got was short shrift.

Vance has begun making public statements in support of the war, but they appear to emerge from clenched teeth. Bolstering this impression was what sure looks like an intentional leak to Politico on Friday that Vance “was skeptical of the U.S. striking Iran in the leadup to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war.” This report was greeted dismissively in some quarters as a frantic attempt by Vance to distance himself from a doomed war, or, as The New Republic’s Alex Shephard put it, “a Machiavellian and astonishingly self-serving maneuver.” One can never rule this out with Vance, but I think it’s just as possible that the story is less a strategic ploy than Vance reacting in frustration to being so ignored by the president.

Insofar as Vance has any sincere beliefs in anything other than himself, his opposition to military intervention seems to be one. Though he has changed many of his positions in the past decade, he has remained consistent on this, and he seems to say the same things in private that he does in public. When an administration official mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a Signal chat about a strike on Yemeni militants last year, Vance was dubious about American action. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he wrote. (Turnabout is fair play: Now Europe seems unenthused about bailing Trump out in the Strait of Hormuz.)

What Vance is learning now is that serving Trump doesn’t mean just compromising on some ancillary issues that you care less about, or keeping a straight face during his nonsensical digressions. Instead, Trump will humiliate you even—or especially—on your most deeply held views. Just as Pence found himself obliged to defend Trump’s least socially conservative tendencies, Vance is now defending his war in Iran. Vance may have thought he was getting a cheap ticket to the pinnacle of power. The price, it turns out, is much higher than he realized.

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Attendees of the 2025 conference of Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind

By Jacob Stern

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”

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Maybe DOGE Was Just Looking in the Wrong Places

2026-03-12T17:15:00-04:00

Readers’ faith in publications and writers relies on a belief that the information provided is true and accurate to the best of the writer’s knowledge. When I get something wrong, I owe it to you to correct myself. Today, I have that unpleasant task.

For years, I have argued that the idea of balancing the budget by eliminating government “waste, fraud, and abuse” was a canard. In 2020, I wrote that “there really isn’t that much waste, fraud, and abuse in the system.” In 2024, when President-Elect Trump announced the creation of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, I said that the phrase was a meme with no real substance to it—Trump claimed DOGE would save money in part by weeding out fraudulent uses of social services, an unrealistic strategy based on an exaggerated problem. Politicians invoked the phrase waste, fraud, and abuse because no one could possibly be against those things, but for the same reason, those things would have been eliminated long ago if they were common and easy to spot.

Three recent stories have forced me to wonder if I was just looking in the wrong places.

The first example of government waste is the luxury airplane that appears to have helped end Kristi Noem’s tenure as homeland-security secretary. NBC News first reported last month on the Boeing 737 that the Department of Homeland Security had leased and requested to buy for $70 million, along with two Gulfstream jets purchased for a reported $200 million. The 737 features “a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and even a bar.” DHS claimed that the plane was intended for, among other uses, deportations; the government typically charters flights to deport people. Given the conditions that the Trump DHS favors for migrants in custody—my colleague Caitlin Dickerson recently wrote about one facility that had “an austere courtroom that reeked of bleach, and an airless cafeteria with a rancid smell”—this excuse is “far-fetched,” a DHS source told NBC. The plane seems like it could be described as waste, fraud (in the colloquial, if not also legal, sense), and abuse.

Even Trump, a walking advertisement for conspicuous consumption, reportedly found this a bit much, and the plane was a factor in Noem’s abrupt, um, reassignment to a newly concocted envoy role. The fallout from Noem’s departure has revealed another embarrassing case. The Washington Examiner reports that ICE’s former No. 2 Madison Sheahan spent about $2.5 million to buy a fleet of new SUVs and wrap them in flashy decorations with ICE’s name and logo. For reasons that should have been obvious, these vehicles are largely useless to an agency that tries to move secretively and usually employs unmarked cars. (This is perhaps one reason that ICE officials reportedly referred to Sheahan, whose previous experience was at Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, as “fish cop.”) The agency is now trying to get rid of the white-elephant vehicles. This example looks like waste, though the fact that a big part of the SUV contract went to a prominent Republican donor means that it also looks a little like a kickback, which would constitute abuse.

Over at the Pentagon, a watchdog group’s analysis found some outlandish outlays: $98,329 on a grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, almost $9 million on lobster tail and crab, and $15.1 million on rib-eye steak—all from September alone. These, too, look like waste and abuse. Although the Iran war cost an eye-popping estimated $11.3 billion in its first week, and continues with no clear goal or strategy, at least it’s related to national defense.

These are just the appalling expenditures the administration isn’t advertising. What about the ones that are matters of declared policy? The administration has imposed tariffs that hurt American farmers who grow corn and soybeans. In response, Trump announced plans for a $12 billion bailout for farmers, which is both cynical and wasteful: government spending to fix a problem created by the government itself. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act also allocated $40 billion in subsidies for fossil-fuel producers, some of which are highly profitable.

When Trump launched DOGE, he promised it would root out waste, fraud, and abuse; its leader, Elon Musk, vowed to cut $2 trillion in federal spending. In practice, the DOGE team appears to have been intended mostly to attack areas of the government that Trump, Musk, and the budget director, Russell Vought, didn’t like. As an engine of efficiency or savings, DOGE failed miserably. CNN reported this week that DOGE cuts “have hampered the US government’s abilities to prepare for domestic emergencies; monitor terror threats; guard against cyber-attacks; broadcast US information into Iran; and quickly help US citizens stranded abroad.” Spending actually rose on DOGE’s watch. Maybe DOGE was just focused on the wrong things—some of its staffers don’t seem like the sharpest crew—but it’s probably not a coincidence that the top Trump aides who were spending frivolously escaped scrutiny.

These cases are relatively tiny in the scope of the federal budget—the Pentagon received more than $2 trillion in funding in fiscal year 2025. That’s another problem with the “waste, fraud, and abuse” trope: Contrary to what those invoking the phrase wish to suggest, balancing the federal budget would take much more than rooting out individual instances of overspending. It would require steep cuts to programs, real increases in tax revenue, or both. But the cost of government leaders participating in wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive behavior is high in ways not best measured in dollars.

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Today’s News

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said that Iran will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and warned the war could expand to new fronts. Attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf have surged as oil prices have risen above $100 a barrel, and millions of people are displaced across Iran.
The Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill to boost supply and lower costs—the largest housing legislation in decades—but its future in the House is uncertain.
A suspect is dead after driving a vehicle into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, and exchanging gunfire with security staff, authorities said. No one was seriously injured, though a security guard was struck by the vehicle and taken to the hospital.

Evening Read

Martin Parr / Magnum

One Food All Americans Can Agree On

By Yasmin Tayag

If nutrition is a sport, it has no casual fans. Supporters of Team Protein, the 2025 champions, are numerous and passionate, backed up by a sprawling industry of protein-supplemented products such as popcorn, soda, and cereal. Also popular is Team MAHA, captained by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which endorses “real foods,” especially red meat and dairy. The Dietitians are veteran players with an old-school strategy: going heavy on plants and light on saturated fats. Alongside underdogs like Team Keto and the Vegans, there are the Fiber-Maxxers, upstarts whose popularity has soared alongside sales of fiber-filled cookies, powders, and drinks.

As in any fandom, choosing one team can mean demonizing the others’ stars: MAHA partisans despise the Dietitians’ low-fat milk, and the Fiber-Maxxers sneer at Team Protein’s constipating supplements. Yet there is one player that any team would gladly welcome. It’s packed with fiber and protein. Kennedy would call it a “real food.” It’s plant-based, widely available, and incredibly affordable. It is the homeliest and humblest of foods: the bean.

Read the full article.

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A Horrible Throwback to the Early 2000s

2026-03-11T17:01:00-04:00

No one could accuse Representative Andy Ogles of using dog whistles. The Tennessee Republican prefers a bullhorn.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles wrote on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.”

The statement’s open bigotry is jarring. Where American Islamophobes in the past two decades have tended to demand that Muslims assimilate or denounce particular people or views, Ogles is taking a categorial approach. (In the past, Ogles has demanded the denaturalization of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he called “little muhammad”— whatever that means—and told an activist that his attitude toward Gazan children was that “we should kill them all.”) His denunciation of pluralism is un-American—not in the sense that it’s reprehensible, though it is, but that it is directly in conflict with the founding principles of the United States. Ironically, it has more in common with hard-line Wahhabis.

But Ogles is not alone. Last month, his House colleague Randy Fine of Florida declared, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” (In January, Fine blamed Representative Ilhan Omar for being attacked during a town hall.) And when Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about the comments yesterday, the Louisiana Republican declined to condemn them. “Look, there’s a lot of energy in the country, and a lot of popular sentiment, that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem,” Johnson said. (There is no evidence of any serious effort to “impose Sharia law.”) He added, “It’s not about people as Muslims,” but of course that’s exactly what Ogles’s comment was about.

This kind of hateful rhetoric is a throwback to the early 2000s. Then, as now, the U.S. was involved in a dubious, poorly defined war in the Middle East. But there are two important differences. One, jihadist violence in the U.S. was at the time a more active threat, following a devastating terror attack on U.S. soil. A failed attack on Islamophobic protesters this weekend in New York City, inspired by the Islamic State, was a notable exception to a sharp decrease in jihadist attacks in the U.S. today.

Second, leaders in the Republican Party made an effort to tamp down on anti-Muslim sentiment in the 2000s. “Americans understand we fight not a religion; ours is not a campaign against the Muslim faith,” George W. Bush said two weeks after 9/11. “Ours is a campaign against evil.” (Bush’s presidential center today makes pluralism one of its focuses.) And in 2008, when a town-hall attendee said that the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was “an Arab,” the GOP nominee, John McCain, was quick to bat it down. “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with,” he said. It was an imperfect response, suggesting that being a decent man was somehow opposed to being an Arab, but it at least reflected McCain’s reflex to oppose such rhetoric—even when it may have hurt him politically.

Johnson’s smarmy answer on Ogles showed that today’s Republican leadership has neither the courage nor the desire to push back in the same way. After McCain lost the 2008 election, some voices on the right began questioning whether Obama was an American citizen and falsely suggesting that he was a Kenyan-born Muslim. The most prominent among them was Donald Trump, who seemed to represent the prejudices of many Republican voters better than Bush or McCain did. (Less remembered than McCain’s decency at the campaign event is the crowd’s response: They booed him for defending Obama.) Trump’s “birther” antics laid the foundation for his successful presidential run in 2016. During the campaign, he called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States and indicated a willingness to create a registry of Muslims inside the country.

As a result, it’s no surprise that a Trump-led GOP would become a home for anti-Muslim bigotry. What is less expected is that the president himself has not been a notable participant recently. The Trump administration has prominently targeted Muslims such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for deportation over their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but among his many rotating justifications for the war in Iran, the regime’s theocratic brand of Islam has not been prominent. His approach to Gaza also seems driven more by affinity for Israel’s government and greed for real estate than by any consideration of religion—unlike some members of his administration, such as Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who interprets Israel’s existence in religious rather than transactional terms. And although Mamdani’s rise has produced a spike in Islamophobia on the right, Trump has so far cultivated a surprisingly chummy relationship with the mayor.

Trump’s relative silence does not absolve him of his role in creating the atmosphere that fostered Ogles and Fine, both hard-line MAGA figures. As he has been happy to point out, he is the sole leader of the GOP, and if he disliked such comments he could put a stop to them by simply expressing his disapproval. During the 2024 election, many Arab and Muslim voters who were angry about the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza voted for Trump, especially in the key swing state of Michigan, but the idea that Trump would be more pro-Palestinian than Kamala Harris was ridiculous to anyone paying close attention. The GOP’s tacit approval of Ogles and Fine is a reminder of the real face of the MAGA movement.

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Today’s News

The International Energy Agency said that member countries will release 400 million barrels of oil from strategic reserves—the largest-ever release—to stabilize markets after the Iran war disrupted the global oil supply.
Strikes continued across Iran on the 12th day of the U.S. and Israel’s war. Tehran launched what it called its “most intense” attacks yet, targeting Israel, Gulf States, and ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for about one-fifth of the world’s oil.
The Trump administration is expected to launch new trade investigations today into what it calls unfair foreign practices, as it seeks new ways to impose tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down many of the president’s earlier tariffs.

Evening Read

Steve Christo / Fairfax Media / Getty

AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job

By Adam Ozimek

By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin …

How could humans possibly compete? Yet today you are more likely to encounter a piano player than a player piano, despite the job being successfully automated a very long time ago. The automatons have been relegated to museums and the rare curiosity. Pianists can be found any night of the week in hotel lobbies, Italian restaurants, and concert halls.

Read the full article.

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Trump Can’t Decide Whether the Iran War Is Still Going On

2026-03-10T16:05:00-04:00

The Trump administration can’t say why the United States went to war with Iran, and it can’t say what the goal of the war is. Now it can’t even decide whether the war is still going on.

During an interview with CBS News yesterday afternoon, President Trump all but declared victory. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said.

This statement is so self-contradictory and confusing that one might be tempted to write it off as just riffing, except that he reiterated it at a press conference later in the day. “We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective, and some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” he said, apparently referring to himself. All that was missing to complete the parallel to the Iraq War was a flight suit, an aircraft carrier, and a Mission Accomplished banner.

Yet the same afternoon, the Department of Defense posted on X, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” mangling a famous quotation from John Paul Jones, the father of the U.S. Navy. Reporters at the press conference, perplexed, asked Trump about the gap. “You said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning, so which is it?”

“Well, I think you could say both,” Trump replied.

You could—if you were a pundit making an argument about the future of the war. But people might hope for a bit more clarity from the man who launched the war without congressional authorization, popular support, or even much buy-in from his own advisers.

Trump’s equivocation yesterday may be his attempt to steady an economy shaken by the war. The president’s approval has been battered recently by the high cost of living. Although inflation was a major factor in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump has seldom focused on it since entering office and has insisted that affordability is somehow both a Democratic “hoax” and a problem that he has already solved.

The war in Iran has exacerbated existing stressors: It has driven up gas prices, rocked stock markets, and suggested that Trump’s attention is not on the economy. The president appears rattled by this and even called on oil-tanker captains to “show some guts” and sail through the contested Strait of Hormuz, according to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, though he hasn’t volunteered to personally dodge Iranian missiles aboard a floating makeshift bomb.

Trump’s comments yesterday seemed to work, at least in the immediate term: Oil futures dropped, and markets rebounded a bit. Over time, however, whatever succor Trump provides to the economy by saying that the war is nearly over is likely to be canceled out by his administration’s vacillation. Markets seek stability, and Trump can’t seem to decide on a talking point, much less a strategy or aim for the war itself. As my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl reported last week, Trump offered 10 different rationales for the war in its first six days alone. Traders may be primed to look for examples of Trump chickening out, but yesterday’s remarks seem more like a feint at ending the war: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that today would “be yet again our most intense day of strikes.”

Trump appears confused not only about the future of the war but also about some of its basic facts. The U.S. has faced international criticism over a missile strike on a girls’ school in Iran, which was next to a naval base that was also struck. Iranian authorities say that about 175 people were killed at the school, mostly children. Over the weekend, Trump said that the attack was friendly fire. “In my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Since then, evidence has emerged that the missile that struck the base was a Tomahawk, an American-made weapon. Yesterday, Trump claimed that Iran possesses Tomahawks. “Whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk—a Tomahawk is very generic,” he said. “It’s sold to other countries.” This is nonsense: Only a few U.S. allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, are known to have them. When a New York Times reporter confronted Trump, asking why no one else in the government was backing up his claims, the president folded. “Because I just don’t know enough about it,” he replied. “Whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

This claim of ignorance is surprising, because Trump usually claims to know better than everyone around him. When asked a question to which he doesn’t know the answer, his default is to say that he’s considering it. But on occasion, when really backed into a corner, Trump will throw up his hands and claim that he doesn’t know anything about a topic.

No president can or should be expected to know everything. This is why he’s provided with a Cabinet and a team of other advisers, an executive branch full of subject-matter experts, and a Congress and judiciary to serve as checks on him. The problem is that Trump wants to operate with complete freedom from any restrictions and without waiting for advisers’ input. Asked when the war would completely end, Trump told CBS, “Wrapping up is all in my mind, nobody else’s.” That’s not very reassuring, for stock markets or anyone else.

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Today’s News

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the United States “will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated,” adding that Iran is “badly losing” and that upcoming air strikes will be the most intense yet. Iran’s foreign minister said that negotiations with the U.S. are off the table as the conflict continues to escalate.
Voters in Mississippi and Georgia head to the polls today in elections that could signal key midterm trends. The races include a primary challenge to longtime Representative Bennie Thompson in Mississippi and a special election to replace former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia.
The luxury real-estate brokers Oren and Tal Alexander and their brother, Alon, were convicted yesterday in federal court of sex trafficking and related charges. Prosecutors said that they lured women with promises of parties and trips and then raped them; they face up to life in prison.

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Illustration by The Atlantic

The Highly Exclusive Way That Everybody Shops Now

By Ellen Cushing

Scarcity is humanity’s great motivator. This has been true forever, since back when we were basically apes: The most important resources—food, shelter, mates—were the ones that were most in demand. Shortage meant value, and being attuned to value meant staying alive. We learned to focus on the rare thing at the expense of what was around it—psychologists call this “tunneling”—and to prioritize avoiding loss over gaining rewards. It was typically smarter to fight for something everyone else wanted than to waste time looking for something else. That animal wisdom is a reason our species survived.

It is also a reason that, in late 2025, you could find a grown adult—a person who lives in the kind of material plenitude our distant ancestors could never dream of—in a Starbucks parking lot before dawn, desperately seeking a coffee cup shaped like a teddy bear. You see, this coffee cup was available only as a drop.

Read the full article.

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The Revenge of the Dummymander

2026-02-23T17:04:00-05:00

Partisan gerrymandering—the practice of drawing districts in a way that is designed to aid one party and hurt the other—is one of the more pernicious phenomena in American politics today. It’s fundamentally antidemocratic because it’s designed to circumvent or at least dampen the will of voters. For the same reason, it’s very difficult to overcome through democratic means: You can’t exactly vote out the people in power if they’ve drawn districts designed to stop you from doing so. And legal remedies are scant. The U.S. Supreme Court has concluded that although partisan gerrymandering is distasteful, the federal courts have no role in stopping it. Some states have specific constitutional protections against gerrymandering, but many do not.

But partisan gerrymandering does have one ultimate weakness—a foe that doesn’t always win, but whose victories are especially satisfying. That foe is gerrymandering itself. If you have never heard of a dummymander, this is probably a good time to learn the word. Dummymander is the term that the political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell coined for what happens when a gerrymander backfires, hurting the party that it was designed to help. Dummymanders are nothing new, but the bunch of new districts drawn in recent months mean that they could play an important role in the outcome of the midterms.

Over the summer, President Trump set off a frantic round of redistricting when he began pushing Republicans in Texas and in other states to redraw their maps to favor Republicans. States typically draw new maps only after each decennial census, and Trump’s pressure to break that precedent was a sign of his concern about potential GOP losses in the 2026 midterms. Democrats in some states considered their own counter-gerrymanders—in California, policy makers even got voters to approve going around an anti-gerrymandering commission set up in 2010.

Now the action is mostly reaching its end as the deadline for finalizing 2026 maps nears, although some questions remain. (Among them: Will the Supreme Court issue a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act in time for Republicans to draw new maps for this cycle?) The consensus among election analysts is that the redistricting will end up giving Republicans only three or four new seats, if any. But Democratic prowess in recent special elections raises the possibility that rather than a cold-blooded political hit, the GOP’s efforts could end up as a Pyrrhic victory.

In late January, a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat in Tarrant County—in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. Most House districts won’t see a shift that big, but victories like these have raised the possibility of Democrats catching enough of a blue wave that maps drawn to help Republicans might actually hurt them. The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

Many of Grofman and Brunell’s examples of dummymanders come from late in the 20th century, when Democrats still held lots of southern seats because of historic party support, but were on the verge of losing them to Republicans. For example, they write that the map Georgia Democrats drew after the 1990 census looks more like a Republican gerrymander than one drawn to help Democrats, which the authors blame on “the belief that it is good to be as thin as possible as long as you still remain breathing.” Entering the 1992 election, Georgia had nine Democratic House members. Three won, but three lost, and three more retired.

Dummymanders also happen when a party has a great deal of control and gets greedy, the journalist Alan Greenblatt wrote last year. Before the 1894 elections, Democrats sought to expand the number of districts they could win, but an economic crisis in 1893 doomed them. The party lost 114 seats in a 357-seat House, reducing it to a regional, southern party. Such a huge collapse is hard to imagine today, in part because partisan gerrymandering has already made so few districts competitive. But this also means that Republicans in particular don’t have a lot of good prospects for gerrymandering without spreading themselves too thin.

The time is too early to declare the presence of any particular dummymanders for 2026, but one place to look is North Carolina. Maps in the Old North State have changed rapidly. In the 2022 election, a court-ordered map produced a 7–7 split between the two parties. In 2024, a new GOP-drawn map produced a 10–4 Republican majority, although Republicans won nearly the same percentage of the overall vote as they did in 2022. Last year, the GOP-led general assembly acted again, with Trump’s urging, to make the district of Representative Don Davis, a Democrat, more Republican.

This attempt to engineer an 11th Republican district may very well work. North Carolina Republicans are experienced and adept mapmakers. But they targeted Davis at the expense of removing Republicans from another district, which is held by the Republican Greg Murphy. Democrats hope, and some conservatives worry, that a big Democratic wave could knock out Murphy and save Davis. In Texas, meanwhile, Republicans drew districts that assume Trump’s success in courting Hispanic voters will translate to the future—but some of his actions since he took office are alienating the same voters.

Whatever the results, any dummymander that emerges in 2026 might be short-lived. The new precedent set by so many states changing their maps during this cycle may mean that legislatures move quickly to correct any errors they made that helped the other party. But gerrymanderers are always making maps based on the last election—which means voters might have a chance to give them their comeuppance.

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Today’s News

Peter Mandelson, a former U.K. ambassador to America, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has been accused of sharing market-sensitive information with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; Mandelson previously denied any allegations of wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
A powerful blizzard dumped more than two feet of snow in places across the Northeast, halting travel and leaving more than 600,000 electricity customers without power.
The European Parliament paused the ratification of a major U.S.-EU trade deal, citing uncertainty after the Supreme Court struck down many of President Trump’s tariffs.

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Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic

The Protein-Bar Delusion

By Nicholas Florko

Eating candy for breakfast is not a good decision. But most mornings, I start my day with something that looks and tastes a lot like just that. The Built Puff protein bar is covered in chocolate and has a sweet coconut center, making it practically indistinguishable from a Mounds bar. Nutritionally, though, the two products are very different. A Mounds bar has north of 200 calories and 20 grams of added sugar. My bar has 140 calories, just six grams of added sugar, and about as much protein as three eggs.

Protein bars have come a long way from the chalky monstrosities that lined shelves not long ago.

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The Latest Ploy to Help Republicans Win Elections

2026-02-18T15:51:00-05:00

Any legislation titled with a backronym is automatically suspect, and the SAVE America Act—that’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—is no exception. A version of the bill languished last year, but President Trump is now pressuring Senate Republicans to pass it, among his other attempts to subvert the midterm elections. Although the bill seems unlikely to become a law, it could still create chaos and confusion about the race.

The SAVE Act is relatively simple to understand: It requires that anyone wishing to vote provide documentation to prove they are a U.S. citizen. On an intuitive level, this might make sense, because noncitizens aren’t permitted to vote. But the bill is a solution in search of a problem. States already have methods of verifying citizenship, and illegal voting by noncitizens is very rare. The bill also threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters. Although some of the bill’s supporters may be sincere, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem committed a classic Kinsley gaffe on Friday, inadvertently revealing the truth of the administration’s push: It’s a ploy to help Republicans win elections.

“When it gets to Election Day,” she said at an event boosting the bill in Arizona, “we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Many states have enacted laws that require photo identification for voting. (Most election laws are made at the state level, though Congress has occasionally passed nationwide laws, such as the 2002 Help America Vote Act.) Studies have found that voter-ID laws have a relatively minor effect on turnout; they are generally popular with voters, but they also disproportionately affect older voters, poorer voters, and minority voters. Politicians who support them like to point out that people need ID to board a plane or buy alcohol—but neither of those is a constitutional right, and violations of alcohol laws are very common. The SAVE Act would go a step further, not only by mandating ID at the federal level but by requiring voters to present proof of citizenship, most likely a passport or a birth certificate. Noncitizen voting simply isn’t a major threat to election integrity, and it’s already punishable under existing laws. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that supports the law, maintains a very helpful database of election fraud. The database contains 99 instances of ineligible voting by noncitizens since 1982. For comparison, more than 150 million votes were cast for president in 2024 alone.

Experts warn that requiring proof of citizenship would shut many Americans out of the polls. Only about half of the population holds a passport. Not all Americans have access to their birth certificate, and even that would not be sufficient for, say, a woman who changed her name at marriage, who would also have to produce proof of marriage. The congressional scholar Norm Ornstein argues that given the cost of establishing proof, the SAVE Act is in effect “a poll tax, a parallel to what Jim Crow laws used to suppress black votes, which the Supreme Court ultimately outlawed.”

If the law passes, Votebeat’s Nathaniel Rakich reports, “there are serious questions about whether it’s even practically possible to implement” by the midterms. Among other problems, the law would require cross-checking state voter rolls against a federal database, also called SAVE (though in this case it stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). But ProPublica reports that the tool is a mess, often turning up inaccurate results.

All that said, the bill seems unlikely to pass. Republican Susan Collins of Maine last week became the 50th senator to back the bill, but because Democrats will filibuster, passing the bill requires 60 votes, which it doesn’t have. Some senators are demanding the end of the filibuster (or the introduction of a “talking filibuster”), but there doesn’t appear to be enough GOP support to make that happen.

Yet Trump doesn’t seem ready to accept defeat. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday. The president promised to issue an executive order, but he has no power to mandate voter-ID requirements—indeed, he has no control over elections, and a previous order requiring proof of citizenship to register has been partially blocked by federal courts. Trump insisted, however, that he has “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future.” (No one seems to know what he’s talking about, and keeping expectations low is probably wise. The legal proof will surely be coming right after his health-care plan and Infrastructure Week.)

The president may just be posturing, trying to get Republicans in the Senate to act. But he has shown little interest in stopping where his legal limitations end. And he’s testing other methods of subversion: He has tried to tell states when they can accept ballots and dictate what machines they use, and he recently called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections. Many of his actions seem motivated by a cynical calculus: Even if he loses the battle to enact the SAVE Act or put it into effect via executive order, he may be able to sow doubt about the results of the elections, which he can use if his party fares poorly in November. For his purposes of subverting elections, creating uncertainty may be nearly as effective as a real policy change.

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Today’s News

At least 12 Democratic lawmakers plan to boycott President Trump’s State of the Union address next week and instead attend a “People’s State of the Union” rally on the National Mall.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health director, as acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to people familiar with the matter. He will replace Jim O’Neill, who will be reportedly nominated to lead the National Science Foundation.
Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in Los Angeles in a landmark trial, in which Meta is accused of designing platforms to be addictive and harm children’s mental health. The case is the first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits; both Meta and YouTube, which is also named in the suit, deny the allegations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Harvard of the South … Of the West?

By Rose Horowitch

Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university’s chancellor had a new idea: What if Vanderbilt was also in San Francisco? Maybe it could become the Harvard of the West too.

Last month, Vanderbilt announced that it was acquiring the facilities of the financially insolvent California College of the Arts and would be converting the space into a new campus. Private universities have been experimenting with satellite campuses for decades. Typically, these outposts are either overseas or limited to a graduate program or two. The Vanderbilt expansion, set to open in 2027, will be different: It will include a full-blown, four-year undergraduate college, not in Abu Dhabi but in the San Francisco Design District. This new tactic, pioneered by Northeastern University a few years ago, is taking the satellite-campus concept to its logical extreme: the national-chain model of undergraduate education. If it works for Vanderbilt, other selective institutions are likely to follow—because no one really wants to be the Harvard of the South. Everyone wants to be Harvard. Perhaps the way for excellent regional schools to develop a national reputation is to set up shop around the nation.

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Censorship Comes for Stephen Colbert

2026-02-17T17:26:00-05:00

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show ends in May, and he’s in almost open warfare with his soon-to-be ex-bosses at CBS. Last night, he had planned to broadcast an interview with James Talarico, a member of the Texas state House who is running in a heated Democratic primary for United States Senate. But it was not to be.

At the start of his show, Colbert told viewers that CBS had barred him from airing the interview, citing threats from Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. (You may remember Carr as the guy who sounded like a cartoon mobster while trying to get Jimmy Kimmel fired—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—drawing a rebuke from Senator Ted Cruz.)

Colbert savaged CBS. He said that the network had told him not to talk about it, which he defied in dramatic fashion. “I want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen—please—I want to assure you, this decision is for purely financial reasons,” he joked, a sly reference to the rationale that CBS gave for ending his show. Colbert posted the interview on his show’s YouTube channel. CBS said in a statement that The Late Show “was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico. The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.”

I wrote in July that CBS’s leadership had lost the benefit of the doubt, and the network’s actions since its parent company’s merger with Skydance and the appointment of Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News have reinforced that. CBS deserves plenty of criticism for cowardice. But that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect to fear FCC action.

Last month, the FCC issued a notice about the equal-time rule, a century-old regulation that says that a broadcast station that provides time to one candidate must provide an equal forum to a rival. The rule has an exemption for “bona fide news”—basically, producers can decide what to cover in their programming, because anything else would constitute government interference in the free press. In 2006, the FCC determined that interviews on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno fit under the exemption even if they are not strictly news programming, a precedent that shows have relied on since.

But the new notice states that “the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption.” (Carr has not extended this reasoning to talk radio, which conservatives dominate.) This is not just bluster. Earlier this month, Fox News reported that the FCC was investigating ABC’s daytime talk show The View, which has become an important stop for politicians seeking to reach the show’s heavily female audience, for violating the equal-time rule. The reported object of Carr’s ire? An interview with one James Talarico.

The Talarico dustups are among several incidents in the past few days that show the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for censoring speech by both the press and ordinary citizens. One year ago, I wrote that Donald Trump and his allies were free-speech phonies who, having campaigned against censorship, were eager to impose it. The threat to First Amendment rights has gotten worse since then.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox reported on a retiree who used a publicly available email address to encourage an attorney at the Department of Homeland Security to have mercy on an asylum seeker. In response, DHS sent federal agents to the man’s door and demanded access to his Google accounts, using a tool called an administrative subpoena that doesn’t require a judge or grand jury to approve. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta in recent months have received “hundreds” of administrative subpoenas from DHS seeking access to information about the accounts of people who have criticized the government. (DHS told both papers that it was acting within its authority but didn’t give any detailed response.)

The goals of both DHS and the FCC in these cases are to intimidate critics and stifle dissent. This is staggering hypocrisy. During the presidential campaign, Trump accused the Biden administration of undermining free speech by asking—though not demanding—that social-media companies remove misinformation about COVID. On day one of his administration, Trump issued an executive order that charged, “Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” This is a good description of what Trump’s administration is doing now.

Some repression efforts fail. Last week, the federal district-court judge Richard Leon, a President George W. Bush appointee, temporarily blocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from punishing Senator Mark Kelly, a Navy veteran, for a video in which he and other members of Congress remind current service members that they can and should refuse illegal orders. “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” Leon wrote.

The ruling is a welcome defense of Americans’ freedoms, but it can’t reverse all of the damage. Kelly is unusually well positioned to fight back and take the administration to court. Not every would-be critic is. And censorship, once established by a president, has ways of spreading its tendrils to other institutions. At one state university in Texas, for example, a philosophy professor was forced to remove passages of Plato from his syllabus because of new policies passed by governor-appointed regents, and an art exhibition critical of ICE was abruptly canceled at another Texas university.

These attacks are clearly partisan: They all target speech by critics of the president, his party, or his policies. But they should be scary even if you feel that Colbert doesn’t deserve a news exemption, The View is too liberal, or Kelly was out of line. Crackdowns on speech by prominent figures pave a way for the government to regulate speech more broadly, which should be concerning for people of any political leaning because the party and people in power can change.

During a Senate hearing last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, of being responsible for the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good because he supported protests. Johnson began, “Did you ever encourage people to go out there and exercise the First—”

“I freely admit being in favor of the First Amendment,” Ellison shot back. This position is apparently not as common among elected officials as you might hope.

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Today’s News

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a civil-rights leader and two-time Democratic presidential candidate who, in 1984, became the first Black man to mount a nationwide campaign for the White House, died today at 84.
Iran’s foreign minister said American and Iranian officials made “good progress” during indirect talks in Geneva, and that they had agreed to exchange draft proposals for a potential deal. According to Iranian officials, Iran has indicated that it would be open to limiting its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
Democrats sent a counteroffer to Republicans and the White House yesterday to fund the Department of Homeland Security as the partial government shutdown entered its third day. President Trump said he will negotiate with Democrats, but Republicans oppose many of the demands to restrict ICE operations.

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Evening Read

John Chillingworth / Hulton Archive / Getty

American Kids Used to Eat Everything

By Olga Khazan

The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.

To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”

If these don’t sound like typical “kid foods,” that’s because they aren’t, and weren’t. “Kid food,” as a category, is a recent invention.

Read the full article.

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The ‘You Can’t Fire Me—I Quit’ Presidency

2026-02-12T18:25:00-05:00

After the administration announced the expansion of its law-enforcement surge in Minnesota early this year, calling it the “largest DHS operation ever,” Donald Trump laid out a series of stinging critiques of the state, which he said had an “incompetent governor,” a huge welfare-fraud problem, high crime, and a corrupt voting system. “What a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed,” he said.

Today, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan announced the effective end to the mission, promising a “significant drawdown” over the coming week. “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude,” Homan said. The announcement should be treated skeptically. When Trump ousted the Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino last month, the administration softened its tone but maintained a large and heavy-handed presence in Minneapolis. But Trump has good reasons to back down: The operation has been a political and moral disaster. Officers shot and killed two American citizens, and public opinion has turned against it.

The mission can hardly be said to have succeeded on Trump’s terms, either. Tim Walz remains governor, though he is not running for reelection. The state has refused to hand over voter rolls that the Justice Department tried to grab as a condition of a pullout. Minneapolis has seen a significant drop in crime in recent years, but the surge has arguably done more harm than good on that front: As Senator Amy Klobuchar noted last month, two of the city’s three January homicides were committed by federal agents. Meanwhile, the federal prosecutor who oversaw the welfare-fraud investigation resigned in protest of Trump-administration decisions (and is now representing a journalist whom the administration charged with dubious crimes).

Trump’s initial argument about the situation in Minnesota was that it was so dire, it required uniquely forceful action. Yet he’s now ready to pull back without achieving any of the goals he laid out. For another president, sending the agents home could be an acknowledgment of rethinking that calculus or reckoning with mistakes made. But that’s not how Trump has framed the decision. “We’re pulling out because we’ve done a great job there,” Trump told NBC News last week, going on to insult Minnesota’s governor and Minneapolis’s mayor. This fits into a pattern of his second term. The president announces a big push; it fails to achieve its goals and is roundly rejected by the people he claims it will benefit; he gives up in a huff. Trump’s mantra is You can’t fire me—I quit!

When Trump began deploying the National Guard to liberal cities such as Chicago and Portland in Democratic-led states around the country, he insisted that it was necessary to fight crime—even though crime was already dropping sharply, and National Guard troops aren’t trained in law enforcement and have limits on what they can do. (The president also said that he wanted to use cities as “training grounds for our military.”)

Because state leaders opposed the deployments, Trump had to federalize the National Guard, but the states challenged that in court. In December, the Supreme Court issued a ruling limiting the president’s ability to nationalize the National Guard in Illinois, which used the same rationale he’d employed elsewhere. A spokesperson promised that the administration would “continue working day in and day out to safeguard the American public,” but apparently Trump decided that didn’t require the National Guard after all. Rather than pursue other possible legal avenues, the White House quietly dropped the matter, pulling all federalized troops from cities.

This isn’t just about armed federal agents in the streets, though. As I wrote earlier this month, Trump insisted that he had big plans for the Kennedy Center, the capital’s premier performing-arts hall, when he embarked on an unprecedented takeover, removing much of the center’s board, pushing out its leaders, and slapping his own name on it. But now, with those efforts producing a barren schedule and empty chairs, Trump appears to just be giving up. He has announced that the Kennedy Center will close for two years starting in July, and he’s been vague about what will happen during the closure.

These examples capture the haphazard and capricious nature of Trump’s presidency. On the one hand, he has insisted in each case that the circumstances are so urgent or dangerous that they require unprecedented action and assertions of federal power. Yet once he encounters pushback, he decides that the problems are not so serious that they require sustained commitment or a real attempt to defend them. Instead, he just walks away.

Trump is no more steadfast in foreign affairs. During the run-up to the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize announcement, Trump portrayed himself as a diplomat par excellence, the man who had ended six—no, seven—no, eight wars. But his frustrations with the difficulty of actually doing diplomacy kept showing through. In spring of last year and then again in the summer, Trump engaged in perfunctory work to broker negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, but as soon as they foundered on Russian intractability, he threw up his hands and said he wouldn’t bother.

Now he seems to have abandoned his quest to be seen as a peacemaker altogether. After kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last month, he began demanding control of Greenland. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump ranted to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

For understandable reasons, that approach was not popular with anyone: not with Denmark, of which Greenland is a part; not with Greenlanders; not with European allies; and not with the American people, who remain unconvinced of the need for annexation. So Trump did what came naturally—he gave up, accepted what was effectively already the status quo, and said that it was what he’d wanted all along.

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Today’s News

Senate Democrats blocked a Republican funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security over immigration-enforcement limits, making a shutdown likely to begin on Saturday morning.
A federal judge ruled that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had unconstitutionally retaliated against Senator Mark Kelly over a video urging service members to refuse illegal orders. The ruling, which followed a grand jury’s refusal to indict, blocked the Trump administration’s effort to punish the Arizona Democrat.
Greenhouse gases will no longer be regulated by the federal government, according to an announcement by President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Jake Lundberg explores a forceful 19th-century essay on the rise of the slaveholding oligarchy that asked: “Where will it end?”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Source: CSA Images / Getty.

The Tide Goes Out on Youth Gender Medicine

By Helen Lewis

As the shaky evidence base for youth gender medicine has become better known, activists have retreated to an argument from authority. Never mind the Cass Report, whose findings resulted in the closure of Britain’s leading youth gender clinic. Never mind the study by a leading American practitioner showing that the treatments she championed did not improve minors’ mental health. Never mind reports that some adolescents were being put on a medical pathway after only a single clinic visit. For advocates, the important thing to remember was that “gender-affirming care” for minors—puberty blockers and hormones, plus surgery in rare cases—was endorsed by all of the major American medical associations.

Read the full article.

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Howard Lutnick’s Epstein Story Doesn’t Make Any Sense

2026-02-11T18:11:00-05:00

“I have nothing to hide. Absolutely nothing,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate committee yesterday. Perhaps that’s true—but given his recent history, don’t bet on it.

During a podcast interview this past fall, Lutnick talked about an unsettling encounter he and his wife had with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who used to be his next-door neighbor, in 2005. After Epstein offered them a house tour and showed them his infamous massage table, Lutnick recalled, he was creeped out and left. “My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he said. “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business, or even philanthropy.”

Only that wasn’t true at all. Documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department show repeated, if more cordial than chummy, conversation between the two men, as well as some shared business dealings. That’s okay, you might think—they never hung out socially again. Right? He seemed to confirm that, recently telling The New York Times, “I spent zero time with him.”

Well, about that: Yesterday, testifying before Congress, Lutnick reiterated, “I barely had anything to do with that person.” Then he admitted to having visited Epstein’s private island in 2012.

“I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick said. “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple; they were there as well, with their children. And we had lunch on the island. That is true. For an hour. And we left with all of my children, with my nannies, with my wife.”

Lutnick seems understandably eager to show that he was not involved in sexual misconduct, and as Senator Chris Van Hollen noted, there is no evidence that he was. But he has no answer for his misleading statements about his dealings with Epstein, and his previous lies make it harder to believe him now. So much for having nothing to hide.

The Trump administration has always been tied to the Epstein scandal—the president himself was once a close friend of Epstein’s—but these new details drag his allies still further into the spotlight. Even before his testimony, Lutnick was facing calls to resign from Democrats as well as from renegade Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The secretary, whose penchant for putting his foot in his mouth was already well established, seems to have held on to his job this long only because he is personally friendly with Donald Trump and because the president refuses to give his political adversaries satisfaction by firing anyone. (This stands in contrast to many other organizations and institutions that have been eager to create distance from Epstein by separating themselves from individuals who were connected to him.)

But Lutnick isn’t the only top Trump aide to come up in the new tranche of documents. Navy Secretary John Phelan, a reported billionaire Trump donor who was appointed despite lacking any military or naval experience, was listed as a passenger on flights between London and New York on Epstein’s private plane in 2006. (The flights took place before Epstein was first indicted later that year; Phelan has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has not commented on the revelations.)

One reason the Epstein files have created such a stir is that they have revealed the elaborate social and financial ties among so many people in positions of power. It’s not that most or even many of the big names who appear in them were pedophiles or sexual predators, but rather that their dealings with him demonstrate that there’s a wealthy, powerful, globe-trotting club, and the rest of us ain’t in it. Lutnick inadvertently reinforced this image with his mentions of his “nannies,” plural. These glaring markers of privilege are what Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, was talking about this past weekend when he called the Trump administration “a government of, by, and for the ultrarich. It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country.”

The defense that people connected to Epstein—from the billionaire financier Lutnick to the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and his wife—have offered is that they didn’t grasp Epstein’s abuses when they socialized with him and were appalled once they did. One problem is that this is sometimes demonstrably false: Lutnick visited the island four years after Epstein’s conviction for sex crimes, and emails show Chomsky offering Epstein public-relations advice after accusations became public.

Another problem is that many of them should have known. You don’t have to take my word for it. Take Trump’s. In 2019, he declared his surprise at the Epstein allegations: “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.” But the Palm Beach police chief at the time recalled that Trump commended him in July 2006, when charges first became public. “Thank goodness you’re stopping him; everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump said, as reported by Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald.

(Trump may have had his suspicions for some time. In 2002, he told New York that Epstein is “a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”)

The Epstein revelations are starting to sink in for members of Congress. “Well, initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, told NewsNation. (One reason Lummis may be willing to say so is that she is retiring, which insulates her from Trump’s wrath.)

These revelations about Trump’s close allies could affect the GOP’s electoral chances if enough voters become aware of them, but at the same time that members of the Trump administration are popping up in the newly released files, coverage in conservative media outlets has dropped significantly, CNN’s Aaron Blake reports. The result is that Democratic voters, who already dislike and distrust the president, are hearing a great deal about Epstein, but Republican ones, who might be swayed, are not. When MAGA pundits such as Dan Bongino talked about a media cover-up of the Epstein scandal, they were onto something—they were just wrong about the media outlets in question.

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Today’s News

Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before Congress amid questioning over the Justice Department’s release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein that revealed sensitive victim information; Bondi defended the department’s actions.
Federal officials offered conflicting explanations for an overnight closure of airspace over El Paso, Texas, that briefly grounded flights before it ended early today. The Federal Aviation Administration initially cited “special security reasons” when it ordered what was originally supposed to be a 10-day halt; a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News that the stoppage was prompted because the U.S. military had shot down a party balloon that it had suspected was a cartel drone.
The House is set to vote to overturn President Trump’s tariffs on Canada after several Republicans broke with party leaders to allow Democrats to advance the measure.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions

By Ross Andersen

To live in time is to wonder what will happen next. In every human society, there are people who obsess over the world’s patterns to predict the future. In antiquity, they told kings which stars would appear at nightfall. Today they build the quantitative models that nudge governments into opening spigots of capital. They pick winners on Wall Street. They estimate the likelihood of earthquakes for insurance companies. They tell commodities traders at hedge funds about the next month’s weather.

For years, some elite forecasters have been competing against one another in tournaments where they answer questions about events that will happen—or not—in the coming months or years. The questions span diverse subject matter because they’re meant to measure general forecasting ability, not narrow expertise. Players may be asked whether a coup will occur in an unstable country, or to project the future deforestation rate in some part of the Amazon. They may be asked how many songs from a forthcoming Taylor Swift album will top the streaming charts. The forecaster who makes the most accurate predictions, as early as possible, can earn a cash prize and, perhaps more important, the esteem of the world’s most talented seers.

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When the Two Sides of the Culture War Meet

2026-02-09T15:09:00-05:00

Last night, during Super Bowl halftime, I watched a mustachioed entertainer put on a show that celebrated working-class values, the pleasures of a good party, and the virtues of marriage, with a side serving of grievance against elites. This wasn’t Bad Bunny’s performance—it was the alternative performance put on by Turning Point USA, led by Kid Rock. Despite the best efforts of the organizers to stoke controversy, I couldn’t help but notice how much overlap there was between its message and the one the Puerto Rican superstar delivered in Santa Clara.

As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber writes, Bad Bunny’s show was unifying rather than divisive, but it did have a political message: that working hard, playing hard, and loving America aren’t values that belong to any political group or linguistic heritage. Although Turning Point’s show was intended to offer a radical contrast, the many thematic convergences only strengthened that argument.

Above all, the Turning Point show was boring and dour. It kicked off with a distorted-electric-guitar rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a Jimi Hendrix pastiche shorn of all the irony and pathos of the famous version at Woodstock. Brantley Gilbert played “Real American,” a bland piece of nu-metal/country patriotic kitsch, and “Dirt Road Anthem,” a paean to drunk driving. Gabby Barrett, a former American Idol third-place winner, sang a kiss-off to a cheater and then a love song to “one of the good ones.”

More overtly political, at least in theory, was Lee Brice’s “Drinking Class.” “I’m a member of a blue-collar crowd / They can never, no, they can’t keep us down,” he sang. “Monday through Friday, man, we bust our backs.” This is a common sentiment in contemporary country music, but it is not, despite what Brice might believe, unique to white conservatives. The New York Times wrote that Bad Bunny “was summoning a Latin heritage across generations, one that recognized hard work—cane-cutting, electric-grid repairs—alongside the good times workers sweated to earn.”

These kinds of echoes were all over the two shows. Kid Rock extolled marriage, singing, “You can always put a diamond on her hand / ’til you can’t,” and Charlie Kirk, the assassinated founder of Turning Point, was heard encouraging marriage in an old audio clip; Bad Bunny hosted an actual wedding during his performance. Both shows used “real” instruments as signifiers of authenticity—workmanlike performances on guitars and drum kits for the Turning Point set (except from Kid Rock, who appeared to be lip-synching his 1999 hit “Bawitdaba”); a brass salsa band and the characteristic Puerto Rican cuatro during Bad Bunny’s.

“We fly that red, white, blue, high, waving all across the land,” Gilbert sang. Bad Bunny flew that red, white, and blue too, along with flags from Puerto Rico and other countries in North and South America, declaring, “God bless America.” The fact that the patriotism he displayed was more complicated and nuanced that Gilbert’s does not make it any less genuine. Bad Bunny even danced on top of a pickup truck, a visual that would have worked perfectly for any of the Turning Point performers if they hadn’t been playing on a darkened, austere soundstage.

Each show also had its complaints about mistreatment by elites, but not all grievances are equally legitimate. During “El Apagón,” Bad Bunny performed atop imitation power poles topped with sparking transformers—a symbol of Puerto Rico’s fragile power grid, and of the political corruption and imperial neglect that let it get that way. But whereas the Jumbotron behind Bad Bunny at Levi’s Stadium declared The only thing more powerful than hate is love, Brice delivered swipes at liberals and trans people in a new song called “Country Nowadays,” which nevertheless complained that “because I have my morals and my small-town point of view / You assume that you don’t like me means that I don’t like you too.” Could that be because of your lyrics?

This unearned sense of grievance is what animated the backlash to Bad Bunny’s performance and inspired Turning Point’s alternative show. Right-wing pundits charged that Bad Bunny’s message would be divisive (it wasn’t) or that he was an immigrant (he’s not). President Trump ranted about the show on Truth Social, writing that it was “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America,” adding that “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting.” Laura Loomer was more straightforward in her condemnation: “This isn’t White enough for me,” she posted on X.

If the people participating in the Bad Bunny backlash slowed down and looked a little closer, they might find that they actually have a great many values in common with him. (Well, maybe not Loomer. Some Bad Bunny critics are just bigoted.) This might provide the grounds for just the sort of understanding and reconciliation that Brice claims to want. Other Americans will notice, however, how familiar and relatable Bad Bunny’s ethos was, even if they couldn’t understand his Spanish-language lyrics.

Almost as important as the message of Bad Bunny’s show was the exuberance with which he conveyed it: Living these American values could be joyful, he suggested. It was, as Spencer wrote, a performance “rooted in the good old-fashioned pleasure principle.” Meanwhile, the Turning Point musicians sang about having a good time, but they didn’t appear to be having a good time. If right-wing leaders wonder why MAGA has struggled to overtake the country’s cultural establishment, they might start with the very different ways the two shows framed shared values.

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America Is Losing the Facts That Hold It Together

2026-02-05T17:23:00-05:00

The CIA World Factbook occupies a special place in the memories of elder Millennials like me. It was an enormous compendium of essential facts about every country around the world, carefully collected from across the federal government. This felt especially precious when the World Factbook went online in 1997 (it had previously been a classified internal publication printed on paper, then a declassified print resource), a time when the internet still felt new and unsettled. Unlike many other pages on the World Wide Web, it was reliable enough that you could even get away with citing it in schoolwork. And there was a special thrill in the idea that the CIA, a famously secretive organization, was the one providing it to you.

Memories are now the only place the World Factbook resides. In a post online yesterday, the agency noted that the site “has sunset,” though it provided no explanation for why. (The agency did not immediately reply to my inquiry about why, nor has it replied to other outlets.) The Associated Press noted that the move “follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”

The demise of the World Factbook is part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration. This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans. “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it … in person or virtually,” the CIA wrote in the valedictory post. Left unsaid: You’re on your own to figure it out now.

If the World Factbook was indeed shut down because it didn’t meet Ratcliffe’s standard for core CIA functions, that reflects the Trump administration’s impoverished view of the government’s role. The World Factbook was a public service that helped Americans and others around the globe be informed, created a positive association with a shadowy agency, and spread U.S. soft power by providing a useful service free to all. I’ve been unable to determine how much it cost the government to maintain, but there’s no reason to think it would be substantive.

At least the raw information the World Factbook collected is available elsewhere (and the current version of the Factbook is available on the Internet Archive). The same is not true of some of the other casualties in the war on information, which have fallen victim to both ideology and incompetence. The executive branch has removed data from its websites, such as those of the CDC, the Census Bureau, and other departments, or removed the webpages that hosted them. Almost 3,400 data sets were removed from Data.gov in the first month of Trump’s term alone. At the start of the second Trump administration, some nongovernmental bodies worked to preserve government data by scraping information from existing sources. That’s valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help with future data—or data that never get collected in the first place.

As the University of Michigan law professors Samuel R. Bagenstos and Ellen D. Katz write in a new paper, “The Trump Administration has scrapped existing obligations to collect and report racial, ethnic and gender-based data involving law enforcement, education, federal contracts, public health, environmental justice, and social research.” In some cases, the administration has simply stopped collecting information. In others, it has significantly changed what data it collects, especially information related to gender identity and race, because of executive orders from the president.

These shifts may sound abstract, but changes in federal data-collecting can have direct impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. As NOTUS reported this week, data erasure means it’s harder to disseminate word about opioid drugs, feed hungry Americans, assess U.S. schools, and understand changes in prices. After the CDC’s entire Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System staff was placed on administrative leave in April, maternal-mortality data weren’t collected for months. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose commissioner Trump fired last summer, did not report monthly jobs data for October, because of the fall government shutdown—the first time in 77 years that an unemployment rate was not released.

The war on information is perhaps even more dangerous than the war on truth. When people can see evidence that obviously contradicts what the administration is saying, they’re primed to disbelieve the officials. (Case in point: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that only 22 percent of people believe that Alex Pretti’s shooting was justified.) But democracy requires voters having access to accurate and shared information so that they can assess the claims that the government makes. This is what the Trump administration is undermining. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone was entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. Now it’s not clear that anyone is entitled to any facts at all.

Related:

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Today’s News

The Trump administration issued a rule making it easier to discipline and potentially fire about 50,000 senior federal workers by reducing long-standing job protections.
The New START treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, ending decades-long limits on deployed nuclear warheads. No replacement talks are under way, and officials and experts warn that the lapse could fuel a new nuclear arms race.
The Trump administration is set to launch TrumpRx.gov, a website designed to connect Americans with drugmakers to buy prescription medicines directly and, according to the White House, at lower costs.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: A new iron curtain now separates American dance and Russian dance, bringing an abrupt end to a rich dialogue that spanned centuries, Sara Krolewski writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Kathryn Riley / Getty; Winslow Townson / Getty.

Mike Vrabel Is Redefining NFL Coaching

By Sally Jenkins

The New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel leads from his ventricles—not from shallow-chested sentiment but from the pump action of his brawny heart, out of which blood occasionally makes its way to spurt from a split lip after a head bump from one of his players. During the team’s playoff run, the defensive tackle Milton Williams gave Vrabel a celebratory helmet to the mouth. “I forgot Vrabes ain’t got no helmet on,” Williams said, to which Vrabel, a former linebacking great, replied, “I’ve been hit harder than that.”

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Pat Thomas

Read. Bekah Waalkes recommends seven books to read when you don’t have time to read.

Watch. The show Fallout (out now on Amazon Prime) blows up all expectations about a quintessential American genre, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

In Tuesday’s edition of this newsletter, I wrote about how President Trump was ramping up his attacks on the integrity of the midterm elections. I cited the attorney Bob Bauer’s concern that Trump might use ICE to interfere with polling locations. After we’d sent the newsletter, I saw a clip of Steve Bannon saying, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” You don’t need to take his statement literally—ICE has about 22,000 agents, and the country has had some 100,000 polling places in recent cycles—but this comment from an influential MAGA voice is another reason to take the threats to fair elections seriously.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump’s New Threats to American Elections

2026-02-03T17:48:00-05:00

Updated 10:00 a.m. on February 4, 2026

With nine months to go until the midterm elections, President Trump’s campaign to subvert them is escalating. His administration has recently taken a series of steps that have election officials, observers, and administrators deeply and rightfully concerned about the prospects for improper interference with the election process.

In October, I published an in-depth article on how the president could interfere (and already was interfering) with the midterm elections. Since then, the reasons for worry have become more urgent. In the past two weeks, the FBI conducted a search in a major Democratic county in a swing state, in service of debunked theories about fraud in the 2020 election; the Justice Department attempted to extort voter rolls from another Democratic state under threat of armed occupation; and the president floated plans to “nationalize” elections. Trump has tried to subvert an election before, but these efforts are earlier, more organized, and—crucially—employing the power of the federal government to help him achieve his personal political goals.

Yesterday, Trump spoke with Dan Bongino, the podcaster turned FBI deputy director turned podcaster, and called for his party to seize control of voting in states. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” Trump said, reprising an oft-used and incorrect claim. (Voting by noncitizens is rare and does not amount to enough to swing elections.) “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over’—we should take over the voting in at least, many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win.”

The executive branch has no constitutional or statutory role in states’ election administration, so the call for “nationalization” is an assertion of power that the federal government does not have, a hallmark of other recent White House ploys. Trump’s declaration that “Republicans” could do it may be a suggestion that Congress take action, but it also points to the partisan aims of his attack.

Trump’s efforts to prove that he won in 2020 are all premised on false claims, yet he continues to try to drum up evidence for a conclusion he’s already reached. “You’re gonna see something in Georgia,” he told Bongino, referring to a search this past Wednesday at the Fulton County election center, in Atlanta, where agents looked for records including ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls from the 2020 election. Immediately after that election, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that he won Georgia, and when his legal efforts to challenge the result fell short, he called the Republican secretary of state and asked him to “find” almost 12,000 votes. (Trump and some associates were charged with racketeering in Fulton County as a result, but the case was dismissed last year.) The search is a stunning intrusion into local election administration. “It’s a five-alarm fire,” as one Arizona Republican election official told my colleagues Sarah Fitzpatrick and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez.

Since the search, more troubling information has emerged. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has no obvious role in the FBI or domestic-election oversight but has been a proponent of bogus fraud claims about the 2020 election, was present for the operation, which she said in a letter to Congress was at Trump’s behest. The New York Times reports that Gabbard met with some of the FBI officers the following day and put Trump on speakerphone for a chat with them—a serious departure from normal practice, and a move that emphasizes the appearance of inappropriate pressure: a federal law-enforcement agency acting as a political agent of the president in a nakedly partisan operation. (Bongino’s own return to partisan podcasting, just weeks after leaving his post as No. 2 at the FBI, demonstrates how politics has infected the bureau.)

As Trump continues to clash with local officials in Minnesota, he also claims that he was cheated out of votes there. “I feel that I won Minnesota—I think I won it all three times,” he said. “I won it all three times, in my opinion.” On January 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz demanding that the state turn over its voter rolls to the Justice Department as a condition of the federal government ending its violent crackdown in Minneapolis. Since May 2025, the DOJ has ordered 44 states and the District of Columbia to hand over voter rolls, though it has no statutory right to them. Many states, including Minnesota, have resisted.

Bob Bauer, a veteran Democratic election lawyer, argues that although Bondi’s letter appears to yoke together two unrelated questions—election integrity and immigration enforcement—the Trump administration may not see them as separate, but rather as an opening to interfering with elections using federal agents. “The administration’s lawyers might view the potential deployment of ICE as an option allowing for the fielding of what one advocate describes as ‘essentially an army’ charged with ensuring election security through immigration law enforcement,” he wrote this week.

As bleak as these developments are, a few hopeful signs for the midterms have emerged. First, Trump has been publicly setting expectations for poor results for Republicans, a sign that he may be resigning himself somewhat to a loss. Second, the president’s attempt to force gerrymanders in GOP-controlled states, in order to help preserve the House majority, seems to be ending up as basically a wash, after Democrat-controlled states responded in kind. Third, an election is at greatest danger of interference when the margin of victory is narrow, and Americans’ growing disapproval of the president’s handling of immigration and the economy has buoyed Democrats on the generic ballot for Congress. An old joke goes that the election administrator’s prayer is, “Lord, let this election not be close.” Even as Trump tries to tamper with elections, his actions in office make it more likely that the prayer is answered.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton reached a deal with House Republicans to testify before the House Oversight Committee later this month about Jeffrey Epstein, avoiding potential contempt of Congress charges. The closed-door interviews are scheduled for late February.
The House passed a set of spending bills today that will reopen the government. The bill now goes to President Trump to sign and triggers a 10-day window for bipartisan negotiations about how ICE conducts immigration raids.
Trump met privately at the White House with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, their first face-to-face meeting after months of public clashes that escalated following a recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Problem With Using AI in Your Personal Life

By Dan Brooks

More and more, large language models are relieving people of the burden of reading and writing, in school and at work but also in group chats and email exchanges with friends. In many areas, guidelines are emerging: Schools are making policies on AI use by students, and courts are trying to settle the law about AI and intellectual property. In friendship and other interpersonal uses, however, AI is still the Wild West. We have tacit rules about which movies you wait to see with your roommate and who gets invited to the lake house, but we have yet to settle anything comparable regarding, for example, whether you should use ChatGPT to reply to somebody’s Christmas letter. That seems like an oversight.

Read the full article.

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Greg Lovett / Palm Beach Post / USA Today / Reuters

Take a look. It’s so cold in Florida that iguanas are falling out of trees. Alan Taylor compiled photos of trappers gathering the cold-stunned invasive reptiles by the thousands.

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Play our daily crossword.

This article originally stated that the federal government has no constitutional or statutory role in states' election administration; in fact, the executive branch has no such role.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump Made a Bad Bet on the Kennedy Center

2026-02-02T18:32:00-05:00

Updated 9:38 a.m. on February 4, 2026

One year ago, President Trump conducted a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, the venerable Washington, D.C., performing-arts institution. The president said he had never attended a show there, but he was confident that he alone knew what the center needed.

Last night, Trump delivered an implicit admission of defeat, announcing that the center will close on July 4 for two years. Trump brought the same theory to the Kennedy Center that he does to most of his moves: He believes that he knows better than the experts, and that a “silent majority” actually supports his disruptions. That certainty seems to have led him to a bad bet here.

“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “The temporary closure will produce a much faster and higher quality result!”

If you’ve been paying attention, this explanation will be perplexing. In October, Trump posted that “Many major improvements” were under way at the center—including, bafflingly, the addition of marble armrests on chairs—but that “We are remaining fully open during construction, renovation, and beautification.” (For the record, the Kennedy Center underwent a $250 million expansion just seven years ago.)

In December, when Trump added his name to the building’s facade—in violation of statute and grammar—he boasted, “We saved the building. The building was in such bad shape, both physically, financially and every other way. And now it’s very solid, very strong.” Just a month ago he added, “A year ago it was in a state of financial and physical collapse. Wait until you see it a year from now!!! Like our Country, itself, it will rise from the ashes.”

Now Trump is saying that a year from now the center will be closed and dark. Trump’s contradictory statements and the absence of an independent board or any notification to Congress make these claims of a building in need of repair unverifiable at best, and most likely nonsense. (He also hasn’t said anything about how he would pay for this renovation.) A more plausible reason for the closing is that under Trump, the Kennedy Center can’t hold on to staff, artists, or audiences.

When Trump took over, he fired Deborah Rutter, the respected administrator who was the center’s president, and replaced her with Richard Grenell, a political bagman who had previously been deployed as acting director of national intelligence, ambassador to Germany, and envoy to Venezuela, but who had no arts experience. (To be fair, he had little or no qualifications for most of those jobs.) Other staff haven’t stuck around either. “Almost every head of programming has resigned or been dismissed,” The Washington Post notes.

The latest of these was Kevin Couch, the new head of programming, who quit less than two weeks after his hiring was announced. One can imagine the job would be no picnic. In recent weeks, the composer Philip Glass yanked a new symphony commissioned by the center. The opera singer Renée Fleming also canceled two performances. The Washington National Opera announced that it was departing the center. The jazz musician Chuck Redd canceled a long-running Christmas Eve concert. Grenell’s threat to sue Redd for $1 million is unlikely to make artists more eager to book shows.

Grenell has accused artists of politicizing the center. “The left is boycotting the Arts because Trump is supporting the Arts,” he posted on X. “The Arts are for everyone—and the Left is mad about it.” But this statement has it all backwards. Trump grabbed unprecedented presidential control and politicized his own involvement in the arts, promising to use his leadership of the Kennedy Center to vanquish leftist culture. One artist who chose to play, the folk guitarist Yasmin Williams, said that an organized group attended and heckled her.

Given the hollowing out of the schedule and Trump’s unpopularity in Washington, ticket and subscription-package sales have fallen steeply. The Washington Post found that since September, “43 percent of tickets remained unsold for the typical production. That means that, at most, 57 percent of tickets were sold for the typical production.” (Some of those tickets may have been given for free.) For comparison, 93 percent of tickets were sold or given for free in fall 2024. One of Grenell’s dictates was that the center would book only shows that broke even or were profitable, yet instead the center is driving patrons away. CNN reports that the Kennedy Center wasn’t even able to book performances for next season. Closing the doors for two years just makes official what was already happening.

Trump believed that if he grabbed the Kennedy Center’s reins and started booking shows that conformed to his taste—and to that of some of his friends and MAGA fans—the venue would be wildly popular. It turns out, though, that a 79-year-old New York–born billionaire whose tastes run to gilded accents and kitschy musicals isn’t a good proxy for either the general population or arts patrons in Washington. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber recently wrote, Trump’s term dawned with expectations of a huge cultural shift. Instead, popular culture has remained stubbornly indifferent to MAGA aesthetics.

Trump keeps making a version of this error. His first term was a series of overreaches, all confidently executed in the belief that the silent majority would back him. Instead, he lost in 2020. His second-term win renewed his overconfidence. Now he believes that because many Americans wanted tighter border security, they will also support violent crackdowns in the streets of American cities; instead, his immigration approval keeps sinking. He believes that because he won the election in part on his promises to fix the economy, Americans are willing to tolerate high inflation; instead, polls show that voters’ confidence in the future is declining.

The closure of the center also fits into another pattern: As I wrote last week, Trump has proved adept at destroying things but shows little interest in building them back up. Trump’s previous predictions for the Kennedy Center haven’t borne out, so some skepticism is warranted now. Even if the physical overhaul succeeds, the center will still have the same problems of audience, artists, and staff when it’s done—only in a gaudier space. In effect, Trump appears to have graffitied his name on an empty shell. “I am doing the same thing to the United States of America, but only on a ‘slightly’ larger scale!” he wrote in an October post about the center’s makeover. This time around, his harshest critics might be the first ones to agree.

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Today’s News

Fulton County, Georgia, plans to sue the FBI and the Justice Department over last week’s seizure of 2020 election records, arguing that the search warrant was improper and that agents took original ballots and voter rolls without proper custody procedures.
The government is likely to remain partially shut down until at least tomorrow, when the House is expected to vote on a funding package. Most Democrats are opposed and say they will not help pass the bill without additional restrictions on immigration enforcement.
Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat, scored a major upset by winning a Texas state-Senate special election on Saturday in a deep-red district near Fort Worth that Trump had carried by 17 points.

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The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores stories on the upside of not fitting in.

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Evening Read

Peter Marlowe / Magnum

The Father-Daughter Divide

By Isabel Woodford

Growing up, Melissa Shultz sometimes felt like she had two fathers. One version of her dad, she told me, was playful and quick to laugh. He was a compelling storyteller who helped shape her career as a writer, and he gave great bear hugs. He often bought her small gifts: a pink “princess” phone when she was a teen, toys for her sons when she became a mom. Some of their most intimate moments came when she cut his hair; it was, she said, “a way to be close without talking.” He was there for her in hard times, too. When her engagement ended, he helped pack her things and drove her home.

But she told me their relationship could also be turbulent. The other version of her father was “dark” and would “get so angry” that he seemed to lose control. He would freeze her out for months at a time if she challenged him. He’d call her names, even in front of her own kids. He died when she was in her 30s, and she grieved intensely, though she doubted whether they ever fully understood each other. Now in her 60s, Shultz told me she still mourns the relationship.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Kevin Winter / Getty

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This article originally misstated Deborah Rutter’s role at the Kennedy Center.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump Shrugs Off the Ilhan Omar Attack

2026-01-29T17:09:00-05:00

The attack on Representative Ilhan Omar on Tuesday was horrifying but depressingly predictable. Not only has the country seen a recent spree of political violence, but Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, has also been a frequent target of death threats.

The suspect, whom police have identified as Anthony Kazmierczak, was arrested after he squirted a combination of apple-cider vinegar and water at Omar during a town hall in Minneapolis, according to court documents. She was apparently not injured in the attack and continued to speak for 25 minutes before being medically screened. Kazmierczak has a long rap sheet, and he also has a long record of social-media posts that support right-wing causes and President Trump. His brother told The Independent that Kazmierczak frequently complained about Somali immigrants and about Omar in particular, who was born in Somalia before immigrating and becoming an American citizen. Court documents allege that he once said someone “should kill that bitch.”

Kazmierczak’s alleged animosity toward Omar didn’t come out of nowhere. A chorus on the right, led by Trump, has worked for years to villainize her. When ABC News reached Trump on Tuesday night, he said that he hadn’t seen the footage of the attack but then baselessly claimed that Omar had staged the incident. “I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud,” he said. “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”

For a guy who claims not to think about Omar, Trump sure seems obsessed with her. Just a few hours earlier, at a speech in Iowa, Trump had been talking about her. “She comes from a country that’s a disaster,” he said. “It’s considered, I think, the worst. It’s not even a country.” He has sought to make her the face of Somali immigration, usually invoking her name when he mentions the fraud rings involving Somali immigrants in Minnesota. (Omar has no known connection to the criminal investigations.) Trump has mentioned her at least 10 times this month alone on Truth Social, where he’s labeled her “disgusting,” called her a “fake ‘Congresswoman,’” and alleged that she married her brother, a long-running claim that fact-checkers have noted is baseless. He said last week that she should be investigated for “Political Crimes,” a chillingly authoritarian phrase, and even found time to rant about her during his speech at the World Economic Forum.

In fact, Trump helped turn Omar into a national figure in 2019, shortly after she entered Congress. “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe,” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he wrote on social media in July of that year. The comment was widely interpreted as a swipe at Omar (among others)—a theory that Trump effectively confirmed a few days later when he complained about her personally, inciting a rally crowd to chant “Send her back!”

In other words, Trump is a major driver of the visceral anger toward Omar. He knows the effect his words might have, though he avoids specifically encouraging violence against her, a phenomenon that Juliette Kayyem, a terrorism scholar and an Atlantic contributor, has called “stochastic terrorism.”

Trump is familiar with this line of thinking, even if he hasn’t used the academic term. After two attempts on his life in 2024, including one that left him bloodied in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump and many of his allies charged that Democrats and other Trump critics were to blame for demonizing Trump and saying that he was a threat to democracy. Many of the same arguments followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk last year, and some on the right tried to crack down on political speech even as they hailed Kirk for defending it.

A handful of Omar’s critics, including Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, have condemned the attack on her. “Regardless of how vehemently I disagree with her rhetoric—and I do—no elected official should face physical attacks. This is not who we are,” Mace wrote on X. But others have hewed closer to Trump’s line. Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, said that Omar shouldn’t have been attacked, and then immediately pivoted: “I also blame Ilhan Omar for what happened.”

After the assassination attempts on Trump and Kirk’s murder, some people believed that a national effort to lower tensions and avoid violent rhetoric might be possible. But the victim-blaming emanating from Trump and Fine shows that many prominent extremists have no appetite for calming their language, and they haven’t developed a principled commitment to suppressing political violence—they just don’t want their own side to face it. Maintaining a peaceful, stable democracy is nearly impossible when some prominent figures are willing to inflame and then shrug off violence against their political adversaries.

Related:

Open the door wider for refugees, Ilhan Omar writes. (From 2024)
Minnesota proved MAGA wrong.

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Today’s News

Senate Democrats blocked a spending package to keep the federal government open because of a dispute over Department of Homeland Security funding. They are demanding limits on immigration enforcement following recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis and have been negotiating with President Trump to avert a shutdown before the deadline at midnight tomorrow.
Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” said that the administration could eventually reduce the number of federal immigration agents in Minnesota, but only if state and local officials cooperate and protest-related interference declines.
A federal appeals court ruled late yesterday that the Trump administration had acted illegally in ending Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had exceeded her authority; the Supreme Court has allowed the terminations to remain in effect for now. The decision also upheld a lower-court ruling on TPS protections for Haitians.

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Evening Read

Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty

Whatever This Is, It Is Not Strategy

By Eliot A. Cohen

“At least,” a friend sighed, “they didn’t call it the 2026 National War Strategy.” True enough, although if Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims that he now leads the Department of War, logical consistency would suggest substituting the fiercer war for the feebler defense in the National Defense Strategy.

But logistical consistency, like coherence and gravitas, does not characterize the new NDS. It is a document that supposedly nests within the National Security Strategy, explaining at greater length the implications of overall policy for the armed forces. The 2026 version does not do that. Rather, it restates some of the basic priorities of the Trump administration but for the most part confines itself to flattery of the president, insults, and bombast.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump, Demolition Man

2026-01-28T17:17:00-05:00

Destruction is easier than construction. If Donald Trump’s decades as a real-estate developer didn’t teach him that, his time as president might.

In October, the administration bulldozed the East Wing of the White House in order to build a ballroom he wants to put on the site. Although Trump had promised over the summer that the project wouldn’t “interfere with the current building,” workers razed the entire structure, which was constructed in 1902 and expanded in 1942. Trump managed this the same way he has so much in his second term: He simply didn’t ask permission from any of the possible relevant authorities, including Congress, and acted so fast that no court could restrain him. In order to circumvent the legislature’s power of the purse, he sought donations from private corporations and individuals.

The demolition was hardly the most egregious action that Trump has taken as president, but it captured popular and media attention because it was such a clear metaphor: Trump had secretively demolished part of a building that belongs to the people of the United States, treating it as his own. That metaphor may become more potent yet. Recent events suggest that the gaping hole where the East Wing once was may lie there exposed, undeveloped, and contested for quite some time.

In a court hearing last week, Richard Leon, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush, skewered the government lawyers representing the administration against a challenge to the ballroom, which would be as tall as the original executive mansion and have nearly double its footprint. Although a law enables the executive branch to conduct maintenance on the building without congressional authorization, Leon said it was not intended to cover $400 million projects. A Justice Department attorney suggested that Trump’s ballroom was similar to previous renovations, including a pool added decades ago, but Leon was not having it.

“The Gerald Ford swimming pool? You compare that to ripping down the East Wing and building a new East Wing? Come on,” he said.

Such reactions from a judge are not generally considered a favorable omen for a litigant. Leon has not issued a ruling yet, and whatever he concludes is likely to be appealed. But the hearing suggests the real possibility that Trump will be unable to construct anything in the East Wing’s place, leaving just an empty site and idled construction equipment.

Destruction followed by stagnation seems to be something of an MO, the likely outcome for some of Trump’s less tangible and visible changes to the federal government. Consider last week’s clash over Greenland. Trump threatened European and Canadian leaders with tariffs and unspecified future consequences, culminating in Trump settling for a tentative deal that appears to closely resemble the existing arrangement, but not before creating bad blood and encouraging Europe to think of the U.S. as not much of a friend. Trump has the capacity to tear down the global international order, but he has neither the plans nor the wherewithal to rebuild anything in its place.

Similarly, DOGE found it relatively easy to destroy USAID, but the administration hasn’t been able to create any new way of extending soft power around the globe. Leveling threats of tariffs on adversaries and allies alike has been relatively easy, but the result has been a weakening of the economy and American trade ties, and a crumbling of the old global-trade system. He has been unable to bring a huge boom of manufacturing jobs and factories to U.S. shores.

Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement has deported so many people, led so many people to leave the country, and discouraged so many people from coming that U.S. population growth slowed dramatically between June 2024, near the end of the Biden administration, and July 2025, according to numbers released this week by the Census Bureau. Yet the right’s hope for pronatalist policies that would try to drive up birth rates have amounted to little. Reduced population growth—or a sinking population, should it come to that—threatens economic growth.

Trump no longer talks about fully repealing the Affordable Care Act; he and Republicans have now adopted a strategy of slowly bleeding the program. The GOP-controlled Congress allowed subsidies to lapse at the end of 2025, helping produce a big drop in the number of people insured under the ACA. But despite offering “concepts of a plan” during the presidential campaign, and rolling out a “Great Healthcare Plan” this month, experts say Trump still hasn’t put together anything resembling a real blueprint for improving health insurance. Meanwhile, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to be having much more luck undermining the existing institutions and practices of American public health than remaking the nation’s practices in his idiosyncratic image.

Even if these things are ultimately achieved, the difficulty and cost of doing so is likely to be much greater than Trump has promised to voters. The same is true of the ballroom project. The president first said it would cost $200 million. By October, the price tag had risen to $300 million. In December, the administration quoted a $400 million figure. Anyone can guess what the final bill might be if the ballroom is ever built, but given the private funding, each jump in the cost creates new opportunities for donors to buy influence from the president.

Some Democrats have said that any new president who replaces Trump should move promptly to tear down his ballroom. If the project never moves forward, though, they’ll have no need. Perhaps they could instead leave the empty site, a fitting monument to the Trump presidency.

Related:

Today’s News

Two Border Patrol agents who fired their guns during Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting in Minneapolis have been placed on administrative leave, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
President Trump warned Iran that it should negotiate a new nuclear deal or face possible U.S. military action, as an American aircraft carrier and additional warships arrived in the Middle East. Iran responded that it is open to talks but threatened to defend itself forcefully if provoked.
Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance at a Minneapolis town-hall meeting last night. The suspect was arrested and is in jail on suspicion of third-degree assault.

Evening Read

Brandon Bell / Getty

What Should Americans Do Now?

By George Packer

The killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been compared to the murder of George Floyd, because they all happened within a few miles of one another, and because of the outrage they inspired. There’s an important difference, though: In 2020 the United States was in turmoil, but it was still a state of law. Floyd’s death was followed by investigation, trial, and verdict—by justice. The Minneapolis Police Department was held accountable and ultimately made to reform.

No one should expect justice for Good and Pretti. Today, nothing stands in the way of the brutal tactics of ICE and the Border Patrol. While President Trump seems to be trying to defuse the mayhem he’s caused by reassigning a top commander, he is not withdrawing the federal agents from the state or allowing local authorities to investigate, let alone prosecute, them for their actions.

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What the Administration Is Signaling to Federal Agents After Minnesota

2026-01-26T18:21:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the Trump administration’s immigration operation in Minnesota is not just that agents of the state are killing peacefully protesting citizens on the streets. It’s that they’re doing it with the expectation of impunity, backed by top government officials who are brazenly lying about what happened.

The response from President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and other officials has sent a clear message: When immigration agents kill peaceful protesters, the government will defend them unconditionally, no matter if clear video evidence contradicts its version of events. It will resist investigating shootings, and it will do everything it can to block probes by other authorities. Vice President Vance has even claimed that federal agents have “absolute immunity” for their actions. This approach all but guarantees more killings.

The culture of impunity runs from the bottom to the top. It includes the federal agents who shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, multiple times in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, despite videos that appear to show that the agents had already removed his holstered gun, and despite knowing that many bystanders were filming. (If this is what Border Patrol feels comfortable doing on camera, one can only guess how they might act in private.) It also encompasses the administration officials who offered false accounts immediately, without bothering to wait for the facts.

Videos show Pretti filming officers before being pepper-sprayed and tackled by multiple officers, who then shot him while he was on the ground. Yet the Homeland Security secretary accused Pretti of “domestic terrorism” and said that he’d “attacked” agents, a claim that FBI Director Kash Patel repeated. Noem also said that Pretti had been “brandishing” a gun. (He had been legally carrying a concealed weapon, a right that the administration has previously celebrated.) Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche argued that because Pretti was shouting and had “a phone right up to ICE’s face,” he was not protesting peacefully. The Trump aide Stephen Miller labeled him an “assassin,” and the Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino said that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” No known evidence backs any of this up, and videos show that much of it is provably false.

When law-enforcement officers shoot civilians, it is common—if unsavory—for government officials to defend them. The Trump administration has gone far beyond this. Fatal shootings are almost always subject to investigation. After an ICE agent killed Renee Good earlier this month, Blanche (who once was Trump’s personal lawyer) said that the FBI would not launch a civil-rights investigation into the shooting. Instead, MS NOW reported, the Justice Department instructed the FBI to seek a search warrant to investigate Good for possible criminal liability. A federal magistrate rejected the warrant, which is unusual—except that, as the magistrate noted, Good is dead and could not legally be considered a suspect. An FBI agent resigned after she was allegedly pressured to stop pursuing a civil-rights inquiry into the ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, who’d shot Good.

Something similar started to play out immediately after Pretti’s death. Federal agencies seem unsure what, if any, investigation is occurring, according to The Washington Post, although White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that DHS and CBP are investigating the Pretti shooting, including reviewing body-cam footage. Federal agents refused to give even “the most basic information” to Minneapolis police at the scene, Chief Brian O’Hara said yesterday, and they initially blocked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the state’s criminal-investigation office, from accessing the crime scene. The state then went to court and obtained an order from a (Trump-appointed) federal judge blocking the destruction of evidence. That such a move was even necessary is astonishing.

A state-level agency like the BCA has nowhere near the resources or expertise that federal agencies do, and local investigators face legal hurdles when investigating federal agents. Yet administration officials have so clearly declared their position with lies and prejudicial statements that any federal investigation would be suspect from the start—another example of how Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department has undermined its ability to do its job.

Compared with the aftermath of Good’s shooting, more Republicans are expressing concerns about the operation in Minneapolis and Pretti’s killing. Even Trump has vacillated somewhat. He blamed Democrats for Pretti’s death but was noncommittal in a conversation with The Wall Street Journal about whether the agents involved had acted appropriately, in contrast to his quick blaming of Good for her own death. He has since conceded that ICE agents may have made a “mistake” in her case. Vance has also backtracked some, abandoning his claims of “absolute immunity.” (Law-enforcement officers are entitled to what’s known as “qualified immunity,” or protection from liability unless breaking clear legal or constitutional boundaries.)

Even as Republicans grow wary, they have tried to blame Trump’s aides rather than the president himself; Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, for example, lamented that the president was “getting bad advice.” But the culture of impunity proceeds directly from Trump. He has enthusiastically embraced the idea that the federal government should serve his personal whims. He argued that investigations into himself, even for overt offenses such as taking home boxes of sensitive documents, were improper. And he has made clear that when people act to assist him, whether they are aides or January 6 rioters, he will use his clemency powers to protect them from consequences.

Trump has spent years dehumanizing immigrants, exhorting law enforcement to treat suspects more roughly, and attacking the rule of law. The killings in Minnesota aren’t the collateral damage of Trump’s approach to governance. They’re a direct result.

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Today’s News

President Trump announced that he is sending the White House “border czar” Tom Homan to Minnesota to oversee and coordinate federal ICE operations amid intense backlash and protests over recent fatal shootings.
A massive winter storm brought dangerously cold temperatures and heavy snow to much of the United States over the weekend, dumping more than a foot of snow in at least 19 states. Roughly 21 people have died, and about 700,000 customers remain without power. Travel and public services across the Midwest and the Northeast remain widely disrupted.
Israel said that it has recovered the body of Ran Gvili, the last deceased Israeli hostage in Gaza, marking the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostages remain in the Gaza strip.

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The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiled suggestions from Atlantic staff and readers on seeking delight in the mundane.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Joe Boyd

How to Have a ‘Don’t-Know Mind’

By Michael Pollan

Anyone who thinks the contemplative life amounts to a form of quietism or a retreat from the world’s suffering should spend some time shadowing Joan Halifax, the Zen priest and anthropologist. I’d been curious about Halifax for years, ever since I heard about an annual trek that she leads through the mountains of Nepal, bringing a cadre of doctors and dentists to remote mountain villages with little access to health care.

Each summer over the course of two weeks or so, this Nomads Clinic covers more than 100 miles on foot and horseback, at altitudes of nearly 18,000 feet. These “medical mountaineers,” as they’ve been called, all volunteers, sleep in tents, often in freezing temperatures. But after some 40 annual trips to Nepal—Halifax is normally based in Santa Fe—she recently decided it was time to hang it up.

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Watch. Last Saturday’s “Weekend Update” segment (streaming on Peacock) explains how Saturday Night Live benefits from making pop culture a little bit cringe, Michael Tedder writes.

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Last Wednesday, covering President Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum, I remarked, “Perhaps the Germans have a word for the experience of watching your country’s leader embarrass himself and the country on the global stage.” Several Germanophone readers wrote in to tell me that, in fact, they do—or at least one that partly captures the feeling. Fremdscham is a term for vicarious embarrassment, a sort of inverse of schadenfreude. I’m going to have to add this one to my vocabulary. Now, if we can only find a way to shoehorn presidential presence into it!

— David

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Trump Gives a Stump Speech at Davos

2026-01-21T13:09:00-05:00

Updated at 5:25 p.m. ET on January 21, 2026

“Without us, right now you’d all be speaking German,” Donald Trump scolded European leaders at the World Economic Forum this morning. Perhaps the Germans have a word for the experience of watching your country’s leader embarrass himself and the country on the global stage.

Where does one start in summarizing such a speech? The straightforward racism? The economic illiteracy? The determination to alienate allies? The many moments where the president said things that were blatantly, provably false? And because he rambled through more than an hour, he covered a lot of ground.

The most anticipated section was about Trump’s ongoing effort to acquire Greenland. Trump argued that only the United States could defend the island, which he perplexingly also dismissed as “a giant piece of ice” and accidentally called “Iceland” on a few occasions. He also said Greenland was essential for the “golden dome” missile-defense system he claims he will build. (He denied that the U.S. is after rare-earth minerals in Greenland.)

Although Trump insisted that he has the utmost respect for both Danes and Greenlanders, nothing else he said evinced any. He accused them of being ungrateful for the U.S. defense of Greenland during World War II and argued that the American government erred when it “gave it back” after the war. Trump delivered a classic mafioso threat to take Greenland by force, saying that U.S. military might was irresistible, before adding nonchalantly that he would not do such a thing. This was not as reassuring as some headlines might lead readers to believe. And he said that if European leaders didn’t acquiesce, “we will remember.” (In a Truth Social post this afternoon, he said he had reached “the framework of a future deal” on Greenland with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and that he had suspended tariffs scheduled to go into effect on February 1. Further details were not revealed.)

More broadly, Trump assailed NATO, saying that the U.S. had spent heavily on the alliance and gotten nothing in return. Although Trump’s push to get NATO countries to spend more on defense has been successful, he still does not grasp that NATO is an expression of American might, not a drain on it. The group has made much of Europe into vassal states that have supported and extended American foreign policy around the globe. Trump also repeatedly said he doubted that the NATO allies would aid the U.S. if called to do so. This statement must come as a surprise to the many members who supported the United States after 9/11—the only time in history that NATO’s mutual-defense clause has been invoked. (My colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker reported last week on the Danish soldiers who died in Afghanistan.)

Trump seemed determined to alienate allies. He mockingly imitated French President Emmanuel Macron’s accent. He took a swipe at Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. He ridiculed the United Kingdom as too incompetent to extract oil from the North Sea. “Sitting on one of the greatest energy sources in the world, and they don’t use it,” he said. But he continued his administration’s outreach to Europe’s far right, blasting immigration to the continent. “Certain places in Europe are not even recognizable, frankly, anymore—they’re not recognizable, and we can argue about it, but there’s no argument,” he said. He claimed that prosperity and progress in Europe and North America were a result of a shared culture that was incompatible with immigration. (Never mind that Trump seems eager to demolish the pillars of cooperation between the U.S. and Europe.)

But Trump’s speech also had a domestic audience; in the lead-up, the White House insisted that his aim was to talk about affordability, which is fast becoming the “infrastructure week” of the second Trump term: frequently promised, never delivered. Trump did meander through some talk of the economy, though his explanations were often too circuitous or false to be very persuasive. Like his predecessor Joe Biden, whom he repeatedly insulted during the speech, he hasn’t figured out how to validate voters’ dim view of the economy without taking blame for it. He celebrated oil drilling (while lying about gas prices); he flogged his plan to cap credit-card interest rates (which Republican congressmen have criticized); he bragged about killing clean energy (while falsely claiming that China does not use wind farms). Most of all, he defended his use of tariffs (which raise costs for American consumers) and complained about trade deficits. Like Trump’s skewed understanding of NATO, this obsession fails to grasp that trade deficits are evidence of America’s massive wealth, not a sign of weakness. His efforts to reduce them, though, are likely to isolate the U.S. and sap that wealth.

Naturally, the president didn’t stay on message. Trump also announced (without offering details) that he would soon prosecute people for a supposedly “rigged” 2020 election. He reprised a racist riff from yesterday’s White House press conference about Somalis having low IQs, and he called Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant and Minnesota Democrat, a “fake congressperson.”

After all of this, the president abruptly delivered a boilerplate conclusion about unity and cooperation among nations. This kind of swerve is baffling unless you’ve spent a lot of time watching Trump campaign rallies, in which case it’s very familiar. Trump has no interest in calibrating his tone or approach to different audiences. This can make his speeches painful to watch, but it may also be illuminating in this case. Global leaders in politics and finance who otherwise wouldn’t spend their time watching full Trump stump speeches got the stump speech to come to them—providing a good reminder of exactly who the president is.