Updated at 1:29 a.m. ET on Sunday, April 26, 2026
We were under the table before we knew what was happening. One moment, a military band was parading out of the Washington Hilton’s cavernous ballroom; hundreds of government officials, diplomats, and journalists, including more than a dozen of us from The Atlantic, dressed in our best or borrowed black tie, had turned to our spring-pea and burrata salads.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
President Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the economy seems to be dropping, according to a recent poll from The New York Times.

Cigarettes have always been noxious to me: As a kid, I stole my grandpa’s Marlboros and hid them deep in a trash bin. In college, Chesterfields made the kisses of a woman I loved taste carcinogenic. When I lived in Spain, smoky air in my favorite bar made my lungs burn. And no law has spared me more irritation than California’s trailblazing 1990s bans on indoor smoking. Yet I vehemently insist on the right of my fellow humans to smoke.

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A familiar dilemma: You open Netflix, determined to watch something new. Twenty minutes of scrolling later, after having rejected dozens of perfectly fine options, you land on a movie you’ve seen many times before.

Photographs by Caroline Gutman
Representative Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s bad side. He would prefer not to have the president’s allies spend millions to defeat him in a primary. In fact, if Massie had his way, he’d be working for Trump right now.