Today's Liberal News

Trump’s Weird Loyalty Pledge

Donald Trump loves rallies. Everyone can see how they energize him, how the crowd’s applause encourages him to ditch the hackneyed prose of his speechwriters and go on wild riffs, how the music and cheering are like water to a parched man. Tonight, at the end of a two-day rally billed as a Republican “midterm convention,” Trump was visibly exhilarated.
But he also protested too much, in the process revealing some political as well as personal fears and insecurities.

The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Without Charlie Kirk

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When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, many of his allies on the right memorialized him as a hero of free speech and the founder of an enduring political movement. Critics on the left tended to emphasize his long history of offensive remarks and dismiss him as little more than a troll.

What Makes Tennis One of the Greatest Games

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
The American tennis player Ben Shelton blasted a 146-mile-an-hour ace past the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz at 3:33 a.m. yesterday. It was the final shot of a U.S.

What Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t

The current New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has affronted one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, by taking the inflammatory step of deciding to attend the city’s 9/11 commemoration. “It offends me,” Giuliani proclaimed earlier this week on Newsmax.
One might suspect that the nature of Mamdani’s offense lay in his being a politician who is associating himself with a day that Giuliani prefers to associate with Giuliani. But the former mayor proceeded to lay out a much darker rationale.

The Los Angeles Rams Are Trying to Defeat Time

Usually, when the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams play, it’s a relatively short commute. But this evening, the teams will kick off the NFL’s first-ever regular-season game in Australia.
The two teams have taken diametrically opposite approaches to preventing the 8,000-mile journey from disorienting their stars.

4.7 Million Dead, $8 Trillion: Counting the Devastating Human & Economic Costs of the Post‑9/11 Wars

As part of our weeklong coverage marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the launch of the United States’ so-called war on terror, we take a look at the human, financial and environmental costs of U.S. military intervention around the world with Neta Crawford, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Researchers at the Costs of War Project estimate that nearly a million people have been killed as a direct result of U.S.

“Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”: Spencer Ackerman

“The ‘war on terror’ was always a construct to be waged, never quite to be ended.” We discuss the origins and impacts of the global “war on terror,” launched by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., with Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

25 Years Later: Afghan New Yorker Masuda Sultan Remembers 9/11 & 19 Relatives Killed in U.S. Bombing

Almost 25 years ago, just days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush addressed the nation, making the case for war against al-Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, was based in Afghanistan. “I sensed that something like this was not going to go unpunished,” Afghan American New Yorker and women’s rights activist Masuda Sultan told Democracy Now! at the time. Within a few weeks, the U.S. invasion began.