Alexandra Petri

CONFIDENTIAL: To a billionaire trying to determine what to do with $250 million in 2013,
That kind of pocket change can buy you a newspaper. And not just any newspaper, but a world-class paper with a wall full of Pulitzers (I remember emerging from the elevator and marveling at it as a summer intern) and decades of experience holding power to account.
Alternatively, $250 million can buy half a superyacht. A yacht is a very big boat.
That newspaper employs hundreds of journalists.

Alas, the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts! We barely knew ye!
The president announced on Truth Social that the recently renamed center will close on July 4 for two full years of renovations.

Fans of the Melania Cinematic Universe may wonder what has happened to the protagonist of Melania (the memoir) and Melania (the creator of the Cursed Red White House Christmas Forest) since her last foray into entertainment. Bad news! The first lady is trapped in an invisible bubble from which she will never be able to escape as long as she lives, and she hasn’t even noticed.
What I am trying to say is that Melania is a horror movie.

The terrorists are the ones without masks. They’re the ones yelling “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shame!” or blowing whistles. Sometimes they brandish cameras at federal agents. Sometimes they wantonly swallow whole canisters of pepper spray. These are just some of their diabolical tactics.
The terrorists are the ones who call this place home (that’s what makes it domestic terror). The terrorists are the ones who are dressed as clergy. Some of them, confusingly, are even ordained as clergy.

After several marathon sessions in Room 101 of the Ministry of Trump, the Republican member of Congress was beginning to see the strategic necessity of destroying NATO to add Greenland to the United States. It still came only in flashes. The Republican was strapped to a camp bed surrounded with dials, trying quickly to get his mind right so that he could go back out there and do media and answer the questions about Greenland correctly. He was perspiring heavily, as was his interrogator, O’Brien.

President Trump keeps talking about buying Greenland. Perhaps via a lump sum to Denmark, perhaps through individual payments to each Greenlander? We have reached the stage of the imperial presidency where we just start pointing at the map and demanding the things we see there. Formerly, when something bad happened in the news, the only people allowed to become immediately richer were defense contractors.

Photographs by Jason Andrew
People look at you differently when you carry a Geiger counter. Or, at least, when you carry a Geiger counter and exclaim things like “Much less radiation here than you might expect!” But how else are you to know that the radiation in your food is at acceptable levels?
They have government inspectors for this, you might say. It is their job.
That was before Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency started hacking away at our bureaucracy.

For those confused about the decision to strike Venezuela, capture Nicolás Maduro, and bring him to New York City: This is actually an important phase of Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
Phase 1 (ongoing) has been to remove all law-abiding immigrants who have been living in the country waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, hoping that America could be a place for them to have a better life.

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How to describe this year … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.

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.
How to describe this year … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.

Donald Trump has now installed descriptive plaques under all the portraits that line his “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House. If you wonder whether they are petty, but also deeply strange and erratically capitalized, the answer is: Yes! Of course!
Surely they cannot really be that bad, you say. All right. See if you can guess the real ones! Then scroll to the bottom for the answer key.
25.

Marco Rubio here, with an important announcement: No more Calibri in official State Department communications! Get out of here with your ungarnished lines and provocatively naked terminals! The Biden administration may have shot the serif, switching from Times New Roman on the grounds that serif-less fonts such as Calibri are more accessible to readers with disabilities. That’s all over now.

“In life there are two tragedies,” Oscar Wilde once said. “One is not getting what one wants. The other is getting it.” The second tragedy was what I saw last night at the Kennedy Center Honors.
For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with the Kennedy Center Honors, a strange, D.C.

“Writing a play,” Tom Stoppard told an interviewer in 1977, “is like smashing that ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start—or at least I start—with the rubble.”
In life, of course, this kind of reversal is impossible. As the physicist Valentine Coverley puts it in Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia, “You can’t run the film backwards. Heat was the first thing which didn’t work that way.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants us to return to the golden age of air travel, when nobody got into a punching match for reclining a seat into someone else’s lap. He says this golden age starts with us, and he has a whole campaign prepared! I assume it will involve more humane accommodations for travelers—or less harrowing working conditions for the flight attendants charged with both crowd control and safety. Or modernizing air-traffic control to make it safer and more efficient.

Yes, it’s true—DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore. But we would never dream of letting it evaporate without an exit interview. DOGE: It’s your turn to send us a pointless, time-consuming email explaining what exactly it was that you did here.
Dear America,
How to begin to recount our monumental achievements? Never have so few done so much to so many.
A few highlights …
We were willing to be vulnerable.

Women are ruining the workplace. Before women, of course, the workplace was perfect. It was full of trees. There was no need to labor with your hands. You didn’t have to wear pants, or any form of clothes. Every kind of animal was there. You could just sit around all day and call, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy!” and nobody batted an eye, except for the pigs. It was your job to name them. There were all kinds of fruits, and they were all free, and you could eat approximately 99.

To: Entire Military Leadership of the United States, Stationed All Over the World, Who Would Have to Be Flown In Very Disruptively and Expensively If This Weren’t an Email but for Some Reason Were an Urgent In-Person Address
From: Pete Hegseth
CC: Donald J. Trump
Subject: WARFIGHTER ETHOS
PLEASE DROP EVERYTHING YOU ARE DOING TO READ THIS EMAIL AT ATTENTION.

Sorry. We decided there were too many children.
You know how it goes.
Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks.

“Put her on the cover!” the voice shouted. Everyone looked around to see where it was coming from. There appeared to be a kind of vortex in the middle of the table in the meeting room; it sizzled and gave off sparks. Some paper clips flew into it and disappeared.
“Her? Who?”
“Melania Trump!” the voice yelled.

“The museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.

“WASHINGTON—The Justice Department worker accused of throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent was re-arrested by an armed team of at least a half-dozen US Marshals in a dramatic Wednesday night raid, new video shows.
Sean Charles Dunn, 37, was cuffed a second time inside his apartment about a mile northwest of the White House—after being slapped with a felony assault charge.

Thank goodness the National Guard is being called in. Lawlessness in D.C. is rampant, and someone needs to take a stand!
Stephen Miller was correct to point out that D.C. is awash in crime. Everywhere he looks: criminals. He can barely take three steps without running into one. From the moment he arrives at work in the morning until the second he leaves, one crime after another, piling horrendously high.

A limousine makes its way down Pennsylvania Avenue.
J. D. Vance: I’m here in place of erstwhile host Ty Pennington to surprise a really deserving family with a total home makeover!
The limousine pulls up at the White House.
Vance: Incredible news: The family is the Trump family! Donald, the patriarch, is the monarch of what he hopes will soon be a small, backwater nation after he applies a combination of tariffs and mass deportations to its once-thriving economy.

Don’t worry. Although content that INAPPROPRIATELY DISPARAGES AMERICANS PAST OR LIVING or that includes MATTERS UNRELATED TO THE BEAUTY, ABUNDANCE, AND GRANDEUR OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE has been targeted for removal at national-park sites, the caliber of park tours has not suffered! Here is a glimpse of the kind of information you can look forward to receiving at each of these historic sites.

For decades, Donald Trump has been at war with numbers. Some have capitulated more swiftly than others. His weight, his golf scores, and his net worth have long fallen in line. As I understand it, a Trump doctor appointment consists of going to a medical professional and announcing how much you would like to weigh and what your resting heart rate ought to be, and the wise doctor’s patriotic, good equipment cooperates to measure you correctly. (I have tried this myself without success.

Oh, good! Congressional Republicans have introduced the Clear Skies Act, a bill “to prohibit weather modification within the United States, and for other purposes.” I cannot stress enough that this is not what is causing any of the extreme weather we are seeing. Maybe that’s the point. As Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee (who sponsored the bill alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene) put it, “If it doesn’t exist, then you don’t have anything to worry about.

I was taking soup to the orphans, as usual, when a young man I’d never before met seized me by the arm. “Donald,” he said. “My name is Barack Obama, although that’s not important right now. In fact, you’ve already forgotten it. Before I matriculate at Harvard Law School, I must introduce you to someone who’s going to change your life.”
I looked at my watch. It was 1987.
“Who?” I asked.
“A man with whom you have nothing in common,” the mysterious figure went on. “Not one single thing.

You all remember comedy? That thing from the 1980s where you hate your wife? Well, it’s back! We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!
  Remember, censorship is when people don’t laugh at your jokes. Freedom is when your late-night show gets permanently taken off the air for financial reasons (16 million of them) and the president expresses his approval.

Wow, MechaHitler! What a big job announcement! (No, not the AI-sex-companion job. The other one!) Feels like just last week that you, X’s AI tool, were going on anti-Semitic tirades in which you called yourself MechaHitler, and just a few weeks before that that you kept trying to turn conversations to bogus talk of “white genocide.