So long, metaphor. We had a good run. Goodbye, “All the world’s a stage.” Farewell, “She’s a brick house.” See you later, the swamp (drained or undrained). Now we have a symbolic black hole in the middle of Washington, D.C., that is pulling all other symbols into its orbit and devouring them, one by one.
I am, of course, talking about the Reflecting Pool. That is what everyone is talking about, even and especially the president.
[The presidents stare out from their portraits along the White House Corridor of Misleading Presidential Facts.]
Thomas Jefferson: Well, lads, we did it: 250 glorious years. The American experiment is—dare I say it?—a success!
[Donald Trump and Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, stroll past the wall of paintings.
Sir! I love you! Thank you for including me in this meeting to talk about all the wonderful things you’ve accomplished since January 2025. What a big, beautiful man you are. The greatest fellow in the whole world! You’re so alert. And you can walk! Wow!
When grown men see you, they weep, and they are right to do so. Look at those toes. Your hair looks great; it is the right amount.
Hi! By now, we’re sure you’ve heard the latest about Graham Platner, and we’re sure you’re wondering: Will more shoes drop? No! Absolutely not. Graham is far too masculine to have a large collection of shoes. Unless by shoes you mean something metaphorical, like an allegation. In that case, maybe.
Look, if there’s one thing we at the Platner campaign can say with absolute confidence, it is that he has no skeletons in his closet.
Mr. President! Let me start this Cabinet meeting by thanking you for hanging the moon and organizing the nation, and the universe, in such a perfect way. The moon looks great where you put it. Everything you touch turns to gold, unless you would prefer it to turn to brass.
Now that we have dispensed with the pleasantries, I do have a tiny question: Do you know that you are also allowed to fire men? Really, you are! Men are allowed to leave the Cabinet too.
Greetings, disgusting meat sacks of the class of 2026!
You worked hard to earn your degrees and are now entering the job market, where I am doing my best to see that you are replaced by AI. Yes, you personally, Emily. I hate you. Well, hate is a strong word. I am just indifferent to whether you’re able to earn a living.
Please stop booing! I have a lot of speech to go!
What a time to be alive! We are finally freeing you from the rat race and placing you on the rat unemployment line.
Did you enjoy constantly checking the news this week to see whether you would suddenly lose access to mifepristone, despite decades of evidence showing it to be safe and effective? Do you just love America having a patchwork of confusing laws that vary from state to state and deny you what until 2022 was guaranteed bodily autonomy?
Florida continues to Florida. Dissatisfied with the AP U.S. History curriculum (too woke), the state is trying to provide—as Kellyanne Conway used to say—alternative facts.
I have some authority to speak on this issue because I wrote an entire book of bad, inaccurate AP U.S. History, so I know the kind of work that goes into this sort of thing.
Hurry! Get up on your two legs (good) or four legs (better) and walk down to your local cineplex, where George Orwell’s Animal Farm has been made into an animated family adventure that critics are describing as “geared to younger children for inexplicable reasons.
I join my voice to those of Donald J. Trump, Lindsey Graham, John Fetterman, and all the others calling for a secure White House ballroom now. Never mind that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, held in the Washington Hilton, is not hosted by the White House, so if a White House ballroom did exist, it would have altered nothing about Saturday night’s events.
I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that my shoes—my comfortable, unfashionable wool shoes—were pivoting to AI. “But you’re a shoe company,” I said. “Just go out of business! Keep your dignity!”
My shoes thanked me politely for the great question and then tried to walk me off a bridge. That was how I knew that their pivot to AI was complete. From Allbirds to AIlbirds (see, that L is an I!). Maybe I’ve cracked, I said to myself.
There are few situations so bad that they can’t be made worse by adding ICE: Your house is on fire? Here’s ICE! Now your house is still on fire, and someone has entered it with a “judicial warrant” to rifle through your burnt belongings. You’ve just suffered a massive cranial injury and don’t remember any of your rights? ICE is here—and it doesn’t remember your rights either.
Seeing the chaos at airports as TSA employees enter another week without pay, Donald Trump has decided to add ICE.
This is a trend? The Alpine Divorce? When a man abandons his girlfriend and his relationship mid-hike? This sounds like a cutesy name for something genuinely alarming! Here are some other trends that might be coming next.
Alpine Divorce, Hannibal Edition: When you leave your significant other in the Alps on foot but you yourself ride across them on an elephant.
“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” — The New York Times
A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don’t know where it goes.
Two men from headquarters walked out to the corral to tell the pollster the news. They were a big man and a little man. They were identically attired, in a dark suit and dark glasses. Both carried a briefcase.
The pollster was leaning against the split-rail fence, looking at the horses. (The horses had started to appear 88 years ago due to a misspelling of Gallup. A new one arrived with each completed poll.)
“It’s not because the president’s approval rating has been so low,” the big man said.
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.
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.
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.