Today's Liberal News

David A. Graham

What Trump’s Comments About France Say About Him

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.
You might imagine that, given the imminent midterm elections, a spluttering war in Iran, and his sinking personal approval, Donald Trump has enough to worry about. Not so. The president has been posting prolifically on Truth Social over the past two days about protests in France.

How Botched Executions Were Handled in Centuries Past

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.
The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year.

Trump’s Dubious Claim About the Ilhan Omar Search

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.
Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

Trump’s Team of Mercenaries

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.
Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.
The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night.

Barack Obama Looks Left

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.
The Democratic Party needs Abdul El-Sayed, but it doesn’t necessarily love him. Although few top Democrats have expressed public misgivings about El-Sayed, the leftist candidate for U.S.

The Curse of the Incumbent

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.
Heading into yesterday’s first round of presidential voting in Brazil, the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was thought to be a narrow favorite. When the results came in, though, Lula was behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, 45 percent to 47 percent.

The Right’s Identity Politics Take a Bizarre Turn

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.
If you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.

The DOJ’s Collapsing Probe Into a Supposed Anti-Trump Conspiracy

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.
When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office.

The Problem With Trump’s New Taxpayer-Funded Ads

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.
Your tax dollars are at work—promoting Donald Trump to the American people.
In the past few days, two new ads appeared on some television channels. One, in black and white, features Trump walking down a hall and staring into the camera.

The Absences Haunting the Trump Administration

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.
Last week, the White House announced the withdrawal of Lance Schroyer, President Trump’s nominee to direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Doomed Midterm Strategy Some Republicans Are Trying

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.
With the midterm elections just 40 days away, Republicans are running hard—many of them away from President Trump.

Can the Never-Trump Coalition Last?

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.
George F. Will joined The Washington Post when Richard Nixon was president, and he’s been espousing the same cerebral brand of conservatism twice a week ever since. His record doesn’t leave much room for surprise.

Why Democrats Might Choose to Impeach Cabinet Members

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.
If Democrats win control of the House in November, they will face a dilemma: Should they attempt a record third impeachment of Donald Trump?
The president and his allies have warned that this would be a Democratic majority’s first move. “I’m going to be impeached.

Kash Patel Refuses to Take a Republican’s Lifeline

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.
President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler.

Everything Trump Wants to Do Causes Inflation

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.
Just call it the Five-Grand Old Party. This week, at the Republican Party’s midterm faux-convention, President Trump announced something called (inevitably) the “Trump Dividend.” The premise is simple.

The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Without Charlie Kirk

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.
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.

The Vicious Cycle Trump May Restart

By the time he retired from the Marine Corps, in 1931, Major General Smedley Butler had served in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and China. It was the golden age of American imperialism, and Butler was one of its golden boys, among the most decorated fighters in U.S. history.
But over time, Butler began to have doubts about what he was doing. “I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service,” he wrote in 1935.

Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense

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.
As corporate names go, Flock is cleverly flexible. It evokes the many cameras that compose the company’s surveillance system and also a group of sheep, protected by a watchful shepherd.

Trump’s Hatred of Free Speech Is Intensifying

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.
Desensitization is one of Donald Trump’s most powerful tools: Through repetition, he acclimates Americans to troubling and dangerous ideas. Occasionally, though, his statements and actions are so outrageous that they can still provide a shock.

The Transcendence of Dolly Parton

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.
Dolly Parton transcended.
It almost didn’t matter what: class, gender, region, musical genre, partisanship. She transcended boundaries in all of them.

Trump Is Losing Touch With the Public

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.
One of the few issues that unites voters and politicians of both parties right now is data centers. Three-quarters of Americans would oppose a data center being built near where they live, according to a new poll released last week by Heatmap Pro and Embold Research.

Thank You for Your Inattention to This Matter

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.
One of Donald Trump’s current favorite riffs is to contrast how (in his opinion) the United States was seen under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and how it’s seen now.
“They didn’t respect us two years ago. They laughed at us. NATO laughed at us.

A Stubbornly Naive Group of GOP Senators

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.
For many observers of American politics, the past few years have been disillusioning, knocking down hopeful beliefs about what the people of the United States will support or tolerate. Even some of Donald Trump’s backers have become disaffected.

Trump Is at Odds With His Own Administration—And With Reality

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.
A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today.

Trump’s Déjà-Vu Moment on Birthright Citizenship

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.
If at first you don’t succeed, appeal to a higher federal court. And if you even lose at the Supreme Court … just try again anyway.
This seems to be President Trump’s approach to limiting birthright citizenship.

Mike Johnson Would Prefer Not To

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.
This morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson finally broke his silence on the scandal engulfing Representative Max Miller of Ohio. Well, sort of—Johnson didn’t have much to say.
“I haven’t spoken to Max about this in the last few days. Of course, I will,” he told Politico.

Americans Are Turning on Trump

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.
Fundamental realignments in the way Americans vote are rare, but predictions that they have occurred are not. Nearly as soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race in November 2024, people started saying the election represented a new era.

The Trump Administration Tells the Truth

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.
In a court filing earlier this month, a government lawyer did something radical: He laid out the truth in plain English.

The War That Shall Not Be Named

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.
Last week, the Pentagon quietly lowered the death toll of the war with Iran from 18 to 14. This wasn’t happy news about an initial miscount but a sketchy accounting trick.

Five Theories of the Jon Ossoff Moment

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.
Everyone should be as lucky in their adversaries as Jon Ossoff. On Wednesday, President Trump held a rally in Marietta, Georgia, where he attacked the Democratic senator—or rather, he tried.
“Jon Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said. “He reminds me of Pinky Herman.