David A. Graham

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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 struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats; the minority party has had little real role so far.

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You don’t hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.

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Unemployment rates are near historical lows, and finding good help is hard. Perhaps that’s why Donald Trump keeps turning to the same group of officials to fill multiple positions.
Todd Blanche is the deputy attorney general, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department—a big and important job.

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On this much, there is bipartisan agreement: The Federal Aviation Administration is in a bad mess. After years of exceptional safety, the U.S. air-travel system has recently been beset with near misses and, in one horrifying case, a collision.

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Donald Trump is in talks to accept a $400 million gift from a foreign government.

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In January 2023, I traveled to Memphis to report on the killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man beaten to death by a group of Memphis police officers.

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One indicator about the health of the nation is how many lower federal judges a regular news consumer can name—and reel off biographical details about—without much hesitation.
By now, many know James Boasberg, who is handling the matter of deportation flights to El Salvador.

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Perhaps no president—including the ones with law degrees—has spent as much time around attorneys as Donald Trump. As a young man, he was infamously mentored by the ruthless Roy Cohn. Throughout his career, he’s used litigation as a tool of business, public relations, and intimidation.

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Donald Trump’s genius has always been marketing: himself, his properties, his political campaigns. But when it comes to the effects of his tariffs, the master has either lost a step or is facing a challenge that even he hasn’t yet figured out how to spin.

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For weeks, Washington has been waiting to see how long National Security Adviser Michael Waltz could hold on. The answer, we now know, was 101 days.
Multiple outlets reported this morning that Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, would be leaving the Trump administration.

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The buzziest moment from President Donald Trump’s interview with ABC News yesterday was a baffling exchange with the reporter Terry Moran over whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man erroneously deported from Maryland to El Salvador, has tattoos reading MS-13 on his knuckles.

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“People are very happy with this presidency,” President Donald Trump said in an interview with The Atlantic last week. “I’ve had great polls.”
That wasn’t true then, and it’s even less true now.

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In The Atlantic’s June 2025 cover story, staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer report deeply into the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

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After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I’d expected.

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“Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,” the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis “an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.

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Of course Pete Hegseth had other Signal chats.

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When I was in high school, my classmates and I marveled at the biting sarcasm of our Spanish teacher. (Shout-out to the peerless Señor Householder.

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Late last month, Jonathan Braun was arrested on allegations of shoving a 3-year-old, “causing a red mark on his back and substantial pain.” This is only his latest brush with the law over the past four years.

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In December, Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about his threats of revenge during the campaign. He demurred. “I’m not looking to go back into the past. I’m looking to make our country successful,” he said. “Retribution will be through success.

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Donald Trump took one step closer to openly defying an order from the Supreme Court today—effectively daring the justices to defend the law or pack up and go home.

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A tension has always existed between President Donald Trump’s push for American retrenchment and his desire to “Make America great again,” but the gulf has grown yawningly wide in the past three months.

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For the past few days, investors, foreign leaders, and members of Congress have gradually gotten more and more frantic about the Trump administration’s huge tariffs. The White House, meanwhile, projected equanimity. “They feel like everything is going according to plan,” an adviser told Politico.

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Inscribed above the front entrance of the U.S. Supreme Court is a simple, four-word inscription: Equal justice under law. The phrase doesn’t require a great deal of explanation, but it does require fortification.

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Chaos is terrifying, which is perhaps why traders were so relieved this morning when Walter Bloomberg tweeted “HASSETT: TRUMP IS CONSIDERING A 90-DAY PAUSE IN TARIFFS FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA.

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Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET on March 27, 2025
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023. As the Trump administration’s first two months prove, he wasn’t bluffing.

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Nothing revitalizes an old franchise like an ambitious crossover event, and this week, two of the dominant memes of the first Trump administration came back and combined forces: But her emails! and There’s always a tweet.

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The Trump administration has provided many jaw-dropping moments, but few have been as shocking as editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s scoop published today.

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Who will defend the federal government against itself? Donald Trump’s administration is waging an aggressive campaign against the executive branch as it has long existed.

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Columbia University faces one of the most consequential choices of its nearly three-century history this week. The Trump administration has given the school a deadline of tomorrow to make a series of concessions in exchange for keeping $400 million in federal funding.