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Past leaders have imagined the United States as a “shining city upon a hill,” a melting pot, a “beacon to the world.” Donald Trump is working toward a different vision: the United States as a fortress.
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From the moment Elon Musk bounded onstage, midriff bared, to campaign for Donald Trump, cynics predicted that the two men’s egos were too large to allow for a lasting alliance. Improbably, however, the bond persisted, despite the rocky rollout of the U.S.
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Who manages the disaster if the disaster managers are the disaster?
That’s a question that the people of the United States may have to answer soon. As hurricane season begins in the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in disarray.
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For the second time in less than a month, the Trump administration has used law enforcement to directly target Congress. And for the second time in less than a month, Congress is showing that it doesn’t have the desire or ability to defend itself.
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One way to trace the past nine years of Donald Trump is the journey from taco bowls to TACO bulls. (Hey, don’t click away! This is going somewhere!)
Back in May 2016, the then–GOP presidential candidate posted a picture of himself eating a Trump Tower Tex-Mex entree. “I love Hispanics!” he wrote.
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Paul Walczak didn’t have a plausible defense, but he did have a backup plan. As a Florida nursing-home executive, he’d defrauded taxpayers out of almost $11 million, using it to fund a lavish lifestyle.
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During Donald Trump’s first stint as president, the political scientist Daniel Drezner maintained a very long thread on the site formerly known as Twitter.
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To understand how much the American right has changed, consider its journey from fiercely resisting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to expand executive power to surpassing them.
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One of the key predecessors of the modern Republican Party was the Know Nothing Party, so called because of its secrecy. When asked about the organization, members would reputedly reply, “I know nothing.
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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.