David A. Graham

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 each new communication medium comes new opportunities for politicians to get themselves into trouble. Congress demanded that letters from envoys to the French government be turned over in the XYZ Affair, thwarting President John Adams’s desire to maintain a tenuous peace with France.

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.
Say what you will about Donald Trump’s effect on American civic life as a whole, but he’s done wonders for public participation. Voter turnout in the past few elections has reached record highs, for example.

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.
Sometimes just a few news items over a couple of days can capture an entire zeitgeist. Here are several that caught my eye this week: The Supreme Court is poised to weaken or destroy one of the last remaining pillars of the Voting Rights Act.

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.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Partisan claims of fraud in the presidential election. Elaborate statistical analyses. Reports of shadowy, closed-door doings. All of this, they say, points to one conclusion: The results were compromised, and the real winner was kept out of the White House.

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 a person is naturalized as a U.S. citizen, they receive not just a new citizenship but also typically a few other objects: an American flag, a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and a greeting from the president.

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 strange thing happens when a notable public figure is killed: Their rough edges are sanded down, and a multidimensional person is flattened into the simplicity of a myth.
This has happened with jarring speed to Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer murdered last week in Utah.

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.
Updated at 7:23 p.m. ET on September 12, 2025
One small relief in an awful week is that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was the man leading the official response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the high-profile conservative activist, is apparently the latest in a string of terrifying acts of political violence in the United States. Real America’s Voice, which aired Kirk’s show, announced his death. He was 31.
Kirk was shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University, just north of Provo, Utah.

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 a man openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump sure does love the rhetoric of violence.
On Saturday, the president posted an image of himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the Wagner-blasting cavalry officer in Apocalypse Now.

Photographs by Lisette Model
“I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America,” the photographer Lisette Model once said. America is many things—joy and pain, freedom and repression—and Model’s photos of jazz musicians and their audiences captured the full range. Model, a Viennese Jewish émigré, is best known today for her street photography, but in the early 1950s, she set out to create a book of jazz pictures, with an accompanying essay to be written by Langston Hughes.

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 best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

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.
Because the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, was caught on camera, what happened isn’t really in doubt.
Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was part of a crowd that stormed the U.S.

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 Trump administration broke the law. Its officials knew they were breaking the law. And they’ll likely try to do so again.

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 fried chickens have come home to roost. Cracker Barrel is reverting to its old logo, fewer than 10 days after announcing a new, stripped-down version. The ensuing controversy has been at once a welcome distraction from other news and an outgrowth of all the most annoying impulses in American 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.
If you’re looking for reasons to be skeptical about the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s home last week, you don’t have to look very hard.

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 era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton declared 29 years ago. Donald Trump never got the memo.
In his second term, the president is embracing perhaps the most sweeping expansion of federal power since that of Franklin D.

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.
Do Democrats need their own Stephen Miller? That’s what the Rolling Stone journalist Asawin Suebsaeng reports hearing from many people on the left. Imagining a progressive version of Donald Trump’s far-right-hand man is hard enough, much less justifying why this might be a good thing.

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.
On the surface, yesterday’s White House summit on Ukraine showed an impressively unified front among President Donald Trump, major European leaders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The participants all smiled and expressed optimism.

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 week after Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., the militarization of the city is escalating.
Trump now says that he expects Congress to allow him to maintain control of D.C. police after a legally mandated 30-day limit.

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.
Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made himself a spokesperson for Democratic resistance to Republican plans for a brazen mid-decade gerrymander, and on Sunday, he appeared on Meet the Press to state his case. “It’s cheating,” Pritzker said of the Texas redistricting that the president has demanded.

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 years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny.

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.
Activists and organizers like to say that the world is run by those who show up, so the fact that what Texas’s Democratic legislators need to do to further their agenda is not show up is inauspicious for them.

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 doesn’t want you to read this article.
Don’t let it go to your head, and I won’t let it go to mine; we’re not special. He doesn’t want anyone reading anything about Jeffrey Epstein, or his own relationship with the late sex offender.

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 tells is his talk of the “Russia hoax.” When that phrase passes his lips, it’s a sign that the president is agitated about something.

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.
Awarding superlatives in the Donald Trump era is risky. Knowing when one of his moves is the biggest or worst or most aggressive is challenging—not only because Trump himself always opts for the most over-the-top description, but because each new peak or trough prepares the way for the next.

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.
Tomorrow is Donald Trump’s deadline to agree to trade deals before he imposes tariffs, and he means it this time. Why are you laughing? (In fact, since saying that yesterday, he’s already chickened out with Mexico, putting the “taco” in, well, TACO.

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 theory, the proposition seems foolproof: Everyone hates the taxman and loves to keep their money, so a tax cut must be politically popular.
But Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act has tested the theory and found it wanting.

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.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a cunning political operator, but even he can’t weaken President Donald Trump’s bond with television. The two leaders are at odds again over Gaza, now because of human-rights-organization warnings of widespread starvation.

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.
Shortly after becoming president, as Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn’t be worth the electoral hit he’d take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted.

Building an empire takes decades. Destroying it can only take a few years, and sometimes the vandals are in the palace, not outside the gates.
For much of the 20th century, American broadcast television revolved around three networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. William S. Paley, CBS’s longtime CEO, made sure that his company—the Columbia Broadcasting Service—was a leader among them. The network was home to Edward R.