David A. Graham

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“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead.

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Updated at 2:24 p.m. ET on Feb. 14, 2025
It’s not hard to find hostage videos online, if for some reason you’re into that sort of thing. Seeing one broadcast live on national television is more unusual, but that’s exactly what happened this morning.

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The single greatest success of Donald Trump’s second term so far might be his Cabinet. Today, senators confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, one day after confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

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Ask Trump supporters why they like the president, and chances are good you’ll hear something like: He tells it like it is and says what he means. The question, then, is why so many of them refused to take him at his word.

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During his most recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “put unelected bureaucrats back in their place.” Apparently, that place is in the federal government, doing what they want with little accountability.

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Donald Trump really knows how to sell someone on working for him. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job at putting yourself out of a job,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office. That’s Linda McMahon, whom he’s nominated to lead the Department of Education.

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So you’re a world leader and you’ve been threatened by the American president. What now? First, take some consolation: You’re not alone. The first two weeks of the second Trump administration have seen the White House trying to wring policy concessions from allies and adversaries both near and far.

Updated at 4:54 p.m. ET on January 29, 2025.
The great federal-grant freeze of 2025 is over, but don’t expect it to be gone for good.
The Office of Management and Budget, which issued a memo freezing grants on Monday, has revoked it, The Washington Post first reported. The whole thing went so fast that many people may have never had a chance to sort out what was happening.

Updated on January 25, 2025 at 2:32 p.m. ET
Some presidents turn to think tanks to staff their administrations. Others turn to alumni of previous White Houses. Donald Trump has turned to Fox News to fill the ranks of his Cabinet.
Former Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth was confirmed to be secretary of defense Friday night in a dramatic vote worthy of cable news, if not the world’s greatest fighting force. After three Republican senators voted against Hegseth, Vice President J. D.

During Donald Trump’s first term as president, critics used to ask, Can you imagine the outcry if a Democrat had done this? As Trump begins his second, the relevant question is Can you imagine the outcry if Trump had done this eight years ago?
Barely 24 hours into this new presidency, Trump has already taken a series of steps that would have caused widespread outrage and mass demonstrations if he had taken them during his first day, week, or year as president, in 2017.

Judge Aileen Cannon isn’t done blocking and tackling for Donald Trump—especially blocking.
In a brief order today, the federal judge in Florida temporarily barred the Justice Department from releasing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report of his investigation into the president-elect. The order, which came after a request from Trump’s co-defendants, not only prevents the public release of the report but also bans DOJ from sharing it with other areas of the government.

The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.
Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic of debate for years.

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump.

The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.
Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic of debate for years.

Well, that was fast.
Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.
“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X.

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.
Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

Was Donald Trump serious about his most draconian plans for a second term? That question shadowed his whole campaign, as commentators questioned whether he’d really attempt to deport millions of immigrants or impose tariffs above 60 percent.
If personnel is policy, as the Ronald Reagan–era maxim states, then the president-elect is deadly serious.

The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.
Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic for years of debate.

When someone attacks the messenger rather than the message, they’re usually revealing something.
Friday night in Austin, Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, fiercely criticized The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, over a recent report about Trump’s troubling attitude toward the military, which he believes should be loyal to him personally.

In the early 17th century, the English jurist Edward Coke laid out a fundamental principle of any constitutional order: No man can be the judge in his own case. Donald Trump thinks he has found a work-around.
The Republican presidential candidate yesterday confirmed what many observers have long expected: If he is elected president in two weeks, he will fire Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel investigating him, right away.

When Donald Trump speaks about the economy, he sounds like a child. China gives us billions of dollars via tariffs. American auto workers take imported cars out of a box and stick the pieces together. These are very light paraphrases of statements he made today at the Economic Club of Chicago, in a sometimes combative interview with the Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait.
Yet voters consistently say they trust Trump more to handle the economy than they do Kamala Harris.

What was the first October surprise of this election? Was it a strike by East Coast stevedores? Was it the threat of a hot war between Israel and Iran? Or was it the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page motion, unsealed yesterday, in the federal case against Donald Trump for subverting the 2020 presidential election?
The answer is almost certainly option D: none of the above. (And by the way, it’s only October 3.

What was the first October surprise of this election? Was it a strike by East Coast stevedores? Was it the threat of a hot war between Israel and Iran? Or was it the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page motion, unsealed yesterday, in the federal case against Donald Trump for subverting the 2020 presidential election?
The answer is almost certainly option D: none of the above. (And by the way, it’s only October 3.

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET on October 3, 2024
When Hurricane Helene struck his home in Hickory, North Carolina, Brock Long lost power for four days. Once his family was safe, he headed into the mountains of western North Carolina to help out. He knows the area well: He graduated from Appalachian State, which is in Boone, one of the hardest-hit places in the state. Long also knows a few things about charging into the breach after a major disaster.

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET on October 3, 2024
When Hurricane Helene struck his home in Hickory, North Carolina, Brock Long lost power for four days. Once his family was safe, he headed into the mountains of western North Carolina to help out. He knows the area well: He graduated from Appalachian State, which is in Boone, one of the hardest-hit places in the state. Long also knows a few things about charging into the breach after a major disaster.

For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.
And then things went off the rails.

Mark Robinson is many things: the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, and a bigot. But the key to understanding him is that he is a poster.
The poster is an internet creature—the sort of person who just can’t resist the urge to shoot off his mouth on Facebook or Twitter or in some other online forum (for example, the message boards on the porn site Nude Africa). These posts tend to be unfiltered and not well thought out. Sometimes they’re trolling.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Donald Trump lacks the “sanity” to be president of the United States.
“It takes vision, knowledge, judgment, strategic thinking, a heart full of love for the American people, and sanity to be president of the United States,” the Democrat told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in an interview today at The Atlantic Festival.

Though it was hard to believe that Mark Robinson could stoop any lower, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina found a way.
A CNN report this afternoon said that Robinson described himself as “a Black Nazi” and said in 2012, “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” Robinson also posted about his enjoyment of transgender pornography, recounted intrusive voyeurism of women showering while a teenager, and criticized Martin Luther King Jr.

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Donald Trump’s luck in the courts has turned.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 counts in May. That followed decisive and costly losses in civil cases: Trump was fined more than half a billion dollars when courts found that he had defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and committed financial fraud in his business.