David A. Graham

The epicenter of corruption in the Trump administration was not at the White House, but at the Old Post Office, a dramatic Romanesque landmark a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the presidential residence.The building, which operated for several years as the Trump International Hotel, became a hot place to see and be seen for a certain set, especially Trump hangers-on (Rudy Giuliani was a regular) and foreign diplomats eager to curry favor—a clear ethical problem.

The House Select Committee on January 6 ended what may be its final public hearing today with what is almost certainly a futile gesture: The members voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump for testimony and documents about his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election and his incitement of a mob that attacked the Capitol.The odds that they will get their way are effectively zero.

Joe Biden is an unlikely stoner hero. Three of his four Baby Boomer predecessors in the Oval Office had explored marijuana in their youth, but by the time they became president, they all disdained the stuff. But Biden, like Donald Trump, was a straight-edge who says he never touched marijuana and was skeptical of any liberalization of drug laws throughout his long career in politics.

Southern Democrats, Rockefeller Republicans, campaign-ending disasters: Some things that used to be staples of American politics don’t really exist anymore. That’s the result of an era in which nothing means as much as the letter next to a candidate’s name. With voters viewing the other party as an existential threat to their lives or the republic, they seem willing to overlook nearly any personal failing in the name of partisanship.

At times in his prepresidential life, Donald Trump represented himself as a real-estate mogul, a television star, a business visionary, and a salesman par excellence. But according to a complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Trump Organization was actually just a massive fraud with incidental sidelines in property development, merchandising, and entertainment.The basic scheme alleged in the complaint is straightforward.

The line between imagination and delusion is thin, as Donald Trump’s initial reaction to an FBI search at Mar-a-Lago in August demonstrated. In the first days afterward, the former president saw the search as a political gift, not a blow: a chance to rally his base, put would-be challengers like Ron DeSantis in their place, and reconsolidate his eroding position as the leader of the Republican Party.

John Durham, the U.S. attorney whom former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed to investigate the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is reportedly near to wrapping up his work.The grand jury he was using to hear evidence is expiring; there’s no indication he will convene another, and members of his team are leaving, having produced a rather thin record.

Although there are many rivals for the title, this week’s FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, the apparent mishandling of classified information that led to it, and the political fallout since is close to the paradigmatic Donald Trump scandal.The story is at once totally new and unexpected and yet entirely of a piece with everything we know and have seen from Trump.

Donald Trump would have you believe that Monday’s surprise FBI raid on his Florida estate was, like so many things he disdains, un-American.Not much is known about the operation as of this writing. The FBI has not commented, and much of what is public comes from a statement by Trump, a notoriously unreliable source of information.

The idea of a Donald Trump–oriented think tank is inherently absurd. Whatever your views on the former president, there’s no question that wonkish attention to policy was never the point or the focus of his administration—which might explain the strangeness of his speech today at the America First Agenda Summit, where a blood-soaked philippic on crime became a cringey laugh-fest of transphobic jokes.The D.C.

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 people say the Secret Service’s job is to protect the president, they usually mean it in a physical way—not a political one.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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 people say the Secret Service’s job is to protect the president, they usually mean it in a physical way—not a political one.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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 the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, some prosecutors say they simply won’t enforce abortion laws. It’s an audacious gesture—that probably won’t make much difference.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
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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.Donald Trump and his allies have dismissed the investigation into the insurrection as the work of enemies and traitors, but they can’t write off Brad Parscale and Katrina Pierson as faint-hearted RINOs.But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.

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 Floyd’s murder changed how Americans view law enforcement. The Uvalde massacre could have its own impact on policing and guns, and yet we still don’t know why the police response went so wrong.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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.Joe Biden promised voters they wouldn’t have to keep thinking about politics all the time. That hasn’t worked out for them, or him.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

In 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country, many states altered their election systems to try to ease voting. Since then, some of those states, especially Republican-led ones, have aggressively reversed course, taking steps to make voting harder.This sort of bad news has overshadowed one of the more interesting and encouraging changes in the country.

Finding signs to worry about the future of American democracy is not hard, but few are quite so painful and acute as the cognitive dissonance displayed by Rusty Bowers this week.Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona State House, was the star witness during yesterday’s hearing of the U.S. House’s January 6 committee. Bowers calls himself a conservative Republican, and he has the record to back that claim up.

Any individual murder in the United States right now is unlikely to make much of an impression—not when elderly Black people at a grocery store or young children at school are being gunned down in large groups. But the Friday murder of a retired judge in Wisconsin is ominous enough to give some pause.Although little is known so far, authorities say they believe that the killing was politically motivated. The victim, Jack Roemer, 68, had served on the local circuit court.

Even if you don’t know a single policy he supports, chances are good that you know what John Fetterman looks like. Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is larger than life at 6 foot 8, distinctively bald with a salt-and-pepper goatee, draped in a baggy shirt or hoodie. Oh, and he’s a shorts guy too.Fetterman easily won today’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, and will run in November in a race that could decide control of the chamber.

One of the most dangerous elements of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election is how it collapsed the gap between two distinct functions: electioneering and election administration. Both are political, insofar as elected officials oversee elections, but they begin from different premises.

Long ago, before J.D. Vance started doing his best to sound like every other MAGA candidate in the country, he had an ear for a metaphor.Reflecting on how heroin and prescription opioids had ravaged his home state of Ohio, Vance worried that a certain Republican candidate for president would have a similar effect. “[Donald] Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit.

Mitch McConnell isn’t known for his joyousness, but the dour Senate Republican leader was able to find delight even in the bleak aftermath of the January 6 insurrection: This, at long last, was the end of Donald Trump.“I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told the New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin late that night, according to Martin’s forthcoming book with Alex Burns, This Will Not Pass.

Almost all politicians lie, but only some are demonstrably liars. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is not only a demonstrable liar; he’s also a sloppy and inartful one.The clever dissembler knows that it’s wiser to sow doubt and confusion than to deny something outright—and that if you must deny it, be sure the denial can’t be definitively and humiliatingly debunked within hours. McCarthy broke both of those rules yesterday.

At the start of his career, Joe Biden was a young man in a hurry: the sixth-youngest senator, an ambitious force in Washington, and a repeat presidential candidate. Now, at the pinnacle and close of his career, the president prefers to procrastinate.Although every leader comes to a decision he or she would rather not make, delay has become a signature tactic of this presidency.

Look, it’s right there in the name: Senate, borrowed from the Romans and meaning a “council of elders.” More than ever, the label fits. This is the oldest Senate, by average age, in American history, at 64 years. Jim Inhofe and Richard Shelby, both 87, have announced plans to retire. Chuck Grassley, 88, is running for reelection this fall. But even he is a shade younger than Dianne Feinstein, also 88.

Look, it’s right there in the name: Senate, borrowed from the Romans and meaning a “council of elders.” More than ever, the label fits. This is the oldest Senate, by average age, in American history, at 64 years. Jim Inhofe and Richard Shelby, both 87, have announced plans to retire. Chuck Grassley, 88, is running for reelection this fall. But even he is a shade younger than Dianne Feinstein, also 88.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the ancient proverb goes. Less known is the Trump corollary: Even when my friend’s enemy is also an alleged war criminal and my country’s geopolitical enemy. It’s harder and harder to be shocked by Donald Trump, but asking Russia’s leader to interfere in American politics to help him, in the midst of a brutal and illegal war condemned by most of the world, might just do it.

“The illegality of the plan was obvious.”Attorneys, as a class, are not typically well regarded for their writing; not for nothing do we call sentences that are incomprehensible, jargon-laden, or obfuscatory “legalese.” Yet what makes an order from federal Judge David Carter today important is less its legal ramifications than the simple clarity of the view it offers of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election.

Six years into the Trump era in American politics, many of his critics still believe they can find a silver bullet to end it. On Wednesday, the House committee on January 6 filed a brief in a federal court in California that, depending on your interpretation, was either an attempt to compel documents from a reluctant witness or an omen of Donald Trump’s imminent imprisonment.