If you’ve come to enjoy the bare-knuckled, closely divided, and high-anxiety American politics of the last few years then the 2022 election brings good news for you.The final balance of power in the U.S. Congress and state houses won’t be clear for days or in some cases possibly weeks, but early results suggest that Republicans will likely retake control of the House, while the balance in the Senate remains too early to predict.
From 2017 to 2021, a string of businessmen with long, lucrative careers entered government service and left with their reputations tarnished. Rex Tillerson was a world-bestriding CEO who found himself hated by both his new boss and his new employees. Steven Mnuchin, a successful though largely anonymous moneyman, developed an image as a sloppy supervillain.
On January 6, 2021, a mob of Donald Trump supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol. They sought to prevent Congress from certifying his loss in the presidential election, but a few of them had even scarier ideas.
Given all the attention that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has drawn, one might forget how little it will affect most people. Although Musk fancies the platform “a common digital town square,” Twitter reports just 238 million daily active users in a world of nearly 8 billion. It just so happens, though, that there is a strong overlap among people who report the news, people who use Twitter, and people who are interested in Elon Musk.
No one knows quite how the stroke that Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman suffered in May might affect his performance as a U.S. senator if he wins an election next month. But his halting, sometimes painful performance last night in the sole debate in his race against Republican Mehmet Oz last night showed that he’s not outwardly the candidate who won the Democratic nomination earlier this year.The answers here are simply unavailable.
The famously logorrheic Steve Bannon finally found a reason to shut up, and it’s going to get him locked up.Bannon, the former éminence grise (and grease) to Donald Trump, was sentenced today to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, stemming from his refusal to testify to the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election. He’ll also be fined $6,500.
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.