In some ways, Donald Trump’s mental state is more transparent than nearly any public figure’s: He has no shame, little discretion, and ample channels to broadcast his feelings in real time. Yet his constant stream of consciousness and always elevated dudgeon make it hard to parse the finer fluctuations in his mood.Even so, the former president’s public behavior since Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted him last week suggests a man feeling cornered.
In January, one of the first acts of the new Republican House majority was to establish a special subcommittee devoted to rooting out the ways the FBI and other federal bodies have supposedly been used as tools of political persecution.“We have a duty to get into these agencies and look at how they have been weaponized to go against the very people they’re supposed to represent,” said Representative Jim Jordan, the Trump ally who chairs the body.
More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him.
Though Donald Trump has sometimes been called “Teflon Don”—a label that connects not just to his own name but to his modus operandi—the truth is not that he has escaped consequences for everything, just his most egregious behavior. He has lost defamation cases, his company got dinged for tax evasion, and he has been charged with byzantine business crimes. But his biggest sins—especially trying to steal the 2020 presidential election—have gone unpunished.
A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.Until now.The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome.
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.Elon Musk and Joe Biden are the unlikely tag team changing the way American journalists approach their jobs.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time
There’s no such thing as an RFK Jr. voter.
Everyone has “car brain.
Donald Trump is not an articulate speaker, but he is an effective one, because he understands the power of the spoken word and deftly wields tone and inflection. One reason the tape of him boasting about sexual assault was such a bombshell was that you could actually listen to Trump saying it all in his inimitable manner.
Chris Christie is the hottest candidate in the Republican presidential race right now. Oh, not with Republican voters. He’s still polling in the low single digits among the people who will actually choose the nominee. But among liberal pundits, Christie’s reputation is on the rise.
Donald Trump has long had the power to turn insignificant moments into days-long news events, but on Tuesday he managed something even more difficult: He did the reverse. The former president of the United States was arrested and arraigned on 37 felony charges, and it felt like an anti-climax.Several factors explain this.
We knew it would be bad. Even so, it’s bracing just how bad the evidence laid out by the Justice Department against Donald Trump is.The indictment against Trump and his personal valet, Walt Nauta, unsealed this afternoon, lays out the federal case against the former president in vivid, shocking, and sometimes even wry detail. An indictment is not a conviction—it’s a set of allegations by prosecutors, without rebuttal from the defendant.
Donald Trump has been indicted by federal prosecutors in connection with his removal of documents from the White House, the former president announced on his social-media site tonight. He said that he has been summoned to appear on Tuesday at a U.S. courthouse in Miami. Several outlets reported that he faces seven counts, but more information was not immediately available.
Remember Ron DeSantis? Of course you know who Ron DeSantis is. But remember who he appeared to be just a few months ago? In the first days after the 2022 midterms, the Florida governor looked like the future of the Republican Party. Donald Trump had just led the GOP to its third straight underwhelming election, thanks largely to underperformance by the former president’s favored candidates. Meanwhile, DeSantis had romped to victory in Florida.
In the past, I’ve leaned on the great Arab proto-sociologist Ibn Khaldun to explain modern life.
Donald Trump is back—or at least, the 2016 version of Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail, just hours after he was arrested and arraigned in a New York court earlier today.The former president has become no more honest and no less irritable since leaving office in disgrace in 2021, but the man who has been campaigning for president these past few months has been a diminished version of himself.
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, became the first former president to be arraigned today. After surrendering to authorities in Manhattan early this afternoon, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felonies during a closed-door hearing.The day provided a series of striking images. The New York–born mogul slowly traveled from Trump Tower in Midtown to a courthouse in Lower Manhattan via motorcade.
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 finding it hard to keep track of all of former President Donald Trump’s legal woes, don’t feel bad: He can’t get it straight, either. Last weekend, he announced that he’d be arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday.
“This is not normal,” Donald Trump’s opponents warned as he took office and began enacting his agenda. He gave them so many chances to use the phrase that it became first a cliché and then a sorry joke.But the warning was not wrong: Trump acclimated Americans to many egregious actions by exposure therapy. What was once novel and frightening became familiar; familiarity bred contempt, but also enough acceptance to let Trump get away with a lot.
In a move that is disappointing to technocratic never-Trumpers and headline writers who love ’60s sitcoms, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced yesterday that he will not run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.“To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from” Donald Trump, Hogan wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times, a placement that showed his seriousness about reaching out to Republican primary voters.
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.Many critics of Donald Trump concluded long ago that Attorney General Merrick Garland was not equal to the challenge of holding the former president accountable. It might be time for them to reassess.
In a 2014 interview, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter was asked how often his working quartet rehearsed. His reply was evasive and illuminating: “How do you rehearse the future?”This was classic Shorter—gnomic, gnostic, mischievous, wise. It was a bit of a humblebrag too. For more than six decades, he conjured the future of music into being, with or without the benefit of rehearsal.
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.Pity the poor mayors. Or don’t—most voters clearly don’t. On Tuesday, Chicagoans unceremoniously kicked Lori Lightfoot to the curb, depriving her of the chance to win a second term in an April 4 runoff election.
After a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, national attention was slow to turn to the crash. That has now changed decisively. In the past 10 days, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, former President Donald Trump, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have all visited the town. A lively national political debate has also emerged, but it’s one that, like the burning rail cars, has produced a lot of heat, but not a great deal of light.
Americans hate—or claim to hate—their politicians, but even by those standards, the early shape of the 2024 presidential race is a little bizarre. More than 20 months out from the election, Americans consistently say they don’t want to see a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet the most likely outcome today is a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Even before the city of Memphis released video Friday evening of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, it seemed the footage would be horrifying. Defense attorneys compared it to the Rodney King beating in 1991, a comparison that now rings true, but the Memphis police chief and head of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation similarly said they were appalled by what they saw.
Even before the city of Memphis released video Friday evening of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, it seemed the footage would be horrifying. Defense attorneys compared it to the Rodney King beating in 1991, a comparison that now rings true, but the Memphis police chief and the head of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation similarly said they were appalled by what they’d seen.
Kevin McCarthy’s humiliation, and that of Donald Trump alongside him, offers a tall draft of schadenfreude. At the end of that, though, the nation is left with an empty glass and a bitter taste.For many reasons, McCarthy is unfit for the speakership: He undermined the 2020 election, he is dishonest, he is (as we see) unable to marshal his caucus. But his defectors aren’t really interested in a speaker who is able to keep the House organized or functional.
High-level politics is fundamentally about dealmaking. You can’t succeed as anything more than a back-bencher if you aren’t willing to make a deal with almost anyone on almost anything. In Faust, a deal with the devil is fatal; on Capitol Hill, it’s how you survive.But those “almosts” are essential, a lesson Kevin McCarthy is demonstrating this week.
The defeat of prominent election deniers around the country in last month’s midterm elections is cause for relief and maybe even tempered celebration, but not complacency about the dangers to democracy.Unexpectedly bad results for Republican candidates were, I have written, the result of an anti-MAGA majority that has turned out in three consecutive elections to rebuke Donald Trump and his coalition.
A fashionable critique of much political punditry is that it’s theater criticism, too focused on personality and superficial action, not focused enough on the real stuff of policy.But we’re talking about Kyrsten Sinema today, the senator from Arizona who loves to create drama. And that’s the best way to understand her announcement this morning that she has changed her affiliation from Democrat to independent.