The Democrats finally have their groove back—or at least a semblance of a groove.
For the first time since Donald Trump was elected a year ago, the Democratic Party’s general vibe is one of tentative celebration. And why shouldn’t it be? On Tuesday, candidates from very different ideological wings of the party sailed to comfortable victories in three states.
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Last month, I wrote about my attempt to self-rejuvenate through small moments of joy, and I asked readers to submit some tips of their own. Boy, did you come through. Two clear themes emerged in the dozens of replies we received.
Texas state Democrats had been plotting their departure for weeks. But most weren’t sure they were going—or where they were headed—until just before they boarded their plane. For a successful quorum break, the timing “has to be ripe,” State Representative Gina Hinojosa told me. “Like a melon at the grocery store.” On Sunday, she and dozens of her colleagues hopped on a chartered plane and flew to Chicago in an attempt to prevent Texas Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional maps.
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Texas Republicans are planning to redraw their congressional districts this year, five years ahead of schedule. As with most other recent examples of norm-breaking behavior in American politics, the reason for this involves Donald J. Trump.
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Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and rosé. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad.
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Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and adviser to two Democratic presidents, is suddenly all over the news. This week alone, he’s appeared on a number of podcasts in what seem to be early forays into an exploratory campaign for president.
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Photographs by Caroline Gutman
The opposition arrived in a flurry of painted cardboard.
Until this week, the 11th of Donald Trump’s second presidency, the resistance has not exactly been uppercase R. Any show of dissent by Democratic leadership has been virtually nonexistent, and protests against Trump’s policies have been small and sporadic. Citizen frustration with the new administration has registered nationally as little more than a distant rumble.
We used to hear a lot about eggs from J. D. Vance. On the campaign trail, he talked about them constantly: how his kids were nuts for them, and how, thanks to the failed policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, omelets were ruined for everyone.
“My kids eat a lotta eggs!” he said in Traverse City, Michigan. And in Monroeville, Pennsylvania: “A lotta eggs in my family!” Although other elements of the speech changed here and there, eggs—and their rising price—were always front and center.
Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET
The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.
For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge.
Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.
The normal rules of public disgrace may no longer apply to Donald Trump. But at least some expectation of good behavior remains, it seems, for a politician in Trump’s orbit.
After a multiyear investigation, the House Ethics Committee reported today that former Representative Matt Gaetz paid “tens of thousands of dollars” to various women, including one 17-year-old girl, “for sex and/or drugs” on at least 20 occasions.
One morning earlier this month, I slammed my laptop shut. I was four cups of coffee deep and full of rage. My hands shook, and my vision blurred. It wasn’t politics, my usual subject matter, that had sent me spiraling.
It was Wyna Liu.
Liu is the New York Times editor who makes Connections, the online puzzle that is both the blessing and the bane of my mornings—and the days of millions of other people who regularly spend time tangling with Liu’s creation.
Yesterday, when Donald Trump announced that he wanted Representative Matt Gaetz to lead the Department of Justice, virtually all Democrats—and even some Republicans—were aghast. The man who was the subject of a federal sex-crimes investigation will now be America’s chief prosecutor? they wondered, eyes wide. Attorney General Matt Gaetz?
They may have to get used to it. “It’s the absolute perfect pick,” Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign strategist, told me last night.
Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”
Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats.
About half an hour into last night’s vice-presidential debate, the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan turned to Tim Walz and asked a question that the Minnesota governor had to have known would come. “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989,” she said, noting that new reporting suggests Walz didn’t go to Asia until months later.
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If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were president, this is the kind of Cabinet he might appoint: Vani Hari, a.k.a. the “Food Babe” influencer; The Biggest Loser’s Jillian Michaels; the conservative psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter, the raw-meat enthusiast Mikhaila Peterson Fuller; and 18-year-old Grace Price, a self-identified citizen scientist.
During a conversation onstage at a Moms for Liberty event last week, Donald Trump said something that made even me—a seasoned visitor to Trump’s theme park of hyperbole—look around in confusion at the people around me in the audience.
“The transgender thing is incredible,” he told the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.
Updated at 5:55 p.m. ET on August 31, 2024
Donald Trump’s appearance last night at Moms for Liberty’s annual gathering was intended as a classic campaign stop—a chance for the candidate to preen in front of a friendly audience.
And this audience certainly was friendly. At this week’s “Joyful Warriors” summit in Washington, D.C.
You might not be shocked to learn that Elizabeth Warren’s favorite Taylor Swift song is about cosmic justice.
“I love ‘Karma,’” the senator from Massachusetts said last night during a Zoom event for a group called Swifties for Kamala. “And I have a thing or two to say about private equity!” The 34,000 attendees probably would have cheered, but, as is typical for such a massive webinar, only the organizers had control of the microphone and camera. Warren was undaunted by the lack of response.
Maybe you’ve seen the joke permeating the internet this week, as Vice President Kamala Harris begins her 100-day campaign for president. In one variation on X Sunday, someone wrote “Kamala’s VP options” above a lineup of Chablis and Chardonnay bottles on a grocery-store shelf labeled “Exciting Whites.” Another user posted a picture of Harris and a saltine cracker, with the caption: “This will be the ticket.
In a different election year, a place like Milwaukee’s Zeidler Union Square would surely have been teeming with people, marching around with Sharpied signs and chanting about fascism. Instead, the square, an official protest zone located a few blocks from the Republican National Convention, was like a scene from some postapocalyptic tale. This afternoon’s designated protest zone was a wide, mostly empty expanse of lush grass.
For a snapshot of our present political moment, imagine this: a 70-something woman in a bright-red sweater bobbing around a sticky dance floor at a bar in downtown Milwaukee. Thanks to the rain last night, the Jamboree at the RNC, the official celebration party on the first night of the Republican National Convention, was mostly empty. Still, DJ Milk N Cooks was in the corner, pumping out beats, and there was Susan, dancing with abandon, glittering flag earrings dangling from her ears.
Updated on Friday, May 17 at 3:27 pm
Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.
Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama.
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It’s common, in criminal court, for a defendant’s friends and family to join them in the courtroom as a show of love and support. That’s not exactly what’s happening in Manhattan this week. More, after these three stories from The Atlantic:
Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves.
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For the first time in 221 years, two different groups of cicadas are emerging simultaneously and screaming from the treetops. More after these three stories from The Atlantic:
This is the next smartphone evolution.
Russell Berman: Attack a Democrat charged with corruption? Republicans wouldn’t dare.
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If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:
It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning.
Trump flaunts his corruption.
The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.
The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs.
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By killing her dog, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have also killed her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s vice president.
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A new abortion ban in Florida has providers scrambling—and pregnant women reassessing their options. But the law has implications well beyond the Sunshine State. More after these four new stories from The Atlantic:
Trump’s contempt knows no bounds.