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.Well, folks, it looks like Congress still has the capacity to surprise us.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The January 6 hearings are changing Republicans’ minds.
Is this a recession? Wrong question.
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 returned to Washington, D.C., for the first time since leaving office in a show of support for the organization trying to make MAGA more than just vibes.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
You may not have predicted that Mike Pence—a man who once praised Donald Trump 14 times in a span of three minutes—would ever publicly defy his former boss. But 2022, it seems, is a brave new world in Republican politics.In the Arizona GOP primary for governor, Pence is, in essence, campaigning against Trump.
The video was the very definition of cringe. One day after Donald Trump endorsed her Republican primary opponent, freshman Representative Nancy Mace filmed a two-minute clip of herself outside the shiny black facade of Trump Tower in Manhattan—approximately 800 miles from her South Carolina district—to remind her followers that she was still loyal to the former president.
Four years and four months ago, a high-school student delivered a speech at a rally outside the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Three days earlier, a gunman had killed 17 of X González’s classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland with an AR-15-style rifle. “We are going to be the last mass shooting,” González told the assembled crowd and cable-news cameras.It wasn’t, of course.
The Instagram influencer’s workshop on abortion was not meant to persuade anyone. But by the end of the 2,000-person, five-hour Zoom history lesson, at least a few attendees were thinking differently about one of the most fraught topics in American politics. “I personally believe in the sacredness of life,” Shelley Smith, a conservative participant from California, told me afterward.
In the weeks after the 2020 election, one particular Michigan woman was trumpeting claims of fraud as loudly as she could. Kristina Karamo, a community-college professor who’d previously accused Democrats of having a “satanic agenda,” went on Fox News again and again to describe how illegal ballots supposedly had been tallied for Joe Biden at the TCF Center in Detroit, where she worked as a poll watcher.
CHEVY CHASE, Md.—A few of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighbors were visibly annoyed last night as a dozen abortion-rights protesters marched down their tree-lined street, blaring music and chanting, “We are not your incubators!” A middle-aged couple in jogging suits scoffed and yanked their goldendoodle to the other side of the road. One woman driving an SUV pulled up dangerously close to a demonstrator and laid on the horn.
If a new coronavirus variant surges in the United States this year—perhaps the one currently tearing through Europe—there’s a reasonable chance that the country will be unprepared to fight it. You can thank Congress for that.Last week, lawmakers passed a massive spending bill without any additional funding for COVID-19 relief, despite White House pleas for more. Democrats would like to fulfill the administration’s request.
Tonight was probably the first time that many Americans had ever heard of Kim Reynolds. It almost certainly won’t be the last.The 62-year-old governor of Iowa delivered the official Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address from outside the Capitol in Des Moines. Reynolds has been involved in Iowa politics for more than a decade.
FLORENCE, Ariz.—Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans.
LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va.—The beer was flowing, the handmade potato chips were self-serve, and hope was in the air. Early in the night, the Loudoun County Democrats who gathered at the Döner Bistro in Leesburg were cautiously—anxiously—optimistic: Sure, it had been a rough year. A global pandemic, regular protests at the local school-board meetings, and the contentious governor’s race, rife with misinformation, had pitted neighbor against neighbor.
The very first United Airlines evacuation flight from Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, on Sunday had 300 passengers on board, and those passengers had many questions. Some wondered where the flight was headed and how long the trip would be. Others asked crew members where their luggage was, whether it had made it out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, and whether it would catch up to them in America.
In just a few hours, Americans will start reading headlines announcing all the lessons learned from today’s Democratic primary in Ohio’s Eleventh Congressional District. Political writers will treat the race as a parable: a warning for progressives or an admonishment of the Democratic Party’s establishment wing. Twitter pundits will publish threads about the winning candidate’s strategy to woo working-class voters.
All along the hallways of the Capitol complex today, members of the Capitol Police stared at their phones and nearby TV screens. Four of their fellow officers were testifying before Congress for the first time about the treatment they’d endured on January 6. They described being beaten with metal flagpoles, sprayed in the eyes with wasp repellent, and shocked with their own Tasers. One of the men cried while he spoke; a colleague patted his back.
Dozens of Texans are dead because of the state’s energy crisis last week. Some froze in their bed or their living room. Others suffocated in their idling car, poisoned by carbon monoxide. A few perished in house fires while trying to keep their family warm. And millions spent days without heat or running water. Gaming out the electoral ramifications of an event when it’s still causing pain may seem crass. But the politics of the energy crisis are inextricable from the event itself.
Updated at 10:28 a.m. ET on February 6, 2021.Public-health experts predicted a tsunami of COVID-19 infections in Iowa this winter. Doctors and researchers told me in November that they expected thousands of Iowans to travel to visit family over Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Donald Trump’s presidency concluded not with mutiny in state capitals or an attempted attack on his successor, but with a calm, conventional ceremony in an otherwise quiet city.Walking through Washington, D.C., today, the silence in the streets was the sound of a country not quite ready to exhale. It was a fitting end to the noisiest era of American politics that many Americans can remember.
Photographs by Tavon TaylorBeyond the dozen National Guardsmen stationed behind the Library of Congress, the seven-foot-tall fence lining the back side of the Capitol, and the men in balaclavas carrying assault rifles, 67-year-old Rick Genderson sells liquor and old wine in his store, Schneider’s of Capitol Hill.
It still hurts to swallow or drink. Water tastes off. She can’t sleep. She buried herself under blankets all weekend, but she couldn’t stay warm. Then came the pounding headache, the blocked sinuses. So far, she’s spent more than a week in self-isolation, toggling between British TV dramas and news reports about the rioters who wanted to assassinate her colleagues in Congress. Her husband’s symptoms are the same, but he is older than her and in a high-risk group.
On the West Lawn of the Capitol Wednesday, a man in a pom-pom beanie clamored for blood. “Execute the traitors!” he shouted into a megaphone. “I wanna see executions!”The man got the deaths he wanted, if not the executions. Four rioters died as a result of Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol. The mob beat a police officer with a fire extinguisher, law-enforcement sources reports.
The Ellipse was a deep sea of delusion. Thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters drove or bused or flew from all corners of the United States to meet here, in the treeless space beside the White House, in their quest to overturn the results of the 2020 election with the help of congressional Republicans. “As I live and die, we will never give up until we have a fair-and-square election!” a small child in a rainbow hat yelled into a megaphone.
Georgia Democrats are in a door-knocking, lit-dropping frenzy. Many of them are focused on turning out voters in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of suburban Atlanta—the voters who helped flip the state to Joe Biden in November, and who are widely considered the key group for Democrats to reach. But not Ben Davidson. Ben Davidson is hitting the apartments.
Updated on October 5, 2020 at 7:04 p.m. ET.On any given morning, the White House is a blur of activity. A chef may be whipping up breakfast for the first couple in the second-floor kitchen. A valet might be shining the president’s shoes, while the head butler lingers in the West Sitting Hall, awaiting any urgent presidential requests. Housekeepers, maybe a dozen of them, could be deployed throughout the building, vacuuming, polishing, and dusting.
On a cold February evening, weeks before the full force of the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, a few dozen Mike Bloomberg supporters milled around the airy living room of a home in the genteel Washington, D.C., suburb of McLean, Virginia. The voters, most of them white, described themselves as moderates or former Republicans.
The messages in the Zoom chat were snide at first, but not despondent. One person observed that the Democrats would rather listen to young people singing the national anthem than to their political opinions. Another noted that the event felt like a highly produced infomercial. Just 30 minutes in, a mustachioed man with a palm-tree Zoom background gave up on the whole production. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he wrote to the group. “I’ve got Bernie taped.
The far left of the Democratic Party spent much of the primary attacking Kamala Harris, decrying her as an untrustworthy “cop” whose overtures to the left were half-hearted and opportunistic. But with Joe Biden naming the senator from California as his running mate, some progressive leaders and activists, including Harris skeptics, sound reluctantly optimistic about what the pair could achieve.
Donald Trump needs Arizona on his side in November. Losing the state and its 11 Electoral College votes would, at the very least, mean a drastically narrower path back to the White House. Keeping Arizona red shouldn’t be a challenge; the state has long been a Republican stronghold.
Debbie Dingell was one of the few Democrats who saw Donald Trump coming. She’s worried that her party will underestimate him again.The 66-year-old representative from Michigan first noticed his pull with voters in her district, which stretches from Ann Arbor to Detroit, in August 2015 at a United Auto Workers picnic.
Jamaal Bowman wasn’t supposed to win.The 44-year-old black progressive candidate, a former middle-school principal, challenged a New York representative who’s been in Congress since before the fall of the Berlin Wall and who had the backing of some of the most powerful players in the Democratic Party. But if the initial results in his primary yesterday hold, he could soon be a presumptive congressman.