Photographs by Nic Antaya
You won’t find a much harsher critic of the Democratic Party than the progressive trying to secure its nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. When I caught up with him last week in Ann Arbor, he was at a café holding an outdoor roundtable with young voters, many of them college students or recent graduates.
Something is happening in the Democratic base.
For a year and a half Democrats have been disgusted with President Trump. They’ve been similarly outraged by the fecklessness of their own party leaders. Now, after a handful of surprising primary elections last night in Colorado, a third observation is coming into focus: The Democratic base would like to shove the entire political establishment into a blade grinder.
When it comes to counting votes, there’s no rushing California. America’s most populous state is also home to the nation’s most frustrating political tradition—a lengthy wait to find out the winners of key elections. Californians only learned yesterday evening—a full week after they finished casting ballots in the state’s primaries—which candidates had been nominated for governor. The state also took several days to determine who will advance in U.S.
As Democratic heretics go, Representative Dan Goldman isn’t guilty of many crimes against his party. He initially won election to the House after prosecuting the first impeachment of President Trump (whom he now calls a “fascist”), and during two terms, he has voted overwhelmingly with Democratic leaders—even swinging to their left by backing Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. Goldman isn’t tainted by scandal, nor is he on death’s doorstep; at 50, he’s pretty young for Congress.
For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.
Florida Republicans have approved a new congressional map that could hand them as many as four House seats that Democrats currently hold. Their goal is straightforward and universally understood: They want to bolster the GOP’s majority in Congress and retake the lead in a yearlong, nationwide partisan gerrymandering showdown with Democrats.
Good luck, however, getting top Republicans in the Sunshine State to openly admit that.
Photographs by Caroline Gutman
Representative Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s bad side. He would prefer not to have the president’s allies spend millions to defeat him in a primary. In fact, if Massie had his way, he’d be working for Trump right now.
The Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee—a small city about 45 miles south of Nashville—had been around for only a few years when white supremacists burned it down. On a Saturday in early 2008, three young men went to the mosque armed with spray paint and Molotov cocktails. According to a federal indictment, they first defaced the exterior walls with swastikas and phrases including White Power. Then they broke into the building and set it aflame.
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.
Earlier this month, Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a Republican, signed a bipartisan statement about Donald Trump’s aggressive pursuit of Greenland that, by the standards of the Trump-loving GOP, amounted to a rare and sharp rebuke of the president.
Representative Seth Moulton is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, but he learned about the U.S. military’s middle-of-the-night capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the same way many Americans did: A friend who saw the news on the internet texted him.
“That is not the way Congress is supposed to be notified of operations by the Department of Defense,” Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told us wryly.
A junior member of Congress from Georgia announced her resignation last night, ending a brief tenure in the House that produced, well, not a whole lot.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is no legislative powerhouse, and in the grand sweep of American history, her five years as a U.S. representative will be a mere blip. She wrote no major laws and had little discernible impact on national policy.
This is how the government shutdown was always going to end.
For the past 30 years, the party that has forced federal agencies to close their doors in a funding fight has never actually achieved the policy outcome it was demanding. Republicans did not successfully pressure then-President Barack Obama to defund his signature health-care law when they shut down the government in 2013.
President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering war has never looked riskier for his party.
Prodded by Trump, Republicans earlier this year launched an audacious plan to entrench their congressional majority by redrawing House-district maps to squeeze out Democrats—anywhere and everywhere they could. The gambit was an exercise in political power and, coming outside of the traditional decennial redistricting process, without precedent in modern history.
President Donald Trump’s theory of executive power does not lend much weight to the views of his predecessors—especially those who happen to be Democrats. But as the government shutdown enters its second month, Trump is showing an odd degree of respect for legal guidance first adopted under a president he has mocked: Jimmy Carter.
Government shutdowns are a relatively modern phenomenon.
With the government shutdown well into its second week, President Donald Trump’s strategy to break Senate Democrats has become clear: Maximize the pain of the closure to force them into retreat. His administration is firing civil servants en masse, threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, and canceling billions of dollars in funding for states that voted for his opponent last year.
When news broke this week that Sherrod Brown would run next year to reclaim a Senate seat in Ohio, Democrats cheered the reports as a huge coup. Before losing a reelection bid last year, Brown had been the last Democrat to win statewide office in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade. His entry instantly transforms the Ohio race from a distant dream to a plausible pickup opportunity for the party.
As New York Governor Kathy Hochul denounced the GOP’s aggressive attempt to gerrymander Democrats into political oblivion this week, she lamented her party’s built-in disadvantage. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” she told reporters.
As political metaphors go, it’s not a bad one. Hochul omitted a key detail, however: Democrats provided the rope themselves. For more than a decade, they’ve tried to be the party of good government on redistricting.
For months, no Republican in either the House or the Senate spoke out more forcefully, or more consistently, against cutting Medicaid than Josh Hawley. As President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was weaving its way through Congress, Hawley argued repeatedly that stripping health insurance from the poorest Americans would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal” for a party that, in the Trump era, has relied on millions of votes from people who receive government assistance.
The so-called moderate Republicans promised they would not slash Medicaid. Conservatives vowed not to explode the national debt. Party leaders insisted that they would not lump a jumble of unrelated policies into a single enormous piece of legislation and rush that bill through Congress before any reasonable person had time to read it.
But President Donald Trump wanted his “big, beautiful bill” enacted in time to sign it with a celebratory flourish on America’s birthday.
When Democrats reshaped the American health-insurance system in 2010, Republicans accused them of all manner of legislative foul play: Middle-of-the-night votes. Backroom deals. An enormous, partisan bill jammed through Congress before anyone could find out what was in it. “Have you read the bill? Hell no you haven’t!” an indignant then-House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered on the House floor.
The GOP’s claims were exaggerated.
Representative Tim Burchett is fond of saying no.
The fourth-term Tennessean was one of the eight renegade Republicans who helped oust Kevin McCarthy, and when Speaker Mike Johnson tries to rally the party around legislation, many times Burchett is one of the last holdouts. As Burchett left the Capitol on Monday, he complained to me: “It’s always the conservatives that have to compromise.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
President Donald Trump has been back in the White House for just more than 100 days, and he’s already thinking about a third term. For much of American history, the notion would have been laughable.
Speaker Mike Johnson flashed a grin as he chided reporters in the Capitol this morning: “I told you not to doubt us.” Moments earlier, the House had approved a budget proposal that could allow Republicans to pass the president’s “one big beautiful bill”—a boost for not only Donald Trump’s legislative agenda but also Johnson’s job security.
In fairness to the speaker’s doubters, they had good reason to question whether the budget would pass.
Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.
Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention.
Republican senators have confirmed a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter to lead the nation’s intelligence community and a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as its health secretary. This morning, however, they saved some of their sharpest questions for a Cabinet nominee who, until last month, served alongside them as a GOP member of Congress.
Representative Ro Khanna has known Elon Musk for more than a decade, so he thought he should raise some concerns about the billionaire’s assault on the federal government where he would be sure to see them. Posting on the platform Musk owns, the California Democrat said yesterday that Musk should be hauled before Congress to explain himself. “Musk’s attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional,” Khanna wrote.
It took Musk just 16 minutes to reply: “Don’t be a dick.
Project 2025, the conservative governing playbook produced by veterans of the first Trump administration, has an entire chapter on how to overhaul USAID. Its authors urged the next president to “scale back USAID’s global footprint,” “deradicalize” its programs, and throttle its funding.
Before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid.
Presidents typically spend their final days in the White House taking care of odds and ends: issuing pardons, signing some last executive orders, thanking staff. Joe Biden is doing all of those things—and also trying to change the Constitution on his way out the door.
This morning, Biden declared on X that “the Equal Rights Amendment is now the law of the land.” Well, there you have it: The Constitution has a 28th amendment, and women’s rights have been enshrined across the country.
Or not.
Democrats spent more than $20 million last year to end then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional career. Now, however, the Republican they worked so hard to defeat is their favorite nominee for President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary came as a pleasant surprise to many Democrats and union leaders, who expected him to follow past Republican presidents and name a conservative hostile to organized labor.
The success of President-Elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda will depend on whether Republicans can close ranks in Congress. They nearly failed on their very first vote.
Mike Johnson won reelection as House speaker by the narrowest of margins this afternoon, and only after two Republican holdouts changed their votes at the last minute. Johnson won on the first ballot with exactly the 218 votes he needed to secure the required majority.