At the end of the classic 1972 film The Godfather, the new don of the family, Michael Corleone, attends a baptism while his men wipe out the heads of the other New York mafia families—all of them Michael’s enemies, and all intending one day to do him harm. Rather than wait for their eventual attacks, Michael dispatched them himself. “Today, I settled all family business,” Michael says to his traitorous brother-in-law, before having him killed.
President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press.
President Donald Trump is about to launch yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations, this time in Los Angeles. Under a dubious legal rationale, he is activating 2,000 members of the National Guard to confront protests against actions by ICE, the immigration police who have used thuggish tactics against citizens and foreigners alike in the United States.
By militarizing the situation in L.A.
Today’s phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump was a painful reminder that Trump is the junior partner in the Russian-American relationship and that Putin will continue his mass-murder campaign in Ukraine for as long as he can get away with it. Nothing else of substance emerged from the call. When it comes to Europe’s largest armed conflict since World War II, Putin’s still in charge.
Esteemed Comrades of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs! Today we ask you to review your files for any communications you may have had with unreliable elements who are critical of our Party and our leader. If you have had contact with journalists, researchers, or other subversives, we ask you to report these interactions in full to the senior comrades responsible for the important work of ideological vigilance.
Donald Trump said on the campaign trail that he would make peace between Ukraine and Russia in a day. Three months later, he’s behind schedule, and his plan now is to end the fighting quickly by selling out Ukraine and its people to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The proposal that Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are pushing is not a framework for peace, but a rich and bloody reward to Moscow for three years of aggression and war crimes.
The United States grabbing land from an ally sounds like the stuff of a Netflix political thriller. But every American should contemplate three realities about Donald Trump’s aggressive desire to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory. First, unlike his usual shtick, in which he floats wild ideas and then he and his aides alternate between saying he was serious and saying he might have been joking, he means it. The Danes seem to believe him, and so should Americans.
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For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.
The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday.
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The defense of the United States is a serious business. Breaches of national security are especially dangerous.
I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away
The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.
American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic.
Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy.
President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.
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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death.
Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multi-billionaire to enforce his executive orders.
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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset.
Dear Mr. Secretary,
Tradition dictates that I begin by congratulating you on your confirmation. You seem like a man who appreciates frankness, and so I will spare you empty decorum: It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have been opposed to your nomination to lead the Department of Defense from the moment it was announced. But the Senate has voted, and you are now the leader of the most powerful military on the planet.
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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been.
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Not long after Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth read his opening statement and began fielding questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, I began thinking: I hope neither America’s allies nor its enemies are watching this. The hope was, of course, completely unreasonable.
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Last week, I pronounced unequivocal judgment—as I tend to do regarding many things—on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I think it’s a contrived and embarrassing idea driven by nostalgia and capitalism, and antithetical to the youthful rebelliousness that drives rock-and-roll music.
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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other.
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I retired from a long teaching career a few years ago, but during my later years in the classroom, I offered a course on the Cold War and American pop culture, to try to help younger students understand the fears that dominated so much of American life in the 20th century.
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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power.
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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power.
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.
Dictatorships seem stable and almost invulnerable, until the day they fall. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime crumbled in days in the face of an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a group that the United States considers a terrorist organization.
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President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter is a done deal. The president has not only obviated the existing cases against Hunter; the sweep of the pardon effectively immunizes his son against prosecution for all federal crimes he may have committed over the course of more than a decade.
Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span.
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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements.
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As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.