Tom Nichols

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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.

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.

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.
Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat.

I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to pantomime the act of giving fellatio.
I could have put it differently.

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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.

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Yesterday, The Atlantic published another astonishing story by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s hatred of the military.

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You know the expression and what it means, but I will use only the abbreviation: WTF. In military circles, it is rendered as “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” On the show The Good Place, it is “What the fork.

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In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.

Over the past week, Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp. At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home.

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It’s Friday, and in the world of politics, it’s been a week that—to me, anyway—seems like a year. Monday was the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.

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A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs.

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This weekend, at his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump descended into a spiral of rage and incoherence that was startling even by his standards.

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Back in 1999—the good old days—a Canadian band that called itself Great Big Sea released a wonderful song titled “Consequence Free.” It was a gentle poke at social conformity, guilt, and, yes, perhaps even what was then called political correctness.

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Scientific American has been a mainstay of science and technology journalism in the United States. (It’s been in business 179 years, even longer than The Atlantic.) As an aspiring nerd in my youth—I began college as a chemistry major—I read it regularly.

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Every American has the right to participate in public life without violence, and that includes Donald Trump. Personally, I think he probably belongs in jail, but that is a matter for the justice system.

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I find it exhausting to have to point out that Donald Trump has—yet again—threatened to engage in violent and dictatorial behavior, and that—yet again—the collective reaction by some in America seems to be a numb acceptance that this is just who Trump is.

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When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets.

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Donald Trump has disgraced himself in many areas.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have now completed their CNN interview. On social media and cable TV, the responses have broken down pretty much as one might expect. Democrats think it was a home run. Republicans are sour and churlish. The truth is that the interview was a solid and competent outing, which is all it needed to be.

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Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”
No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate.

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The Democrats have met, they’ve nominated a candidate, and now they’re all going home. Their meeting was not a replay of the 1968 disaster; it did not devolve into a divisive confrontation among factions; it did not feature tense ballot fights stretching into the wee hours.

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One of the great myths of American politics is that detailed policy positions are crucial to winning elections. Yes, policy matters in broad strokes: Candidates take general positions on issues such as taxes, abortion, and foreign policy.

Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.

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The Democratic ticket has now taken shape, and Donald Trump is not handling it well. Meanwhile, his running mate and the rest of his party are stumbling.

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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be the Democratic nominee for vice president. He’s likely been tapped not for his liberal policies but for his amiability and optimism, in a bid to attract voters tiring of the gloom and doom pushed by Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

Russia and its junior partner, Belarus, have agreed to a prisoner exchange with the United States and Germany. The deal includes the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, the retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, and the Russian British journalist and Kremlin opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza among the people who are being released after arrests and convictions on various charges.

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The current political climate is suffused with nostalgia for supposedly better times. I remember my own childhood, and those days weren’t better—but they had their sugary moments.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
All airlines are now the same.

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The men leading Kamala Harris’s shortlist right now illustrate the differences in how the two major parties define modern masculinity.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
“I hope Trump kept the receipt.”
The Supreme Court fools itself.

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President Joe Biden has chosen to put his country over his own ego, a heroic decision that shows the difference between a political party and a cult of personality.
Joe Biden, the president of the United States, has decided not to run for his office in 2024.