Donald Trump sent thousands of tweets during his four years as president. None may prove as consequential as the one he sent in the wee hours of December 19, 2020: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild,” the president wrote at 1:42 a.m. ET.At the time, Trump’s middle-of-the-night missive deepened a sense of growing alarm about a defeated president who appeared to be unmoored and was fomenting chaos during his final weeks in office.

One question keeps bouncing around my mind as I look at this image from the new James Webb Space Telescope: How is this real? I have followed the story of Webb for years, chronicling the ups and downs and controversies the mission has experienced on its way to becoming a real, functioning telescope. I’ve talked with many dozens of scientists and engineers about how the observatory works and the kind of high-resolution images it is designed to produce.

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.George Floyd’s murder changed how Americans view law enforcement. The Uvalde massacre could have its own impact on policing and guns, and yet we still don’t know why the police response went so wrong.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

When it comes to art against tyranny, no work is more seared into our consciousness than Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s dark, howling mural against fascist terror. Created in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, it has in the 85 years since become a universal statement about human suffering in the face of political violence. Throughout World War II, it stood for resistance to Nazi aggression; during Vietnam controversies such as the My Lai massacre, protesters invoked it against the U.

Over the weekend we learned that Donald Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon had written to the January 6 committee indicating that he might, after all, be willing to testify. Bannon, who has been indicted for contempt of Congress, had previously claimed to be bound by executive privilege—though no court has accepted that argument—but he now presented a letter from the former president granting a waiver.