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.
In his first term, President Donald Trump was assiduous in courting his base of committed supporters, often at the expense of voters who were persuadable. Those decisions helped lose him the 2020 election.
Donald Trump helped create a monster. Now he’d like for everyone to ignore it.
After years of sounding dog whistles and peddling outright conspiracism to work his supporters into a lather about global pedophile rings, Trump is telling those same people to move on. Earlier today, Trump posted on Truth Social that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy—a pillar of the MAGA cinematic universe—is a “hoax” and went so far as to disavow his “PAST supporters” over the issue.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent a lot of his time as health secretary on the road. Late last month, he spoke at an event in Baton Rouge and lamented how Americans have gotten sicker and sicker over the years. “When my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old boy—we had the healthiest children in the world,” he said, flanked by supporters in green MAHA Louisiana hats.
When the poet Andrea Gibson learned two years ago that their ovarian cancer was incurable, the news marked a turning point; Gibson would often say it led to some of the most joyous moments of their life.
Before the terminal prognosis, they were always afraid. They had severe anxiety and chronic panic attacks; they were petrified of the ocean; they couldn’t bring themselves to eat nuts on a plane, in case they turned out to have developed a new allergy and might suffocate in flight.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the conversation around the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Frum explains why Trump’s move has triggered backlash from parts of his own base and why it reveals a deeper political fracture inside the MAGA movement.
The Trump administration’s mass deportation machine continues to shatter families and communities with violent, indiscriminate raids on schools, homes and workplaces. Farms are a particular target of its brutal, racist crackdown; around two-thirds of U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, largely from Mexico. Earlier this month, a raid on a farm in California turned fatal when 57-year-old Jaime Alanís died after falling from the roof of a greenhouse.
On July 16, 1945, the United States carried out the Trinity test, the world’s first nuclear detonation. Today, 80 years later, the University of Chicago — the site of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction — is host to the Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War, an event that brings Nobel laureates and nuclear experts together to confront the growing global risk of nuclear war.
In a major new New York Times exposé on health insurance behemoth UnitedHealth, deputy investigations editor David Enrich reveals how the largest insurer in the country works to intimidate and silence critics of its often predatory and exploitative treatment of patients. While “companies do this kind of stuff all the time,” Enrich says, UnitedHealth’s lawyers “were really going after some fairly obscure stuff, and that suggested to me that this was a campaign of desperation.
They’re risky for the president politically—and for your own bank account.
The shoeless shuffle through security lines is finally over.
Riders don’t want buses to be free. They want something else.
Brian Goldstone on the unrecognized population of full-time workers in America without stable housing.
The most painful health care provisions in the new Republican law don’t take effect for years, giving lobbyists plenty of time to undo them.
Red states are banning the tooth-protecting mineral, while blue state skeptics aren’t budging.
Civil servants told POLITICO they’re anxious and exhausted, but holding out hope their lawyers can still save their jobs.
The CDC says cases have reached nearly 1,300, the most since 1992.
It seeks information on employees who quit or faced discipline during the Biden administration for refusing to execute DEI orders, according to an email obtained by POLITICO.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
An immigration raid in Camarillo, California, on Thursday led to an hourslong standoff between protesters and federal border agents, who blocked the roads with military-style vehicles and tear-gassed community members, including children, as crowds attempted to protect dozens of farmworkers from arrest.
The Department of Homeland Security said over 300 immigrants were detained in dual raids on cannabis farms and agricultural fields in Camarillo and the coastal city of Carpinteria.
For weeks now, the country-music star John Rich has waged a very public battle against a proposed gas-fired power plant near his home in Nashville. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest public energy provider in the United States, says the new plant will keep blackouts at bay and prices low; Rich, along with environmental groups who have vocally opposed the project, is worried about “water contamination, destroyed farms, noise and air pollution.
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.
One thing that’s helpful in a crisis is steady leadership. Unfortunately, disaster-stricken Americans are stuck with Kristi Noem instead.
Noem, the secretary of homeland security, was unequivocal at a March Cabinet meeting: “We are eliminating FEMA.
President Donald Trump’s “golden age of America” has no need for migrant labor. Picking crops? There are 34 million able-bodied American adults on Medicaid who can do that grueling work. Building homes? Native-born Americans will handle those jobs. Meat processing? The country has no use for foreign laborers willing to put in the hours for “slave wages.
Early last year, Pixar appeared to be on the brink of an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had thrown the business of kids’ movies into particular turmoil: Many theatrical features were pushed to streaming, and their success on those platforms left studios wondering whether the appeal of at-home convenience would be impossible to reverse. Disney, Pixar’s parent company, premiered the Pixar films Soul, Luca, and Turning Red on Disney+, and each was well received.
