Today's Liberal News

“Injustice”: How Biden’s DOJ Failed to Hold Trump Accountable for Jan. 6, Corruption & More

We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis on the day they publish their new book, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, which looks at how the DOJ during the Biden administration was overly cautious in pursuing cases against Trump and his allies over 2020 election interference, the January 6 riot and more.

“The Dark Side”: Dick Cheney’s Legacy from Iraq Invasion to U.S. Torture Program

Dick Cheney, the former vice president and one of the key architects of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died Monday at age 84. Cheney served six terms in Congress as Wyoming’s lone representative before serving as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, when he oversaw the first Gulf War and the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama that deposed former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney served as chair and CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, before George W.

No Politics Is Local

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.
You can’t find many clichés hoarier than Tip O’Neill’s rule that “all politics is local.” A truism is supposed to be true, though. Does this one still hold?
Tomorrow’s elections make the case that the opposite is more accurate these days: No politics is local.

Today’s Atlantic Trivia

The 37-volume Naturalis Historia, written by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, is the world’s earliest surviving encyclopedia. In the first century C.E., Pliny set out to collect the breadth of human knowledge, and millennia later, it’s still a great document for learning a little bit about everything. It has chapters on sugar, Germany, the rainbow, Cesarean births, the art of painting, and hypothetical antipodes.

A Confederacy of Toddlers

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.

What’s a Scandal When Everything Is Outrageous

The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses.
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post.

The Solution to the Third-Term Threat

American Presidents are plainly meant to be term-limited. The Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, spells it out: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Donald Trump has sometimes sung a different tune, though. In March, he told NBC News that “there are methods” by which he could continue serving past the end of his term, and that he was “not joking.” Riffing on this, the Trump Organization’s website began selling “Trump 2028” paraphernalia.

Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on Denial of His U.S. Visa & Trump’s Threat to Strike Nigeria

We speak to Wole Soyinka, the 91-year-old celebrated Nigerian writer and first African Nobel laureate, who recently had his U.S. visa revoked after he made comments critical of Trump. As Trump threatens U.S. military action against Nigeria over claims of a “Christian genocide” in the country, Soyinka says, “when religious differences began to be invoked as a means of political power, and even social and economic powers, we’ve had unquestionably the issue of impunity.