Right around the time that Donald Trump was arriving at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress—the longest such speech, it would turn out, in the history of the presidency—Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator tasked with delivering the Democratic Party’s rebuttal, was telling me all the things she wouldn’t be talking about.
The key to understanding this morning’s Supreme Court ruling unfreezing American foreign aid is that two different rulings are at issue here, and teasing apart those technicalities reveals a loss that is perhaps more significant for the Trump administration than is first apparent.
The two orders both come from U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali.
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For a few years, Democrats were so regimented that one could almost forget Will Rogers’s well-worn quip that he was not a member of any organized political party but rather a Democrat.
I sure hope J.D. Vance hasn’t seen what people are doing to him on the internet.
Generative-AI companies have been selling a narrative of unprecedented, endless progress. Just last week, OpenAI introduced GPT-4.5 as its “largest and best model for chat yet.” Earlier in February, Google called its latest version of Gemini “the world’s best AI model.” And in January, the Chinese company DeekSeek touted its R1 model as being just as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model—which Sam Altman had called “the smartest model in the world” the previous month.
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.
Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior.
Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress discussed the Middle East without any mention of Palestinians. This comes as Trump has called for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and posted an AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a resort town with a golden statue of Trump. Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman attended the speech with her guest Dr. Adam Hamawy, an Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who recently volunteered at a Gaza hospital.
President Trump has signed a number of anti-trans executive orders in the first month of his second term. He has attempted to ban trans women from sports, declared that there are only two sexes, and placed restrictions on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Trump continues to target trans people with hateful rhetoric, leaving trans people uncertain of their futures.
As stiff new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China took effect on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that Trump’s moves are aimed at “a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” Canada relies on the U.S. for 75% of exports and a third of its imports. For more, we speak with a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood. “If there’s one feeling in Canada right now, it’s probably betrayal.
President Trump on Tuesday once again focused on the importance of securing the U.S. border and criticized former President Biden’s so-called open border policies. He accused Biden of allowing migrants to “overwhelm” towns like Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, and pushed for even more funding to implement his campaign promise of mass deportations.
In his first speech to a joint session of Congress in his second term, Trump once again threatened to annex the Panama Canal. Juan González, co-host of Democracy Now!, fact-checks some of the lies that Trump used to justify U.S. control of the Panama Canal. In his address, Trump claimed 38,000 Americans were killed during the creation of the Panama Canal. In reality, the vast majority of the labor force that built the canal was from the West Indies, largely Barbados.
The Covid contrarian’s Senate confirmation hearing to lead the National Institutes of Health promises another airing of pandemic grievances.
Luigi Mangione wasn’t the only one haunting the event.
You can’t blame Trump for the recent plane crashes. You can blame him for what’s about to happen.
Part of the unbridled joy of nabbing a great discount used to be the thrill of the chase.
Bezos will gladly help set the world on fire as long as he can bid on the contract to clear the debris.
Trump’s FBI and DOJ dropped several ongoing investigations into threats against abortion clinics and issued a new memo signaling reduced enforcement going forward against such acts.
House Majority PAC will run TV and digital ads targeting vulnerable GOP congressional incumbents.
GOP lawmakers are considering a plan to limit federal matching funds for the health insurance program to pay for tax cuts.
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.
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.
Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech, might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.
But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.
The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.
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 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January.
In the months between Donald Trump’s election and his inauguration, cryptocurrency prices soared on speculation that the president would appoint crypto-friendly regulators and set up a “strategic bitcoin reserve.” Trump has delivered on the regulatory front: The Securities and Exchange Commission has a new pro-crypto commissioner and has dropped or paused lawsuits against crypto exchanges.
An Idaho hospital is stepping in to argue that the state’s near-total abortion ban violates patients’ rights.
