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Until recently, Donald Trump was consistent about this: The time for the United States to police the world, enforcing laws and norms, was over. “We are going to take care of this country first before we worry about everybody else in the world,” he told The New York Times in 2016.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Exactly 39 years after Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first published in The Atlantic, Mark Twain scratched out a new version. “Battle Hymn,” which Twain considered “beautiful and sublime,” was in need of revision.

On January 6, Donald Trump’s administration published an apologia for the Trump supporters whom he incited to storm the Capitol five years earlier. The next day, Stephen Miller, in response to news that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, lambasted the Democratic Party on X for “inciting a violent insurrection.”
The juxtaposition of the January 6 anniversary and the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota the next day is a coincidence of timing.

Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company’s “chief concept officer,” Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to “reevaluating and redefining fast food,” but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also “reevaluating and redefining” how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.

Photographs by Jason Andrew
People look at you differently when you carry a Geiger counter. Or, at least, when you carry a Geiger counter and exclaim things like “Much less radiation here than you might expect!” But how else are you to know that the radiation in your food is at acceptable levels?
They have government inspectors for this, you might say. It is their job.
That was before Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency started hacking away at our bureaucracy.

Aidan Perzana woke up to honking vehicles and looked out his window just as ICE officers surrounded an SUV. The 31-year-old data engineer told me he saw the officers moving to the side of the vehicle as the driver attempted to pull away. “There was not a thought in my mind that she was going to hit one of them,” he said. “I was surprised to hear the gunshots.”
Videos circulating on social media showed more of the confrontation.

Since he was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary early last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previewed big changes to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans—the government’s go-to guide on what to eat, and how much of it. Rewritten only every five years, the dietary guidelines are ubiquitous in American life: The food pyramid, launched in the 1990s, is a result of the document. The guidelines determine what millions of kids eat in school cafeterias every day.

Representative Seth Moulton is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, but he learned about the U.S. military’s middle-of-the-night capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the same way many Americans did: A friend who saw the news on the internet texted him.
“That is not the way Congress is supposed to be notified of operations by the Department of Defense,” Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told us wryly.