It’s hard to overstate just how much the conservative activist Charlie Kirk felt like family to many in Donald Trump’s inner circle, and to the president himself.
Kirk was close friends with Vice President J. D. Vance and with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., regularly texting on small-group threads with them and a coterie of young male aides and allies. He was a frequent and welcome presence at the White House and at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club.

In December 2023, I spent half a minute with Charlie Kirk in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center. Turning Point USA, the youth organization that he founded in 2012 and built into a right-wing juggernaut, was holding its annual convention in the city that the Chicago-born Kirk had made his home. Tall and dark-haired, he was moving quickly with a group of aides through a crowd of admirers.

Whether the senior Hamas officials Israel tried to kill in a surprise missile strike in Doha yesterday are still alive is an open question. But the U.S.-brokered peace deal they were meeting to consider is almost certainly dead.
The diplomatic calculation is not difficult.
“When one party bombs the negotiating team of the other party, it’s hard to see a path forward,” Dana Shell Smith, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, told us.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the high-profile conservative activist, is apparently the latest in a string of terrifying acts of political violence in the United States. Real America’s Voice, which aired Kirk’s show, announced his death. He was 31.
Kirk was shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University, just north of Provo, Utah.

Early this morning, Russia sent a swarm of drones into Poland. The crisis of the NATO alliance that people on both sides of the Atlantic have been denying or trying to put off is now here: This is the moment when the world finds out whether the United States remains committed to the defense of its allies.
Ever since he began running for president, Donald Trump has been equivocal at best about America’s security commitments to Europe.

Looking back, I don’t know what exactly I was expecting when I opened “Request No. 1,” the PDF file containing the contents of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator, created the book in 2003 by soliciting tributes from the financier’s friends and associates. Given the crimes Epstein was convicted of, I steeled myself before scrolling. Somehow, my internet-addled imagination failed me. This book is a nightmare.

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 there. Stop what you’re doing. Take off that tool belt and hard hat—let’s see some ID. Why? Because we don’t think you’re a citizen. Now show us your papers.
This kind of behavior by government officials is now legal in the United States.

Today, Israel attacked Hamas, apparently targeting its lead negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, in Doha, the capital of Qatar. This tactic is not endorsed in Getting to Yes or in any other guide to negotiation or international law. It is, however, consistent with the stated view of Israel’s leadership, which is that avowed members of a group engaged in ongoing acts of terror are valid targets wherever they happen to be.