Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
The worst aviation disaster in almost a quarter century is one of the first tests of Donald Trump’s second administration. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how the president responded to the crisis.

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To stay in or to go out, that is the question. It’s the dance we do while checking the time before we’re supposed to meet up with friends after a long day at work.

From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support.

Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET
The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.
For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge.

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Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C.

This afternoon, FBI personnel braced for a retaliatory purge of the nation’s premiere law-enforcement agency, as President Donald Trump appeared ready to fire potentially hundreds of agents and officials who’d participated in investigations that led to criminal charges against him.
A team that investigated Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was expected to be fired, four people familiar with the matter said.

“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin.

Updated at 5:53 p.m. on January 31, 2025
Last night, scientists began to hear cryptic and foreboding warnings from colleagues: Go to the CDC website, and download your data now. They were all telling one another the same thing: Data on the website were about to disappear, or be altered, to comply with the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility. “I was up until 2 a.m.

According to Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” the administration’s deportation policies apply only to people who are “in the country illegally,” not to the “millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees, that want to come in the right way.”
This week, more than half a million Venezuelans who’d done things “the right way” discovered that the distinction might not matter.