In Donald Trump’s first administration, he was surrounded by buffers and filters—but in his second, he’s surrounded by amplifiers. On a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic, the foreign-affairs columnist Thomas Friedman joins to discuss the chaos of Trump’s conflicts, and how world leaders are viewing the instability.
Meanwhile, the end of Donald Trump’s friendship with Elon Musk was never really a question of “if,” but “when.

Early in my career, I worked as an assistant at a literary agency. Big publishers generally consider taking on only writers already represented by agents, which makes literary agencies a front line of sorts. As the person opening the mail, I was the front line of the front line. I saw the true democratic range of the slush pile, full of pitches that no one had vouched for and, for the most part, that no one ever would.

Watching Carrie Bradshaw—erstwhile sex columnist, intrepid singleton, striver—float down the majestic staircase of her new Gramercy townhouse on a recent episode of And Just Like That while wearing a transparent tulle gown, on an errand to mail a letter, is one of the most cognitively dissonant television experiences I’ve had recently.

Photographs by Bieke Depoorter
Walking through her neighborhood in Ghent, Belgium, in 2020, Bieke Depoorter came across a man named Henk, bent over a telescope, gaze trained on the moon. “I realized that I never really look up,” she told me, describing the chance encounter. She found herself intrigued by this man, who was “comforted by the cosmos.

After insisting again and again that they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States, Trump-administration officials flew the 29-year-old Maryland man back from El Salvador today to face a grand-jury criminal indictment in Tennessee.
Abrego Garcia’s return doesn’t mean he can go free.

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Past leaders have imagined the United States as a “shining city upon a hill,” a melting pot, a “beacon to the world.” Donald Trump is working toward a different vision: the United States as a fortress.

For once, President Donald Trump was trying to be the adult in the room.
Trump and Elon Musk, two billionaires with massive egos and combustible temperaments, had forged an unlikely friendship over the past year, one built on proximity, political expediency, and, yes, a touch of genuine warmth. Relations between the president and his top benefactor had grown somewhat strained in recent weeks, as Trump began to feel that Musk had overstayed his welcome in the West Wing.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is presiding over an unmitigated disaster, and everything about the U.S.- and Israel-backed group’s failure was entirely predictable. After lifting a blockade on relief supplies to the Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities tapped GHF, which is barely months old, as the principal aid-delivery system for starving Palestinian residents.

The first time President Donald Trump tried to institute a travel ban to prevent large numbers of immigrants and visitors from reaching the United States, back in 2017, massive protests erupted at major airports across the country. This time, at least so far, there has been nothing of the sort. The disparity in reactions helps illustrate how habituated Americans have become to a president who wields his power with discriminatory intentions.