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.
Updated at 7.44 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be on a mission to erase women from the top ranks of the U.S. armed forces.
Summer weekends in America are good for lots of things: baseball games, cookouts, farmers’ markets, sipping a bev next to a lake. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump: crashing out on social media in hopes of distracting the nation from nonstop coverage of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump is an inveterate poster, known for his erratic style and late-night tirades.
Every so often, Donald Trump sends an encouraging signal to Ukraine, despite his long pattern of deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week, the president of the United States allowed the transfer of a number of American Patriot anti-missile systems through Germany—a move that will strengthen Ukraine’s air defense at a dangerous time.
Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.
Dear James,
I’ve been a lifelong participant in various recreational sports. Candidly, I’m not a great athlete, but I’ve always been enthusiastic.
You all remember comedy? That thing from the 1980s where you hate your wife? Well, it’s back! We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!
Remember, censorship is when people don’t laugh at your jokes. Freedom is when your late-night show gets permanently taken off the air for financial reasons (16 million of them) and the president expresses his approval.
As the federal government begins to implement some $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts called for in President Trump’s budget bill passed by the Republican-led Congress, a new investigative documentary, Life After, examines the moral dilemmas and profit motives surrounding assisted dying that could increasingly confront members of the disabled community. Reid Davenport, who directed the film, notes the “film is not about suicide.
A new report titled “You Feel Like Your Life Is Over” details the dangerous and abusive conditions faced by immigrants held at three ICE jails in Miami, Florida, since Trump returned to office. One testimony describes how detention officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs. One man said, “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.
ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR.
As Congress approved some $45 billion to expand ICE’s immigration detention capacity, including the jailing of families and children, we look at the case of one family. In May, plainclothes ICE agents detained a 6-year-old boy from Honduras who has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, along with his 9-year old sister and their mother, as they left their immigration court hearing in Los Angeles. In detention, the boy missed a key doctor’s appointment, and the family said his sister cried every night.
They’re risky for the president politically—and for your own bank account.
The shoeless shuffle through security lines is finally over.
Riders don’t want buses to be free. They want something else.
Chronic venous insufficiency is a common condition that can worsen over time.
The letter from President Donald Trump’s doctor details his new vascular diagnosis.
The expiration of shots the Biden administration promised to send comes after President Donald Trump cut deeply into foreign aid.
The health secretary has said repeatedly he wants to provide better care for Native Americans, but he’s yet to reveal how.
The most painful health care provisions in the new Republican law don’t take effect for years, giving lobbyists plenty of time to undo them.
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.
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
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.
Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Joe Biden, among others, reportedly could sling Anglo-Saxonisms with gusto. In public, most of them managed to convey an image of geniality.
Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. “Pretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway.
President Donald Trump’s latest assault on the news media came in the form of another lawsuit last week. After The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had allegedly written a birthday note, complete with “bawdy” doodling, to the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump boiled over with indignation.
