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.
What will Donald Trump do with the remaining two years of his presidency, and how will Democrats in Congress respond? On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss this and more.
Illustrations by Katherine Lam
The train’s seats: blue with a white strip down the middle. The windows: wide, tinted green. The sun: halfway below the horizon. He was playing with the top his mother had bought from the cart lady. With each spin came flashes of rainbow light: zzz zzz zoom. The train’s seats: white with a blue strip down the middle, five per row. The windows: wide, tinted blue. A hard orange sunlight cut through the glass.
He was playing with the top his mother had bought.
“Heaven forbid, if we lose this majority or whatever, I don’t know what my next chapter of life is, I’m just open to it. And if God moves on our hearts and says we should, you know, go back to my hometown of Shreveport and start a lawn business, I’ll do that with equal fervor. I mean, I just want to be of my highest and best use to God and to my country.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
What does your ideal night look like? Maybe it’s dinner with friends or a quiet evening at home with family or a partner. If you picked the latter option, you are part of a growing contingent of Americans who are spending less time with friends and, by some measures, more time with family.
For airlines in the United States, going bankrupt is practically a rite of passage. Since the airline industry was deregulated almost 50 years ago, dozens of airlines have filed for Chapter 11, including each of the so-called Big Three carriers—United, American, and Delta. A notable exception has been JetBlue, which until recently was one of the industry’s few success stories.
Nearly $12 billion dollars was spent on political ads for the midterms.
Anthropic promises a blockbuster IPO with its revealing filing
We gave up what makes life meaningful in order to do it.
“No one seemed to be concerned about ‘heritage citizens.
A monopoly on mortgages is finally loosening. Homebuyers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit.
What’s alarmist and what’s real about artificial intelligence. Plus, how lawmakers are dealing with a situation they don’t really understand.
Kennedy and the leader of his Make America Healthy Again movement have stood by the British actor.
Republican losses threaten the rationale behind the health secretary’s deal with the president.
Voters overwhelming backed pro-abortion rights ballot measures and candidates Tuesday night. The GOP remained largely silent on the issue.
The GOP has joined Democrats in blaming pharmacy conglomerates for high drug prices.
Pennsylvania is home to one of the worst measles outbreaks in decades.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
In a Canberra Playbook Podcast interview Jim Chalmers accused Liberals of wanting Australians to suffer, as their path back to power.
Jim Chalmers warns global pressures mean more domestic pain.
Democrats regained control of both the House and the Senate in Tuesday’s historic midterm elections, a comeback fueled largely by voter anger over high prices and the war on Iran. But surveys also found that corruption was a major concern, with 76% of voters telling a Harris poll that elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving the economy for ordinary people.
In the days before MAGA’s midterm disaster, President Trump began complaining about his presidency. He felt stuck. The war in Iran wouldn’t end. Inflation wouldn’t subside. Little was going his way. But in the president’s mind, there was one exception: “Stephen is the only one who gets stuff done,” Trump repeatedly griped, a person close to the White House told us. “I need more people who get stuff done.
The most important Cybertruck ever built is probably still parked somewhere on the grounds of Mar-a-Lago. In August 2024, Donald Trump stood on the driveway of his Palm Beach club and circled a custom version of Tesla’s notorious, angular electric truck. Wrapped in a giant photo of his bloodied face after the assassination attempt that summer, the car was a gift from the MAGA influencer Adin Ross during a livestreamed interview. “Wow, that’s an Elon!” Trump said.
Harmeet Dhillon is not the most notable administration official to depart after Democrats’ enormous midterm victory—that title goes to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who President Trump announced today would be replaced by Stephen Miller. But Dhillon’s short tenure shows the immense influence that Trump has had on the federal government in less than two years in power.
The criminal trial of Russell Brand took less than four weeks, at the end of which the comedian turned spiritual influencer was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. (The jury in London declared him not guilty of three other charges, two of rape and one of attempted indecent assault.) The accounts detailed by Brand’s accusers were harrowing.
Introspection has never been one of Donald Trump’s more notable attributes. He never accepts blame or course-corrects; he only becomes a more distilled version of himself.
And so, faced with rejection at the ballot box on an overwhelming scale, the president responded by replacing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, with Stephen Miller.
Technically speaking, Miller had been Wiles’s second in command, as deputy chief of staff.
Tuesday was a historic night for progressive Democrats and, in particular, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Six new DSA-endorsed candidates were elected to the House, and democratic socialists won mayoral races in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Providence.
“The Democratic Socialists of America had a phenomenal night, and this movement is only going to continue to grow,” says prominent leftist political commentator Hasan Piker.