Rarely in the annals of public controversy has so much certainty been expressed in the face of such great ignorance. With very few exceptions, the Republican Party has coalesced around Donald Trump and expressed the fierce conviction that the Department of Justice’s decision to serve a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was a grotesque abuse of power.There’s a notable problem with this conclusion: The American public still hasn’t seen the search warrant.

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.“It’s not just my opinion that things are weird,” Derek Thompson told me recently. It’s a fact of life, he explained, that the U.S. economy is behaving very strangely right now.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Unless Serena Williams pulls off the kind of feat typically reserved for Hollywood endings at this year’s U.S. Open, 23 is the number of Grand Slam singles titles with which she will retire. It is a number that makes her the all-time winningest, slammiest singles champion, of any gender, in the modern incarnation of tennis (Rafael Nadal did recently inch closer to her record, capturing his 22nd at this year’s French Open, but still).

Once again, the United States is messing up its approach to vaccines. Three months into its monkeypox outbreak, just 620,000 doses of the two-injection Jynneos shot—the nation’s current best immune defense against the virus—have been shipped to states, not nearly enough to immunize the 1.6 million to 1.7 million Americans that the CDC considers at highest risk. The next deliveries from the manufacturer aren’t slated until September at the earliest.

Two days after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, details about the underlying investigation are still scarce. News reports suggest that it is connected to concerns around presidential record-keeping—that Trump White House documents that should have been in the hands of a professional archivist somehow ended up on vacation at the former president’s Florida home.

If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.

Today’s most elderly bats aren’t supposed to exist. Ounce for ounce and pound for pound, they are categorically teeny mammals; according to the evolutionary rules that hold across species, they should be short-lived, like other small-bodied creatures.And yet, many of Earth’s winged mammals buck this trend, sometimes blowing decades past their anticipated expiration date.

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.Americans should not let the revelations about Donald Trump’s demands for a loyal military get lost in all the hysteria over the raid at Mar-a-Lago.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic.

In some corners of MAGA-land, a new civil war is getting under way. The FBI’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening to collect evidence in a criminal investigation related to former President Donald Trump is the trigger that some of his supporters needed to suggest that violence is imminent.