Category: The Atlantic

Nothing about Carl Hiaasen’s outward appearance suggests eccentricity. I’ve seen him described as having the air of “an amiable dentist” or “a pleasant jeweler” or “a patrician country lawyer.” He is soft-spoken, courteous, and plainly dressed. The mischief is mostly detectable in his eyes, which he’ll widen to express disbelief or judgment, or cast sideways […]

In November, when Donald Trump first announced his plan to place Elon Musk in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency, the idea was widely written off as a joke. Then Trump took office, and DOGE began its very real stampede through the government. As an effort to meaningfully reduce federal spending, however, DOGE […]

On Sunday, Donald Trump went on TV and told Americans that their children should make do with less. “They don’t need to have 30 dolls; they can have three,” the president said on Meet the Press. “They don’t need to have 250 pencils; they can have five.” Critics were quick to point out the irony […]

When judges act as partisan hacks, it is important to condemn their conduct. Last month, four Republican Justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court blessed the anti-democratic attempt by fellow Republican judge Jefferson Griffin to subvert the outcome of the November 2024 election for a seat on that same court by throwing out ballots of […]

Of the innumerable insults directed at Donald Trump and his supporters, the one that seems to get under their skin the most is “woke right.” The epithet describes the Trump movement’s tendency to counter left-wing illiberalism with a mirror-image replica. “The woke right,” my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams explained earlier this year, “places identity grievance, […]

Photographs by Elliot Ross Just after 8 o’clock one spring morning, 2,000 feet below the rim of the Grand Canyon, Nate Chamberlain, wearing chaps and cowboy boots, emerged from the post office in Supai, Arizona, with the last of the morning mail. He tucked a Priority Mail envelope into a plastic U.S. Postal Service crate […]

The intensely hostile letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to the leadership of Harvard yesterday has a lot going on. But the most notable thing about it is what it leaves out. To hear McMahon tell it, Harvard is a university on the verge of ruin. (I say McMahon because her signature is at […]

President Donald Trump’s promised cultural renaissance will begin with misery—specifically, Les Misérables. Trump plans to attend a showing of the musical at the Kennedy Center next month and host a private fundraising reception beforehand, marking the first performance he will attend at the center as president and his first effort to raise funds for the […]

Everyone who follows American politics is going to spend a lot of time thinking about presidential and judicial power over the next few years. But to really understand the coming clashes between the president and the courts, and the constitutional environment in which they’re taking place, we have to pay attention to what isn’t happening […]

Jeff Joseph, a 53-year-old immigration attorney in Colorado, has recently started taking precautions while traveling abroad that, at another time, he would have considered a little paranoid. He leaves his phone at home. Instead, he carries a “burner’’—a device scrubbed of his contact list and communications—in case U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers send him […]

One of President Donald Trump’s greatest political strengths has suddenly become a weakness. He won a second term in large part because voters believed he could boost the economy. Instead, Trump has shrunk it, and his tariffs have sent both the stock market and consumer confidence tumbling. Republicans in Congress could soon make things much […]

American households don’t look like they used to. They’ve been changing for decades, in part because fewer people have been having kids—but also because different people have been having kids. More unmarried couples have been starting families. More single people have been parenting on their own. Some are even raising children with their friends. According […]

In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of […]

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president: In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details […]

The arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan over allegedly obstructing the apprehension of an undocumented immigrant is an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. You can just ask Attorney General Pam Bondi. “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” Bondi told Fox News, commenting on Dugan’s arrest. “They’re deranged. I think some of these […]

Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s related cover story, “‘I Run the Country and the World.’” On Thursday, April 24, I joined my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer in the White House to interview President Donald Trump. The story behind this meeting is a strange one, told in their new Atlantic cover story, which you […]

This month’s cover story is written by two of our newest reporters, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. Both came to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they covered the White House and national politics. As one might expect, they have developed complicated and intriguing ideas about the brain of Donald Trump and the nature […]

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Earlier this month, after it became clear that the Trump administration would not be facilitating the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a Salvadoran megaprison, I texted a close childhood friend. He’d voted for Donald Trump in each […]

Shortly before taking office, Donald Trump promised his supporters that he’d have “the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” And, well, his second administration certainly hasn’t been ordinary. Historians tend to rate presidencies by the breadth of their accomplishments, on a scale ranging from ineffectual to transformative. The classic measuring […]

After Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief in a group chat about military attack plans on the Signal messaging app, he found himself on very thin ice with his boss. But President Donald Trump and his advisers were loath to take a political hit by firing Waltz, especially […]