Category: The Atlantic

Pollsters seemed to finally get it right in 2024. After years of bad misses, they said the presidential election would be close, and it was. In fact, the industry did not solve its problems last year. In 2016, pollsters famously underestimated Donald Trump by about 3.2 points on average. In 2024, after eight years of […]

J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic […]

Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical […]

The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a […]

As Air Force One glided into Doha today, it was easy to imagine President Donald Trump having a case of jet envy. Hamad International Airport, in Qatar’s capital, is sometimes home to the $400 million “palace in the sky,” a luxury liner that Trump is eyeing. Qatar’s royal family plans to give the plane to […]

Steve Witkoff emptied his backpack on the conference table in his second-floor office, in the West Wing. He wanted to show me a pager given to him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials of the Mossad. The pager commemorates the intricate operation in which Israel detonated handheld devices used by Hezbollah, the […]

A generation ago, the Republican Party’s preferred symbol of government-funded indolence was the “welfare queen,” a quasi-mythical figure who collected checks to sit at home watching television. Today’s GOP has fixated on an even stranger target: unemployed adults who take advantage of the taxpayer by collecting free … health insurance. The fiscal centerpiece of the […]

When the welcome ceremony was over, and the Trump officials drove off in their black SUVs, a dozen or so newly arrived South African refugees stepped out into the parking lot of a private terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport yesterday afternoon, still carrying little paper flags they’d been handed. Now it was time for […]

The long-running television show Cops became a propaganda boon to American law enforcement soon after its debut in 1989. The morality of the show is not complicated: The heroes are guys in uniforms braving danger to restore order. They face off against shirtless, drunken louts yelling in the street or barreling down the highway at […]

When President Donald Trump launched his trade war on the world, he issued a stern warning: “Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded.” China ignored the warning. It was rewarded anyway. This morning, Trump largely suspended his trade war in return for nothing but promises of ongoing discussions. There is a lesson here for […]

Earlier this year, Gary Peters made a decision that’s utterly ordinary for most 66-year-olds: He was going to retire. Except Peters happens to be a United States senator, so his announcement that he would not seek a third term next year came as a shock. “Oh, but you’re so young!” constituents told him, the Michigan […]

Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as Washington, D.C.’s new interim U.S. attorney. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one. Millions of Americans know Pirro as […]

Surely, you remember The Orb. It’s been nearly a decade, but the image from Riyadh still prompts fascination, mystery, and a general feeling of Just what was that anyway? The glowing orb radiated from the center of a darkened room lined with computer screens. A trio of world leaders—President Donald Trump, King Salman of Saudi […]

Remember the days after President Joe Biden’s barely-coherent debate performance, when Democratic dead-enders insisted that nothing was the matter? That was embarrassing. But apparently it wasn’t so embarrassing that everybody took away the correct lesson, because something similar is now happening between Senator John Fetterman and a coterie of admirers on the right. Conservatives are […]

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 […]