Politics | The Atlantic
What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities
John Hendrickson
Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters in a windy airfield, watching them watch their candidate. I traveled to the former president's event just outside Dayton, Ohio, because I couldn't stop thinking about something that had happened one week earlier, at his rally in Georgia: Trump had broken into an imitation of President Joe Biden's lifelong stutter, and the crowd had cackled.Mocking Biden is not the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is a grown man, and the most p...
War-Gaming for Democracy
Elliot Ackerman
It's January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes.In response, the Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona mobilize National Guard unit...
The Dead-Enders of the Reagan-Era GOP
Damon Linker
For those of us who very much want to see Donald Trump defeated in November by the widest possible margin, the news on Friday afternoon that former Vice President Mike Pence would not be endorsing his former boss seemed encouraging. Not that Pence commands a large faction of voters. Given that he dropped out of the Republican presidential-primary race late last year after failing to rise above the lower single digits, there's no reason to assume that he does. Still, every prominent, normie Republ...
The Ego Has Crash-Landed
David Frum
Donald Trump dominated the news cycle this weekend. Everybody's talking about the outrageous things he said at his rally in Dayton, Ohio--above all, his menacing warning of a "bloodbath" if he is defeated in November. To follow political news is to again be immersed in all Trump, all the time. And that's why Trump will lose.At the end of the 1980 presidential debate, the then-challenger Ronald Reagan posed a famous series of questions that opened with "Are you better off than you were four years a...
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
Megan Garber
"I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified," Christine Blasey Ford said in the fall of 2018, introducing herself to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a television audience of millions. Early in One Way Back, the memoir Ford has written about her testimony, its origin, and its aftermath, she repeats the line. She feels that terror again, she writes. She is afraid of having her words taken out of context, of being a public figure, of being misunderstood. "Stepping back into the spot...
Why Biden's Pro-worker Stance Isn't Working
James Surowiecki
Joe Biden courted the leaders of the Teamsters this week, looking for the endorsement of the 1.3-million-member union. He will probably get it. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, calls him "the most pro-union president in history." He's already won the endorsement of many of the country's most important unions, including the United Auto Workers, the AFSCME public employees' union, the Service Employees International Union, and the main umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO.Biden...
Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now
Josh Barro
On Election Day in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire--Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he tried to stay on the Court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successo...
'All We Must Do Is Survive Four Years'
Ronald Brownstein
For the venerable American Civil Liberties Union, Donald Trump's four years in the White House had the intensity of life during wartime.The group filed its first lawsuit against the Trump administration on January 28, 2017, just eight days after Trump took office and one day after he promulgated his first attempt at banning the entry into the U.S. of travelers from several Muslim-majority nations.The pace of the organization's legal combat against Trump never let up. Ultimately the ACLU filed mor...
D.C.'s Crime Problem Is a Democracy Problem
Harry Jaffe
Matthew Graves is not shy about promoting his success in prosecuting those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. By his count, Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has charged more than 1,358 individuals, spread across nearly all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for assaulting police, destroying federal property, and other crimes. He issues a press release for most cases, and he held a rare news conference this past January to tout his achievements.But Graves's record...
The People Rooting for the End of IVF
Elaine Godfrey
Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on March 11, 2024Chaos reigns in Alabama--or at least in the Alabama world of reproductive health. Three weeks ago, the state's supreme court ruled that embryos should be treated as children, thrusting the future of in vitro fertilization, and of thousands of would-be Alabama parents, into uncertainty. Last week, state lawmakers scrambled to pass a legislative fix to protect the right of prospective parents to seek IVF, but they did so without addressing the court's existen...