Politics | The Atlantic
Trump Media Is the New Bed Bath & Beyond
James Surowiecki
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.After the stock-market frenzy that ensued when Trump Media & Technology Group started trading on Tuesday (under the ticker symbol DJT), one thing is almost certainly true: Donald Trump is now the chairman of the most overvalued company on Nasdaq. Trump Media had a grand total of $3.4 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023, against more than $10 million in operating losses. Its only product is Truth Social, T...
Where RFK Jr. Goes From Here
John Hendrickson
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Wasn't Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposed to have flamed out by now? At a rally yesterday in Oakland, California, Kennedy--a lifelong Democrat turned independent--unveiled his 2024 running mate, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan. Kennedy selected Shanahan from a motley crew of reported vice-presidential contenders: Aaron Rodgers, Jesse Ventura, Mike Rowe, Tulsi Gabbard, and the rapper Killer Mike, to name a few.Sh...
The Supreme Court Is Shaming Itself
Ryan Goodman
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Donald Trump is determined to avoid accountability before the general election, and, so far, the U.S. Supreme Court is helping him.Trump has no legal ground whatsoever to delay a ruling in his plea for presidential immunity. The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Dep...
Donald Trump's Nine Lives
David A. Graham
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Donald Trump loves the musical Cats, and like the titular creatures, the former president seems to have nine lives. Today, in the face of yet another near-death financial experience, Trump got his latest reprieve. An appeals-court panel in New York State reduced the bond he must post in a civil fraud case from more than $464 million to just $175 million.Given that the past few months have seen Trump repeatedly use legal p...
Why Trump Won't Stop Suing the Media and Losing
Paul Farhi
Why would the most notoriously cash-strapped man in America waste money on frivolous lawsuits?On Monday, Donald Trump--whose lawyers recently announced that he can't come up with the money to post a $454 million bond in his civil fraud case--fired off yet another suit against a news organization that reported facts he didn't like. The targets this time are ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who Trump alleges defamed him by stating that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carr...
What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities
John Hendrickson
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on March 26, 2024Last 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...
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 Ego Has Crash-Landed
David Frum
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.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 ...
Why Biden's Pro-worker Stance Isn't Working
James Surowiecki
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.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 Employee...
Trump Finds Another Line to Cross
John Hendrickson
Former President Donald Trump, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden's well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent's lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. "Wasn't it--didn't it bring us together?" Trump asked sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. "'I'm gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,'" Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.Trump has made a new habit of this. "'He's a threat to d-d-democracy...