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A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.

Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.

In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.

The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.

The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.

With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally is still shocking.

This kind of public conflict with allies has become typical. Over the weekend, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—who has no official government post—met with Hamas officials in an attempt to revitalize an administration plan to disarm the group and rebuild Gaza. That plan is struggling for several reasons, including a flat rejection from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been close to Trump and reportedly talked him into the Iran war.

Meanwhile, Trump announced yesterday that he was curtailing joint military exercises with South Korea, “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” This supposed friendship has produced a splashy 2018 summit and flattering correspondence that Trump purloined from the White House after he lost the 2020 election, but it has done nothing to advance American interests. Most important, it has done nothing to curtail North Korea’s nuclear program. At the same time that Trump is fighting a war in Iran that he claims will prevent nuclear proliferation, he’s bestowing a favor on North Korea, which has offered no concessions and many threats. But Trump also gave another reason for his snub, noting that South Korea—like every other major U.S. ally—has declined to get involved in the Iran quagmire.

Throughout Trump’s two terms, many analysts have sought to discern some sort of guiding doctrine to his foreign policy. The incoherence of his actions in the past week alone should provide further evidence that looking for a framework is futile. Earlier this year, my colleagues Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker reported that the White House’s foreign-affairs philosophy was “Fuck around and find out.” Administration officials meant this as a warning to the leaders of other countries. But as the current crisis festers, they, too, are finding out.

Related:

• The fuck-around-and-find-out presidency
• Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Julia Curlee: “The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.”
• Jonathan Chait on what Trump officials mean by “never”
• Even college students have stopped hanging out.
• NATO’s nightmare

Today’s News

1. A 60-day window for the United States and Iran to negotiate an end to the war expired today without a final agreement. The June framework laid out terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, easing some financial restrictions on Iran, and addressing its nuclear program, but talks have stalled as both sides have traded attacks and accusations of violations.
2. Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss President Trump’s plan for Gaza after Israel said it refuses to pull back its military from Gaza until Hamas fully disarms.
3. The Supreme Court declined for a second time to review Trump’s appeal of a $5 million civil judgment awarded to E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll; Trump paid the $5 million award last month.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores what the last weeks of summer can offer.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Problem With Child-Led Potty Training

By Stephanie H. Murray

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue …

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time.

Read the full article.

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• Radio Atlantic: The Trump administration wanted her expertise, just not her.
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• Why learn something that a machine can do for you?
• How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks
• David Frum on Trump’s last loyal constituency

Culture Break

Watch. The masked web-slinger has been setting box-office records for decades, even as the popularity of superhero movies wanes, David Sims writes. And this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel (out now in theaters) has broken nearly every record imaginable.

Explore. Poetry critics didn’t always think much of Mary Oliver, whose work could sometimes read like self-help—but they didn’t give her enough credit, Hillary Kelly argues.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate. The institutions he saw as his enemies—in politics, business, and education—faced a dilemma about how to respond.

A few concluded that they should resist the president’s demands of fealty and collaboration. Another group tried appeasement, seeking accommodation that would allow them to otherwise operate as usual. And some looked at the landscape and concluded that something fundamental had shifted in American politics. They saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust.

As I wrote last week, predictions of a Trump-driven realignment of the electorate now look extremely shaky. The groups that he was able to attract to the Republican ticket two years ago—young voters, especially men; Hispanic voters; and Black men—have turned solidly against him and against GOP candidates in polls ahead of the midterms. Voters who were unimpressed with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and who heard Trump’s promise of stopping inflation are now angry about the president’s shrugging at higher prices and inflationary war in Iran. With some distance, the 2024 election looks less like a decisive turning point and more like a fluke. But that realization has come too late for those who reshaped themselves for a reality that has proved ephemeral.

David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump’s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate. First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss’s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn’t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.

Ellison has already moved on to an attempted merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials deep political changes at CNN if the deal was approved by federal regulators. Ellison got approval, but now that deal is in trouble anyway. Facing an antitrust lawsuit led by the attorney general of California, Paramount agreed to pause the merger until a trial next year. Experts are divided on how likely Paramount is to prevail, but if the merger doesn’t close by September 30, the company will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million every day until it does. In a New York Times column last week, Ellison complained that people are drawing incorrect inferences about his politics, but his private views are beside the point: What is public is Ellison’s willingness to play to the Trump administration’s politics to build an empire.

CBS News is not the only media interest to discover that courting MAGA news consumers is not a guarantee of success or growth. The Times also reported recently on how a range of right-wing influencers has seen audiences shrink drastically. Their travails appear to reflect Trump’s own difficulty in keeping his 2024 coalition together: The most pro-Trump figures have seen some of the biggest drops, amid ideological battles inside the MAGA coalition over Israel and the war in Iran, while more Trump-critical figures on the right have sometimes gained.

Other corporate leaders also bet on Trump. Elon Musk attempted to become something like an unelected deputy president at the start of Trump’s second term. That experiment ended acrimoniously, and the men’s relationship has been on and off ever since, but Musk’s reputation is now inextricably connected with Trump’s. X has shed users. Tesla sales have struggled, in part because anti-Trump consumers have turned against Musk and also because Musk has been distracted by other ventures, such as SpaceX.

These decisions to throw in with Trump were notable because many institutions treated his 2016 win as an accident of chance, and were happy to publicly resist him. In doing so, though, they seem to have opened the door to more direct corporate involvement in politics—and with it, greater vulnerability to political pressure. The idea that corporations had gone “woke” by embracing DEI and other progressive causes in 2020 and 2021 was to some extent a marketing ploy by the companies, but it infuriated Republicans and made them targets for Trump’s second administration. Trying to protect themselves, corporate leaders now may have overcorrected, mistakenly assuming a lasting MAGA regime.

Within right-wing politics, many individuals and organizations also leapt into Trumpism. The venerable Heritage Foundation reworked itself and lost or pushed out many long-standing scholars and staffers. Now it finds itself in an identity crisis—and also shut out of the White House because Trump is still sore about the attention and credit that Project 2025 won for driving his agenda. Many mainstream Republicans remade themselves as MAGA Republicans, but the results have not always been good. Just ask Senator John Cornyn, who lost his primary to an even-more-MAGA challenger this May.

Earlier this month, Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported on the broken pipeline for bringing new foot soldiers into conservative government and nonprofit organizations. “Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” a senior GOP congressional staffer told her. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

This is the risk of betting big on a long-term realignment: If you wager wrong, politics overall will snap back quickly, but you will be stuck with the consequences of your decision for much longer.

Related:

• Americans are turning on Trump.
• What if 2016 was a fluke? (From 2020)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Tyler Austin Harper on why he quit the tenure track
• The man in charge of immigration data just resigned.
• Charles Fain Lehman: In defense of Flock

Today’s News

1. A 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck western Colombia, killing at least 111 people and causing building collapses, injuries, and widespread damage, according to Colombian officials.
2. President Trump told Axios that the United States is only “semi-negotiating” with Iran as talks over reopening the Strait of Hormuz remain stalled after Tehran laid out its demands, including compensation for war damage.
3. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the Trump administration’s 15-point Gaza plan yesterday, saying that Israel will not withdraw its forces until Hamas is fully disarmed. The proposal, announced by Trump’s Board of Peace last month, called for Hamas to surrender its weapons in phases in exchange for a gradual Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Dispatches

• The Weekly Planet: Living outside is a more dreadful prospect during a heat wave, Meg Bernhard reports.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

If Only This Could Last Forever

By Elizabeth Bruenig

Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month. After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall. So does the grand, semi-malevolent intelligence that organizes American consumption: By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes. As I stroll through the aisles, I gaze wistfully at candy corn while the frosty supermarket air cools the sweat I worked up walking to the store beneath the blazing sun. Late September can’t arrive soon enough.

Read the full article.

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• Radio Atlantic: Never Trump, still a Republican
• How the “body positivity” movement died
• France’s best argument against racism isn’t working.
• The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse.
• Ukraine may be just the ally America needs.

Culture Break

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Listen closely. Conducting can look like either inexplicable magic or embarrassing nonsense. Matthew Aucoin, himself a conductor and a composer, explores the profession’s power and purpose.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

If at first you don’t succeed, appeal to a higher federal court. And if you even lose at the Supreme Court … just try again anyway.

This seems to be President Trump’s approach to limiting birthright citizenship. Last year, he issued an executive order that purports to end the practice of automatically granting citizenship to babies born in the United States—as has been the norm since the late 19th century. Despite Trump visiting oral arguments in an apparent attempt to intimidate the justices, the Supreme Court struck down the order this June.

Yesterday, Trump attempted to do some of the same things via new executive orders. One is intended to deny automatic citizenship to children born to people living in the United States while working for a foreign government and children of people declared to be terrorists or adversaries of the U.S. It would also deny citizenship to people born in U.S. territories if Congress passes a proposed law allowing that, creating a new group of stateless people. The second order is intended to prevent the practice of “birth tourism,” in which people visiting the United States on tourist visas give birth to babies who are then U.S. citizens.

Legal experts and advocates say the orders are unconstitutional, and they are certain to be challenged in court. Trump’s loss at the Supreme Court seems to make these orders a long shot. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the Court, “children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States” satisfy the relevant conditions and thus “under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”

The language in the orders about “alien enemies” is another likely area for dispute, not because anyone is eager to welcome the children of bona fide adversaries but because this administration has made absurd claims about illegal immigration constituting an “invasion,” which makes no sense on its face and has been rejected by federal judges.

Trump’s announcement of the orders at the White House yesterday was full of fabrications, exaggerations, and lies. Trump claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment “was meant for the babies of slaves. It was—it was right after—one week or two weeks after the Civil War ended.” In fact, it passed three years later, in 1868. The presidential adviser Stephen Miller echoed the same idea, saying that the amendment “had no other meaning and purpose outside of that, and that’s been clear, obviously, since the day that it was passed.” When a politician uses the word obviously—like frankly—that’s a good sign that what follows will be neither obvious nor true. If this had been obvious since 1868, the U.S. wouldn’t have acted otherwise for more than a century, and the Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of the administration.

Trump’s claims about birth tourism were even further off base. The president isn’t making the idea up—just wildly exaggerating it. Asked by a reporter how many people are engaging in the practice, Trump said, “I can tell you right now. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.” This number appears to be pulled out of thin air. During Supreme Court oral arguments, Solicitor General John Sauer, arguing on behalf of Trump, was asked how commonly birth tourism occurs and replied, “No one knows for sure.” In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports much stricter laws, estimated the number at between 20,000 and 26,000 births each year, out of roughly 3.6 million babies born in the United States.

By attempting to end or restrict birthright citizenship in order to address these issues, Trump is trying to use a bulldozer to achieve a task that calls for a small mallet. The law already prohibits fraudulent visa applications, and the Justice Department has prosecuted people for birth tourism in the past. Trying to undermine birthright citizenship risks jettisoning one of the fundamental bases of modern American society to deal with a minor challenge.

Trump could have tried another path. Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered the White House a potential lifeline in his concurrence in the birthright case, suggesting that despite the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could pass a law altering birthright citizenship. The likelihood of such a bill succeeding seems very low, and pushing it through would require sustained attention from Trump. Instead, he’s trying to achieve his goals through executive orders, which are both easily reversed by a future president and have already proved unsuccessful.

But the president has a demonstrated weakness for this kind of grand, overreaching presidential gesture. Last month, after a member of the U.S. men’s national soccer team was suspended for a game in the World Cup, Trump decided to use his position to exert some pressure, calling FIFA President Gianni Infantino to try to get the suspension waived. In a direct sense, it worked—FIFA allowed the player to participate—but it may have backfired. Belgium, the American opponent, was incensed, and trounced the United States 4–1. Trump ended up looking obnoxious and corrupt, but didn’t even get a victory out of it. The player in question, by the way, was Folarin Balogun—a U.S. citizen by birth because his mother, while pregnant and visiting family, got stuck in the United States.

Related:

• The revolutionary idea that remade the New World
• The other case for birthright citizenship

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• MAGA’s most famous prisoner is free.
• Icarus in the faculty lounge
• Bring back the blue-book exam.
• Sadism and a blue bunny

Today’s News

1. Senator Bill Cassidy said he will vote for Todd Blanche to be the next attorney general, giving Republicans enough support to confirm President Trump’s nominee despite opposition from GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.
2. The U.S. economy unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, while the Labor Department lowered May and June’s job figures by a combined 103,000, adding to signs that the labor market is weakening.
3. A 14-year-old student in Thailand killed his grandparents and fatally shot five teachers and staff members at a school outside Bangkok, before dying by suicide, authorities said. Twenty-three people were wounded, nine critically, and Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the government would pursue a stricter gun law following the country’s second school shooting this year.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich writes about the case for calling people on the phone.
• The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo on the best way to learn outside the classroom.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

A Chatbot-Free Childhood Will Be a Status Symbol

By Dana Suskind

The human brain has evolved to learn from specific instructors. When a child hears a gentle spoken word or a soothing lullaby from another person, when their cry is responded to, their brain lights up. Nurturing interactions, or what child-development experts call “serve and return” exchanges, help shape and strengthen the 1 million new neural connections taking place in a child’s brain every single second. Every time a child cries or serves up a bid for attention and receives a caregiver’s response, that back-and-forth helps build the circuits underlying their communication, learning, and emotional well-being. No other input, not even Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, is capable of activating the neural circuitry the way human interaction does.

Until now.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Watch (or skip). Netflix’s true-crime documentary Maternal Instinct tells the story of a woman who committed two murders—and what’s remarkable is how much it leaves out, Elizabeth Bruenig writes.

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Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

This morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson finally broke his silence on the scandal engulfing Representative Max Miller of Ohio. Well, sort of—Johnson didn’t have much to say.

“I haven’t spoken to Max about this in the last few days. Of course, I will,” he told Politico. Johnson said that Miller, a fellow Republican, was taking the allegations seriously (despite evidence to the contrary) and that a House Ethics Committee process should “play out.” (Miller requested the investigation this week, an apparent stalling tactic.) Johnson added, “There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time. It’s not my business to get engaged in it.”

This raises the question of what Johnson does think the speaker’s business is. One might imagine that the Miller situation would concern Johnson for several reasons. Johnson positions himself as a staunch social conservative and defender of morality; Miller has been accused of domestic abuse against his ex-wife and toddler daughter, and of illegal drug use. (Miller has denied the abuse allegations and said that although he has used illegal drugs in the past, he no longer does.) For his caucus, it’s a big distraction from any midterm messaging that the Republican Party might wish to do in the last 100 days before elections. The scandal also puts another GOP seat in play in November; Miller said on CNN last night that Donald Trump had told him that it would be a “tough” race to win. If Miller drops out by Monday afternoon, Republicans in Ohio can replace him on the ballot, but it’s not clear how quickly the Ethics Committee process will move.

If Johnson doesn’t think that his job includes protecting the moral reputation of the House, his small and endangered House majority, or the prospects of the Republican Party more broadly, he must have some other idea about his role. What that might be is mysterious.

Passing legislation would seem like an obvious answer, but the 119th Congress has been one of the least productive in history. Legislators have succeeded in enacting just 104 laws since January 2025. That’s the lowest number by far since at least 1947—only the 274 laws passed last Congress even come close. This is especially remarkable because Republicans hold control over both chambers. Legislative leaders have also yielded some of their power over budgets, one of their most basic duties, to the White House. Even worse, 2025 saw the longest complete shutdown of the federal government in history, as legislators failed to fund the government for 43 days.

Some of the blame for this unproductivity belongs to the Senate, where the GOP edge is narrow and where rules mean that a Democratic minority can more easily block legislation. But senators are at least filling their time with other official duties, such as confirming presidential appointments, that the House doesn’t have. Another basic congressional duty is oversight of the executive branch, but the House has done little to investigate or shed light on what the administration is doing, much less hold it to account. In May, Johnson called a recess rather than hold a vote condemning Trump’s war in Iran, after it became clear that the nonbinding measure would pass. (The House has since passed a similar resolution.)

Johnson isn’t setting some sort of broader agenda for the legislature either. That, too, has been left to Trump, who seems to have been interested in only two bills: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last year, and the SAVE America Act, currently and perhaps permanently bottled up in the Senate. Johnson’s deference to Trump has reportedly led the president to joke in private that he has “two jobs: being president and being speaker.”

That’s rather demeaning for Johnson, but given how Trump dominates the House, one might expect that Johnson would pay close attention to what the president says and does. Yet Johnson has a consistent pattern of pleading ignorance when asked about controversial statements or actions by Trump or his administration. In a characteristic example, Johnson dodged a question in October about cuts to funding for special education: “I’ve been so busy on this; I’ve not had a chance to dig into the details.” Busy on what, precisely?

In fairness to Johnson, he’s working in a difficult environment with just a seven-seat majority, a rebellious right flank, and a mercurial president. But he does have some power when he wants to use it—as became apparent this week. On Monday, the House Ethics Committee found that Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, a Republican, had “engaged in persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers” and had likely “violated House rules related to sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.” (Edwards denied that any of his conduct had been intended as a sexual or romantic advance.) Yesterday, CNN reported that House leaders were pressuring Edwards to drop his reelection bid. Early this morning, Edwards did just that.

By attempting to remain distant from the Miller scandal, Johnson is allowing Miller to claim, as he did in an interview last night, that “Speaker Mike Johnson, everyone else—they’re standing behind me.” Johnson’s reluctance to become involved in a messy, lurid story like this one is understandable, but it’s also one of the burdens that falls on leaders. By declining to bear it, Johnson may help ensure that he doesn’t have to worry about the duties of the speaker when the new Congress opens next January.

Related:

• A family tragedy in the age of Trump
• Mike Johnson is tuning out the news cycle to focus on self-care, Alexandra Petri writes. (From 2025)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The once-shameless president is deeply embarrassed.
• Liberals are now fighting a two-front war.
• Anne Applebaum: Putin’s human safari is the dystopian future of war.

Today’s News

1. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Representative Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, marking a significant win for the party’s progressive wing after a tight race. He will face Republican Mike Rogers in November in a battleground contest that could help determine control of the Senate.
2. The cyclosporiasis outbreak has reached six more states, bringing the total to 15 states. The CDC said there are more than 22,000 confirmed or suspected cases, 517 hospitalizations, and two deaths linked to the outbreak.
3. The White House has declassified FBI records showing that the bureau opened a 2017 investigation into whether President Trump had been acting on Russia’s behalf when he fired then–FBI Director James Comey, according to administration officials. They said that the inquiry had ultimately found no evidence to support the theory.

Evening Read

What Happened to al-Qaeda?

By Graeme Wood

Since September 11, 2001, al‑Qaeda has pulled off exactly one fatal attack inside the United States. If you remember the details of that attack, you probably spend too much time thinking about terrorism. On December 6, 2019, in Pensacola, Florida, a 21-year-old Royal Saudi Air Force officer took out a legally acquired Glock pistol and killed three U.S. sailors at a naval air base, before police arrived and killed him. The shooter, an affiliate of al‑Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, had been on the base for flight training. I was in Taif, Saudi Arabia, at the time, and the Saudis I met said they were sorry about the incident but relieved that after 18 years of terrorist R&D, the most ferocious blow al‑Qaeda could strike on the path of jihad was not much worse than the kind of mundane workplace violence that we Americans regularly inflict on ourselves.

Read the full article.

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• Gen Z is testing the limits of how weird parties can get.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

Fundamental realignments in the way Americans vote are rare, but predictions that they have occurred are not. Nearly as soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race in November 2024, people started saying the election represented a new era. “Trump just realigned the entire political map. Democrats have ‘no easy path’ to fix it,” announced NBC News.

The election had been very close. Trump won slightly more electoral votes than Joe Biden had in 2020 (312 to 306), but he also won fewer total popular votes and a smaller percentage of the vote. This was still significant because it was the first time in three tries that Trump had captured a plurality of the electorate, but the case for realignment hinged less on raw numbers than on demographic breakdowns. The Republican Party had strengthened its grip on the white working class and had done historically well with young voters—young men in particular—and Hispanic voters.

Writing in The Atlantic in May 2025, the pollster Patrick Ruffini argued that a new era of politics had dawned, in which Trump had broken Democrats’ solid grip on minority voters. “The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters,” he wrote. “In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous.”

The Democratic Party’s problems remain very real, but for the moment, Trump and the GOP have more serious ones. The most glaring one is Trump’s deep personal unpopularity. In the current polarized and dyspeptic political environment, all presidents seem to be unpopular, but Trump is in a different league. A CNN poll released last week measured Trump at 34 percent support, matching the low he reached in that poll following the January 6 insurrection. Still, that was better than his showing in the AP-NORC survey, which found his approval at 33 percent, just one point above a 2017 low. Quinnipiac University found Trump at 32 percent, the lowest ever in that poll.

These broad strokes are ugly enough, but digging into polling results shows particular deterioration with the particular groups that were supposed to be at the center of the Trump 2024 realignment.

Consider young voters. Kamala Harris won a slim majority of them in 2024, a huge drop from the 25 percent margin that Biden enjoyed four years earlier. The Yale Youth Poll found in May that 68 percent of voters ages 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters ages 23 to 29 disapproved of Trump. Echelon Insights also found that younger voters disapprove of Trump more than the general population—the number has fallen 37 percent since the start of this administration. Polling from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that young voters are especially skeptical of expanded presidential power and claims of “national emergency”—two staples of Trump’s approach to governance.

One reason Trump’s numbers have sunk so much among young people is his poor performance among young men. A popular explanation was that a feminized, woke Democratic Party had driven them away and into the arms of Trump and a growing manosphere of influencers. To the extent that that was true, it was ephemeral. These voters are still wary of the Democrats, but they’ve soured on Trump as well. The Yale Youth Poll found that men under 30 were one of the two groups that had turned the most against Trump since last fall.

Trump is also bleeding support among Black and Hispanic voters, and especially men, as Bloomberg Government reports. In 2024, Trump won almost half of Hispanic voters, but polls show Republicans drawing 27 to 35 percent support in the midterms, which would be their worst performance with the group since the Democratic-wave year of 2018. Equis, a pollster focused on the demographic, finds Latino approval of Trump is lower than that of non-Latino voters. A May poll found that a quarter of Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 wouldn’t do so again.

The decay has even reached Trump’s core supporters. A New York Times review of polling data found in June that white working-class voters’ views of the president’s handling of the economy were tanking. During the first two years of his first term, these voters rated him higher than the overall population; now they rate him much worse. In February 2016, Trump boasted about his backing among the least-educated voters, saying, “I love the poorly educated.” They don’t love him back: Echelon finds his approval down to 41 percent among those with a high-school education or less. Polling from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism finds a shrinking Trump base and less personal connection to Trump, which is a particular problem for a personalist leader and movement. Republican strategists are now worried that even consistent GOP voters might not turn out in November, according to The Washington Post.

As the poll analyst G. Elliott Morris has written, several convincing explanations existed for Trump’s 2024 victory that didn’t involve realignment, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and the peculiar dynamics of Biden’s ill-advised decision to run and his late exit from the race. But the foremost was inflation. Americans were angry at the Democratic Party because of persistently higher prices. Now Trump is losing support for the same reason. Not only has Trump not ended inflation, as he promised—in June, it ran at 3.5 percent—but his decisions, especially the Iran war, have driven prices higher. Voters were willing to give Trump a chance because of their disgust with Biden. Now they’re seeing the results, and they don’t like them.

This was perhaps foreseeable. Although some observers believed a sea change had occurred, the Brookings Institution scholar (and Atlantic contributor) Jonathan Rauch concluded on November 9, 2024, that the result did not represent “a pro-MAGA realignment or a sweeping repudiation of Democrats. Rather, this was an ordinary election.” He added, prophetically, “While the Republicans undoubtedly scored a clear victory, they may be tempted to claim a stronger mandate than the voters intended to deliver—and they may respond with policies that are more extreme and disruptive than the public wants or expects.” Now the realignment looks nearly as moribund as GOP chances in the midterms.

Related:

• Patrick Ruffini: American realignment
• Trump crashes into reality

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• The great romance slump
• The one town that wants a data center
• Anne Applebaum: The far right is distorting Ceuta.
• Why is the U.S. running so low on weapons?

Today’s News

1. Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis said that they will support Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after the Justice Department rescinded a planned $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and clarified the scope of an IRS settlement involving President Trump. Their support clears the way for the Senate Judiciary Committee to advance Blanche’s nomination tomorrow.
2. Michigan health officials reported two deaths linked to the state’s cyclosporiasis outbreak, saying both people had significant underlying health conditions that may have been worsened by the illness and dehydration. More than 11,000 cyclosporiasis cases have been reported in the state since early May, according to Michigan’s health department.
3. Nearly 65,000 people have been evacuated in Spokane County, Washington, as three major wildfires have burned more than 8,000 acres. No deaths or injuries have been confirmed, though officials warned that additional structures remain at risk as crews continue to assess the damage.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores nature’s most extraordinary stories.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Kill the Ticks

By Sarah Zhang

In parks, in backyards, in woods that are lovely, dark, and deep, a many-legged menace now stalks the land. I speak of ticks, and I come bearing absolutely no good news. In recent decades, ticks have made the leap from nuisance to genuine public-health threat: Their numbers are rising. Their ranges are expanding. And the diseases they carry are multiplying. Lyme cases have more than doubled since 2000, in which time scientists have also discovered eight new tick-borne diseases—plus an unusual and potentially dangerous tick-induced meat allergy called alpha-gal syndrome.

“The ticks are winning,” a CDC scientist wrote in a recent paper.

Read the full article.

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• Olga Khazan: The best parenting hack is being rich.
• Radio Atlantic: What “America First” means for global health
• How AI could make people more anxious
• Trump’s literal gilded age

Culture Break

Debate. A plan to renovate Dulles, one of America’s most hated airports, will surely be popular—but the airport is actually fine the way it is, Adrienne LaFrance argues.

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Play our daily crossword.

PS

On Friday, I wrote that a battle over Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general showed that Trump cared more about his $1.8 billion slush fund than Blanche, and that “dissident Republicans really can push Trump around if they want to.” Late Friday, Trump seemed to confirm that by filing an appeal of a judge’s ruling against the fund. But last night, the office of Senator John Cornyn, one of two Republicans who was blocking Blanche, announced a deal to move forward. A statement said that the Justice Department “will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund.” The details remain a bit vague, but the track record of administration promises to senators does not instill a great deal of confidence.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Donald Trump blared yesterday on social media, “is a STAR, and everyone knows it!” But the rest of the presidential missive told a very different story. Blanche’s nomination to run the Justice Department has stalled over objections from outgoing Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to a settlement between Trump and the IRS that would create a $1.8 billion slush fund for rewarding Trump’s political supporters, including those convicted of crimes on January 6, 2021. Tillis and Cornyn have demanded that Blanche deliver written guarantees that the fund would not proceed, and they remain unsatisfied with what they’ve received. Although a deal may still be struck, Trump wrote in his post that he had “no objection to temporarily withdrawing” Blanche’s nomination “and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

The senators met with Blanche last night and could still waver, and Trump could still change his mind, but the president this morning posted a strong defense of the slush fund and attacked Cornyn. “John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called ‘Fund,’ which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas,” he wrote. “Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”

This moment of peril for Blanche’s nomination reveals three things: First, dissident Republicans really can push Trump around if they want to; second, Trump (as usual) seemingly has no strategy or contingency plan to save the nomination; and third, Trump apparently cares more about preserving the slush fund than he does about Todd Blanche.

If Trump really valued Blanche, then reaching an agreement with Cornyn and Tillis would be easy: He’d just have to give up on the fund. Not only is the planned payout politically toxic, but courts may prohibit it anyway. The fund emerges from a settlement in a case filed by Trump against the federal government over a leak of his personal tax returns. In exchange for dropping the case, the government agreed to grant Trump and his family immunity from IRS audits and to create a $1.8 billion pot of money for supposed victims of a “weaponized” federal government, such as people prosecuted for their role in the January 6 insurrection.

The fund is an abomination for several reasons, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote when it was announced. The deal was struck between Trump as plaintiff and Trump as head of the executive branch—an arrangement a federal judge later said is improper. It gives the president an opportunity to direct taxpayer money to his allies and supporters—and specifically people who attempted to subvert the 2020 election and rioted at the U.S. Capitol.

One federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, is currently blocking the fund’s creation, and another, Kathleen Williams, concluded that the settlement was improper self-dealing and harshly criticized Blanche’s role in negotiating the deal as acting attorney general. Blanche himself told senators that the money wouldn’t be paid out, but as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported in June, administration officials said privately that it wasn’t really dead. That helps explain why Brinkema requested a sworn statement from Blanche about the demise of the fund, and why Cornyn (who lost a GOP primary in May) and Tillis (who decided to retire) have said they want written assurances from Blanche.

By announcing that he would rather pull Blanche’s nomination, even temporarily, than allow Blanche or any other administration official to provide such assurances, Trump has implicitly confirmed that he has no intention of letting go of the fund. His statement also undercuts Blanche’s credibility with senators because it shows that Blanche was either not telling the truth or was making a promise he couldn’t keep when he said earlier that the fund wouldn’t proceed.

The idea of renominating Blanche later on may well be a feint anyway, since Trump hates to ever admit defeat, but it’s peculiar. Trump’s unstated premise is that he will have a more favorable Senate in 2027, which is questionable. Cornyn and Tillis are currently preventing Blanche’s nomination from advancing out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and neither man will be on that panel come January. But most forecasts suggest that Democrats will gain ground in the Senate in the midterm elections, and possibly even win a narrow edge in the chamber. Either way, Blanche will still have a hard time getting the necessary votes for confirmation next year.

That is especially true because Trump’s power over Republican senators appears to be on the wane. For years, senators have trash-talked Trump privately, but meekly followed him in public. Tillis and especially Cornyn made their hesitations about Blanche public weeks ago, and the White House seems to have wagered that they would simply give in as GOP members have in the past. (The administration may have underestimated Cornyn’s taste for revenge against a president who endorsed his opponent in the primary.) At the same time, Trump has been unable to persuade all Republican senators to back the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to present proof of citizenship to vote, and they have shrugged off his demands to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass it. After all, they know that they could be in the minority within six months.

What made Blanche attractive to Trump as an attorney general was not his legal acumen but his eagerness as an enabler. Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, began in the administration as deputy attorney general. Attorney General Pam Bondi was willing to destroy many of the boundaries keeping politics out of the Justice Department, and she pursued many of Trump’s projects of political retribution, but she fell out of favor after some of them stalled and was soon asked to resign. When Blanche became acting attorney general in April, he set out to fulfill Trump’s desires with zeal.

That was enough to win Blanche a nomination to hold the job permanently, but it also made his path to confirmation more perilous. Now Trump has little reason to fight for his nomination. Since Blanche is already deputy attorney general, the president can leave Blanche as acting attorney general indefinitely, even without confirmation. That would surely be a disappointment to Blanche, who worked so hard to win Trump’s favor, but it’s an easy calculation for Trump: Why would he give up a $1.8 billion pot of money when he already has a lackey in place?

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In a court filing earlier this month, a government lawyer did something radical: He laid out the truth in plain English.

The surprise was not just the honesty from a chronically dishonest administration but also the substance: The Trump administration admitted that it had withheld federal money in retaliation against its political rivals. The disclosure, first reported by The New York Times on Friday, is part of a lawsuit from a group of researchers in California whose grants were canceled. In lieu of turning over documents to the plaintiffs in discovery, an Energy Department attorney acknowledged in a filing that decisions about which grants might be terminated had been “based solely” on a goal of political retribution. “With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” the filing stated, contradicting previous public statements by officials.

Every administration has its own policy agenda and preferences, but this goes beyond that, subjugating science to partisanship and holding research and infrastructure money hostage throughout much of the country. If the United States is to remain legally and civically coherent—and scientifically dynamic—the rules have to apply consistently.

Even before Donald Trump returned to office, the country was in some ways pulling apart into two different policy worlds: one governed by Democrats and one by Republicans, as the journalist Ronald Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic in 2022. This was being driven largely by decisions at the state level, producing widely varying economic, health, and social outcomes. Trump is now using the power of the federal government to drive the two sections further apart, a glaring act of division as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary. (Punishing states that lean Democratic also punishes many Republican voters. More Californians cast a ballot for Trump in 2024 than voters in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee did combined.)

In some ways, the retaliation acknowledged in the suit is in step with other Trump-administration actions. Trump is not coy about his desire for political retribution, especially against high-profile critics, or his sense that he is president to only those who voted for him. This is not his first example of using federal funds to reward red states while punishing blue ones. Earlier this year, Politico calculated that in his first 14 months in office, Trump approved 89 percent of requests for disaster assistance from GOP-led states but just 23 percent of those from Democrat-led states. Yet when asked about the disparity, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied any political motive, saying, “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster aid.”

Jackson faced no legal penalty for such an obvious falsehood—which is one reason courts remain a vital bulwark against Trump’s abuse of power. I wrote during Trump’s first presidency that many depositions demonstrated a huge gulf between the president’s public bluster and balderdash and his meeker, franker statements made when under oath. The same has been true of attorneys representing his second administration. In several high-profile cases, they have been forced to admit in court that public claims by officials were false. Last year, for example, the official White House line was that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a dangerous MS-13 gang member who had been rightly shipped to a Salvadoran prison. In court, however, lawyers acknowledged that his deportation had been the result of an “administrative error.”

This past spring, charges against a group of people arrested at a protest near Chicago fell apart after federal prosecutors conceded a series of major mistakes to a judge: They impermissibly vouched personally for the credibility of evidence before a grand jury, spoke with grand jurors outside a courtroom, and, after failing to obtain an indictment, excused grand jurors who’d voted against charges and tried again. They then redacted transcripts to try to hide this from the judge. And last week, the Department of Justice dropped subpoenas issued to Times reporters after prosecutors admitted to a judge that they had not followed either DOJ policy or court precedent by not exhausting other options first.

(In some other instances, a related but inverted dynamic has emerged in which it’s not court statements that contradict the public ones, but the other way around: Government lawyers attempt to argue that administration decisions were made deliberately and without regard to politics, only for judges to point to public statements by the president that appear to reveal the true, improper motivations for the actions.)

Statements by government lawyers that contradict the official White House line are not merely the results of pangs of conscience. Attorneys understand that they can face sanctions, including disbarment, for lying in court. Earlier this month, a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit that produced Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies blasted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for testimony that was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.” She also referred Blanche, who faces a confirmation vote on his elevation to permanent status, to the New York State Bar Association.

An Energy Department filing could put Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a tight spot too. Last month, he told a House panel, “No decisions were made on politics.” The Times reported that, according to a department spokesperson, Wright had been “making a distinction between that review process and the timing of when certain cancellations were announced.” Was he trying to mislead, or was he himself kept in the dark, and which would be more troubling? Trump sees his time in office as a chance to settle political scores, and aides who pretend otherwise risk making themselves look like fools—or worse.

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Today’s News

1. President Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House to discuss the Iran war, a proposed peace framework between Israel and Lebanon, and a possible expansion of the Abraham Accords, a White House official told NBC News. Earlier, officials said, Trump had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war.
2. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, leaving dozens injured or missing and at least two feared dead; rescue efforts continue. The earthquake prompted evacuation advisories for more than 260,000 people, mostly in the Kumamoto prefecture, Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.
3. The FDA said that “the U.S. food supply is safe” after an estimate of more than 11,000 cyclosporiasis cases nationwide. The agency acknowledged that identifying the source of the outbreaks remains a major challenge; it is still investigating the outbreaks.

Evening Read

The Return of the Monarch

By Vann R. Newkirk II

“¡Mire! ” my guide, Silvestre, pointed upward, as if I wasn’t already walking with my neck craned as far back as it could go. The sky was alive with millions of fluttering shapes, congregating into clouds at random, occasionally turning into ribbons that wound through the trees. So many butterfly wings beat the air that their vibrations were audible, like a waterfall rushing in the distance. I understood for the first time the immensity of the event I’d come to see.

Read the full article.

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Explore all of our newsletters here.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Last week, the Pentagon quietly lowered the death toll of the war with Iran from 18 to 14. This wasn’t happy news about an initial miscount but a sketchy accounting trick. Although the Defense Department at first blamed a data issue, military sources told The New York Times that the Trump administration had removed four recently killed service members from its count “because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Yesterday, the government website that tracks U.S. military casualties was updated again, this time to include the four people, but placing them in a new category: “Overseas operations casualties starting July 7th 2026” is now listed separately from Operation Epic Fury—the military code name for the Iran war. July 7 is the day that the administration restarted strikes against Iran, acknowledging that the April cease-fire had definitively failed. What’s going on here is more than an effort to merely reduce the war’s death toll: The administration is trying to hide a war and ended up hiding the deaths of American service members along the way.

Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president can take military action but must inform Congress. Then, within 60 days, the president must end the conflict, obtain congressional authorization, or invoke a 30-day extension. In April, when the U.S. reached a very fragile cease-fire with Iran, the administration—aided by Republican leaders in Congress—claimed that the war was over, and thus that no congressional action was needed or justified.

Yet the war was plainly not over. Sporadic fighting among Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, and the United States continued for weeks, producing some tortured semantic debates about the definition of cease-fire, until Trump finally declared the cease-fire dead earlier this month. But instead of admitting that this is a return to the original conflict, the White House now says it’s an entirely different clash—which means that Congress won’t have any role until early September, 60 days from July 10, the day the White House delivered formal notification of the conflict. Trump is purporting to follow the letter of the War Powers Resolution while mocking its spirit.

The administration’s concern is a little odd, given its indifference to so many other laws, but the White House is contending with an unhappy public and growing anger among Republicans in Congress, which never authorized the conflict with Iran. Last week, the GOP-majority House passed a resolution calling for the end of the war; four Republicans joined Democrats. The Senate passed a similar measure last month. Neither is binding, but they reflect some Republican members’ fear that the war will drag them down in the midterm elections.

Trump’s rhetoric about Americans killed during the war has been as stomach-churning as one might expect. In a Truth Social post last Tuesday, the president listed the death toll from several more recent conflicts, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea, as well as from the war with Iran, in what looked to many observers like an attempt to downplay the human cost. (Undercutting the Pentagon’s later revisionism, he cited 18 deaths.) Also last week, before traveling to Dover Air Force Base for a ceremony where the bodies of slain troops were returned home, Trump attempted to ventriloquize the dead, claiming that they had endorsed the (current) rationale for the war. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,’” Trump said. This results in a ghastly paradox: Trump insists that these service members died supporting the aims of Operation Epic Fury, but, according to his administration, by the time they were killed, Operation Epic Fury was already over.

Over the course of his two terms, Trump has frequently treated the military as a political prop and shown little respect for those killed or wounded in battle. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020, Trump called Americans who died in wars “suckers” and “losers,” and avoided visiting the graves of men killed in World War I. During his first term, he ended up in a public feud with the widow of a soldier killed in Niger, who, following a phone conversation with the president, said that Trump had forgotten her husband’s name and had implied that the slain man “knew what he was getting into when he signed up.” (Trump, in turn, called her account fabricated.)

Prior presidents have also tried to shroud war deaths from the public. From 1991 to 2009, the press was barred from photographing the returns of remains to Dover. This became a liability for the George W. Bush administration after an activist obtained images via public-records requests, leading to questions about whether the White House was keeping damaging images from the public in order to maintain support for the war. The dustup was a classic instance of the “Streisand effect,” in which someone brings attention to a story by trying to stifle it.

The Trump administration is now in the same situation. The reduction in the death toll brought much greater attention to the 18 Americans killed in the war. When the Pentagon published the recategorized data, it also revealed that the number of Americans wounded is now more than 600, up from a reported 482 last week, according to CNN. The administration sought to hide the war with Iran; instead it showed the painful and growing costs.

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Today’s News

1. President Trump said he paused the United States’ military strikes on Iran in order to give peace negotiations another chance, but warned that strikes would resume if the talks do not reach a deal.
2. Senator Mitch McConnell said he is still not ready to return to the Senate after his hospitalization last month; he has missed 38 votes in the chamber and didn’t provide a timeline for his return to work.
3. Extreme heat is expected to worsen the already record-breaking wildfires in France and Spain this week. Blazes have burned about 287,000 acres in France and 378,000 acres in Spain and forced evacuations.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how to open yourself up to a new passion.

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Evening Read

An Odyssey for Our Own Time

By Peter Wehner

“A war. A man. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with a bard singing a hymn about the cunning of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, to the men who have overrun his house—courting his wife, menacing his son—while he is absent. A feast has been turned into a desecration.

The law these men broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “xenia,” the law of hospitality. The stranger at the door stood under the personal protection of Zeus, the greatest of the gods and the protector of strangers. The bond between guest and host was not mere courtesy; it was the covenant that made trust between strangers possible.

Read the full article.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Everyone should be as lucky in their adversaries as Jon Ossoff. On Wednesday, President Trump held a rally in Marietta, Georgia, where he attacked the Democratic senator—or rather, he tried.

“Jon Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said. “He reminds me of Pinky Herman. Do you ever see Pinky Herman?” The line might have landed better if he had gotten Pee-wee Herman’s name right. You’d expect Trump of all people to remember weird ’80s kitsch.

Ossoff has benefited before from the president’s approach. In a runoff on January 5, 2021, he unseated GOP Senator David Perdue—a defeat that many Republicans blamed in part on Trump’s meltdown after he lost the 2020 presidential election; he was focused more on false claims of fraud in Georgia than on campaigning for Perdue or Senator Kelly Loeffler, who also lost. Ossoff’s narrow win made him look like a bit of an accidental senator, but his 2026 reelection bid is shaping up differently. Republicans have struggled to mount a strong campaign against him, and even in a red-leaning state, most forecasters expect Ossoff to beat Republican Mike Collins, who limped to the nomination out of a messy primary.

Now buzz has begun over whether Ossoff might be a strong Democratic candidate for president in two years. The hype has grown stronger in recent weeks, even though Ossoff is less well-known and has a less defined image than some of the other possible candidates. Ossoff may not end up running for president—and, indeed, may not win his reelection race—but here are a few theories on why he’s capturing 2028 attention right now.

1. Roll the Tape

In the age of clippers, a politician who can deliver a strong message or moment in one to two minutes will inevitably draw lots of attention. Like his fellow Millennial Zohran Mamdani, Ossoff seems to have a knack for it. Ossoff appears to have coined (or at least popularized) the Epstein class as a way of tying the Jeffrey Epstein story to broader questions of corruption and inequality in the Trump GOP. When rumors circulated that Trump might declare Ossoff and his fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock “illegitimate,” Ossoff had a crisp response. He’s also had politically effective exchanges with Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (about who won the 2020 presidential election), and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (about past claims of victory in the still-raging Iran war) during recent committee hearings.

2. Finding His Voice

It’s not just what Ossoff says—it’s how he says it. For almost two decades, the Democratic Party has been plagued by guys (almost always guys) who sound like they’re doing their best Barack Obama imitation. Ossoff has been guilty of this in the past, but lately, he seems to have developed his own cadence. In the exchanges with Clayton and Hegseth, he adopted a forensic, almost monotone voice to interrogate them. (He’s not a former prosecutor or even a lawyer, and he doesn’t have the flair for courtroom drama that many of his colleagues do.) Witnesses’ fumbling looks bad by comparison, and Ossoff sounds righteously angry without being rageful. It’s a kind of grandstanding-by-not-grandstanding, and it stands in sharp contrast with Trump’s over-the-top infotainment style or J. D. Vance’s awkward pandering.

3. Earnest, Not Anxious

Politics has become fixated recently on the idea of “authenticity,” another way of saying whether a politician seems comfortable in his or her own skin. Ossoff comes off as earnest and a little nerdy: His stump speeches and questioning in hearings suggest a guy who has done a lot of preparation and doesn’t feel a need to hide that. But unlike some other Democrats in the 2028 hunt (Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and, most glaringly, Gavin Newsom), he also doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. He doesn’t frantically jump into every ephemeral news moment, and he hasn’t taken up swearing to try to show that he’s not a regular senator; he’s a cool senator.

4. Not That Kind of Man

Both parties are focused on machismo at the moment. The secretary of Health and Human Services can’t stop working out on video (in jeans), and Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, when he isn’t doing calisthenics (poorly). Many Democrats were so eager for an answer that they rushed to nominate an oysterman to the U.S. Senate despite, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey put it, “a bouquet of red flags.” Ossoff represents a different kind of masculinity, one that owes less to Sly Stallone and more to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: square-jawed, but bound more by principle than muscle.

5. A Blank Slate

Trump has been talking a lot about Democrats as “Communists,” and at Wednesday’s rally, he tried to lump Ossoff in. That’s a tough order: Ossoff isn’t a DSA-aligned candidate and doesn’t have Mamdani’s or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s left-wing credentials. In fact, he’s a bit of a blank slate on the national stage, without a clear ideological profile or strong ties to any party faction. That makes him alluring to Democrats of all varieties, who can project onto him whatever they wish—at least for now.

Eventually, a national figure has to start staking positions and disappointing some people, and buzzy moments in Senate hearings don’t necessarily mint presidents, or else we might be in Booker’s or Harris’s second term. Then again, Ossoff may not want to be a national figure. He has repeatedly said that he is not running for president in 2028, and although that’s an obligatory statement for any senator running for reelection, it might also happen to be true. At the moment, Democrats seem to be thirsting for an alternative to the familiar likely names, and few things excite the heart like someone who insists that he’s not interested.

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• The return of the Democratic manly man
• The 2028 presidential race has begun.

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1. The United States has recorded its highest annual total of measles cases since the disease was declared eliminated in the country in 2000. The resurgence, driven by declining vaccination rates and dozens of outbreaks, has raised concerns that the U.S. could lose its measles-elimination status later this year.
2. The United States launched another round of strikes on Iran overnight after President Trump told Axios that he is “considering a massive attack” that would be “bigger than ever before.”
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Evening Read

A Planeload of Informants

By Kevin Sieff

The governor of Baja California is a 40-year-old attorney and former big-city mayor named Marina del Pilar. Her state, which includes the megacity of Tijuana, is a magnet for American tourists, and also for narcotics cartels. As a politician of some experience, she is presumably unfazed by the sorts of challenges that come with governing a volatile section of her volatile country.

And yet, in what has quickly become a very famous recording of a phone call that leaked last week, she has difficulty masking her shock about an unusual predicament. “Are they saying they want to extradite me?” she asks her interlocutor, who is apparently an intermediary for the FBI. The “they” in question is the United States government. Almost immediately, her tone becomes more businesslike, and she makes a not-so-cryptic offer: “Can’t they tell me what they want me to talk about? I might know or hear a lot of security-related things.”

In other words, the governor of the strategically important border state of Baja California was just caught on tape offering to become an FBI informant. The remarkable thing here is that she would not be the first; the list of current and former Mexican officials and drug traffickers who have offered to cooperate with the U.S. government is now lengthy.

Read the full article.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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