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.

The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.

Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)

A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.

When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.

Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.

The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)

The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.

Related:

• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• The real harm of a public execution

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Jonathan Chait: Five fabulous days of Katie Zacharia
• Exclusive: He joined the military. They reported his wife to ICE.
• How Pete Hegseth’s plan for a reality-TV execution imploded
• Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels.

Today’s News

1. President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
2. Three children and a teacher were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. Police said that a bystander pursued the 16-year-old shooter into the school and fatally shot him; another child and a teacher were critically injured.
3. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $1 million to support Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could determine control of the Senate in November.

Dispatches

• Over/Under: Gamblers are more likely to lose money than make it—yet they keep coming back, Will Gottsegen writes. In the first edition of Over/Under, he explores why bettors return to casinos and prediction apps even when it’s not in their financial interest.
• The Books Briefing: Don’t listen to the romantasy haters, Talya Zax writes. The best-selling genre is more than just smut.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

By Bernie Sanders

Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Watching for a blue wave in South Carolina
• What the loss of Starshield revealed
• How the Catholic Church is rethinking war
• What three gene-therapy deaths have in common
• The cutest target of Trump’s D.C. makeover

Culture Break

Watch. Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes (out now in theaters) is a captivating study of self-perception, David Sims writes.

Read. Stephanie Bai asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to share some of the best first lines in modern literature.

Play our daily crossword.

PS

A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Lee as prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.

— David

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.

The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.

Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)

A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.

When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.

Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.

The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)

The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.

Related:

• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• The real harm of a public execution

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Jonathan Chait: Five fabulous days of Katie Zacharia
• Exclusive: He joined the military. They reported his wife to ICE.
• How Pete Hegseth’s plan for a reality-TV execution imploded
• Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels.

Today’s News

1. President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
2. Three children and a teacher were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. Police said that a bystander pursued the 16-year-old shooter into the school and fatally shot him; another child and a teacher were critically injured.
3. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $1 million to support Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could determine control of the Senate in November.

Dispatches

• Over/Under: Gamblers are more likely to lose money than make it—yet they keep coming back, Will Gottsegen writes. In the first edition of Over/Under, he explores why bettors return to casinos and prediction apps even when it’s not in their financial interest.
• The Books Briefing: Don’t listen to the romantasy haters, Talya Zax writes. The best-selling genre is more than just smut.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

By Bernie Sanders

Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Watching for a blue wave in South Carolina
• What the loss of Starshield revealed
• How the Catholic Church is rethinking war
• What three gene-therapy deaths have in common
• The cutest target of Trump’s D.C. makeover

Culture Break

Watch. Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes (out now in theaters) is a captivating study of self-perception, David Sims writes.

Read. Stephanie Bai asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to share some of the best first lines in modern literature.

Play our daily crossword.

PS

A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Lee as prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.

— David

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.

Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.

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.

Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.

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.

Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.

The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night. Deters, a right-wing podcast host, failed political candidate, and suspended lawyer in Kentucky, wanted help in clearing up some tax issues, and also wanted the Trump administration to extradite a doctor whose alleged fraud victims he was advising in a legal case. Guilfoyle, the messages indicate, wanted money—in one instance, a $100,000 wire—and she wanted it untraceable.

Guilfoyle was right to worry about secrecy. She was about to begin confirmation hearings for her ambassadorship, and understood the pay-to-play could hurt her. Yet neither she nor Deters could stop breaking the Stringer Bell rule by recording their skullduggery in writing.

“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” Guilfoyle wrote. “Please.” And in another: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” Yet even as she laid these instructions out, she kept haranguing Deters for indiscretion. “I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal,” she wrote, referring to the encrypted messaging app. In one message, she wrote, “If you write an email or a text about, l’m gonna kill you cause I love you but you’re so out of control.” Unfortunately for Guilfoyle, her Signal messages were not as safe a space as she might have wished. (The Journal does not reveal how it viewed the messages. Guilfoyle’s lawyer broadly disputed their authenticity to the paper but offered no details.)

Somehow, this is not the only Trump scandal with Balkan ties in the news this week. The New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are ostensibly President Trump’s top political advisers, traveled—during an intense midterm campaign in which Republicans appear to be on the verge of serious setbacks—to advise a candidate in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s self-governing Serbian entity.

Both of these stories show the way that many people in Trump’s orbit view their positions not as public service but as a profit center. There’s a long and often depressing pattern of former officials capitalizing on government and political work, but Trump’s aides aren’t even willing to wait until they take their leave to start taking. Forget a team of rivals. Trump world is a team of mercenaries, in some cases literally.

Jared Kushner, who was a senior adviser in his first presidency and is married to his daughter Ivanka, continues to work as an envoy for Trump while pursuing business deals around the world. As Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in September, Kushner’s record as a diplomat is underwhelming, yet his financial gains have been enormous. “He represents a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth,” Filkins wrote. Kushner and Ivanka Trump even have their own Balkan boondoggle, an attempt to develop an island in Albania that has run into legal and political difficulties.

Earlier this year, the Times reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick helped negotiate access to Kazakh tungsten reserves for an American mining company, and the federal government provided $1.6 billion in financing. Lutnick’s sons and Trump’s sons are both involved with companies that stand to profit from the deal (though representatives for them have said that they did not play a role in the deal). A Washington Post investigation this summer noted that Trump’s sons have invested heavily in defense-technology companies; the companies have scored “at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” (Company representatives told the Post that they secured their business without assistance from Trump’s sons.)

Where do any of these people get the idea that this is appropriate or that they can get away with it? From the president himself, naturally. Trump has moved on from small-scale grifts such as charging the Secret Service exorbitant fees to stay in his hotels during his first term to far more ambitious and lucrative schemes such as crypto ventures; even conservative estimates put his gains during this term alone in the billions.

Though Trump doesn’t have ethical scruples, he does have a sense of right and wrong: It’s right for him to profiteer, but wrong for others to make too much money from his name. That’s where Blair, LaCivita, and Guilfoyle may run into trouble. Politico reports that Republicans’ “knives are now fully out” for the two consultants. Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social, saying he was unaware of their clients but adding that he “will, on reflection, ask them and, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Firing them just before the midterms seems risky, as it might just create more chaos for Republicans, but they could make for good scapegoats after the fact. Trump has not spoken publicly about the Guilfoyle story, although Vice President Vance said he didn’t “love that.” In a further embarrassment, the article emerged while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Athens.

Perhaps inevitably, Guilfoyle’s relationship with Deters ended acrimoniously. “I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote her in 2025, adding, in an amusingly self-negating flourish, “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker.” She was not happy, either. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she told him at one point, per the Journal. Her warning may have been too late.

Related:

• MAGA is making the world safe for corruption.
• The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Helen Lewis on the simple truth behind Jane Doe’s story
• Kathy Hochul’s improbable turnaround
• How the polls could be wrong again

Today’s News

1. U.S. prosecutors charged Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiring to torture Americans and other prisoners in Venezuela to suppress opposition and maintain power. The new charge has been added to the federal case against the couple, who are scheduled for trial in June 2027.
2. At least 30 people were killed in a Russian strike on a bus in eastern Ukraine, a day after another Russian strike killed 22 people in an apartment building. The attacks come as Russia intensifies its use of drones, missiles, and guided bombs against Ukrainian targets.
3. Hurricane Isaias strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season as it approached the Gulf Coast, and landfall is expected as soon as tomorrow. It could reach Category 3 strength, prompting hurricane watches and mandatory evacuations in parts of Florida.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1987, two writers predicted a path to energy independence from the Middle East. What they didn’t anticipate was what the U.S. would do to get there, Rafaela Jinich writes.
• Video Village: David Sims lists the decade’s 10 most defining movies (so far).
• Work in Progress: Rogé Karma explains the biggest source of inequality that no one talks about.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Forgive the Bad Texters

By Julie Beck

Whenever I receive a text, this is what happens. I pick up my phone. So far, so good. I experience whatever emotion the message elicits—the pleasant warmth of being reached out to, possibly the annoyance of being interrupted. Then, if conditions are right, if I’m not too busy or in the middle of talking with someone else, if my mind is at peace, if my anxiety is at no more than a low hum, if Mercury is not in retrograde, I will respond right then and there. If conditions are not right, it will be as though the text never existed at all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Michael Powell: “What I saw at New York’s anti-Israel October 7 rallies”
• Radio Atlantic: Why FBI officials are worried about the midterms
• If you want a real digital commons, build it yourself.
• Reducing the number of generals isn’t the problem.
• OpenAI just carpet-bombed mathematics.

Culture Break

Explore. Anne Carson, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, makes ancient texts feel tantalizingly new, Walt Hunter writes.

Take a look. An ambitious retrospective examines the life and work of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—to brilliant effect, Sebastian Smee writes.

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.

Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.

The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night. Deters, a right-wing podcast host, failed political candidate, and suspended lawyer in Kentucky, wanted help in clearing up some tax issues, and also wanted the Trump administration to extradite a doctor whose alleged fraud victims he was advising in a legal case. Guilfoyle, the messages indicate, wanted money—in one instance, a $100,000 wire—and she wanted it untraceable.

Guilfoyle was right to worry about secrecy. She was about to begin confirmation hearings for her ambassadorship, and understood the pay-to-play could hurt her. Yet neither she nor Deters could stop breaking the Stringer Bell rule by recording their skullduggery in writing.

“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” Guilfoyle wrote. “Please.” And in another: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” Yet even as she laid these instructions out, she kept haranguing Deters for indiscretion. “I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal,” she wrote, referring to the encrypted messaging app. In one message, she wrote, “If you write an email or a text about, l’m gonna kill you cause I love you but you’re so out of control.” Unfortunately for Guilfoyle, her Signal messages were not as safe a space as she might have wished. (The Journal does not reveal how it viewed the messages. Guilfoyle’s lawyer broadly disputed their authenticity to the paper but offered no details.)

Somehow, this is not the only Trump scandal with Balkan ties in the news this week. The New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are ostensibly President Trump’s top political advisers, traveled—during an intense midterm campaign in which Republicans appear to be on the verge of serious setbacks—to advise a candidate in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s self-governing Serbian entity.

Both of these stories show the way that many people in Trump’s orbit view their positions not as public service but as a profit center. There’s a long and often depressing pattern of former officials capitalizing on government and political work, but Trump’s aides aren’t even willing to wait until they take their leave to start taking. Forget a team of rivals. Trump world is a team of mercenaries, in some cases literally.

Jared Kushner, who was a senior adviser in his first presidency and is married to his daughter Ivanka, continues to work as an envoy for Trump while pursuing business deals around the world. As Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in September, Kushner’s record as a diplomat is underwhelming, yet his financial gains have been enormous. “He represents a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth,” Filkins wrote. Kushner and Ivanka Trump even have their own Balkan boondoggle, an attempt to develop an island in Albania that has run into legal and political difficulties.

Earlier this year, the Times reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick helped negotiate access to Kazakh tungsten reserves for an American mining company, and the federal government provided $1.6 billion in financing. Lutnick’s sons and Trump’s sons are both involved with companies that stand to profit from the deal (though representatives for them have said that they did not play a role in the deal). A Washington Post investigation this summer noted that Trump’s sons have invested heavily in defense-technology companies; the companies have scored “at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” (Company representatives told the Post that they secured their business without assistance from Trump’s sons.)

Where do any of these people get the idea that this is appropriate or that they can get away with it? From the president himself, naturally. Trump has moved on from small-scale grifts such as charging the Secret Service exorbitant fees to stay in his hotels during his first term to far more ambitious and lucrative schemes such as crypto ventures; even conservative estimates put his gains during this term alone in the billions.

Though Trump doesn’t have ethical scruples, he does have a sense of right and wrong: It’s right for him to profiteer, but wrong for others to make too much money from his name. That’s where Blair, LaCivita, and Guilfoyle may run into trouble. Politico reports that Republicans’ “knives are now fully out” for the two consultants. Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social, saying he was unaware of their clients but adding that he “will, on reflection, ask them and, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Firing them just before the midterms seems risky, as it might just create more chaos for Republicans, but they could make for good scapegoats after the fact. Trump has not spoken publicly about the Guilfoyle story, although Vice President Vance said he didn’t “love that.” In a further embarrassment, the article emerged while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Athens.

Perhaps inevitably, Guilfoyle’s relationship with Deters ended acrimoniously. “I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote her in 2025, adding, in an amusingly self-negating flourish, “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker.” She was not happy, either. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she told him at one point, per the Journal. Her warning may have been too late.

Related:

• MAGA is making the world safe for corruption.
• The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Helen Lewis on the simple truth behind Jane Doe’s story
• Kathy Hochul’s improbable turnaround
• How the polls could be wrong again

Today’s News

1. U.S. prosecutors charged Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiring to torture Americans and other prisoners in Venezuela to suppress opposition and maintain power. The new charge has been added to the federal case against the couple, who are scheduled for trial in June 2027.
2. At least 30 people were killed in a Russian strike on a bus in eastern Ukraine, a day after another Russian strike killed 22 people in an apartment building. The attacks come as Russia intensifies its use of drones, missiles, and guided bombs against Ukrainian targets.
3. Hurricane Isaias strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season as it approached the Gulf Coast, and landfall is expected as soon as tomorrow. It could reach Category 3 strength, prompting hurricane watches and mandatory evacuations in parts of Florida.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1987, two writers predicted a path to energy independence from the Middle East. What they didn’t anticipate was what the U.S. would do to get there, Rafaela Jinich writes.
• Video Village: David Sims lists the decade’s 10 most defining movies (so far).
• Work in Progress: Rogé Karma explains the biggest source of inequality that no one talks about.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Forgive the Bad Texters

By Julie Beck

Whenever I receive a text, this is what happens. I pick up my phone. So far, so good. I experience whatever emotion the message elicits—the pleasant warmth of being reached out to, possibly the annoyance of being interrupted. Then, if conditions are right, if I’m not too busy or in the middle of talking with someone else, if my mind is at peace, if my anxiety is at no more than a low hum, if Mercury is not in retrograde, I will respond right then and there. If conditions are not right, it will be as though the text never existed at all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Michael Powell: “What I saw at New York’s anti-Israel October 7 rallies”
• Radio Atlantic: Why FBI officials are worried about the midterms
• If you want a real digital commons, build it yourself.
• Reducing the number of generals isn’t the problem.
• OpenAI just carpet-bombed mathematics.

Culture Break

Explore. Anne Carson, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, makes ancient texts feel tantalizingly new, Walt Hunter writes.

Take a look. An ambitious retrospective examines the life and work of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—to brilliant effect, Sebastian Smee writes.

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.

The Democratic Party needs Abdul El-Sayed, but it doesn’t necessarily love him. Although few top Democrats have expressed public misgivings about El-Sayed, the leftist candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan who defeated an establishment candidate in an August primary, most of them aren’t overflowing with enthusiasm either. This hesitation is one reason yesterday’s news that former President Obama will campaign with El-Sayed and other Michigan Democrats later this month is notable.

Seeing why El-Sayed would want Obama’s imprimatur is easy: He’s by far the most popular politician in America, and he won Michigan in both of his presidential races—once by more than 16 percentage points and another by nearly 10, over a native Michigander. (More unexpected is El-Sayed’s welcome for Kamala Harris, who is unpopular with leftists, lost Michigan in 2024, and has gotten a stiff arm from some Democratic candidates this cycle.)

Obama’s incentives are more interesting. He is in an awkward phase of his career—no longer young enough to be cool but still too young to be an elder statesman. Nonetheless, with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden both aging and somewhat tarnished, no other figure can match Obama’s stature. He has become, as Politico put it today, the Democratic Party’s “closer-in-chief.” In that role, he’s been more willing to back left-wing candidates than other establishment figures have.

Last year, many high-profile Democrats were wary of the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani—either because they were skeptical of his policy stances or because of their long-standing ties to the family of his leading opponent, Andrew Cuomo. But Obama privately called him, praised his campaign, and offered to be a “sounding board” should Mamdani want advice. (Obama did not formally endorse Mamdani, though The New York Times, which first reported the call, noted that he prefers not to intervene in municipal races.) And in 2018, Obama endorsed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for U.S. House. He did so only after she’d won a primary in a safe district, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion, but given her anti-establishment campaign, he seemed to be sending a message—or placing a bet on future success. (Obama also privately called El-Sayed after his primary victory.)

Obama’s engagement with leftist candidates stands in contrast with most of his statements on leftist politics. Ideologically, Obama’s stances remain essentially center-left—even as the party overall has shifted leftward since he departed the White House—and he has at times appeared to scold or at least push back on the party’s left wing. Since leaving office, he has criticized cancel culture, slogans such as “Defund the police,” and what he views as a culture of ideological purity. Some critics on the left have been happy to return fire, labeling him a fake progressive who is too cozy with the powerful.

Notwithstanding his overall popularity, Obama has drawn grumbling from other parts of the party, too. Some critics complain that he spends too much time jetting around the globe, hobnobbing with NBA stars, and podcasting with Bruce Springsteen. Even his year-end playlists and reading lists feel a bit stale. (Obama bristled when the comedian Hasan Minhaj questioned whether he really made them.) In good times, this would be merely cringe; in a time of rising authoritarianism, some view him not being more actively involved in politics as a dereliction of duty.

Obama tends to lock in for campaign season, and he is a consummate party man; if the Democrats need to win the Michigan Senate seat, Obama will hit the stump for the nominee, whoever that might be. But Obama may have other reasons to embrace candidates such as El-Sayed and Mamdani. The politician who once described himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name” may see some of the same in them—or, in El-Sayed’s case, a swole kid. He is not a Muslim, as they are, but he was a target of Islamophobic attacks. And he is not a leftist, like them, but he was often tarred as a radical socialist.

Beyond the personal, Obama has signaled some impatience with more traditional elements of the Democratic Party during appearances in the past two years, echoing the boisterous left more than the buttoned-up establishment. He has criticized what he sees as faintheartedness from Democrats who he said last year were “cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe, or at least what they said they believe.” In sidestepping internecine battles, he has also suggested agnosticism about methods as long as the results are good. “There’s been, I gather, some argument between the left of the party and people who are promoting the quote-unquote abundance agenda. Listen, those things are not contradictory. You want to deliver for people and make their lives better? You got to figure out how to do it,” he said.

Obama will never have the same policy slate as Senator Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani do, but his rhetoric and backing of leftist candidates suggest that he’s more attuned to shifts in the Democratic Party than his establishment peers are, and less rigid than his leftist critics contend. In 2008, Obama promised change; in 2026, he is still willing to give it a shot.

Related:

• Where is Barack Obama?
• The firebrand

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Tom Nichols: Russia needs to tell the truth about a plague death.
• The battle for Hormuz is not the war.
• What Justice Alito really wants

Today’s News

1. Cornell’s faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution over the university’s handling of an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a fraternity house. The faculty senate is expected to consider the measure on October 14 amid calls for changes to how the university addresses sexual assault.
2. Paramount completed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a new media giant called Skydance. The combined company brings HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount, and their major film and streaming franchises under one owner.
3. Student-led protests in France over poor school conditions spread to more than 40 cities, drawing roughly 256,000 people, including teachers, parents, and unions. The government suspended classes for two days as the movement grew, and some protests ended in clashes with police.

Evening Read

Churches Are Finally Making the Moral Case Against Sports Betting

By McKay Coppins

One of the puzzling things about the online sports-betting boom that has swept through American culture over the past decade is the relative slowness of religious leaders to articulate a moral case against the vice.

In the past, churches were among the leading voices warning against gambling. Jerry Falwell denounced it as a sinful habit that preyed on the poor and left “little children” to pay the price. In The Atlantic’s December 1907 issue, a Unitarian minister made the case against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”

But in recent years, as state legislatures have raced to legalize sports betting and gambling ads have flooded the airwaves and millions of young men have begun walking around with a casino in their pocket, spiritual leaders have been relatively muted.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Trump’s unlikely strategy to control history: footnotes
• A striking decline in openness to IVF
• What we really know about the Russian “plague” case
• Radio Atlantic: The 2026 midterms must-watch list

Culture Break

Watch. Twenty-five years ago, Zoolander (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+) gave us a power poser for the ages—and an enduring argument about the limits of gender, Megan Garber writes.

Explore. Fishermen have always exaggerated the size of their catches. But AI has taken the practice to a different level, Tyler Austin Harper writes.

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.

The Democratic Party needs Abdul El-Sayed, but it doesn’t necessarily love him. Although few top Democrats have expressed public misgivings about El-Sayed, the leftist candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan who defeated an establishment candidate in an August primary, most of them aren’t overflowing with enthusiasm either. This hesitation is one reason yesterday’s news that former President Obama will campaign with El-Sayed and other Michigan Democrats later this month is notable.

Seeing why El-Sayed would want Obama’s imprimatur is easy: He’s by far the most popular politician in America, and he won Michigan in both of his presidential races—once by more than 16 percentage points and another by nearly 10, over a native Michigander. (More unexpected is El-Sayed’s welcome for Kamala Harris, who is unpopular with leftists, lost Michigan in 2024, and has gotten a stiff arm from some Democratic candidates this cycle.)

Obama’s incentives are more interesting. He is in an awkward phase of his career—no longer young enough to be cool but still too young to be an elder statesman. Nonetheless, with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden both aging and somewhat tarnished, no other figure can match Obama’s stature. He has become, as Politico put it today, the Democratic Party’s “closer-in-chief.” In that role, he’s been more willing to back left-wing candidates than other establishment figures have.

Last year, many high-profile Democrats were wary of the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani—either because they were skeptical of his policy stances or because of their long-standing ties to the family of his leading opponent, Andrew Cuomo. But Obama privately called him, praised his campaign, and offered to be a “sounding board” should Mamdani want advice. (Obama did not formally endorse Mamdani, though The New York Times, which first reported the call, noted that he prefers not to intervene in municipal races.) And in 2018, Obama endorsed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for U.S. House. He did so only after she’d won a primary in a safe district, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion, but given her anti-establishment campaign, he seemed to be sending a message—or placing a bet on future success. (Obama also privately called El-Sayed after his primary victory.)

Obama’s engagement with leftist candidates stands in contrast with most of his statements on leftist politics. Ideologically, Obama’s stances remain essentially center-left—even as the party overall has shifted leftward since he departed the White House—and he has at times appeared to scold or at least push back on the party’s left wing. Since leaving office, he has criticized cancel culture, slogans such as “Defund the police,” and what he views as a culture of ideological purity. Some critics on the left have been happy to return fire, labeling him a fake progressive who is too cozy with the powerful.

Notwithstanding his overall popularity, Obama has drawn grumbling from other parts of the party, too. Some critics complain that he spends too much time jetting around the globe, hobnobbing with NBA stars, and podcasting with Bruce Springsteen. Even his year-end playlists and reading lists feel a bit stale. (Obama bristled when the comedian Hasan Minhaj questioned whether he really made them.) In good times, this would be merely cringe; in a time of rising authoritarianism, some view him not being more actively involved in politics as a dereliction of duty.

Obama tends to lock in for campaign season, and he is a consummate party man; if the Democrats need to win the Michigan Senate seat, Obama will hit the stump for the nominee, whoever that might be. But Obama may have other reasons to embrace candidates such as El-Sayed and Mamdani. The politician who once described himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name” may see some of the same in them—or, in El-Sayed’s case, a swole kid. He is not a Muslim, as they are, but he was a target of Islamophobic attacks. And he is not a leftist, like them, but he was often tarred as a radical socialist.

Beyond the personal, Obama has signaled some impatience with more traditional elements of the Democratic Party during appearances in the past two years, echoing the boisterous left more than the buttoned-up establishment. He has criticized what he sees as faintheartedness from Democrats who he said last year were “cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe, or at least what they said they believe.” In sidestepping internecine battles, he has also suggested agnosticism about methods as long as the results are good. “There’s been, I gather, some argument between the left of the party and people who are promoting the quote-unquote abundance agenda. Listen, those things are not contradictory. You want to deliver for people and make their lives better? You got to figure out how to do it,” he said.

Obama will never have the same policy slate as Senator Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani do, but his rhetoric and backing of leftist candidates suggest that he’s more attuned to shifts in the Democratic Party than his establishment peers are, and less rigid than his leftist critics contend. In 2008, Obama promised change; in 2026, he is still willing to give it a shot.

Related:

• Where is Barack Obama?
• The firebrand

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Tom Nichols: Russia needs to tell the truth about a plague death.
• The battle for Hormuz is not the war.
• What Justice Alito really wants

Today’s News

1. Cornell’s faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution over the university’s handling of an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a fraternity house. The faculty senate is expected to consider the measure on October 14 amid calls for changes to how the university addresses sexual assault.
2. Paramount completed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a new media giant called Skydance. The combined company brings HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount, and their major film and streaming franchises under one owner.
3. Student-led protests in France over poor school conditions spread to more than 40 cities, drawing roughly 256,000 people, including teachers, parents, and unions. The government suspended classes for two days as the movement grew, and some protests ended in clashes with police.

Evening Read

Churches Are Finally Making the Moral Case Against Sports Betting

By McKay Coppins

One of the puzzling things about the online sports-betting boom that has swept through American culture over the past decade is the relative slowness of religious leaders to articulate a moral case against the vice.

In the past, churches were among the leading voices warning against gambling. Jerry Falwell denounced it as a sinful habit that preyed on the poor and left “little children” to pay the price. In The Atlantic’s December 1907 issue, a Unitarian minister made the case against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”

But in recent years, as state legislatures have raced to legalize sports betting and gambling ads have flooded the airwaves and millions of young men have begun walking around with a casino in their pocket, spiritual leaders have been relatively muted.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Trump’s unlikely strategy to control history: footnotes
• A striking decline in openness to IVF
• What we really know about the Russian “plague” case
• Radio Atlantic: The 2026 midterms must-watch list

Culture Break

Watch. Twenty-five years ago, Zoolander (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+) gave us a power poser for the ages—and an enduring argument about the limits of gender, Megan Garber writes.

Explore. Fishermen have always exaggerated the size of their catches. But AI has taken the practice to a different level, Tyler Austin Harper writes.

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.

Heading into yesterday’s first round of presidential voting in Brazil, the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was thought to be a narrow favorite. When the results came in, though, Lula was behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, 45 percent to 47 percent. The two men will compete in an October 25 runoff to determine the winner.

Those surnames will likely be recognizable even to casual watchers of global elections: Lula, a leftist, has been the dominant force in Brazilian politics this century, and was president from 2003 to 2011. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, was a right-wing president from 2019 to 2023 but was defeated by Lula in a comeback bid; Bolsonaro the elder then attempted a Trumpian autogolpe to stay in power but failed and was later convicted and sentenced to prison for it.

Now it’s Lula who’s struggling with voters. He was hurt by crime concerns as well as a corruption scandal, but he’s also a very familiar figure to Brazilians—perhaps too familiar. “Brazil wants change and I am very happy with the results,” Bolsonaro fils said last night. What kind of change, though?

When Donald Trump completed his own presidential comeback in the 2024 U.S. election, one common explanation was that a fundamental change had occurred in American politics, realigning demographics, parties, and policy for the long run. (As I have written recently, that claim looks shaky today.) A competing narrative, especially popular among comparative scholars, focused on a wave of anti-incumbent results in elections around the world. In this view, the results were more a rejection of Joe Biden’s administration and his vice president, Kamala Harris, than they were an embrace of Trump—and part of a broad trend of dissatisfaction among voters in many countries.

The specific motivations of the global anti-incumbent wave have never been entirely obvious. They include a post-COVID hangover but also deeper running dissatisfaction with democratic systems of government. Whatever the reasons, the trend is an important shift. Parties lose power from time to time in any country with free and fair elections, but political scientists have long observed that incumbents have an electoral advantage. In the modern United States, for example, Trump’s and Biden’s single presidential terms were outliers. If voters’ default stance is to throw the bums out after only one term or a few years, parties and leaders will struggle to create lasting policy changes. This creates instability and conflict, as politicians try more extreme tactics to achieve their goals.

Lula’s poor showing in the first round, at least, is a sign that the anti-incumbent wave has not receded since 2024. Indeed, politicians across the political spectrum have faced serious voter anger this year. In Hungary, a broad coalition emerged to eject the right-wing strongman Viktor Orbán, who, my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker noted, had been viewed as un-oustable. In Denmark, the governing coalition lost seats, though Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a centrist, was eventually able to form a new, weaker government. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is unpopular, and his future looks precarious, as parties on both the left and the right have gained in state elections, leaving his centrist government teetering. And today, the center-left Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called for a November 29 snap election for Parliament, with polls showing his party trailing behind the center-right Popular Party.

The power of the anti-incumbent wave is demonstrated by the fact that it now threatens to wash out some of the same parties and politicians it previously carried in. Lula’s victory in Brazil’s 2022 election was in part a testament to voters rejecting the government of the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. Now the same dissatisfaction could swamp Lula and elect Bolsonaro’s son.

In the United Kingdom, anti-incumbent currents helped defeat a long-running Conservative government in 2024. The result was a landslide: Conservatives lost 251 seats while Labour picked up 211 and a huge majority. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer lasted just two years in office before sagging popularity led to his effective toppling by another Labour politician, Andy Burnham. In what may be a canny reading of the global mood, Burnham has rejected suggestions that he call an election before he is required to do so, in 2029.

Finally, there’s Trump, who benefited from anti-incumbent sentiments in 2024 but may be burned by them in November. Voters may not have liked Biden, but now that they’ve seen Trump back in the White House, they like him even less. Among other issues, the inflation that hurt Biden (and other global incumbents) in 2024 has persisted and sometimes worsened under Trump. Midterm elections in the U.S. are usually defeats for the sitting president’s party, but many analysts now forecast a larger-than-normal Democratic victory. Trump has begged voters to act as though he is on the ballot, but that may be imprudent.

Anti-incumbency is a global trend, but it can have big effects on domestic politics. In the United States, Trump treated his narrow 2024 win as a huge popular mandate. Although that was a political overreach, he has managed to radically reshape the federal government and foreign policy. In Brazil, a new Bolsonaro presidency would jerk the country back toward the right after a leftward lurch under Lula. As long as voters remain this dyspeptic, however, any new approach should be treated as fragile and fleeting.

Related:

• Why everyone thinks their government has failed (From 2025)
• Hindsight is 2024.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Using the power of the government to win elections
• When anesthesia goes wrong
• Hegseth’s one percent
• Waiting on Marco

Today’s News

1. The Supreme Court opened its new term by hearing a case over whether Boulder, Colorado, can hold Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy liable for local damages from climate change. The justices focused on whether federal law blocks such lawsuits and whether the Court has jurisdiction to hear the case; a ruling could potentially affect dozens of similar cases nationwide.
2. A researcher at a Russian anti-plague institute died from a suspected case of pneumonic plague, and as many as 189 people are reportedly under medical observation. The World Health Organization said the cause has not been confirmed and that no contacts have shown symptoms so far.
3. The U.S. military removed all of its bombers from a British air base used for strikes on Iran yesterday after a suspected terror plot targeted the base. Six people have been arrested and released on bail in the investigation.

Dispatches

• Video Village: Introducing a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores the strange power of coincidence.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

What Is Zionism?

By Adam Kirsch

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.

But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• She wanted to have three kids. Then life happened.
• AI’s real gift to science
• The Permanent Questions: Should we ban AI for kids?
• A reckoning in Springfield
• Are Mormons losing their distinctiveness?

Culture Break

Explore. Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on the people who refuse to let their gadgets die.

Watch. A sketch in the most recent Saturday Night Live episode (streaming on Peacock) captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their social-media feeds to one another, Valerie Trapp writes.

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.

Heading into yesterday’s first round of presidential voting in Brazil, the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was thought to be a narrow favorite. When the results came in, though, Lula was behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, 45 percent to 47 percent. The two men will compete in an October 25 runoff to determine the winner.

Those surnames will likely be recognizable even to casual watchers of global elections: Lula, a leftist, has been the dominant force in Brazilian politics this century, and was president from 2003 to 2011. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, was a right-wing president from 2019 to 2023 but was defeated by Lula in a comeback bid; Bolsonaro the elder then attempted a Trumpian autogolpe to stay in power but failed and was later convicted and sentenced to prison for it.

Now it’s Lula who’s struggling with voters. He was hurt by crime concerns as well as a corruption scandal, but he’s also a very familiar figure to Brazilians—perhaps too familiar. “Brazil wants change and I am very happy with the results,” Bolsonaro fils said last night. What kind of change, though?

When Donald Trump completed his own presidential comeback in the 2024 U.S. election, one common explanation was that a fundamental change had occurred in American politics, realigning demographics, parties, and policy for the long run. (As I have written recently, that claim looks shaky today.) A competing narrative, especially popular among comparative scholars, focused on a wave of anti-incumbent results in elections around the world. In this view, the results were more a rejection of Joe Biden’s administration and his vice president, Kamala Harris, than they were an embrace of Trump—and part of a broad trend of dissatisfaction among voters in many countries.

The specific motivations of the global anti-incumbent wave have never been entirely obvious. They include a post-COVID hangover but also deeper running dissatisfaction with democratic systems of government. Whatever the reasons, the trend is an important shift. Parties lose power from time to time in any country with free and fair elections, but political scientists have long observed that incumbents have an electoral advantage. In the modern United States, for example, Trump’s and Biden’s single presidential terms were outliers. If voters’ default stance is to throw the bums out after only one term or a few years, parties and leaders will struggle to create lasting policy changes. This creates instability and conflict, as politicians try more extreme tactics to achieve their goals.

Lula’s poor showing in the first round, at least, is a sign that the anti-incumbent wave has not receded since 2024. Indeed, politicians across the political spectrum have faced serious voter anger this year. In Hungary, a broad coalition emerged to eject the right-wing strongman Viktor Orbán, who, my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker noted, had been viewed as un-oustable. In Denmark, the governing coalition lost seats, though Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a centrist, was eventually able to form a new, weaker government. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is unpopular, and his future looks precarious, as parties on both the left and the right have gained in state elections, leaving his centrist government teetering. And today, the center-left Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called for a November 29 snap election for Parliament, with polls showing his party trailing behind the center-right Popular Party.

The power of the anti-incumbent wave is demonstrated by the fact that it now threatens to wash out some of the same parties and politicians it previously carried in. Lula’s victory in Brazil’s 2022 election was in part a testament to voters rejecting the government of the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. Now the same dissatisfaction could swamp Lula and elect Bolsonaro’s son.

In the United Kingdom, anti-incumbent currents helped defeat a long-running Conservative government in 2024. The result was a landslide: Conservatives lost 251 seats while Labour picked up 211 and a huge majority. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer lasted just two years in office before sagging popularity led to his effective toppling by another Labour politician, Andy Burnham. In what may be a canny reading of the global mood, Burnham has rejected suggestions that he call an election before he is required to do so, in 2029.

Finally, there’s Trump, who benefited from anti-incumbent sentiments in 2024 but may be burned by them in November. Voters may not have liked Biden, but now that they’ve seen Trump back in the White House, they like him even less. Among other issues, the inflation that hurt Biden (and other global incumbents) in 2024 has persisted and sometimes worsened under Trump. Midterm elections in the U.S. are usually defeats for the sitting president’s party, but many analysts now forecast a larger-than-normal Democratic victory. Trump has begged voters to act as though he is on the ballot, but that may be imprudent.

Anti-incumbency is a global trend, but it can have big effects on domestic politics. In the United States, Trump treated his narrow 2024 win as a huge popular mandate. Although that was a political overreach, he has managed to radically reshape the federal government and foreign policy. In Brazil, a new Bolsonaro presidency would jerk the country back toward the right after a leftward lurch under Lula. As long as voters remain this dyspeptic, however, any new approach should be treated as fragile and fleeting.

Related:

• Why everyone thinks their government has failed (From 2025)
• Hindsight is 2024.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Using the power of the government to win elections
• When anesthesia goes wrong
• Hegseth’s one percent
• Waiting on Marco

Today’s News

1. The Supreme Court opened its new term by hearing a case over whether Boulder, Colorado, can hold Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy liable for local damages from climate change. The justices focused on whether federal law blocks such lawsuits and whether the Court has jurisdiction to hear the case; a ruling could potentially affect dozens of similar cases nationwide.
2. A researcher at a Russian anti-plague institute died from a suspected case of pneumonic plague, and as many as 189 people are reportedly under medical observation. The World Health Organization said the cause has not been confirmed and that no contacts have shown symptoms so far.
3. The U.S. military removed all of its bombers from a British air base used for strikes on Iran yesterday after a suspected terror plot targeted the base. Six people have been arrested and released on bail in the investigation.

Dispatches

• Video Village: Introducing a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores the strange power of coincidence.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

What Is Zionism?

By Adam Kirsch

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.

But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• She wanted to have three kids. Then life happened.
• AI’s real gift to science
• The Permanent Questions: Should we ban AI for kids?
• A reckoning in Springfield
• Are Mormons losing their distinctiveness?

Culture Break

Explore. Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on the people who refuse to let their gadgets die.

Watch. A sketch in the most recent Saturday Night Live episode (streaming on Peacock) captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their social-media feeds to one another, Valerie Trapp writes.

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 you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.

That’s the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is the daughter of the GOP fixture Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary for President Trump. Now governor of Arkansas, she’s facing criticism from right-wing influencers over an ad boosting the state’s imposition of work requirements for recipients of the state’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. These requirements are a long-standing Republican priority, but my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last year that they are “a terrible idea”: The requirement creates new taxpayer costs and red tape without really solving any problem, because most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work already do.

That’s not why the activists are mad, though. They’re upset because the face of loafing in Sanders’s ad is a cheese-ball-snarfing couch potato named Brad who is a young white man. The “Pizzagate” influencer Jack Posobiec labels it “Antiwhite.” Sean Davis of The Federalist calls it part of decades-long, systematic discrimination against white men. The openly bigoted investor James Fishback, fresh off getting trounced in a GOP primary for governor of Florida, traveled to Little Rock this week to rail against the “false and disgraceful ad.”

Assessing the accuracy of a fictional character in an ad feels a little absurd, but for the record: More than 60 percent of Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Arkansas are white, and 18 percent are Black, according to The New York Times. (The state overall is about 75 percent white and 15 percent Black.) A little more than half are women. Sanders rebuffed criticism, writing, “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls.”

The immediate and obsessive focus on a throwaway character in a 30-second ad is a lurid reminder of how identitarianism has become influential in segments of the American right, particularly young voters. This is a matter of how members of the movement understand politics, as well as how they attempt to communicate to the American public.

For decades, the right—as well as some centrist Democrats, such as Bill Clinton—criticized progressives for embracing identity politics. They argued that a focus on demographic segments was divisive and unhelpful. Ronald Reagan preached that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (though in practice this often meant support for trickle-down policies that helped mostly the already-thriving) and called for “color-blind” policies (which also tended to result in worse outcomes for people of color). This impulse persists in some segments of the Republican Party, most notably in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, led by the former Reagan aide John Roberts.

This didn’t mean that people on the right hesitated to use race as a political wedge. They just did it elliptically. The avatar of this strategy was Lee Atwater, an adviser to Reagan and George H. W. Bush, whose 1981 explanation was as vulgar as the impulses he courted. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he explained. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

In 1980, for example, Reagan delivered a controversial speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, and spoke about “states’ rights,” a phrase that segregationists had adopted. In 1988, a pro-Bush group aired a commercial that attacked his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, for allowing a convicted criminal named William Horton furlough from prison, during which he nearly killed someone. The ad didn’t mention Horton’s race and didn’t need to; it included his mugshot and called him “Willie,” which Horton (among others) interpreted as a dog whistle. “It was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, Black—‘Willie,’” he said later.

And, perhaps most relevant to the “Brad” brouhaha, Reagan often spoke about someone who became known as the “welfare queen.” As the journalist Josh Levin has written, this referred to a real individual, a woman in Chicago named Linda Taylor. Reagan never talked about her race, yet “welfare queen” became entrenched as a trope of lazy Black women grifting off the welfare system.

This may explain why people such as Posobiec and Fishback are so agitated about the Arkansas ad: They understand how powerful a political weapon racial associations can be in shaping policy. But they don’t have Atwater’s finesse or plausible deniability. The right has gone from insisting that its rhetoric about entitlements was color-blind to demanding that it include racial signifiers. And though the number of Americans willing to tolerate or embrace gutter racism in politics appears to be growing, it remains a marginal group. The hardest-core activists, hyping one another up in group chats and on Discord servers, may have lost sight of that, failing to recognize how bizarre they look freaking out over a forgettable advertisement.

If these identitarians looked around, they could see cautionary tales about the wholesale embrace of identity politics, such as the impression among many voters that the Democratic Party is more interested in niche groups than in ordinary people. They could learn from the first wave of the MAGA movement, which was willing to accommodate racism and bigotry for electoral gain but apparently believed that they could be contained and channeled. The commentator Erick Erickson, for example, has spent years tolerating Trumpism but now reacts with horror at neo-Nazis in the movement. Or they could consider the plight of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who defended Trump’s every move from the White House lectern and now finds herself accused of treachery by his zealous followers.

Related:

• James Fishback is an unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future.
• The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Exclusive: Is there anything Kash Patel won’t do for Trump before the midterms?
• Here’s who Democrats want to impeach next.
• The college decision just got harder.

Today’s News

1. New York Governor Kathy Hochul criticized Cornell University police and the local district attorney over their handling of a student’s 2024 rape allegations. Hochul appointed State Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to take over the reopened criminal investigation, which James said will include gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses while she considers whether to bring charges.
2. The Kennedy Center Honors will be held outside the Kennedy Center for the first time in the ceremony’s history; it will take place in Washington’s Capital One Arena on December 7. The center’s main building has been closed since last month.
3. President Trump is expected to name Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the White House’s new AI czar, according to people familiar with the matter. Clayton would take on the role while continuing to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Dispatches

• The Books Briefing: Robert Kolker’s The Vanishing Family joins a growing bookshelf of new works focused on dementia, Boris Kachka writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The GOP’s Culture-War Hail Mary

By Elaine Godfrey

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Manipulator vs. manipulator
• Trump got what he wanted from the Kennedy Center Honors.
• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• What Vienna lost when it lost its Jews
• Ella Langley can’t believe her success. Many listeners can’t either.

Culture Break

Explore. When Durkee Famous Sauce disappeared from grocery-store shelves, “I mourned a piece of my childhood,” Wright Thompson writes.

Debate. James Patterson and MrBeast’s new book is meant to get young people reading—but the lackluster result is more of a gamble on a modern shopping trend, Franklin Schneider writes.

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 you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.

That’s the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is the daughter of the GOP fixture Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary for President Trump. Now governor of Arkansas, she’s facing criticism from right-wing influencers over an ad boosting the state’s imposition of work requirements for recipients of the state’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. These requirements are a long-standing Republican priority, but my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last year that they are “a terrible idea”: The requirement creates new taxpayer costs and red tape without really solving any problem, because most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work already do.

That’s not why the activists are mad, though. They’re upset because the face of loafing in Sanders’s ad is a cheese-ball-snarfing couch potato named Brad who is a young white man. The “Pizzagate” influencer Jack Posobiec labels it “Antiwhite.” Sean Davis of The Federalist calls it part of decades-long, systematic discrimination against white men. The openly bigoted investor James Fishback, fresh off getting trounced in a GOP primary for governor of Florida, traveled to Little Rock this week to rail against the “false and disgraceful ad.”

Assessing the accuracy of a fictional character in an ad feels a little absurd, but for the record: More than 60 percent of Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Arkansas are white, and 18 percent are Black, according to The New York Times. (The state overall is about 75 percent white and 15 percent Black.) A little more than half are women. Sanders rebuffed criticism, writing, “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls.”

The immediate and obsessive focus on a throwaway character in a 30-second ad is a lurid reminder of how identitarianism has become influential in segments of the American right, particularly young voters. This is a matter of how members of the movement understand politics, as well as how they attempt to communicate to the American public.

For decades, the right—as well as some centrist Democrats, such as Bill Clinton—criticized progressives for embracing identity politics. They argued that a focus on demographic segments was divisive and unhelpful. Ronald Reagan preached that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (though in practice this often meant support for trickle-down policies that helped mostly the already-thriving) and called for “color-blind” policies (which also tended to result in worse outcomes for people of color). This impulse persists in some segments of the Republican Party, most notably in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, led by the former Reagan aide John Roberts.

This didn’t mean that people on the right hesitated to use race as a political wedge. They just did it elliptically. The avatar of this strategy was Lee Atwater, an adviser to Reagan and George H. W. Bush, whose 1981 explanation was as vulgar as the impulses he courted. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he explained. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

In 1980, for example, Reagan delivered a controversial speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, and spoke about “states’ rights,” a phrase that segregationists had adopted. In 1988, a pro-Bush group aired a commercial that attacked his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, for allowing a convicted criminal named William Horton furlough from prison, during which he nearly killed someone. The ad didn’t mention Horton’s race and didn’t need to; it included his mugshot and called him “Willie,” which Horton (among others) interpreted as a dog whistle. “It was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, Black—‘Willie,’” he said later.

And, perhaps most relevant to the “Brad” brouhaha, Reagan often spoke about someone who became known as the “welfare queen.” As the journalist Josh Levin has written, this referred to a real individual, a woman in Chicago named Linda Taylor. Reagan never talked about her race, yet “welfare queen” became entrenched as a trope of lazy Black women grifting off the welfare system.

This may explain why people such as Posobiec and Fishback are so agitated about the Arkansas ad: They understand how powerful a political weapon racial associations can be in shaping policy. But they don’t have Atwater’s finesse or plausible deniability. The right has gone from insisting that its rhetoric about entitlements was color-blind to demanding that it include racial signifiers. And though the number of Americans willing to tolerate or embrace gutter racism in politics appears to be growing, it remains a marginal group. The hardest-core activists, hyping one another up in group chats and on Discord servers, may have lost sight of that, failing to recognize how bizarre they look freaking out over a forgettable advertisement.

If these identitarians looked around, they could see cautionary tales about the wholesale embrace of identity politics, such as the impression among many voters that the Democratic Party is more interested in niche groups than in ordinary people. They could learn from the first wave of the MAGA movement, which was willing to accommodate racism and bigotry for electoral gain but apparently believed that they could be contained and channeled. The commentator Erick Erickson, for example, has spent years tolerating Trumpism but now reacts with horror at neo-Nazis in the movement. Or they could consider the plight of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who defended Trump’s every move from the White House lectern and now finds herself accused of treachery by his zealous followers.

Related:

• James Fishback is an unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future.
• The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Exclusive: Is there anything Kash Patel won’t do for Trump before the midterms?
• Here’s who Democrats want to impeach next.
• The college decision just got harder.

Today’s News

1. New York Governor Kathy Hochul criticized Cornell University police and the local district attorney over their handling of a student’s 2024 rape allegations. Hochul appointed State Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to take over the reopened criminal investigation, which James said will include gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses while she considers whether to bring charges.
2. The Kennedy Center Honors will be held outside the Kennedy Center for the first time in the ceremony’s history; it will take place in Washington’s Capital One Arena on December 7. The center’s main building has been closed since last month.
3. President Trump is expected to name Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the White House’s new AI czar, according to people familiar with the matter. Clayton would take on the role while continuing to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Dispatches

• The Books Briefing: Robert Kolker’s The Vanishing Family joins a growing bookshelf of new works focused on dementia, Boris Kachka writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The GOP’s Culture-War Hail Mary

By Elaine Godfrey

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Manipulator vs. manipulator
• Trump got what he wanted from the Kennedy Center Honors.
• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• What Vienna lost when it lost its Jews
• Ella Langley can’t believe her success. Many listeners can’t either.

Culture Break

Explore. When Durkee Famous Sauce disappeared from grocery-store shelves, “I mourned a piece of my childhood,” Wright Thompson writes.

Debate. James Patterson and MrBeast’s new book is meant to get young people reading—but the lackluster result is more of a gamble on a modern shopping trend, Franklin Schneider writes.

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 President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.

Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not.

The team conducting the probe sought to compel testimony from agents involved in an August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, in which the FBI recovered documents that Trump had removed from the White House. Last week, lawyers representing agents involved in the search filed a motion saying that if they were forced to testify to a grand jury, they would relay “their firsthand memories of investigating a properly predicated allegation” that Trump had “unlawfully retained hundreds of highly classified documents,” as well as “factually supported opinions on why and how such retention put the country’s national security at risk.”

No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it. (Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee today—more on that in a moment.)

More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them. (Prosecutors further alleged that he’d suggested to his lawyers that they hide some documents, and that he’d tried to hide others from them.)

The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes. (Brennan is reportedly facing two separate DOJ criminal investigations, which a law professor told The Washington Sun is an indication of either prosecutorial incompetence or malice; those might not be mutually exclusive.)

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.

Yesterday, another member of the team, Kurt Olsen, departed. The Times reports that Olsen faced difficulties with his security clearance; The Washington Post says that he was also frustrated by pressure from DOJ officials to move faster. If even Olsen thinks DOJ is being hasty, that would be stunning: He pushed DOJ to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election and more recently was the driving force behind more conspiracy theories, including about voting in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2020.

People like diGenova and Olsen are die-hard loyalists, not just deep-staters or fair-weather Trump fans. The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.

Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.

A robust debate continues about whether it was politically prudent to prosecute Trump for his various offenses in order to uphold the rule of law, or whether doing so simply inflamed his supporters and fostered an atmosphere of partisan retribution. Legally, the matter is simpler. On one side of the ledger, Trump did take the documents, Trump did try to overturn an election that he lost, and Trump’s 2016 campaign did have a series of inappropriate contacts with foreign governments. (The weakest case against Trump involved falsified business records, but that one produced a felony conviction.) On the other side, federal law-enforcement agencies did their job and investigated those actions, for which many were fired. Given the facts, is the DOJ probe investigating a grand conspiracy, or is it evidence of one?

Related:

• A Department of Justice for an age of conspiracy theories
• Trump is turning DOJ into his personal law firm. (From 2025)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Can the polls possibly be right?
• Inside the biggest feud in artificial intelligence
• Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies.

Today’s News

1. ICE plans to hire 5,000 additional employees by the end of the year to support the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which would expand its workforce by about 17 percent. Most of the new hires are expected to be deportation officers, and the agency says that it plans to use stricter vetting procedures after hundreds of recruits from last year’s hiring surge were removed.
2. The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to temporarily resume rapidly deporting immigrants to third countries; the justices will hear arguments in December over whether immigrants must be given an opportunity to contest removal to a third country where they could face persecution.

3. The Trump administration launched America.gov today, an AI-powered chatbot designed to help people find information about federal services. The tool will initially search government websites, and the administration plans to have it eventually help users complete tasks such as enrolling in Medicare and renewing passports.

Evening Read

ICE Deportees Are Vanishing Into Salvadoran Prisons

By Kevin Sieff

Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.

But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Why do AI agents sound so frustrated?
• The art of dealing with Trump
• Why did Wallace Shawn liken Israelis to Nazis?
• Gaza’s open horizon
• The THAAD delusion
• Radio Atlantic: Republican candidates are running from Trump. Will it work?

Culture Break

Debate. Taylor Swift’s music once put a clever twist on ideas about aging and adulthood. Now she seems to just be going backwards, Spencer Kornhaber argues.

Explore. Faith Hill writes about Gillian Anderson’s case for sexual fantasies.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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 President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.

Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not.

The team conducting the probe sought to compel testimony from agents involved in an August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, in which the FBI recovered documents that Trump had removed from the White House. Last week, lawyers representing agents involved in the search filed a motion saying that if they were forced to testify to a grand jury, they would relay “their firsthand memories of investigating a properly predicated allegation” that Trump had “unlawfully retained hundreds of highly classified documents,” as well as “factually supported opinions on why and how such retention put the country’s national security at risk.”

No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it. (Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee today—more on that in a moment.)

More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them. (Prosecutors further alleged that he’d suggested to his lawyers that they hide some documents, and that he’d tried to hide others from them.)

The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes. (Brennan is reportedly facing two separate DOJ criminal investigations, which a law professor told The Washington Sun is an indication of either prosecutorial incompetence or malice; those might not be mutually exclusive.)

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.

Yesterday, another member of the team, Kurt Olsen, departed. The Times reports that Olsen faced difficulties with his security clearance; The Washington Post says that he was also frustrated by pressure from DOJ officials to move faster. If even Olsen thinks DOJ is being hasty, that would be stunning: He pushed DOJ to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election and more recently was the driving force behind more conspiracy theories, including about voting in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2020.

People like diGenova and Olsen are die-hard loyalists, not just deep-staters or fair-weather Trump fans. The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.

Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.

A robust debate continues about whether it was politically prudent to prosecute Trump for his various offenses in order to uphold the rule of law, or whether doing so simply inflamed his supporters and fostered an atmosphere of partisan retribution. Legally, the matter is simpler. On one side of the ledger, Trump did take the documents, Trump did try to overturn an election that he lost, and Trump’s 2016 campaign did have a series of inappropriate contacts with foreign governments. (The weakest case against Trump involved falsified business records, but that one produced a felony conviction.) On the other side, federal law-enforcement agencies did their job and investigated those actions, for which many were fired. Given the facts, is the DOJ probe investigating a grand conspiracy, or is it evidence of one?

Related:

• A Department of Justice for an age of conspiracy theories
• Trump is turning DOJ into his personal law firm. (From 2025)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Can the polls possibly be right?
• Inside the biggest feud in artificial intelligence
• Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies.

Today’s News

1. ICE plans to hire 5,000 additional employees by the end of the year to support the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which would expand its workforce by about 17 percent. Most of the new hires are expected to be deportation officers, and the agency says that it plans to use stricter vetting procedures after hundreds of recruits from last year’s hiring surge were removed.
2. The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to temporarily resume rapidly deporting immigrants to third countries; the justices will hear arguments in December over whether immigrants must be given an opportunity to contest removal to a third country where they could face persecution.

3. The Trump administration launched America.gov today, an AI-powered chatbot designed to help people find information about federal services. The tool will initially search government websites, and the administration plans to have it eventually help users complete tasks such as enrolling in Medicare and renewing passports.

Evening Read

ICE Deportees Are Vanishing Into Salvadoran Prisons

By Kevin Sieff

Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.

But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Why do AI agents sound so frustrated?
• The art of dealing with Trump
• Why did Wallace Shawn liken Israelis to Nazis?
• Gaza’s open horizon
• The THAAD delusion
• Radio Atlantic: Republican candidates are running from Trump. Will it work?

Culture Break

Debate. Taylor Swift’s music once put a clever twist on ideas about aging and adulthood. Now she seems to just be going backwards, Spencer Kornhaber argues.

Explore. Faith Hill writes about Gillian Anderson’s case for sexual fantasies.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

Your tax dollars are at work—promoting Donald Trump to the American people.

In the past few days, two new ads appeared on some television channels. One, in black and white, features Trump walking down a hall and staring into the camera. In a voice-over, he says, “This is the final battle with you at my side.” The other features clips of Trump giving a speech at Mount Rushmore. But the most striking words are the ones on the bottom of the screen: Paid for by the U.S. Government.

These are part of a series. Last week, as my colleague Matt Viser wrote, the administration aired an ad that featured images of Trump looking resolute and imposing, with the words AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY superimposed for most of the spot, which also flashes various empty Trump policy boasts. (Largest tax cuts in history, which is flatly false; reigniting American manufacturing, which is dubious.) The soundtrack, apparently used without permission, is the musician JMSN’s song “Love Me.” To date, taxpayers have spent at least $443,000 on this ad alone, according to the Associated Press.

The White House calls these “public service announcements,” intended only to remind “Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” a White House spokesperson told Viser. Taken at face value, this is the latest example of Trump’s Sun King–esque attempt to conflate himself and the state. This administration has named a new visa program the “Trump Gold Card,” tried to place his name before John F. Kennedy’s on an official memorial, established a 47-day training program at ICE to honor his number in the presidential sequence, printed his portrait in passports, and last week launched something called “Trump TV” under White House auspices. (It’s a glorified streaming-video app.) But the White House’s claim that these are PSAs should not be taken at face value. A much simpler term exists to describe them: propaganda.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, pointed out that Trump’s political operation has plenty of cash to spend—almost $416 million as of August 31—and compared him to the strongman whom Hungarians toppled earlier this year: “Using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán.” Another GOP senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, said yesterday that no public official “should spend public money on private ads for themselves.” He added: “I think there oughta be a rule—well, there probably is a rule—you can’t spend public money to promote yourself.”

Indeed, there is a rule. The law bars the use of taxpayer money on “publicity or propaganda.” The problem is how one defines that. The administration has cited past PSAs, including an anti-drug ad during the George W. Bush administration and a pro-COVID-vaccine spot from the Biden years, to justify the newest ads. The White House insists that these ads are not promoting Trump, because he is not currently running for election. “The PSAs are clearly not political,” an official told NBC News. “The president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.”

These pretexts are so skimpy that they would make a fig leaf shrivel in shame. The ads lean heavily on the White House’s big talking points this cycle, such as dark warnings about “communism.” Trump is not on the ballot, but he has repeatedly begged his supporters to treat this election as a referendum on him—writing on Truth Social this morning, “MAGA, pretend I am on the ballot.” Finally, the new ad is just a new version of one that his campaign produced late in the 2024 presidential race, only this time paid for with public money. (Perhaps someone should have edited out the line where Trump promises to “expel the warmongers from our government,” which hasn’t aged so well.)

Yet just because the ads are wildly inappropriate, redolent of personalist dictators, and clearly violate the intent of the law, that doesn’t mean they can easily be stopped. A reasonable viewer will know that the ads are intended to boost Trump and Republicans in the midterms, but because the spots don’t have the “call to action” that qualifies them as campaign advocacy under the law, they may not violate the letter of the law. And even if they did, who would police that? Both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, whom the ad is intended to help. The Federal Election Commission doesn’t have a quorum to take action, because Trump has declined to nominate members. And anyway, the Supreme Court has consistently granted the president very wide leeway for any “official” actions.

Kennedy’s there-oughta-be-a-rule response is understandable, but one big lesson of the Trump era is that writing a law to prevent every potential abuse of power is impossible. Attempting to do so would tie Congress up in reams of mind-numbing legislation. Courts might strike some of it down; other parts would be impossible to enforce; and a sufficiently motivated administration would simply find nefarious work-arounds, just as this one has. A functioning democracy cannot be just a matter of statute. It requires good faith and some measure of virtue from its officeholders. No law can substitute for character in leaders.

That makes these transgressions primarily a matter for voters, not legislators or regulators. And in the case of the campaign ads, they can weigh in soon. As Paul Krugman writes, Trump’s personal unpopularity is already a drag on Republican candidates, so emphasizing his role would seem to be politically unwise. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars broadcasting a song called “Love me,” but you can’t make voters love you.

Related:

• Trump’s public service announcement: “Love me”
• Trump is putting his face on everything.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The problem with Democrats’ favorite policy proposal
• How Biden averted a war with Iran
• The Permanent Questions: What is the meaning of mystical experience?

Today’s News

1. Five British men, arrested on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offenses near an air base in England, were released on bail today as the investigation continues. The men were detained after three suspicious vehicles were seen heading toward RAF Fairford, about 90 minutes west of London, which the U.S. has used to support strikes on Iran.
2. FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey announced that he is resigning after a little more than a year at the bureau. Bailey, a former Missouri attorney general, said he is leaving to return to his family in Missouri.
3. The United States and China agreed to reduce tariffs on about $60 billion in goods, including U.S. agricultural products and Chinese toys and household items. Under the agreement, each country identified about $30 billion in goods that will receive more favorable tariff treatment.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how to define the fuzzy phases of life.
• The Weekly Planet: The edge of California is falling into the ocean, Joshua Partlow reports.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Babies Left Behind in America

By Caitlin Dickerson

Estela Garcia and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.

Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Matteo Wong: OpenAI has gone rogue.
• Alexandra Petri: The Kennedy Center is the most terrifying building in America.
• The hidden state Russia is building inside Ukraine
• Radio Atlantic: What Israel knew before October 7
• Elizabeth Bruenig: Why empathy is now “toxic,” “suicidal,” and a “sin”

Culture Break

Watch. With one deft impression, the Saturday Night Live season premiere (streaming on Peacock) captured the dissonance between how tech CEOs and the public talk about AI, Paula Mejía writes.

Reflect. Society’s pursuit of faster and frictionless experiences has made avoiding other people far too easy, Julie Beck writes.

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.