"Almost any time Trump talks to a foreign strongman, he seems both charmed and intimidated, and ends up defending his autocratic friend rather than his country. These dictators appear to bring out a kind of neediness in Trump." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Relevant piece from 2015 for anyone needing a primer on the Thucydides Trap: "In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed." www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

"In the age of Trump, there are no half-gestures of loyalty. You’re MAGA or you’re not. Cassidy traded his legacy for an attempted show of loyalty by voting in Kennedy. But it seems to not have even registered with many voters in his state." www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

"To judge from this report, America’s counterterrorism policy is unfocused, run by amateurs, and concerned more with Donald Trump’s many grievances than the security of the United States." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

“Democrats keep pushing for race-based affirmative action, to their own political detriment—rather than supporting a much fairer policy of providing a leg up to economically disadvantaged people of all races” Richard D. Kahlenberg writes:

Wrote about the importance of adhering to an effective, disciplined nonviolence in fighting the Trump regime, especially given a growing obsession with “heroic” violence online (gift link). www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Trump is using social media not as Big Brother or Stalin would have employed this technology, but the way a depressed teenager would: as a source of fantasies that provide him with validation, comfort, and escape from the frightening realities of the world." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Rarely, if ever, is anyone given a diplomatic posting directly following such a spectacular failure, especially one that did so much damage to American interests around the world." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Thinking that an assassination would advance a political cause is likewise delusional. The only cause these attempted assaults have benefited is Trump’s." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

RFK Jr. does not remember the days before vaccines eliminated the terror and death wreaked by polio and measles. Fran Moreland Johns (born 1933) does. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Wow. What a 𝑝𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 of an article. *blink* When almost every researcher and industry insider is telling you policy engagement is a precursor to handle the risks of AI development, these agentic ogres are doing the moral opposite, either playing for time or for keeps. /1

"AI's inventors spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the technology even as they issue dire warnings of its dangers: 'It might kill us, but we have to make it as powerful as possible as fast as possible.'" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Sacks joined the most corrupt administration in American history. Throughout his year in the White House, his work on tech policy brushed up against the spectacular grift of his boss at almost every turn." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"The path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy all that important in the first place." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"With the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Yesterday on Will Cain’s Fox News show, the vice president delivered something that might be entirely new: a confirmation-denial. Vance called The Atlantic’s reporting false and then pivoted instantly to verifying that it was true." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Trump "'has been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,'” the confidant told us. 'He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.'” www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"The Trump administration has realized that its profiteering no longer produces the same public fury it once did...The result is on a dollar basis, and perhaps on any basis, the most corrupt administration in American history." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

"The belief that he could cross through many hallways and dozens of yards of armed and trained men and women, without being taken out himself, speaks to a John Wick–like delusion that may yet prove clinical in origin." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"I have become convinced that if the Madisonian republic is to endure, conservatives must reckon with our role in bringing the nation to its current breaking point, and work to reestablish the checks and balances that we helped erode." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"These podcasters are, I suppose, the hard-left equivalent of those prosperity-gospel preachers, who dress rich so that they can give others a vision of something to aspire to. They could not look or sound more unoppressed if they tried." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"You get zero points for recognizing Trump’s style and character only now, a decade into his era." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

"Simultaneously touting your prospective deal while comparing it to the worst deal ever is a bit like saying, 'I’m a fantastic basketball player, much better than my late grandmother, who never played the game.'" www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

“Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public, but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.” - FBI Official

"The problems with Patel's conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the DoJ." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

"Vance's attempt to enlighten the pontiff revealed not only his arrogance, but his lack of knowledge about the just-war tradition itself." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

We often disparage dissidents as self-righteous, but if you look at Thoreau, and what it took to oppose slavery in his time, maybe acting out of conviction does take a certain presumptuousness. An excerpt in @theatlantic.com from "How to Be a Dissident." www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

"To contend successfully with the traditionalists’ effects on our politics and culture, we also need to recognize that elements of their worldview are correct. But which parts are correct, and which are completely off the rails?" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"We moderns may think we own the future, but the traditionalists like their chances. If this is a global culture war, it’s the whole world against us." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Is history running backwards?

"Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere. Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away. Turns out that was yesterday’s vision of the future." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

“'The devil,' William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, 'can cite Scripture for his purpose.' As we’ve seen in recent weeks, so can Pete Hegseth." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Even if all other problems, including the economy, were holding steady—and they are not—America cannot keep ignoring the dysfunction of the commander in chief, the sole steward of the codes to a massive nuclear arsenal." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Trump's blood-curdling Truth Social posts—shocking as they were—proclaimed desperation, not resolve. That’s the Trump version of the madman strategy: yelling at people in the street while begging those same people for a bailout." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"Donald Trump has vacillated between Neville Chamberlain and Attila the Hun, threatening to walk away one day and to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” the next. Tehran has clarity: Its ideology is resistance, its strategy is chaos, and its endgame is survival." www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

For those wanting to better understand the right's admiration for Orban strongly recommend this new article from @isaacstanleybecker.bsky.social.

Does the phrase “Hitler-branded architecture” ring any bells?

"He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble." On Hitler's grandiose architectural plans for an expansion of the government's seat of power, and the dictator's use of fascist aesthetics to awe and intimidate. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"The president seems lost. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"A normal politician would attempt to convey that he is being reasonable and negotiating in good faith, whereas his adversaries are violent war criminals. Trump is arguing the reverse." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"When Hegseth tries to don the armor of a warrior priest, the result is a rancid mess that should offend believers and nonbelievers alike." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

"Yet whatever truths it contains, Marc Andreessen’s worldview still comes with a few problems. In the first place, he is an ignoramus of epic proportions." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Airports "are the opposite of vacation, even as they are inextricably linked to it. And they lay bare the fragility of this modern life, how easy it is for everything to go wrong—right now, especially." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

"The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas. This shallowing effect reshapes the public square, allowing brief snippets of emotionally charged content to crowd out nuance, and algorithms to reinforce preferences and prejudices." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

“'There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,' Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. 'All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.'" www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

"On Yelp, where Newark Airport has a lower rating than several nearby prisons, 1,100 one-star reviews refer to it with vocabulary such as 'chaotic,' 'unacceptable,' and 'hell on earth.'" www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

A Trimmer has been called “a kind of state-otter, neither fish nor flesh, and yet he smells of both” and a political “hermaphrodite.” Yet Trimmers, "the antithesis of Donald Trump," are what this moment calls for. @DavidBrooks224 makes the case. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"At the core of the MAGA project and Trumpism is disruption and destruction, the delegitimization and razing of institutions, and the brutalization of opponents. Its leader, the president, abuses power, hurts the innocent, and mocks the dead." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...