Robert F. Kennedy Jr. smiled, threw up a stilted wave, and made eye contact with nobody in particular. He was shuffling into Puckett’s restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, earlier this month for a plate of midday meatloaf. No advance team had peppered the room with stickers or buttons bearing his name. No one had tipped off the local media.
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American voters have never been more polarized—except, perhaps, when it comes to the shared belief that shooting a puppy is wrong.
Wasn’t Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposed to have flamed out by now? At a rally yesterday in Oakland, California, Kennedy—a lifelong Democrat turned independent—unveiled his 2024 running mate, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan. Kennedy selected Shanahan from a motley crew of reported vice-presidential contenders: Aaron Rodgers, Jesse Ventura, Mike Rowe, Tulsi Gabbard, and the rapper Killer Mike, to name a few.
Shanahan is by no means a household name.
Former President Donald Trump, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden’s well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent’s lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. “Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together?” Trump asked sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. “‘I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.
Trump has made a new habit of this.
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At what point does a “long-shot candidacy” tip into a pure vanity spectacle? Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota refuses to suspend his Democratic-primary campaign against President Joe Biden.
My friend Lee Caggiano, who died several weeks ago, was not famous. But through her work, she changed one particular corner of the world: Lee made people who stutter, like me, want to talk.Like 99 percent of the population, Lee was fluent, meaning she never knew what it was like to stutter herself. But her son did. His experience with stuttering made her pivot her life and go back to school.
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.A group of voters in Colorado are trying to use the power of the court to keep Donald Trump’s name off the state’s 2024 ballot. Below, I look at this week’s contentious Fourteenth Amendment trial in Denver—and speak with Trump’s co-defendant in the case.
Three words told the story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign had billed this afternoon’s event in Philadelphia as a “much-anticipated announcement.” Of course, that specific phrase may have been more true than intended.Ever since Kennedy entered the Democratic presidential primary race in the spring, observers had been anticipating that he’d one day announce his honest intentions as a 2024 candidate.
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.It’s never been more fraught to be the “main character” in the United States. Below, I look at how this week’s debacle in the House of Representatives is illustrative of a larger cultural phenomenon.
Suddenly, it just tumbled out: “Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.
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.Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The end will come for the cult of MAGA.
This summer, I set out to write about Vivek Ramaswamy because I thought that his public-speaking skills set him apart from his GOP presidential rivals. Whereas most candidates were struggling to find their lane, Ramaswamy knew exactly what he was offering: a message that seemed to be libertarian at its core, paired with views that were consistent with more extreme corners of the right. Ramaswamy’s team agreed to participate in the profile.
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.There’s Donald Trump, and there’s everyone else. At the moment, the former president of the United States appears unbeatable in the 2024 Republican primary race. But perhaps inevitable is a trickier word than it seems.
Did you think it would all happen this fast? The heat domes, the thousand-year floods, the apocalyptic wildfires, that horrific orange sky? This summer’s convergence of extreme events makes it feel like we’re living in a CGI-laden disaster movie. But those epic blockbusters all offer the same material comfort: an ending. What we’re experiencing is different.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
It turns out that the debt matters after all.
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.Mike Pence and Chris Christie are each expected to announce their 2024 presidential candidacy this week. As the Republican primary field continues to grow, so do candidates’ awkward attempts to prove that they’re just regular people.
In the weeks leading up to today’s arraignment in New York, former President Donald Trump was reportedly enamored by the idea of a dramatic “perp walk.” He seemed to revel in the power of the word arrested. Perhaps Trump, a noted Godfather fan, wanted this historic day to resemble that of the real-life mafioso John Gotti, the former Gambino-crime-family boss, who famously strutted into the New York State Supreme Court in 1990 as flashing cameras captured his smirk.
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.Let’s begin by assuming you’re not planning to watch WrestleMania this weekend. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), with its ridiculous bombast and barbaric violence, has turned people off for decades.
Awash in strobes, Seth “Freakin” Rollins begins his waltz to the ring. His nemesis, the YouTube star Logan Paul, is there waiting for him.Rollins pauses beneath the jumbotron and holds his arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. Green and purple spotlights dart and swirl around Boston’s TD Garden. Thousands of fans start screaming the “whoa-ohh-ohh” part of Rollins’s theme song; exponentially more are live-tweeting the broadcast at home.
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s message at the annual South by Southwest festival could be summarized in three words: Follow the money.Pelosi uttered that specific phrase—and similar versions of it—several times during her interview with Evan Smith, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, as part of the magazine’s Future of Democracy summit this morning in Austin, Texas.
Former President Donald Trump gripped the CPAC lectern as he workshopped a new sales pitch: “I stand here today, and I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent—and very easily—World War III.” (Wild applause.) “And you’re gonna have World War III, by the way.” (Confused applause.
The question is not whether aliens exist—I’m firmly in the “Hell yeah, they do!” camp—but rather when we’ll have enough hard evidence to end the decades-long debate over said existence.Believers in UFOs have gotten some tantalizing clues over the past few years. Those 2019 New York Times videos of zig-zagging, Tic Tac–like vessels with curious propulsion are always worth a rewatch.
Growing up, you might have been told not to stare at the guy in the wheelchair. You were probably taught, more or less, that aggressively averting your eyes when passing a stranger with a physical difference is the “right” thing to do. Most of us—whether we realize it or not—keep up this behavior well into adulthood.
Ask anyone what Mehmet Oz said about reproductive rights during last month’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, and they’ll probably tell you that the TV doctor believes an abortion should be between “a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders.” The truth is, that dystopian Handmaid’s Tale–esque statement did not come verbatim from the Republican’s mouth. But it may have cost him the election anyway.
Why did John Fetterman’s team agree to tonight’s debate? Because declining it likely seemed a worse option. For all of Mehmet Oz’s carpetbaggery, medical quackery, and general charlatanism, he got that much right near the end of the first and only Pennsylvania debate for U.S. Senate: Voters really do want to see both candidates face off.Fetterman used to talk one way, he had a stroke, and now he talks another way.
Earlier this week, John Fetterman sat down with NBC News for one of the defining television segments of the year. “Unlike any political interview I’ve ever done,” Dasha Burns, the NBC reporter who met with him, tweeted. Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, suffered a stroke in May. During this, his first on-camera interview since then, he relied on closed-captioning to process Burns’s questions.
There’s a saying, though it’s more of a whisper, that politicians are damaged people. That those who run for office have a pathological need for validation, that they’re willing to go to obscene lengths to get attention, even if it means putting themselves or their family at risk. Jason Kander is ready to admit that all of this is true.You may remember Kander as the Millennial Afghanistan veteran who emerged on the national stage just under a decade ago.
You couldn’t miss the sound—a piercing, atonal whine—even if your phone had been set to vibrate. Usually this repetitive blare manifests as an Amber Alert, but this morning it accompanied a push notification about an alleged criminal on the loose in New York City. Curiously, the message that flashed across scores of smartphone screens didn’t use the phrase person of interest or suspect. Instead, the jarring alert felt more like something out of a Philip K.
At first, the footage offers a perspective we’ve seldom seen: an inside-the-classroom view of high-school students trying to evade an active shooter. Kids crouch below their desks and strategize in hushed tones. The lights are off. Fearing that the voice on the other side of the door is that of a killer, they flee. Then, as teenagers push open a window and thrust themselves to safety, the scene starts to look familiar.
Excitement seizes Donald Trump’s face when it’s time, once again, to humiliate another human. His eyes narrow and he curls the corners of his lips. You’re likely to spot the sinister grimace during one of the president’s campaign rallies. Yesterday in Michigan, Trump turned to the screen behind him to watch a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden stumbling while trying to say, “I’ll lead an effective strategy to mobilize true international pressure.
You could hear the stutter in Brayden’s lungs, all those heavy inhalations, his search for sounds that wouldn’t come. The 13-year-old stared into a stationary camera and told the world about his problem, the affliction he shares with 3 million Americans, one of whom is now the Democratic nominee for president.“Without Joe Biden, I wouldn’t be talking with you today,” Brayden began. A big smile revealed braces.