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.
For almost an entire year, Donald Trump has begged the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates and supercharge the American economy. And for almost an entire year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has barely budged.

Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated.

Updated with new questions at 4:50 p.m. ET on December 12, 2025.
You’ve been waiting to build that dream place of yours, there in the spot you picked out a few years back, between the pons and the frontal lobe. Maybe you want to crib some designs from your friend Steve’s place; it’s got space for the first 115 digits of pi and the names of all 266 popes.

In rejecting yesterday a redistricting plan backed by President Donald Trump, Indiana’s Republican-controlled senate did not merely deny Republicans two new U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. They also engaged in a mass revolt against the president. The stakes of their defiance reach far beyond the midterms. This vote was possibly the most significant blow yet against the authoritarian ambitions that have defined Trump’s second term.

OpenAI turned 10 yesterday, and President Donald Trump incidentally gave the company a very special birthday gift: a sweeping executive order aiming to dismantle and preempt many state-level regulations of artificial intelligence. “There’s only going to be one winner here, and it’s probably going to be the U.S. or China,” Trump said in a press conference announcing the order. And for the United States to win, “we have to be unified. China is unified.

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 force is pulling on Donald Trump that is even more inexorable than the march of time: political mortality.
Sometimes scandal or ineffectiveness is what fells a politician; if they survive those, term limits may get them anyway.

When Michael and Susan Dell announced last week that they would be donating $6.25 billion to put $250 per account into government-run savings accounts for millions of American children, it brought new attention to an initiative that was otherwise buried in the tax bill Republicans passed earlier this year: the Trump Account.
Trump Accounts—yes, that is the official name—function basically as individual retirement accounts for kids.

Marco Rubio here, with an important announcement: No more Calibri in official State Department communications! Get out of here with your ungarnished lines and provocatively naked terminals! The Biden administration may have shot the serif, switching from Times New Roman on the grounds that serif-less fonts such as Calibri are more accessible to readers with disabilities. That’s all over now.