Today's Liberal News

Trump Terrified Even His Truest Believers

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 and his allies have dismissed the investigation into the insurrection as the work of enemies and traitors, but they can’t write off Brad Parscale and Katrina Pierson as faint-hearted RINOs.But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.

Everything About Twitter v. Musk Is Utter Nonsense

This is exhausting, but I’ll attempt to bring you up to speed: Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Twitter accepted this offer, presumably because it was the best the social-media company’s directors thought they could do. Then Musk changed his mind and said he was pulling out of the deal, claiming that he couldn’t tell how many Twitter users were fake. And then Twitter sued Musk to force him to go through with the purchase.

‘Watching for Discomfort’: Mark Leibovich on Reporting His New Trump Book

What distinguishes Mark Leibovich’s new book about the Trump years from all the many, many others is that he started it with an unusual premise: He was bored with Trump. “I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure,” Leibovich writes in an excerpt for The Atlantic. Far more interesting were those who stood next to Trump and enabled his rise—the Lindsey Grahams and Kevin McCarthys—those who should have known better.

Why They Still Support Trump

The seven public hearings by the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have made the task of dot connecting easy: America’s 45th president oversaw and directed a multipart plan to violently overturn the 2020 election. Texts and testimonies of those in Donald Trump’s inner orbit have shattered every excuse that the former president’s supporters had publicly broadcast since that awful, searing day.

Capitol Rioter & Former Oath Keeper Testify at Jan. 6 Hearing That Trump Radicalized Extremists

Chilling live testimony at the seventh hearing of the January 6 House select committee hearing came from former Donald Trump supporters who detailed their own radicalization in response to Trump’s actions leading up to the deadly insurrection. “I think we need to quit mincing words and just talk about truths. And what it was going to be was an armed revolution. I mean, people died that day. Law enforcement officers died this day. There was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol.

House Jan. 6 Committee to Trump: You “Cannot Escape Responsibility by Being Willfully Blind”

In its seventh public hearing, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol presented evidence and witness testimony that revealed how then-President Trump was a driving force behind assembling a violent mob that would target the Capitol. While Trump’s own Cabinet members and legal advisers found no evidence of voter fraud and advised him to concede the election, he continued to tweet messages to followers that painted the election as stolen.

News Roundup: Trump planned for Jan. 6 crowd to march on Capitol; extremist leaders knew in advance

A new public hearing from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup attempt focused on Trump’s specific actions to assemble a “wild” crowd on that date, a crowd spurred to action by Trump’s knowingly false claims of a “stolen” election. New evidence indicated that violent extremists were expecting Trump to order them to march to the Capitol during the counting of electoral votes, which Trump then did. Trump also altered his planned Jan.

Daily Space: It’s Webb Telescope day! NASA releases the first batch of gorgeous images

The James Webb Space Telescope was more than a decade in construction. When it finally launched back on Christmas Day, the massive and complex structure faced what NASA called “344 points of failure” on its way to its new home at Lagrange Point 2 (L2), roughly 1,500,000 kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth. 

Day by day, week by week, the telescope didn’t just pass those points of potential failure, it passed with flying colors.

‘Misled the American people’: AOC calls out Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on lying about abortion views

As the country continues to process the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that made abortion legal nationwide, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on the Senate Monday to question whether Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath about their views on the case.

During their Senate confirmation hearings, both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said that they viewed Roe v. Wade as a settled “precedent” that had been “reaffirmed many times.

Josh Hawley tries to mock law professor on abortion—she teaches him a lesson in under two minutes

During a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on abortion access and the law, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri attempted to derail the otherwise incredibly important conversation by trying to trip up expert Khiara Bridges. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, had used inclusive language when referring to people who seek abortions. And Hawley couldn’t handle it.

‘They started throwing gas bombs’: Cops leave teen caught in crosshairs of SWAT standoff to die

Albuquerque police officers knew a person other than the suspect they were pursuing had run inside the very house they threw powder irritants into. They had that knowledge before they decided to activate the irritants, and they did so anyway, desperate to drive those inside the home, including 15-year-old Brett Rosenau, outside. They failed in more ways than one.

“Rosenau was found deceased inside the home,” police said in a news release.

The Incitement Paper Trail

Donald Trump sent thousands of tweets during his four years as president. None may prove as consequential as the one he sent in the wee hours of December 19, 2020: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild,” the president wrote at 1:42 a.m. ET.At the time, Trump’s middle-of-the-night missive deepened a sense of growing alarm about a defeated president who appeared to be unmoored and was fomenting chaos during his final weeks in office.