Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Virginia Hates Tyrants
Life under President Donald Trump has Tim Kaine thinking a lot lately about the Book of Job. The results of last night’s election in Virginia, where Kaine is a U.S. senator, had him thinking of Job too.“He thought, I’d been such a good person. So is it just all pointless? I’m going to suffer just pointlessly,” the onetime...
Donald Trump Is All Alone
Early in President Donald Trump’s term, White House aides worried that he was spending too much time cocooned in the building. So they went to a senior official and pitched an intervention of sorts: Take him to dinner one night at the Peking Gourmet Inn, a Chinese restaurant in the Virginia suburbs where both Bushes dined as president. The...
Why Hasn’t Trump Thrown Rudy Giuliani Under the Bus?
Yesterday was a bad day for Rudy Giuliani, which means it was a bad day for his client, Donald Trump. This is hardly new. Each day of the impeachment inquiry seems to bring new, unflattering evidence about Giuliani’s skullduggery in Ukraine and the extent to which it infuriated and perplexed U.S. officials, strained the American-Ukrainian...
What It’s Like to Deal With U.S. Foreign Policy in the Trump Era
The main revelation in the latest release of transcripts from the House impeachment inquiry is that Ambassador Gordon Sondland explicitly told a Ukrainian official that the U.S. would withhold military aid until his government pledged to pursue corruption investigations that Donald Trump had a political stake in—buttressing the case that the...
The Atlantic Politics Daily: Bellwethers
It’s Tuesday, November 5. We’re still combing through newly released testimonies from key characters in the Ukraine affair.In today’s newsletter: ¶ People. Gordon Sondland. ¶ Places. Arizona, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia. ¶ Things. Fossil fuels.*” TODAY IN POLITICS »(Mark Makela / Reuters)It’s Election Day in...
It Was a Corrupt Quid Pro Quo
Updated on November 5 at 4:02 p.m.Newly released testimony in the House impeachment inquiry shows in new detail how the Trump administration’s demands for a quid pro quo from the Ukrainian government operated.Ambassador Gordon Sondland, in an addendum to his original testimony released alongside his deposition transcript today, acknowledges...
The Republican Doctrine of Trumpian Infallibility
William Barr was outraged about the special-counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.The claim that President Donald Trump could have obstructed justice by conducting official acts, such as firing the FBI director, was “fatally conceived,” he wrote in a June 2018 memo, and could do “lasting damage to the presidency and...
How a Populist Destroys America
Donald Trump enflames the passions of his supporters by calling impeachment a : The impeachment inquiry is fully legitimate]More legitimate, in his mind, is his role as the putative voice of the people. Populism is a disposition, rather than a fully worked-out theory of government. Its essence is that the voice of the people is the true voice of...
The American Prisoner Caught Between Trump and the Kremlin
Elizabeth Whelan, a soft-spoken portrait artist from Martha’s Vineyard, has never considered herself political. And yet seated before this shrine of sorts—the Trump bobblehead next to the Trump-branded bottle of rosé; the Trump coffee mug; the Make America Great Again hats in red, white, and blue; the Trump tube socks; the SAVE FREEDOM:...
The Federal Government Fears Trump’s Tweets
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch could tell the knives were out for her, even if she couldn’t figure out why. From her posting in Ukraine, she began to get wind of people undermining her in private, she told House investigators in a deposition last month. Then, in March 2019, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that “jokers” like her needed to be...
