Discussions

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images It’s a bit of a surprise that it’s taken Donald Trump over two months in office to extend his broad-based campaign of presidential power grabs into the familiar area of election administration. After all, the claim that Democrats have systematically rigged elections is one of the great foundational myths of […]

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images Mike Waltz appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show on Tuesday night to discuss why he added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group text about war plans. It seems the national security adviser’s goal was to declare that he was taking responsibility for the debacle, while actually shifting the

Photo: James Hughes/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images During a raucous city-election season 60 years ago, nearly everybody in New York agreed on two things: The city was going to hell in a handbasket, and something needed to be done about it. “I’m running a campaign that calls for change because change is needed,” liberal

Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images On Tuesday, Trump-administration officials denied that they had shared sensitive material about an ongoing military operation in a Signal group chat that mistakenly included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national security, said

Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times/Redux When Hillary Clinton used a private email server while she was secretary of State, she became the subject of a yearslong Justice Department investigation that culminated with a public announcement by the FBI director that she had been “extremely careless” but would not be indicted. When Donald Trump took

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images After reading about “Houthi PC small group” — the Yemen-air-strike-planning Signal group that included the secretary of Defense, the director of national intelligence, the vice-president, and, accidentally, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic — there are a few images I can neither separate nor get out of my head. There

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux Before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump that precipitated Elon Musk’s MAGA conversion in the summer of 2024, there was at least one prominent member of Trumpworld who had been courting Musk in public for years. In May 2020, Musk posted, “Take the red pill,” with a rose emoji, to his 34

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images Various theories are kicking around to explain the speed and lack of caution surrounding the initial blizzard of executive actions in the second Trump administration. The most conventional is simply that having four years to mull what happened in his first term, Trump and his top advisers came prepared to hit

Photo: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images In one of the most stunningly idiotic security breaches of all time, top Trump-administration officials discussed war plans in a private Signal group chat and accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, to the conversation. You might assume that someone, or perhaps several people, would get fired over this.

Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images There are many different ways to explain Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency in 2016, ranging from mere fatigue with Democratic governance to a vast revolt against a bipartisan Establishment pushing globalization. But all accounts would converge on one important detail: He would not have won his incredibly narrow Electoral