The Atlantic

The Trump administration is trying to muddle reality—and create apathy.  

The president’s disturbing, excremental propaganda campaign

For nearly 250 years, America promoted freedom and equality abroad, even when it failed to live up to those ideals itself. Not anymore.

The Venezuelan opposition leader shows why participation matters.

Negotiations have stalled. Trump keeps changing his policies. Ukrainians, backed by Europeans, are taking matters into their own hands. ​​​

Every day, some 2 billion people around the world use privacy-protection tools supported by the Open Technology Fund. When people in China escape their government’s firewalls and censorship software—now so dense that the system has been called the “locknet”—or when users in Cuba or Myanmar evade cruder internet blocks, they can access material written in […]

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media […]

For nearly half a century, the State Department has reported annually on human-rights conditions in countries around the world. The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions, but to collect and disseminate reliable information. Congress mandated the reports back in 1977, and since then, legislators and diplomats have used them to shape decisions […]

Photographs by Lynsey Addario This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. In the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians. If their soldiers lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the militia’s commanders would […]

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Since The Atlantic first released the podcast Autocracy in America last fall, Donald Trump was elected president again. Staff writer Anne Applebaum describes how Trump’s return to the White House fits into the changing geopolitical landscape as she hands the show over […]

Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency. Updated at 7:20 a.m. ET on July 4, 2025 The American president wrote, “Vladimir, STOP!” on his Truth Social account in April, but the Russian president did not halt his offensive in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian president called for an unconditional […]

Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency. Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different. They know they will do damage on the road to their utopia, and they know […]

A few days before the Polish presidential election on Sunday, a Polish friend of mine received an unexpected message from someone she had not seen for 20 years. The woman had found my friend on Facebook, noticed that she was supporting the candidacy of Rafał Trzaskowski—the mayor of Warsaw, a liberal centrist—and begged her to […]

On Saturday, I asked Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, in western Ukraine, whether he expected the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul to lead to a cease-fire. “No,” he told me. Later, I asked the audience at the Lviv Media Forum whether any of them expected a cease-fire soon. About 200 journalists and editors were in […]

As the stock markets crashed on Friday, April 4, Donald Trump left Washington, D.C. He did not go to New York to consult with Wall Street. He did not go to Dover, Delaware, to receive the bodies of four American servicemen, killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. Instead, he went to Florida, where […]

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. He blinked. But we don’t really know why. Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald […]

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the […]

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about […]

Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.” Sick of it. […]

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered […]

Updated at 1:01 p.m. ET on February 14, 2025 Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something […]

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. […]

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call-the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants-and discovered […]

Late last year, Venezuela’s democratic opposition set out to choose, jointly, someone who could challenge Nicolás Maduro, the country’s autocratic president, in an election that was sure to be violent and unfair. Hundreds of thousands of participants from different political parties voted in a primary held across Venezuela and in exile communities abroad. Although they […]

As Hemingway once wrote of bankruptcy, the collapse of autocratic regimes tends to happen gradually and then suddenly-slowly, and then all at once. This is not just a literary metaphor. A tyrant’s followers remain loyal to him only as long as he can offer them protection from their compatriots’ wrath. In Syria, doubts about President […]