Democrats chose Tom Perez as new leader, Trump says he won’t attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and more from the United States and around the world.
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez
Christopher Aluka Berry / Reuters
—Members of the Democratic National Committee have selected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new chairman, beating out Representative Keith Ellison for the top position. More here
—In the latest development with his contentious relationship with the press, President Trump said will not attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
President Trump Will Not Attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
In the latest development with his contentious relationship with the press, President Trump said will not attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The president made the announcement over Twitter on Saturday afternoon.
I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!
Trump, who would firsthand be the subject of ridicule by a comedian selected by the association, decided to avoid the awkward showing on April 29. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was the last person to not attend the dinner, but that was because he was shot in an assassination attempt a month earlier.
Several media organizations, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg, had already announced they would no longer host afterparties. Samantha Bee, of TBS’s Full Frontal, said she would host a Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner event to raise money for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Trump has never handled roast-style events well. In 2011, Seth Meyers ripped Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with some scathing jokes, including, “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
Earlier this year, there were rumors of whether this year’s dinner would even happen. But in February, Jeff Mason, a Reuters reporter and WHCA president, said the dinner was still on, adding, “the WHCA will pursue its core mission of advocating for journalists’ ability to ask questions of government officials, push for transparency, and help Americans hold the powerful to account.”
Members of the Democratic National Committee have selected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new chairman, beating out Representative Keith Ellison for the top position. Democrats, still reeling after the win of President Trump in the last election, are hoping fresh leadership can get the party back on track. In recent years, Democrats have struggled to connect with voters in state and local elections, as Republicans dominate state governments nationwide. A majority of the 447 members of the DNC, who are activists and donors from across the country, thought Perez could bring the necessary change. Ellison, who is the first Muslim elected to Congress, was backed by the progressive wing of the party, including from Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Perez was a darling of former administration officials, and enjoyed the endorsement of former Vice President Joe Biden. Meeting in Atlanta, the selection required two rounds of voting. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who built an outsider campaign, dropped out of consideration before the first round of voting, along with a string of other long-shot candidates. Perez said the Democratic Party is “suffering from a crisis of confidence, a crisis of relevance" after Trump’s win in the 2016 election. In his first act as chairman, Perez made Ellison the deputy chairman of the DNC.
A September 2016 view of Homs (Omar Sanadiki / Reuters)
Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents stormed two Syrian security offices in Homs, killing at least 32 people, including the head of the local military intelligence service branch. The Levant Liberation Committee attack in the central city, which has been ravaged by the civil war, also wounded at least 24 others. The twin attacks, each with three suicide bombers, hit heavily fortified buildings. As rescue workers arrived on the scene, other bombs went off at security checkpoints. This comes just one day after a suicide car bombing killed 60 people and wounded 100 in the northern city of al-Bab. The city was recently retaken by Syrian forces after three years of ISIS control.
Stick shifts are dying. When they go, something bigger than driving will be lost.
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I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.
That streak may soon be over. When it comes time to replace my current car, I probably won’t be able to get another like it. In 2000, more than 15 percent of new and used cars sold by the auto retailer CarMax came with stick shifts; by 2020, that figure had dropped to 2.4 percent. Among the hundreds of new car models for sale in the United States this year, only about 30 can be purchased with a manual transmission. Electric cars, which now account for more than 5 percent of car sales, don’t even have gearboxes. There are rumors that Mercedes-Benz plans to retire manuals entirely by the end of next year, all around the world, in a decision driven partly by electrification; Volkswagen is said to be dropping its own by 2030, and other brands are sure to follow. Stick shifts have long been a niche market in the U.S. Soon they’ll be extinct.
A bedrock principle is that no one—not even the president, much less the former president—is above the law, and if they commit crimes, they must answer for them.
Donald Trump would have you believe that Monday’s surprise FBI raid on his Florida estate was, like so many things he disdains, un-American.
Not much is known about the operation as of this writing. The FBI has not commented, and much of what is public comes from a statement by Trump, a notoriously unreliable source of information. Trump wrote, “My beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” who he said arrived unannounced and broke into a safe.
Reporting from The Washington Postand The New York Timesindicates that the raid appears to be connected to Trump’s removal of records from the White House at the end of his administration, in what critics have said was a clear violation of federal public-records law.
The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy
As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan: She calls the parents or closest relatives to let them know the child is safe and well cared for, and provides 24-hour contact information.
This process usually plays out within hours of when the children arrive. Most are teens who have memorized or written down their relatives’ phone numbers in notebooks they carried with them across the border. By the time of that initial call, their families are typically worried, waiting anxiously for news after having—in an act of desperation—sent their children into another country alone in pursuit of safety and the hope of a future.
He’ll compel loyalty no matter what the FBI finds. If Republicans kowtow, they might as well hand him the 2024 nomination now.
You might think that the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago yesterday would provide a welcome opportunity for a Trump-weary Republican Party. This would be an entirely postpresidential scandal for Donald Trump. Unlike his two impeachments, this time any legal jeopardy is a purely personal Trump problem. Big donors and Fox News management have been trying for months to nudge the party away from Trump. Here was the perfect chance. Just say “No comment” and let justice take its course.
But that was not to be.
The former president has discovered a new test of power: using his own misconduct to compel party leaders to rally to him. One by one, they have executed the ritual of submission: Kevin McCarthy, Marco Rubio, even the would-be Trump replacer Ron DeSantis. Maybe they’re inwardly hoping the FBI will do for them what they are too weak and frightened to do for themselves. But outwardly, they are all indignation and threats of retribution.
If you’re just eating one dish, you’re missing out.
In the 19th century, when European thinkers began developing the economic principle of diminishing marginal utility, they probably weren’t dwelling on its implications for the best strategy for ordering food at a restaurant. But nearly 200 years later, their work informs what I get for dinner.
The basic concept that these early economists were getting at is that as you consume more and more of a thing, each successive unit of that thing tends to bring you less satisfaction—or, to use the economic term, utility—than the previous one.
Recently, Adam Mastroianni, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, invoked this idea in his newsletter, Experimental History, to explain why a flight of beer can be more satisfying than a larger glass of a single brew. “The first sip is always the best sip,” he wrote, “and a flight allows you to have several first sips instead of just one.”
The merits of a potential government case against Donald Trump, and of the basis for the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, cannot yet be evaluated, despite the assertions of many of Trump’s supporters and critics. A federal search warrant can be obtained only with probable cause and with the approval of a federal magistrate, but that does not mean that Trump is guilty of whatever alleged crime the FBI is investigating. Nor does the fact that Trump may be guilty of criminal conduct in other contexts mean that he is guilty here. But at the same time, the reflexive Republican insistence that the investigation is politically motivated is itself unmoored from the available evidence.
The first generation to grow up with social media, Millennials are now becoming the first generation to age out of it.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
It took me two years to post my first TikTok. I’d press “Record,” mumble into the camera, and hastily hit delete before anyone could see just how awkward I was on video. I took the plunge only after practicing enough to eliminate any telltale signs that I was a near-30-year-old trying to be cool. Or so I thought.
Apparently, I’m still guilty of the “Millennial pause.” After hitting “Record,” I wait a split second before I start speaking, just to make sure that TikTok is actually recording. Last year, @nisipisa, a 28-year-old YouTuber and TikToker who lives in Boston, coined the term in a TikTok about how even Taylor Swift can’t avoid the cringey pause in her videos. “God! Will she ever stop being relatable,” @nisipisa, herself a Millennial, says. Gen Zers make up a larger portion of TikTok’s base, and have grown up filming themselves enough to trust that they’re recording correctly. Which is why, as short-form video comes to Instagram (Reels), YouTube (Shorts), and Snapchat (Spotlight), the Millennial pause is becoming easier to spot.
The conundrum facing America’s allies is how to cope with a great imperial power in decline that is still a great imperial power.
A peculiar cognitive dissonance seems to have taken hold in the world. The Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—led and propped up by the United States—has reminded the world that the international order is, if anything, more dependent on American military, economic, and financial might now than only a few years ago. Yet everywhere you turn, there is a sense that the U.S. is in some form of terminal decline; too divided, incoherent, violent, and dysfunctional to sustain its Pax Americana. Moscow and Beijing seem to think that the great American unwinding has already begun, while in Europe, officials worry about a sudden American collapse. “Do we talk about it?” Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria who remains well connected within Europe’s diplomatic network, told me, somewhat indignantly, after I asked whether an American implosion was ever discussed at the highest levels of government. “We never stop talking about it.”
How the U.S. dealt with Russia in Afghanistan is informing how Russia is dealing with the U.S. in Ukraine.
Near the end of the film Patton, George C. Scott, who plays the eponymous general, is invited to a banquet hosted by the Soviet high command to celebrate its impending victory over Nazi Germany. When Patton’s Soviet counterpart, General Mikhail Katukov, proposes that he and Patton drink a toast to each other, Patton replies through an interpreter, “My compliments to the general; please inform him that I do not care to drink with him or any other Russian son of a bitch.” The interpreter tells Patton that he cannot possibly relay this, but Patton insists. General Katukov replies through the interpreter that he thinks Patton is “a son of a bitch, too.” Patton laughs. “I’ll drink to that,” he says. “One son of a bitch to another.”
In a Hollywood-worthy plot twist, television writers are embracing fan theorists who try to “solve” their shows.
Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance, has been having what he calls “anxiety daydreams.” He’s working on the second season of the acclaimed Apple TV+ series, and though the show just got nominated for a bevy of Emmys, he’s already picturing the worst: headlines about disappointed viewers, articles analyzing his ineptitude, reviews pronouncing “the biggest precipitous drop-off in quality in the history of television,” he told me over the phone, laughing nervously. “I don’t think it’s going to be,” he clarified, “but, I mean, that’s the worry from somebody in my position.”
After all, Erickson isn’t just the showrunner of a hit drama. He’s the showrunner of a hit drama with the most discerning of audiences: the theorists. These are the fans who pick apart scenes for clues, listen to dialogue with the intensity of an FBI sting, and can anticipate entire storytelling arcs long before the show actually gets there. They don’t simply watch something; they solve it. Severance follows in the footsteps of series such as Lost, Mr. Robot, and Westworld, puzzlebox mysteries that attracted fans who feverishly speculated online. These shows spawned an entire industry built on watching a project solely to see if a prediction, no matter how tame or ludicrous, panned out.
