Mitt Romney Crushes in New Hampshire

The Lasting Damage of Trump's 'Tapes' Bluff

David Frum

The president’s attempt to intimidate James Comey didn’t merely backfire—it may also embolden hostile regimes to conclude his other threats are equally empty.

This is a first for the Trump presidency: the first formal presidential retraction of a presidential untruth.

President Trump tweeted a warning to James Comey: The fired FBI director had better hope that no “tapes” existed that could contradict his account of what happened between the two men. Trump has now confessed that he had no basis for this warning. There were no such tapes, and the president knew it all along.

The tweet was intended to intimidate. It failed, spectacularly: Instead of silencing Comey, it set in motion the special counsel investigation that now haunts Donald Trump’s waking imagination.

But the failed intimidation does have important real world consequences.

First, it confirms America’s adversaries in their intensifying suspicion that the president’s tough words are hollow talk. The rulers of North Korea will remember the menacing April 4 statement from the Department of State that the United States had spoken enough about missile tests, implying that decisive actions lay ahead—and the lack of actions and deluge of further statements that actually followed.

How to Deal With North Korea

Mark Bowden

There are no good options. But some are worse than others.

点击这里阅读中文版本 | Read this article in Chinese.

Thirty minutes. That’s about how long it would take a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from North Korea to reach Los Angeles. With the powers in Pyongyang working doggedly toward making this possible—building an ICBM and shrinking a nuke to fit on it—analysts now predict that Kim Jong Un will have the capability before Donald Trump completes one four-year term.

About which the president has tweeted, simply, “It won’t happen!”

Though given to reckless oaths, Trump is not in this case saying anything that departs significantly from the past half century of futile American policy toward North Korea. Preventing the Kim dynasty from having a nuclear device was an American priority long before Pyongyang exploded its first nuke, in 2006, during the administration of George W. Bush. The Kim regime detonated four more while Barack Obama was in the White House. In the more than four decades since Richard Nixon held office, the U.S. has tried to control North Korea by issuing threats, conducting military exercises, ratcheting up diplomatic sanctions, leaning on China, and most recently, it seems likely, committing cybersabotage.

The Cheapest Generation

Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann

Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy

In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.

Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011.

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a k a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Katie Martin /The Atlantic

The Senate Puts Medicaid on the Chopping Block

Vann R. Newkirk II

A draft version of the AHCA released Thursday shows even deeper cuts to the program than the House version.

The new AHCA is a lot like the old AHCA.

After weeks of secret gestation in back rooms, the Senate released a discussion draft of the chamber’s version of the American Health Care Act. Like the version passed through the House to cheers in May, it is likely to make health care less affordable for low-income, sick, and near-elderly people; it makes Obamacare tax credits for exchange coverage less generous; it restricts and slashes Medicaid funding deeply over the next decade; and it attempts to smooth euphemistically-named “market disruptions” from all those reforms by injecting billions into state funds and reinsurance.

There are some substantial changes in the specifics, though. For starters, the Senate bill would tweak the House bill’s tax subsidy for private insurance purchased on the exchanges. The final version of the House bill provided a tax credit to people making up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line that would be less generous than the existing ACA credits. It would also reduce the amount of expenses covered as recipients get older and have more expenses.

The Paradox of American Restaurants

Derek Thompson

The quality and variety of food in the U.S. has never been better. The business seems to be struggling. What’s really going on?

For restaurants in America, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times.

Last century’s dystopians imagined that mediocre fast-food chains would take over every square inch of the country. But in cities across the U.S., residents are claiming that the local restaurant scene is in a golden age of variety and quality. I’ve heard it in Portland, Oregon, named the best food city in America by the Washington Post; in Washington, D.C., named the best food city in America by Bon Appetit; in New Orleans, where the number of restaurants grew 70 percent after Hurricane Katrina; and in San Francisco, which boasts the most restaurants per capita in the country; and in Chicago, which has added several three-Michelin-star restaurants this decade. I live in New York, which will always lead the country in sheer abundance of dining options, but after years of visiting my sister in Los Angeles, I’m thoroughly convinced that America’s culinary capital has switched coasts.

Trump: There Are (Probably) No Tapes

David A. Graham

The president admits he never had any recordings of conversations with James Comey, but his idle threat has already set off a catastrophic chain reaction.

President Trump said on Thursday that, despite his repeated teases about the existence of recordings of his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey, he did not make any tapes. But he added a paranoid flourish, nodding toward frequent leaks from the government and his claims of persecution by the intelligence community, by suggesting that recordings might have been made without his knowledge.

In keeping with the increasing sidelining of his communications staff, Trump made the statement via Twitter.

With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017

...whether there are "tapes" or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017

What's in the Senate Republican Health-Care Bill

Russell Berman

Like the House version, Mitch McConnell’s proposal would slash taxes, cut Medicaid, and eliminate Obamacare’s insurance mandates for individuals and employers.

Updated on June 22 at 2:15 p.m. ET

The Senate Republican health-care bill is finally out in the open.

After weeks of secretive deliberations, party leaders on Thursday released a 142-page proposal that would slash taxes on the wealthy and businesses; reduce federal funding for Medicaid and phase out its expansion under the Affordable Care Act; and limit the tax credits available to help people purchase insurance on the individual market. The legislation, titled the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, is officially labeled a “discussion draft,” but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants Republicans to debate and vote on the bill by the end of next week.

Like the American Health Care Act that passed the House in May, the Senate bill is a substantial revision to Obamacare but not a wholesale repeal. And while Senate Republicans had vowed to start over rather than work off the unpopular House proposal, their version is structured the same way. The Senate measure mirrors the House bill in eliminating the ACA’s employer and individual insurance mandates and most of the tax increases it imposed to pay for new programs. Both proposals call for an overhaul of Medicaid funding that would allow states to institute work requirements and end the program’s status as an open-ended entitlement. The Senate bill would go further than the House’s $800 billion in cuts by reducing its growth rate beginning in 2025, but unlike the House version, it would begin a three-year phase-out of the program’s expansion in 2020. The AHCA would cut off the expansion entirely that year.

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

Franklin Foer

If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.

Elaina Natario / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Therapy for Everybody

Olga Khazan

In Appalachia, a primary-care clinic offers quick bursts of psychotherapy on the spot.

JOHNSON CITY, Tennessee—The first patient of the morning had been working 119 hours a week. Greta (not her real name) had been coming home late at night, skipping dinner, and crashing into bed. One recent night, her college-aged daughter melted down, telling an exhausted Greta that her parents’ marital tensions were putting a strain on her.

“She’s like, ‘Why don’t you just divorce him?’” Greta recounted to her psychotherapist, Thomas Bishop, who was perched on a rolling stool in the bright examination room. “‘Why don’t you just do it and get it over with?’” Greta planned to stay with her husband, but her daughter’s outburst worried her. “Is this going to affect the way she feels about relationships?” she asked Bishop.

Power Causes Brain Damage

Jerry Useem

Over time, leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise.

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

Which Animal Murders the Most?

Alice Roth, Ed Yong, Jeremy Raff, and Jackie Lay

Humans aren't the only mammals who kill each other. So how do we stack up to lions, tigers, and bears?

Watch Video

Little White Lie

Nadine Ajaka

Lacey Schwartz grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household, and never once questioned her whiteness—despite not looking like anyone in her family.

Watch Video

How North Korea Became a Crisis

Daniel Lombroso, Jackie Lay, and Mark Bowden

To understand how the standoff between Pyongyang and the world became so dire, it helps to go back to the country's founding

Watch Video

Mitt Romney Crushes in New Hampshire

About the Author

Most Popular