Hires Jenna Johnson and Dan Zak as Senior Editors, and Tyler Austin Harper as Staff Writer
Today The Atlantic is announcing three new staff members: Tyler Austin Harper, who was previously a contributing writer, will become a staff writer, and Jenna Johnson and Dan Zak will both be senior editors. Tyler has written for The Atlantic since 2023; before joining the magazine on staff, he was an associate professor at Bates College. Jenna and Dan both come to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they have worked for almost two decades.
Below is the announcement about these hires from The Atlantic 's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:
First, Tyler. As a contributing writer for us, he has published an impressive number of articles on an even more impressive range of topics: extreme fishing off Montauk, gun ownership in America, ChatGPT on college campuses, and many, many others. I speak for so many of us when I say that the more Tyler we have, the better. He'll be joining us from Bates College, where he has been an assistant professor of environmental studies.
Now, Dan. Dan Zak is a gifted journalist with a talent for teasing out clear, compelling narratives, and for bringing complicated profiles to life. He brings to us a deep love for magazines and the craft of writing. (Don't get him started on the Caitlin Flanagan lede. Or, actually, do.) At The Post, he wrote for the Style section for nearly twenty years before becoming an editor in 2023. Dan is also the author of Almighty, a book about anti-nuclear activists, and he was nominated for a National Magazine Award this year in the feature writing category.
From Jeffrey, announcing Jenna's hire last week:
I'm very happy to report to you that Jenna Johnson is joining The Atlantic as a senior editor. Jenna is a supremely talented journalist with deep expertise in all things Trump. She comes to us after 18 years at The Washington Post, where she most recently served as immigration editor. Before that role, she served as the deputy editor for democracy coverage. Jenna is beloved by her reporters, who tell us she guided them to the best work of their careers. She's creative, bold, and unfailingly prepared for whatever the news may bring. She also leads with empathy and is generous with advice for the dozens of young journalists she has mentored over the course of her career.
Before becoming an editor, Jenna was best known for her distinctive coverage of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. She was The Post 's lead reporter on his 2016 presidential campaign and, through interviews with his supporters, produced memorable dispatches from rallies across the country. Jenna examined the types of communities where Trump held his events and documented how he made suspicion of Muslims, immigrants and other groups a centerpiece of his pitch to voters. As a White House reporter during his first administration, she documented America's deepening divisions.
The Atlantic has announced a number of new hires since the start of the year, including managing editor Griff Witte; staff writers Isaac Stanley-Becker, Nick Miroff, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Caity Weaver; and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner. Please reach out with any questions or requests.
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In the bigger theater—of our nation, of geopolitics—he brings the stuff of Hugo's nightmares. Yet Trump's love of Les Mis is not much of a surprise. Irony, for one thing, does not seem to preclude his aesthetic appreciation. (Trump has also said that Citizen Kane, Orson Welles's pitying satire of a wealthy mogul turned politician, is his favorite film.) The president often discusses his love of Broadway shows and of megamusicals in particular. He has, at various points, also claimed Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera as favorites. Those musicals arose in the era that made Trump into a celebrity: the late 1970s and the '80s. Trump himself has conducted an 'off-and-on flirtation with the theater world,' The New York Times noted in 2016, a flirtation that has included a brief stint as a Broadway producer in the early '70s, as well as repeated discussions about turning his life into a musical. Until The Trump Follies makes its debut, though, the president has channeled himself through the political stylings of Les Mis. He has used one of the show's signature songs, ' Do You Hear the People Sing? ' in rallies since the days of his 2016 campaign. He used it, in fact, when announcing that he would be running for the White House in the 2024 election. And out of context, the song works: Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Beyond the barricade Is there a world you long to see? Then join in the fight That will give you the right to be free! These are unobjectionable lyrics. They are widely applicable lyrics. But their obviousness can abet misreadings, as well. Where the song refers to 'the right to be free,' a person might fill in the words 'from oppression,' 'from hatred,' 'from fear'—or 'from the woke mob.' When it refers to 'crusade' and a better world, audiences might apply those ideas to their own sense of how things are. Les Mis, Hugo wrote, is 'a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life.' But evil and good have no fixed meaning. Les Misérables, as a title, is commonly translated as, among others, 'The Miserable' or 'The Wretched' or 'The Poor.' Some translations, though, choose a different word: 'The Victims.' Justice, in Hugo's time as in ours, is a slippery aspiration. Woke can mean whatever people want it to mean. So can freedom. For many Americans, Trump included, the January 6 rioters are freedom fighters and political prisoners. For many of those same Americans, Trump is fighting tyranny rather than establishing it. 'I don't know whether it will be read by everyone,' Hugo wrote of Les Misérables, 'but it is meant for everyone.' He most likely did not envision that people of the future would take him so literally. If you remove history from the equation, though—if you strip away reality as a context — Les Mis can say anything. The show's red-white-and-blue color scheme (in context, a reference to the French flag) can seem to be American. Its climactic protests (in context, a recounting of the June Rebellion of 1832) might read like the siege of January 6. So many things, these days, have Rorschachian edges, which is to say blurred ones. So many things can be shape-shifted into political convenience. Les Mis 's lyrics—'Who cares about your lonely soul / We strive toward a larger goal'—might refer to anyone's cause. So might another line: 'Our little lives don't count at all.' Les Mis, published in 1862, emerged from a period of constant upheaval: revolutions, counterrevolutions, coups, widespread poverty, displacement. France was a monarchy and a republic and a monarchy again; along the way, chaos reigned. Hugo's novel distills the human costs of that instability. 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'In addition, violent protests threaten the security of and significant damage to federal immigration detention facilities and other federal property,' the memorandum claimed. 'To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.' A rebellion? Trump is perhaps the nation's foremost expert on violent attacks on the U.S. government, but here he has missed the mark. Nobody is shooting or killing federal agents. Nobody is occupying or destroying federal buildings. A few Waymo cars have burned so far, sure, but the damage is localized and hardly severe by the city's own standards. Los Angeles Dodgers fans torched a city bus and looted some stores after their team won their eighth World Series last October, and Trump still welcomed the team to the White House in April. Perhaps the most curious thing about the memorandum is what it isn't: an invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump officials have salivated at the prospect of invoking the act since he left office, typically with an eye toward quelling anti-Trump protests. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's draconian immigration policies, also proposed invoking the act when discussing his second-term agenda in 2023 to supplement existing federal personnel when carrying out his ambitious mass-deportation plans. What do those plans entail? The White House reportedly hopes to deport about one million people during Trump's first year in office. Trump administration officials claimed that they had deported roughly 139,000 people by the end of his first 100 days in office in April. But, as USA Today reported at the time, those numbers are hard to square with the ones disclosed by Customs and Border Protection over that same time period, which only counted about 57,000 removals. It is possible that the administration is counting a mixture of voluntary removals, apprehensions at the border, and pending departures to inflate the numbers. Whatever the source, even the administration appears to recognize behind closed doors that it is not meeting its already extraordinary goals. Axios reported last month that Miller, who currently serves as the White House's domestic policy chief, yelled at ICE officials in a mid-May meeting for not arresting enough people, leaving some participants with the impression that their jobs were in danger. What's the big holdup? Logistics are the primary issue. It is not easy to track down millions of immigrants, even if you have a decent idea of where they might be. There are only so many ICE agents, so many facilities to hold prospective targets for deportations, so many immigration judges to hold deportation hearings, so many flights that can be chartered to the deportees' home countries, and so many countries willing to cooperate with this process. The Trump administration recognizes this: Its omnibus bill currently up for debate in Congress would set aside billions to hire new ICE agents and support staff. At the same time, the Trump administration appears to be prioritizing spectacle over substance. The raids in Los Angeles appear designed more to provide fodder for right-wing broadcasts—and to forestall another shouting episode from Miller—than to actually achieve significant numbers of removals. Federal officials brought Dr. Phil along with them so he could film an episode for a television show; meanwhile, the city of Glendale responded to public blowback by ending its agreement to detain suspected immigrants on behalf of ICE, which will make it harder for the agency to do its job. Legality is another concern. The Supreme Court is far from hostile to the Trump administration's current deportation agenda: It cleared the way for Trump to revoke temporary protected status from about 350,000 Venezuelans in May and allowed him to effectively wipe out the humanitarian parole program that protected about 500,000 immigrants from deportation proceedings. But the blowback from the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case—including the court's unanimous order that underscored that all foreign nationals must receive due process before deportation—may have hindered some of the administration's plans. One unusual option that the administration has explored would be to send deportees to a third country. This isn't without precedent in the United States: Under the Obama administration, Guantánamo Bay detainees who couldn't be repatriated to their home countries were sent to a wide range of other places, including Palau, Senegal, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, and so on. Though the removals were not technically deportations since the detainees never reached U.S. soil, the Obama administration had to devote significant diplomatic resources to the effort over the course of eight years to resettle roughly 150 detainees. Other countries have embarked on similar plans, albeit without much success. In the United Kingdom, where immigration is also a major political issue, multiple Conservative governments spent more than two years between 2022 and 2024 on an ambitious scheme to send tens of thousands of migrants to Rwanda. Under the plan, President Paul Kagame's regime would receive millions of pounds in compensation and development aid in exchange for accepting the migrants' asylum claims and allowing them to reside there. But the plan foundered. British courts blocked the policy from going into effect—an exceedingly rare move in their political system—after the migrants' lawyers questioned the lawfulness of deporting them to an authoritarian country. Despite Parliament's efforts to overturn the court ruling, public opposition and logistical hurdles meant that only a handful of migrants were sent to Rwanda before the Labour Party won in 2024. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government canceled the plan last July because of its exorbitant cost, claiming that the Tories had spent more than $900 million on it without any tangible results. Indeed, Trump's own efforts to send people to third countries have hit their own series of legal and logistical roadblocks. The Supreme Court barred the administration from sending further flights of Venezuelans who were accused of membership in an international prison gang without providing hearings where they can contest those allegations. Federal courts have also intervened to block other ad hoc deportation efforts, including efforts to deport non-nationals to unstable African countries like Libya and South Sudan, some of which are in the middle of civil wars. One of the Trump administration's problems is that it is high on its own supply. It has often depicted the United States as occupied by teeming throngs of violent migrants and international gang members. Now it is struggling to discover that its bigoted perception is not actually the reality. Miller, for example, reportedly shouted at ICE officials to carry out more raids at Home Depot, apparently driven by the common perception that large numbers of undocumented day laborers are milling around there. ICE has followed suit at Home Depot stores in and around Los Angeles County, all without much apparent success. I do not doubt the Trump administration's desire to remove as many immigrants from the U.S. as possible, nor do I dispute that its authoritarian tendencies are shaping events here at home. There appears to be an ideological desire to punish California and inflict harm upon its residents and elected officials because it happens to be a big blue state. (Trump even threatened to arrest Governor Gavin Newsom, for no apparent reason, on Monday.) At the same time, they don't appear to be very good at this on a practical level, and they don't have any answers for their shortcomings other than these sporadic and legally dubious shows of force. The real question now is how much damage they'll do to the rule of law and the Union along the way.
