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Atlantic
a few seconds ago
- Atlantic
A Terrible Five Days for the Truth
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Awarding superlatives in the Donald Trump era is risky. Knowing when one of his moves is the biggest or worst or most aggressive is challenging—not only because Trump himself always opts for the most over-the-top description, but because each new peak or trough prepares the way for the next. So I'll eschew a specific modifier and simply say this: The past five days have been deeply distressing for the truth as a force in restraining authoritarian governance. In a different era, each of these stories would have defined months, if not more, of a presidency. Coming in such quick succession, they risk being subsumed by one another and sinking into the continuous din of the Trump presidency. Collectively, they represent an assault on several kinds of truth: in reporting and news, in statistics, and in the historical record. On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History had removed references to Trump's record-setting two impeachments from an exhibit's section on presidential scandals. The deletion reportedly came as part of a review to find supposed bias in Smithsonian museums. Now, referring to Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, the exhibit states that 'only three presidents have seriously faced removal.' This is false—Trump came closer to Senate conviction than Clinton did. The Smithsonian says the material about Trump's impeachments was meant to be temporary (though it had been in place since 2021), and that references will be restored in an upcoming update. If only that seemed like a safe bet. The administration, including Vice President J. D. Vance, an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board, has been pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president's political priorities, claiming that the institution has 'come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.' The White House attempted to fire the head of the National Portrait Gallery, which it likely did not have the power to do. (She later resigned.) Meanwhile, as my colleague Alexandra Petri points out, the administration is attempting to eliminate what it views as negativity about American history from National Park Service sites, a sometimes-absurd proposition. During his first term, Trump criticized the removal of Confederate monuments, which he and allies claimed was revisionist history. It was not—preserving history doesn't require public monuments to traitors—but tinkering with the Smithsonian is very much attempting to rewrite the official version of what happened, wiping away the impeachments like an ill-fated Kremlin apparatchik. The day after the Post report, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will shut down. Its demise was sealed by the administration's successful attempt to get Congress to withdraw funding for it. Defunding CPB was a goal of Project 2025, because the right views PBS and NPR as biased (though the best evidence that Project 2025 is able to marshal for this are surveys about audience political views). Although stations in major cities may be able to weather the loss of assistance, the end of CPB could create news and information deserts in more remote areas. When Trump isn't keeping information from reaching Americans, he's attacking the information itself. Friday afternoon, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised employment statistics that suggested that the economy is not as strong as it had appeared, Trump's response was to fire the commissioner of the BLS, baselessly claiming bias. Experts had already begun to worry that government inflation data were degrading under Trump. Firing the commissioner won't make the job market any better, but it will make government statistics less trustworthy and undermine any effort by policy makers, including Trump's own aides, to improve the economy. The New York Times ' Ben Casselman catalogs plenty of examples of leaders who attacked economic statistics and ended up paying a price for it. (Delving into these examples might provide Trump with a timely warning, but as the editors of The Atlantic wrote in 2016, 'he appears not to read.') The next day, the Senate confirmed Jeanine Pirro to be the top prosecutor for the District of Columbia. Though Pirro previously served as a prosecutor and judge in New York State, her top credential for the job—as with so many of her administration colleagues —is her run as a Fox News personality. Prior to the January 6 riot, she was a strong proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Her statements were prominent in a successful defamation case against Fox, and evidence in the case included a discussion of why executives yanked her off the air on November 7, 2020. 'They took her off cuz she was being crazy,' Tucker Carlson's executive producer wrote in a text. 'Optics are bad. But she is crazy.' This means that a person who either lied or couldn't tell fact from fiction, and whom even Fox News apparently didn't trust to avoid a false claim, is being entrusted with power over federal prosecutions in the nation's capital. (Improbably, she still might be an improvement over her interim predecessor.) Even as unqualified prosecutors are being confirmed, the Trump White House is seeking retribution against Jack Smith, the career Justice Department attorney who led Trump's aborted prosecutions on charges related to subverting the 2020 election and hoarding of documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Office of Special Counsel—the government watchdog that is led at the moment, for some reason, by the U.S. trade representative —is investigating whether Smith violated the Hatch Act, which bars some executive-branch officials from certain political actions while they're on the job, by charging Trump. Never mind that the allegations against Trump were for overt behavior. Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post she had never seen the OSC investigate a prosecutor for prosecutorial decisions. The charges against Trump were dropped when he won the 2024 election. If anything, rather than prosecutions being used to interfere with elections, Trump used the election to interfere with prosecutions. This is a bleak series of events. But although facts can be suppressed, they cannot be so easily changed. Even if Trump can bowdlerize the BLS, that won't change the underlying economy. As Democrats discovered during the Biden administration, you can't talk voters out of bad feelings about the economy using accurate statistics; that wouldn't be any easier with bogus ones. Trump is engaged in a broad assault on truth, but truth has ways of fighting back. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News The Texas House voted to issue civil arrest warrants for Texas Democrats who left the state to delay a vote on a Trump-backed redistricting map. Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump's special envoy for peace missions, will head to Russia this week in an effort to secure a Ukraine cease-fire before a Friday deadline. The European Union paused planned retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods for six months amid ongoing trade talks with the Trump administration. Dispatches Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Grief Counseling With Kermit By Sophie Brickman After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I'd come to grieve with the Muppets. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Watch. In 2022, Shirley Li recommended 15 underseen TV shows that are worth your time. Have a laugh. The comedian Marc Maron's style is still confrontational and opinionated —but now his subjects are different, Vikram Murthi writes. Play our daily crossword.
Newsweek
a few seconds ago
- Newsweek
Map Shows Countries With Highest US Visa Overstay Rates
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The State Department is proposing a pilot program that would require some visitors to post a bond of up to $15,000 before being granted a U.S. visa, targeting travelers from countries with high visa overstay rates. A map created by Newsweek shows what countries would be affected if the pilot program were implemented based on the most recent available overstay data. The map highlights nations like Angola, Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Cabo Verde and Burkina Faso—all with visa overstay rates above 10 percent in 2023. Why It Matters According to a notice published Monday in the Federal Register, the 12-month program would apply to applicants for business and tourist visas from countries identified as having high rates of visa overstays, poor internal document security or citizenship-by-investment programs that require no residency. The bond would be returned if the traveler departs the U.S. on time, and forfeited if they stay past the allowed date. What To Know The new visa bond program would take effect August 20, according to documents reviewed by Newsweek and a notice previewed Monday on the Federal Register website. The Department of Homeland Security says the goal is to ensure the U.S. government doesn't incur costs when a visitor violates visa terms. "Aliens applying for visas as temporary visitors for business or pleasure and who are nationals of countries identified by the department as having high visa overstay rates ... may be subject to the pilot program," the notice said. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, more than 500,000 people overstayed visas in 2023. By comparison, other countries have far more total overstays, but much lower rates. Colombia had the most total overstays in 2023 with 40,884, followed by Haiti (27,269), Venezuela (21,513), Brazil (20,811) and the Dominican Republic (20,259). Colombia also sent nearly 945,000 visitors to the U.S., resulting in a relatively low overstay rate. The administration of President Donald Trump first introduced a version of the visa bond rule in 2020, but it was never implemented due to the sharp decline in international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic. The revived proposal includes similar criteria and is part of a broader effort to tighten immigration enforcement. The list of countries subject to the bond requirement will be released at least 15 days before the program begins, according to the notice. The State Department said the program would help determine whether the long-standing assumption that visa bonds are too difficult to enforce holds up under modern conditions. What People Are Saying The public notice stated: "The Pilot Program will help the Department assess the continued reliance on the untested historical assumption that imposing visa bonds to achieve the foreign policy and national security goals of the United States remains too cumbersome to be practical." Andrew Kreighbaum, a journalist covering immigration, posted to X, formerly Twitter: "It's getting more expensive for many business and tourist travelers to enter the U.S. On top of new visa integrity fees, the State Department is imposing visa bonds as high as $15,000." What Happens Next Visa bonds are not new, but the State Department has rarely used them. A section of the Foreign Affairs Manual has described the process as impractical, a view the department now says was based on assumption rather than data.
Politico
a few seconds ago
- Politico
The challenge in expanding aid to Gaza
'FAMINES HAVE MOMENTUM' — President Donald Trump signaled a subtle shift within the White House last week, publicly recognizing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Trump acknowledged 'real starvation' in Gaza, while Vice President J.D. Vance urged Israel to increase humanitarian aid access. Other top U.S. officials visited Gaza to witness the humanitarian crisis for themselves before devising an aid plan for the area. The recalibration reflects mounting pressure from both Democrats and Trump allies to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza, as over 1000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to receive aid, and international watchdogs warn of a widespread famine. Globally, U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada have announced that they will recognize a state of Palestine in September if a ceasefire agreement is not reached or if the Palestinian Authority commits to reforms and elections, respectively. But despite an increased willingness from Trump officials to confirm the existence of a humanitarian crisis, the administration has been light on actual details. Malnutrition remains a widespread problem, even as Israel has started daily pauses in military operations in parts of Gaza and Israel and the U.K. have airdropped aid. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — the two officials who visited Gaza 't o help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza' — have also yet to share specifics on what that plan could look like. The silence may in part be because increasing aid is a complicated task — especially in a conflict-ridden area like the Gaza Strip. To better understand the state of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza and the challenges to delivering humanitarian aid, Nightly spoke with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former director of USAID's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance and former executive of the agency's Covid-19 task force. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At the moment, most aid being distributed in Gaza is organized by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is designed to replace the United Nations aid operation. Since Israel announced this plan in May, many aid organizations refused to work with the organization. Why are aid groups against GHF, and what has changed since they took over aid operations? There's three main complaints that the traditional aid apparatus — the UN-led and NGO-organized aid system that has operated pretty effectively throughout much of the war — have. First, GHF was very much pitched not as additive, but as a substitution, as an alternative. At the same time, the Israeli government is facilitating and really working kind of hand in glove with GHF. GHF even seems to operate like an extension of the IDF and the Israeli presence; they coordinate very, very closely with the IDF in Gaza. That is also being used then as a rationale by the Israeli government for suppressing the rest of the humanitarian system in Gaza. The GHF just has orders of magnitude less capacity and less reach than the traditional aid architecture had. It's not in any meaningful way, a replacement or substitution. It's run by people who are not humanitarian professionals and don't, frankly, have a background, or qualifications, or knowledge or expertise to really do that effectively. The second complaint would be that the model of the GHF puts Palestinians at enormous risk. In order to seek aid from GHF, Palestinians have to run this militarized gauntlet down [the coastal road] and then down the Morag Corridor in order to get to the aid sites. That has produced almost daily massacres. The third is that it's also just wildly inadequate relative to both the scale and the scope of the humanitarian needs in Gaza today. Gaza today is going headlong into a famine. The way you fight famine is not only with food, and this is a well-established humanitarian doctrine that when a population is moving into famine, you need to provide food, yes, but the type of food needs to be appropriately fortified and nutritious and adequately cover the full range of nutritional requirements. The GHF distribution boxes don't really do that. If you're distributing dried food aid that still needs to be prepared, then people need cooking fuel to prepare that. They need shelter and kitchen sets and places to prepare that and the goods with which to prepare it. They need clean water, both for their own drinking, sanitation, hygiene, and of course, to prepare the food. They need really specialized nutritional support, including inpatient malnutrition treatment therapies for people who reach an advanced stage of malnutrition. The pictures that have been coming out of kids in an advanced state of severe, acute malnutrition, those kids can't eat the food that GHF is distributing. Their bodies would not tolerate it at this point. And then finally you need robust health care because we know from famines past, that sometimes a majority, and certainly a large share of the people who die in famines die of disease before starvation takes them. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that GHF delivers more than a million meals a day. Does this align with what you're hearing on the ground, and what is in these dried food packs? There's not a lot of transparency about how they're reaching that number, about what's in the food packs, and about how they're calculating what constitutes a meal, even if you take that entirely at face value. I don't know, for example, what's the denominator of what they consider a meal. Is that 800 calories? How much food are they considering constitutes a meal? Of course, normally, a person needs three meals a day, and there's around 2 million people in Gaza. If you look at it that way, a million meals a day, even at face value, is maybe a sixth of the food needs that Gaza has. So, it's not remotely sufficient. It has been widely reported that thousands of aid trucks are waiting outside Gaza. What are the obstacles stopping that aid from reaching Gazans? The principal obstacle is Israeli government policy. During the ceasefire, the Israeli government would allow aid groups to drive trucks across the border directly to the where their warehouses inside Gaza through multiple points of entry around Gaza. There was enough aid that was getting in through that channel that no one had much of an incentive to try and pillage those convoys because there was sufficient aid getting in. Convoys get pillaged when people are so desperate, and they have been so deprived that they're fearful that if they don't get what's on the convoy in front of them, they don't know when or where the next round of aid will be coming from. The bottom line is, there was a system that was working. It was working well, and the Israelis shut it down when they when they were trying to put pressure on Hamas in March, they shut that system down. The variable there, what toggles that on and off, is Israeli government policy. You can just look at the difference between the aid that was going in during the ceasefire, and then what happened in March and April when nothing got in. What needs to happen to alleviate the starvation and malnutrition in Gaza? What needs to happen is a massive scale up of humanitarian access and humanitarian delivery across every part of Gaza. One of the core principles of humanitarian response is you want to bring the aid as close to where the people are as possible. You don't make the people traverse a combat zone in order to get to an aid distribution site. You bring the aid to where they are. That's very possible. Gaza is not a big place. I've overseen U.S. government responses to hunger catastrophes in Yemen, in South Sudan, in Ethiopia, in northeast Nigeria, and in my NGO career in Somalia with the 2011 famine as well. Those were all large, logistically complicated places with huge populations. Gaza is a tiny place with 2 million people. If humanitarian groups had access and were not being impeded from doing their work, they could scale up a very robust response, really rapidly. But the limiting factor is political obstruction of their ability to do that. If that were removed, what they would then ramp up the distribution of appropriately nutritious food and alongside that, you scale up nutrition support programs. And of course, sanitation and hygiene are really important. If no significant changes are made, what do you see as the trajectory of the humanitarian crisis? It will continue to get worse. Famines have momentum. The more malnourished, the more vulnerable a population gets, the more of them become vulnerable to dying. When you have a huge swath of the population that is in a state of significant malnutrition, and you've got a huge population of people who are succumbing to disease, succumbing to injury, the risk to them grows and grows the longer that they're in that in that situation. I think the further someone deteriorates into a state of severe malnutrition, the harder and more expensive and more time consuming it is to return them to health. What happens in a famine situation, is because as you go further down that trajectory, the number of people at risk and the amount of effort it takes to stabilize them grows exponentially, thereby, too, the risk of mortality grows exponentially the longer that it is allowed to progress. The fear that I have is that what we're seeing now in Gaza, with these daily clusters of deaths from starvation is kind of the leading edge of that exponential trajectory. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@ Or contact tonight's author at jmunis@ What'd I Miss? — CBO: Republican megabill to cost $4.1T, due to higher borrowing costs: Interest rates will be higher over the next decade because of the GOP's megabill and drive up borrowing costs even for the federal government, Congress' nonpartisan scorekeeper predicts in a new report released Monday. In an analysis of the massive domestic policy package President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the measure will increase the federal deficit by $4.1 trillion over a decade. Because the bill's red ink is not offset by more spending cuts or new revenue, CBO found, the legislation will drive up interest rates. — Trump again threatens India with tariffs over its trade with Russia: President Donald Trump on Monday again threatened to raise tariffs on India over its Russian oil purchases, once again infusing geopolitics and international security into his trade war economic policy. Trump's threat marks the second time in under a week that he has attacked India for its dealings with Russia. Last Wednesday, Trump announced he was issuing 25 percent tariffs on New Delhi due to what he identified as longstanding trade barriers. But he previewed an additional penalty for India's trade with Moscow in military equipment. — State Department to charge some travelers $10,000 bond to get visas: The State Department is launching a pilot program wherein it will require travelers entering the United States on tourism and business visas to pay a hefty bond as a guarantee they will not stay in the United States. In a cable sent to State Department employees Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the department will implement a 12-month pilot of a 'visa bond' program designed to target travelers from countries whose nationals have a high rate of overstaying their visas. That bond could total up to $15,000 per person, but the cable says consular officers will be expected to require a $10,000 bond per adult and $5,000 per child, according to two State Department officials familiar with the cable. — Warren boosts Mamdani as model for Democratic victory: Elizabeth Warren doesn't have a problem with Zohran Mamdani being the face of the Democrats. In fact, she wants the rest of the party to follow his example on affordability. The progressive senator from Massachusetts swung by New York City on Monday to pay homage to Mamdani, who overwhelmingly won the Democratic nomination for mayor in June — but still hasn't secured endorsements from many of New York's party leaders. — Duffy to announce nuclear reactor on the moon: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will announce expedited plans this week to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, the first major action by the former Fox News host as the interim NASA administrator. NASA has discussed building a reactor on the lunar surface, but this would set a more definitive timeline — according to documents obtained by POLITICO — and come just as the agency faces a massive budget cut. The move also underscores how Duffy, who faced pushback from lawmakers about handling two jobs, wants to play a role in NASA policymaking. AROUND THE WORLD DIRECT MEETING— Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to meet with Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy if the groundwork is done beforehand, the Kremlin announced Monday. 'I want to remind you that the president himself does not rule out holding such a meeting after the necessary work is done at the expert level and the necessary distance has been covered,' Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters. However, he added, that preparatory work 'has not yet been done.' Zelenskyy called for a direct meeting with Putin last week after the Kremlin chief expressed hope for further peace talks and said Russian troops were 'advancing on the entire front line.' THE CASHLESS SOCIETY — In a country where cash is king, Prime Minister Edi Rama's ambition to make Albania go without by 2030 would turn society on its head. For years, Albanians have preferred to keep their cash under the mattress — next to their AK-47, as the national joke goes — rather than in banks. But if Rama gets his wish, Albania would become the world's first cashless economy. Much of the reason for this is that at the moment so many transactions happen under the counter. The elimination of cash 'is an absolute priority for countries with high informality and destabilizing amounts of illegal money in the financial system,' said Selami Xhepa, professor of economic science at the University of Tirana. Nightly Number RADAR SWEEP SLOTS FOR SOLDIERS — Although Congress may have banned gambling devices from domestic U.S. bases, casino-style slot machines are still installed abroad, raking in millions of dollars from service members — many who are more likely to struggle with gambling disorders than civilians. The money that is raised through the slot machines is reinvested into recreation for troops, but an increasing number of service members and experts are saying that more of that money needs to be used toward prevention, education, and treatment from problem gambling. Molly Longman reports on the risk of installing on-base slot machines for Wired. Parting Image
