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.

One takeaway from the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Elaine Godfrey wrote earlier this week, is “the simple fact that an angry septuagenarian still holds the Grand Old Party in a vise grip.” I asked Elaine what that might mean for other Republican politicians, particularly those with presidential aspirations.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Donald J. Trump guide to getting away with anything What we gain from a good-enough life How to kill a newspaper

He’s Back

Isabel Fattal: You wrote that “in another universe, last week’s FBI search could have provided a perfect opportunity for a wannabe party leader like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to set himself apart.” What’s happening in this universe instead?

Elaine Godfrey: Republicans up and down the Trump scale are circling the wagons in defense of him. You could’ve definitely expected that, but I didn’t expect it from Mike Pence, for example. I didn’t expect it from Mitch McConnell.

I think some people were surprised by DeSantis’s response because, as I wrote, it would’ve been a great opportunity for him to say “No comment,” or to leave his response a bit more ambiguous, as a way to set himself apart or to show that he’s above it all. But we’re seeing that even DeSantis—a sitting governor!—knows that his political future is tied to Trump’s.

They’re circling the wagons because people know where their bread is buttered. They know where the base is. They have put their finger to the wind and realized, We have to be on Trump’s side of this.

Isabel: Are any notable 2024 hopefuls diverting from the “circle the wagons” strategy?

Elaine: Yesterday Mike Pence actually came out and said that people should stop attacking the FBI—and that calls to defund the FBI are as bad as calls to defund the police. Other than that, there hasn’t been much. I do think it’s important to note that even DeSantis is giving himself some room, and a lot of these people are giving themselves some room, by not saying “This is an attack on Donald Trump.” They’re trying not to mention Trump. They’re framing it instead as an overreach by the government. That’s sort of a middle route. Instead of saying “Poor Donald,” they’re doing the diplomatic third way of “The FBI is infiltrated by leftists.” There are a lot of 2024 and 2022 hopefuls doing that, who don’t quite want to directly defend Trump but want to say something seen as a defense.

Isabel: What are these politicians most worried about when it comes to defending Trump more explicitly?

Elaine: Saying Trump’s name is a very powerful thing. It immediately ties you to him in a way that can be used for or against you. Mike Pence has done a really excellent job of just never talking about Trump directly as he challenges Trump-endorsed candidates in primaries. It’s a fine line.

Some Republicans are testing the waters of Trumpism without Trump. That’s the message DeSantis and others want to stick to—to seem like they’re defending Trump but also to be able, in the case that Trump disappears, to continue this line of thought without it being about Trump.

Isabel: It’s like Trump is this albatross, and these other hopefuls are just waiting for him to disappear.

Elaine: Right. People have been asking me, “Do you think he’s going to run?” I have no idea. I do know that he just really seems to love being able to hold this over everyone, threatening to run. I don’t really think he wants to be president again. But he definitely doesn’t want to exit the conversation, as we’ve seen.

Now he’s very much back in the conversation, and I think that was a jolt to reality for people like DeSantis who were enjoying Trump’s falling to the wayside. There were a few months this year where he was not part of the conversation, just posting into the ether and sending out his little press releases. And now he’s back.

Isabel: If Trump gets indicted, what does that mean for 2024 contenders?

Elaine: The people I talked with about that question—specifically about DeSantis, but I think you can extend it—said that we’re seeing a small glimpse of what would happen if Trump is indicted. If he’s actually indicted, it’s going to be more circling the wagons, more “The leftists are coming for us and they’re coming for you too” kind of language. At some point, candidates like DeSantis will have to make a decision: Are we going to jump in the primary and challenge him or not? An indictment would make it way less likely that they would. They wouldn’t want to be seen as opposing the great leader in his hour of need.

Democrats really want Trump to be prosecuted. Politically, that might be the worst-case scenario as far as solidifying support for Trump. Although you could also argue that Trump is the best candidate for Democrats to run against in 2024, because he’s just so polarizing. You can look at it all kinds of ways. But my prediction is that an indictment means that Trump will almost certainly be the nominee.

Isabel: Am I right to observe that none of the 2024 hopefuls have responded to the threats and violent rhetoric that have been circulating since the Mar-a-Lago search?

Elaine: I think you are observing it correctly. I was sort of surprised that none of the highest-profile 2024 hopefuls who have been trying to set themselves apart from Trump—with the exception of Pence yesterday—have stood up for the FBI or condemned people’s super-intense rhetoric on all of this.

Related:

The Mar-a-Lago “raid” put Ron DeSantis in a box The Republicans have a Trump problem. Again.

Today’s News

Allen H. Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies related to a tax scheme. A grand jury indicted the man who is accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie last week. The Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson agreed to be suspended for 11 games and was fined $5 million. Watson has been accused by more than two dozen women of sexual misconduct.

Dispatches

Wait, What?: The people making excuses for Donald Trump are having trouble sticking to a story, Molly Jong-Fast writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains why the rent inflation is so damn high.

Evening Read

You Have No Idea How Good Mosquitoes Are at Smelling Us

By Katherine J. Wu

Luis Robayo / AFP / Getty

Nothing gets a female mosquito going quite like the stench of human BO. The chase can begin from more than 100 feet away, with a plume of breath that wafts carbon dioxide onto the nubby sensory organ atop the insect’s mouth. Her senses snared, she flies person-ward, until her antennae start to buzz with the pungent perfume of skin. Lured closer still, she homes in on her host’s body heat, then touches down on a landing pad of flesh that she can taste with her legs. She punctures her victim with her spear-like stylet and slurps the iron-rich blood within.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with companies promising to pay for abortion travel Honesty is love. Photos: The views from the top

Culture Break

A scene from "Paris, 13th District" (IFC)

Read. Stuck Rubber Baby, by Howard Cruse, a masterfully rendered comic about a white gay man growing up in the segregated South.

Watch. Paris, 13th District (streaming on multiple platforms), a soapy comedy about Parisian romance and the messy lives of Millennials.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In an edition of the Daily last month, Elaine asked readers for their Aperol spritz recipes, so of course I checked in with her on what she learned. “I think I had probably 20 people email me recipes. Basically all of them were like, ‘Instead of Aperol you should try Campari, because it’s better.’ And I did, and it was better!” she told me. “I think I’m a Campari girl. That’s been my great discovery for the summer.”

Thank you, Daily readers, for improving the quality of our summer beverages.

— Isabel

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.

I am appalled at the intentional cruelty and shocking incompetence that drove the Trump administration’s family-separation tragedy.

But first, here’s more from The Atlantic.

What America’s great unwinding would mean for the world Beach vacationers are doing it wrong. David Petraeus: Afghanistan did not have to turn out this way. “This is evil.”

Welcome to the week, and allow me to introduce—or reintroduce—myself to you. I’m Tom Nichols, a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where I’m also the proprietor of the Peacefield newsletter. If you’re a regular Daily reader, you might remember that I authored this newsletter in June; I’m back, and I’ll be writing the Daily most days of the week. Along with some of my Atlantic colleagues, I’ll be sharing thoughts and analysis about the day’s news and other issues.

I write, among other things, about the perilous state of democracy in the United States and around the world. Today, I urge you to read The Atlantic’s new cover story by my colleague Caitlin Dickerson about the origins and consequences of the disastrous decision by President Donald Trump and his advisers to curtail illegal immigration by instituting a brutal family-separation policy in which children—including infants and toddlers—were intentionally taken from their parents.

Caitlin’s intense and detailed examination shows that the family-separation policy was not a misunderstanding, or a bureaucratic error, or some sort of overzealous interpretation of otherwise sensible rules. It was, as one government figure told her, “evil,” and intentionally so: The goal of the policy was to pull children from their parents at the border as a deterrent, to inflict so much pain on people trying to enter the United States illegally that no one would be brave or tough enough to keep trying to do it.

Heartbreaking stories of children torn from their parents and then subjected to inhumane detention conditions should afflict the conscience of any decent person. But Americans should also be enraged by the completely dysfunctional nature of their own government. Even if you believe in taking a tough stand against illegal immigration (as I do) the combination of moral rot and bureaucratic incompetence produced outcomes that were far worse than the policy’s designers expected—and they already expected it to be bad.

When Trump officials such as Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions finally got the family-separation policy under way, the immigration system’s courts, shelters, and other assets were almost instantly overwhelmed by a flood of traumatized children. The fallout was so awful and so obvious that soon, even Trump’s people began to backpedal away from it. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen—who spoke with Caitlin on the record—admitted that she did not understand how bad the situation would get and that she regretted caving to the pressure to sign the order.

The family-separation nightmare is what can happen when zealots who have no idea what they’re doing get control of the levers of a gigantic and powerful government. Not only were Trump’s aides clueless about how the immigration system worked, but they took pride in their ignorance and saw any attempt to inject facts or caution into the debate as a sign of weakness. “There’s this worship of process,” one member of Miller’s team said. “Process, process, process. Process is code for ‘We can slow down the quick impulses of a fiery political administration with no experts.’ Well, that’s not what was voted for.”

The public never votes for “process,” but that’s how governments work, and it is how, in a system of separated powers, policies are formed, funded, and implemented. But immigration was merely one of many areas in which the Trump White House regarded the Constitution and federal law as little more than annoyances. At one point, according to the notes of a senior DHS official, Trump told Chief of Staff John Kelly “to tell Nielson to, ‘Round them all up and push them back into Mexico. Who cares about the law.’”

According to this official’s notes, “silence followed.”

This silence was part of a persistent cowardice among senior figures in the U.S. government. Opponents of the policy thought that the system, or the courts, or the person in the next office down the hall would somehow stop the cruelty. But the people who wanted to do the right thing—or, at the least, knew how the immigration system actually worked—were shouted down by low-level minions such as Katie Waldman (who was soon to be Mrs. Stephen Miller). This kind of bullying, Caitlin writes, was part of “an administration plagued by insecurity and imposter syndrome.” Whether out of misplaced loyalty or fear of professional repercussions, the professionals just took it. “They made me lie,” claimed one government official who misled Caitlin when she was reporting an earlier story about the policy.

This remarkable article is a cautionary tale for Americans and other citizens of democratic nations, a story of a political monkey’s paw. When people vote for incompetent and cowardly leaders to execute policies founded on ignorance and cruelty, they will get what they asked for—to their shame and regret.

Related:

The secret history of family separation (Leer este artículo en español.) America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses.

Join Caitlin Dickerson and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a live discussion about the secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy on August 12 at 2 p.m. ET. Register here.

Today’s News The three men convicted in the 2020 Georgia murder of Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced by a federal judge for hate crimes. President Joe Biden visited Kentucky, where severe flooding has killed more than 30 people. June 29 was found to be the shortest day on record since scientists began using atomic clocks in 1960. Dispatches I Have Notes: Nicole Chung argues that the proposed Penguin Random House–Simon & Schuster merger would threaten the survival of indie publishers—to the detriment of both writers and readers. Humans Being: The new Amazon Prime series Paper Girls explores who we are to our younger selves, Jordan Calhoun writes. The Weekly Planet: History’s greatest obstacle to climate progress has finally fallen, Robinson Meyer writes. Evening Read (Katie Martin / Jo Imperio / The Atlantic; Getty)

Fish Oil Is Good! No, Bad! No, Good! No, Wait

By Jacob Stern

At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenland’s northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat diet—in other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution. “I remember how exciting those studies were when they first came out,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at NYU, told me. “The idea that there were populations of people who were eating fish and were protected against heart disease looked fabulous.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What did ancient whales see? The American faith I was raised in Escaping the patriarchy for good Culture Break Gwendoline Christie and Tom Sturridge in Netflix's The Sandman. (Netflix)

Read. “Hotel Earth,” a poem from our September issue.

Watch. Netflix’s The Sandman—especially if you’re a fan of the original comic books.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The launching of the Webb space telescope has, for many of us, rekindled a fascination with space. I feel it, and I’m now binge-watching two television shows about it: The Star Trek series Strange New Worlds on Paramount+, and the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind—a “what if” alternate history of the Cold War space race. Both of them are throwbacks to a time in the late 1960s‚ when Americans took the conquest of space as their birthright, a natural extension of our technological optimism and can-do approach to the world. I won’t spoil the major plotlines of either for you, but I recommend them both. I miss the days when Americans were space pioneers, and now that the Russians have threatened to pull out of international space cooperation with the United States, I hope that the Americans take up the challenge of space once again.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Quartz読者の皆さん、おはようございます。8月9日火曜日、今朝の「世界で今起きていること」をお伝えします。

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