As Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Stewart Rhodes yesterday to 18 years in prison—the longest yet for a defendant involved in the January 6 insurrection—he explained why the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers needed to be behind bars for a long time. “You pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes.

Mehta was right about that. At his sentencing, Rhodes was unrepentant. In a 20-minute speech before the court, he portrayed himself alternately as a character in Kafka’s The Trial; as an “American Solzhenitsyn,” after the Soviet dissident writer who was sent to the gulag; and as a misunderstood advocate for peace. This monologue was standard fare for Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate who likes to align himself with literary heavyweights and historical leaders.

And yet Rhodes also unwittingly revealed deepening fissures in the far-right movement that, two years ago, resorted to violence to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The defendant used some of his time to distance himself from the Proud Boys, another extremist organization, with whom he had met in the days before the insurrection. “Unlike other groups like the Proud Boys, who seek conflict and seek to street-fight,” Rhodes explained, “we deter.” I’ve been misunderstood, he was telling the court; the Proud Boys are the ones you want.

Rhodes, it seems, is not entirely in sync with his radical brethren. A unified extremist front is a threat to our democracy; but the story is different when extremists start pointing fingers at one another in the criminal-justice system.

[From the November 2020 issue: A pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans]

The rift between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers has been simmering for years, and it hasn’t kept them from collaborating in the past. In 2019, the two groups arrived in Portland, Oregon, to support far-right protests. Rhodes pulled his group, he later claimed, after learning that white nationalists were involved in the demonstrations. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was outraged. Tarrio—who has also been found guilty of seditious conspiracy for January 6—and Rhodes remained at odds even as they coordinated efforts for the insurrection, including at a secret meeting in a parking garage the night before.

Both testified before the congressional committee investigating January 6 and spoke at length of the division between them. “I didn’t like Stewart Rhodes. I still don’t like Stewart Rhodes,” Tarrio told the panel. The Oath Keepers, Rhodes insisted, are “quiet professionals” who believe that Trump won a second term. The Proud Boys believe the same about Trump, Rhodes said, but are “sloppy” and have been infiltrated by racists.

Whether such distinctions are real matters less than the fact that the rift appears to be deepening. On January 6, a variety of groups put aside their differences, but solidarity is difficult to sustain. As prosecutions continue and participants in the insurrection try to save themselves, divisions within the far right over ideology and strategy—as well as conflicts driven by pure ego—are reasserting themselves.

Over time, mismanagement and general pettiness distract many extremist groups from their cause. Al-Qaeda and ISIS similarly devolved into catfights as they lost on battlefields. Rhodes, who imagines himself an intellectual, appears to feel tarnished by alliances with mere racists. That he would defend himself in court by complaining about the Proud Boys signals to would-be followers that he’s self-absorbed, not that he’s sacrificing himself for noble cause. An effective way to combat right-wing extremism is to put its leaders’ selfishness on display.

[David A. Graham: It was sedition]

Violence, of course, clearly remains a threat to our democracy. The day before Rhodes was sentenced, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened threat environment” in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. This week, a man carrying a Nazi flag and praising Hitler rammed his U-Haul into a security barrier protecting the White House.

Violent, noxious ideologies do not just vanish with a tough sentence. Success against them can’t be measured by whether bad people see the light, but whether they are able to expand their ranks. Raising money and organizing large-scale collective actions becomes more difficult if seemingly like-minded groups are at war with each other. Far-right groups make noise about left-wing conspiracies, but they are under attack from within their own cause.

Rhodes will have 18 years to contemplate the violence and stew in his resentment of the Proud Boys. In the meantime, let the infighting continue.

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.

A verdict against a sexual abuser and the indictment of a con-man fabulist are causes for optimism. But the fundamental indecency of the new American right marches on.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

An ominous warning to the E. Jean Carroll jury Your next mosquito repellent might already be in your shower. What Michael J. Fox figured out

A Tempered Celebration

People who have polluted the waters of American politics have had a bad few weeks. Another gang of seditionists was found guilty of plotting against the United States. Donald Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. And one of the weirdest phonies ever to bumble his way into a congressional seat, George Santos, has been booked by the Justice Department for a long list of alleged offenses. (He has pleaded not guilty to all of them.)

Unfortunately, I’m here to rain on your parade, because the struggle to restore basic decency in politics is still mostly a rearguard action.

But first, let’s drink in the good news that there is still some accountability for wrongdoing. The Justice Department secured yet more convictions for seditious conspiracy, this time against three leaders of the Proud Boys and their former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, who now joins the previously convicted Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, as another walking example of the banality of evil. The government asked that Rhodes get 25 years in federal prison. For a man already in his late 50s, that sentence (if levied) basically amounts to “from now on.” (Attorneys for Rhodes, Tarrio, and the three Proud Boys leaders have indicated that they plan to appeal the verdicts.)

Back in January, George Santos’s arrival in the People’s House dented my already shaky faith in the People. Santos, however, has finally been ensnared by his own prevarications. As my colleague David Graham wrote today, Santos might have been better off losing and remaining just another unknown flake who took a run at elected office, but like so many people in the age of Trump, his thirstiness brought him both fame and legal attention. Santos remains a free man, but only because three unnamed people have put up half a million dollars of bail money while he awaits trial for 13 federal charges.

And justice, of a sort, snared Trump himself when he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s defenders, including his lawyer (who says that Trump plans to appeal the verdict), are emphasizing that the jury declined to affirm the claim of rape, but they are carefully not mentioning that this decision may have been colored by some confusion about how to apply the term rape. Trump’s own deposition probably helped sink him, and it provided a reminder that our 45th president is a surly, smug child who never admits to a moment of regret or responsibility.

One might hope that Trump’s loss in New York would lead him to slink away in shame, but we now live in post-shame America. Instead, Trump will sit for a town hall on CNN tonight, where he will field questions as if he is a normal person running for office instead of a sexual abuser who incited sedition and violence against the government he is once again seeking to control.

Trump, of course, has the self-awareness of a traffic cone, and he is seemingly incapable of remorse. But CNN’s decision to move ahead with the event, as if nothing has happened, is disappointing. A more defensible position would have been to scrap the town-hall format and tell Trump that he is still invited to sit, one-on-one, with a CNN reporter. To present him to voters as just another candidate, however, is the very definition of normalizing his behavior.

I understand why CNN, as a journalistic outlet, would give a town hall to every candidate. Trump is the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, and he is by definition newsworthy. (I will be watching, and I will likely write about it, so I am in something of a glass house here myself.) But Trump has just been found liable for a hideous act. This feels, to me, nearly as distasteful as if a network were interviewing O. J. Simpson on his views about the future of professional sports right after his loss in civil court to the families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

Trump and Santos are clowns, and sadly, we’ve gotten used to them. But their antics have also taken our attention away from the indecent behavior of other public figures. One might think, for example, that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would be breathing a sigh of relief that Santos is reaching the end of his cringe-inducing political fan dance. One would be wrong. McCarthy, instead, is mumbling his way through fuzzy and shapeless expressions of concern.

Finally, let us temper any celebration of justice with the realization that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up nearly 200 promotions of senior U.S. military officers because … well, for a lot of reasons, apparently. Tuberville’s hold began weeks ago, when he objected to the Defense Department’s policy of paying for the travel of service members seeking an abortion. (Tuberville apparently thinks that if you’re a member of the military, and you drew the short straw of a deployment to a state whose laws on reproductive health care have been sent back to 1972, the U.S. government should not enable your interstate travel.)

Tuberville now has a new beef with the Pentagon: The senator from Alabama is upset that the U.S. military would like to prevent white supremacists from joining its ranks. In an interview with a Birmingham public-radio station, Tuberville was asked if he believes that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military. Referring to the Biden administration, Tuberville answered, “They call them that. I call them Americans.”

He went on to explain, for some reason, how the January 6 insurrectionists were mostly good people:

There were probably a hundred of them that came in, broke windows and broke doors that should have been locked up. That’s not how we do it in America. But there were hundreds of thousands that didn’t come in, outside, that were true Americans that believe in this country. But right after that, we, our military and Secretary Austin, put out an order to stand down and all military across the country, saying we’re going to run out the white nationalists, people that don’t believe how we believe. And that’s not how we do it in this country.

As it happens, I was a Defense Department employee when Austin issued that order, and I participated in that stand-down. It was a pretty anodyne event, and I was actually disappointed at the time that it wasn’t more forceful and more focused on the growing problem of extremism in the ranks. But even this watery response was too much for Tuberville’s fragile sensibilities.

(Tuberville, however, did have a reaction to the Carroll trial in New York. He said the verdict “makes me want to vote for [Trump] twice.”)

The cause of justice has advanced over the past few weeks. But the cause of decency is still under bombardment from people who have lost any sense of shame, while more reasonable people remain apparently unable to exercise the kind of moral judgment and leadership that should exile extremists, frauds, and abusers from the public square—and especially from offices of public trust.

Related:

George Santos would have been better off losing. The astonishing E. Jean Carroll verdict

Today’s News

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging Representative George Santos with 13 counts, including money laundering, wire fraud, making false statements to the House of Representatives, and stealing public funds. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Advisers to the FDA voted that the benefits of an over-the-counter birth-control pill would outweigh the risks. The federal agency is expected to decide this summer whether to approve such a pill. The Labor Department reported that although rates remain high, inflation continued cooling in April, marking the slowest pace of price increases in two years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf considers responses to the tragic death of Jordan Neely.

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Evening Read

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Taylor Hill / Getty; Philip Pacheco / Stringer / Getty.

Elizabeth Holmes Isn’t Fooling Anyone

Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone.

The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over again. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes—which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The medical care that helps no one The book-bans debate has finally reached a turning point. Don’t execute people in public.

Culture Break

JOHN THYS / AFP / Getty; Museum of the City of New York / Getty

Read. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, a sweeping new book from Peter Frankopan on how the climate has changed human society—and how we have changed the climate.

Listen. Steely Dan’s 1974 hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” The perfectionist duo is capturing the hearts of a new generation of listeners.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Have you ever heard of Connie Converse? Until yesterday, I hadn’t, but after reading this story in The New York Times, I’m rather fascinated by her. She was one of the earliest singer-songwriters to buck the treacle of 1940s pop: Born in New Hampshire, she dropped out of Mount Holyoke College and became a kind of knockabout folk singer in New York a decade before Bob Dylan showed up. Her music career never took off, and she moved to Michigan, where her brother was a political-science professor. (Oddly enough, I was aware of her brother and his important work, because I have a Ph.D. in political science.)

And then, at 50 years old, she packed up her stuff in her car, said goodbye to her friends, and vanished.

I’m a sucker for this kind of “vanished artist” story, but not, in general, for her kind of music. Still, I looked up her only surviving compilation of recordings here on Spotify. I didn’t expect to find it mesmerizing, and now I think I get why the few people who knew of her thought she was better than Dylan.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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.

With 18 months to go before the 2024 election, a Trump-Biden rematch seems imminent, a sharp reversal of expectation from as recently as this March. Trump’s resurgence is a reminder of what has become a nonnegotiable trait for presidential contenders—and the electorate’s Achilles’ heel.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

A country governed by fear The only way out of the child-gender culture war Ted Lasso has lost its way. The outer limits of liberalism A Good Show

Donald Trump becoming the 2024 Republican front-runner wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. When various Trump-endorsed candidates lost their races in November’s midterms, it appeared that the stench of MAGA had putrefied into surefire voter repellant. But by spring, something had changed. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, briefly the heir presumptive of Trump’s GOP, came under new scrutiny. Once again, this would be Trump’s nomination to lose.

Set aside that he has achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges (a hiccup that, some polling has shown, may have actually boosted his electoral prospects among Republicans). Forget the fact that this particular milestone landed amid a tangle of legal challenges so numerous that Trump himself appears barely able to keep track of them. Forget his tacit endorsement of incarcerated January 6 seditionists, or that he is currently standing trial in a federal civil court over a rape accusation by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump has something going for him that DeSantis and other would-be leaders of his party simply don’t: The man is very funny.

Worse, he knows it. Whether or not the 45th president has ever believed himself to be a “very stable genius,” for instance, that now notorious 2018 soundbite is just one of a bottomless supply of examples suggesting the reflexive hijinks of a practiced class clown (consider, also, “covfefe”).

Some critics of the former president might be disinclined to agree with this point, which is their prerogative. But my observation is hardly original. In 2018, Damian Reilly argued in The Spectator that even the then-president’s “most ardent detractors” would have to admit that Trump is not just funny; he’s funny on purpose. And, Reilly added, it was specifically in the humor department that Trump had incontrovertibly bested his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The question Is Trump funny? was, by the time of Reilly’s writing, an established soul-searching prompt for pundits across the ideological spectrum. That there would be any hand-wringing or hesitation, on the part of Trump’s many critics, to acknowledge the possibility reveals much about the outsize role of humor in politics. Which is to say: It plays a perhaps larger role than many of us would care to acknowledge.

Wariness at this state of affairs is not unwarranted. After all, the ability to elicit chuckles from a crowd has no bearing on a person’s fitness to lead. Being funny has, nevertheless, become a necessary virtue for those seeking the highest elected office of the land. It cannot be the only virtue a candidate possesses, but it’s a nonnegotiable one.

The NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro noted as much ahead of the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when President Barack Obama was vying for his own reelection against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Shapiro also narrowed in on why humor is so nonnegotiable. “Humor is an essential tool in any politician’s kit—all the more so in an age of instant, constant media,” he explained. “It can disarm an opponent, woo a skeptical voter or pierce an argument.”

Shapiro pointed out that although both candidates had been “the butt of a lot more jokes” than they’d made, it was Romney who faced the steeper uphill trek of “trying to reverse his reputation as a humorless aristocrat.” (Romney’s insistence, in a CNN news hit, that he “live[s] for laughter” did not exactly help his cause.)

My colleague Megan Garber made a similar observation in her March cover story, in which she argued that American politics has come to resemble a kind of 24-hour reality-television feed, accentuating the ever-blurrier boundary between life and fiction. Recounting some constituents’ blasé responses to last fall’s news of New York Representative George Santos’s many biographical fabrications, Megan noticed echoes of an earlier political moment. “Their reactions,” she wrote, “are reminiscent of the Obama voter who explained to Politico, in 2016, why he would be switching his allegiances: ‘At least Trump is fun to watch.’”

Comedic timing is no measure of moral standing, judgment, or intelligence. Most of us would never flex the skill of “clownery” on a job résumé, and for very good reasons—reasons that likewise apply to public-office aspirants. But, as bygone election seasons have shown time and time again, the thrall of a good show can eclipse better judgment. Let the circus begin.

Related:

Is Ron DeSantis flaming out? We’ve lost the plot. Today’s News Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the group were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack. Russia claimed that the United States was behind a drone attack on the Kremlin. A jury found that Ed Sheeran did not infringe on the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s song “Let’s Get It On.” Dispatches Up for Debate: Tucker Carlson was wrong in his analysis of the media, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

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Evening Read Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic

The Future of Policing Is a ‘Little Gay Woman’ Named Terry Cherry

By David A. Graham

One Tuesday this past fall, Senior Police Officer Terry Cherry was struggling to connect with some 75 bleary Clemson University students doing their best to stay awake and not make eye contact with the day’s guest speaker. Cherry, who packs a lot of ebullience and authority into a short frame, was deploying nearly all of it to get their attention.

“Who here wants to be a police officer?” she asked. A few tentative hands went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be an FBI agent.” Twenty-some hands went up.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Republicans’ big rich-city problem This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse. What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine Culture Break Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Read. Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, a novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going.

Watch. A rerun of The Office (streaming on Peacock). Then learn what Rainn Wilson knows about God.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Speaking of “covfefe,” I recommend revisiting that typo turned meme—and what it meant—in this brief yet incisive 2019 salvo by Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance: “Long after the president’s tweets are stripped of meaning by the passage of time and the rotting of the internet, his severest critics will still have to grapple with the short distance between politics and entertainment in America, and the man who for years toyed so masterfully with a nation’s attention.”

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was convicted on Thursday of orchestrating a plot for members of his far-right extremist group to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election.