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There’s Donald Trump, and there’s everyone else. At the moment, the former president of the United States appears unbeatable in the 2024 Republican primary race. But perhaps inevitable is a trickier word than it seems.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ukraine after the deluge The misunderstood reason millions of Americans stopped going to church One more COVID summer?

It’s Iowa Time

What happens when you say the unsayable? Former Congressman (and current GOP presidential contender) Will Hurd found out the hard way Friday night. “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again,” Hurd told the Republican masses inside the Iowa Events Center. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

The boos rained down, and, rest assured, they were mighty.

Hurd was one of 13 candidates who had trekked to Des Moines for the Iowa GOP’s cattle-call event known as the Lincoln Dinner. Prospective voters and donors gathered roughly six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus to remind themselves of their importance, which may or may not be waning. The night was ostensibly a chance for Iowans to listen to a range of electability pitches. Former Vice President Mike Pence told the room he would reinstate a ban on transgender personnel in the U.S. military and endorsed the idea of a national abortion restriction after 15 weeks. The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy rattled off a list of government agencies he would shut down: the FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, and IRS. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boasted that he had refused to let his state “descend into a Faucian dystopia” during the pandemic and called for term limits in Congress. (One dinner attendee, the 89-year-old Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley—currently serving his eighth term—probably didn’t like that one.)

The whole spectacle—including the after-parties where you could snap selfies with candidates or, at the DeSantis event, knock down a pyramid of Bud Light cans—felt like a study in performative competition.

Each speaker was given a democratizing 10-minute time limit to deliver his or her remarks (poor Asa Hutchinson suffered the embarrassment of having his mic cut off), but all were merely warm-up acts for the headliner. When Trump finally took the stage, he seemed tired, bored, and annoyed with this obligation. A lack of teleprompters meant that Trump spent the bulk of his 10 minutes looking down at printed notes, only occasionally making eye contact with the audience or ad-libbing. He got a few chuckles out of his old pandemic go-to, the “China virus.” He notably referred to his White House predecessor as “Barack Hussein Obama.” The only newish development was that Ron “DeSanctimonious” had been shortened to the easier-to-say but far more confusing “DeSanctis.”

Trump is not running as an incumbent, but it sure seems that way. A New York Times/Siena College poll out today shows Trump with a 37-point lead over DeSantis, who was the only other candidate able to crack double digits among respondents. Did January 6 matter? Do the indictments matter? Does anything remotely negative about Trump matter? Not yet. Trump remains the Katie Ledecky of the 2024 contest—so far ahead of the pack that it feels wrong to even call it a race. Trump knows it too. He may not even bother to show up at the first Republican debate next month, in Milwaukee.

These factors would suggest that the Republican Party is delaying the inevitable, that the GOP base earnestly wants to “Make America great again” … again. And yet, the various campaign buses keep on rolling across Iowa and New Hampshire. The noble attempts at retail politics and down-home charm continue apace. Pence strategically name-dropped the Iowa chain Pizza Ranch. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tweeted a video of himself fist-pumping after sinking a bag in cornhole. (“If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” Scott said onstage Friday night.) Expect much more of this at the Iowa State Fair, which kicks off in just over a week.

I was in the press pen at the Lincoln Dinner on Friday night, and I spent the weekend in Iowa speaking with various Republicans about all things 2024. I came away with the sense that a not-insignificant portion of conservatives is willing to accept Trump’s dominance, but that many are still quietly hoping for a deus ex machina to avoid a 2020 rematch. The still-rolling indictments don’t seem to have much effect—too many Republican voters argue that the legal cases against Trump are politically motivated. He shows no signs of giving up his nickname, “Teflon Don.”

The fact that Trump is running from a stance of inevitability is paradoxically both emboldening and hindering. Trump doesn’t seem to want to actually be president (as Hurd suggested). Maybe he just wants to prove he can win again. Will that motivational gap matter to voters? Will anything matter?

Related:

The revenge of the normal Republicans The secret presidential-campaign dress code

Today’s News

A state judge in Georgia rejected Trump’s bid to derail the investigation into his attempts to overturn election results in the state. A Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, killed at least six people, including a 10-year-old girl and her mother, and wounded dozens more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Sunday’s suicide bombing of a political rally in Pakistan that killed at least 54 people.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert argued that movies were better in theaters. The recent success of Barbenheimer is evidence—and points to the ongoing magic of communal experiences, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

The Myopia Generation

By Sarah Zhang

A decade into her optometry career, Marina Su began noticing something unusual about the kids in her New York City practice. More of them were requiring glasses, and at younger and younger ages. Many of these kids had parents who had perfect vision and who were baffled by the decline in their children’s eyesight. Frankly, Su couldn’t explain it either.

In optometry school, she had been taught—as American textbooks had been teaching for decades—that nearsightedness, or myopia, is a genetic condition. Having one parent with myopia doubles the odds that a kid will need glasses. Having two parents with myopia quintuples them. Over the years, she did indeed diagnose lots of nearsighted kids with nearsighted parents. These parents, she told me, would sigh in recognition: Oh no, not them too. But something was changing.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What “fitboxing” is missing “Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it.” The weird, fragmented world of social media after Twitter America is drowning in packages.

Culture Break

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

Read. “I Wish I Could Remember,” a new poem by Michael White.

“It’s just a dream, / I’d tell myself. But dreams are how / we travel through the dark”

Watch. Biopics tend to be “functional to a fault,” better at showcasing an actor than creating challenging art—but these 20 movies manage to break the mold, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, the podcast host Jack Wagner went viral on Twitter (er, X) with a prompt: “serious question: if the grateful dead is not the greatest band of all time from the united states then who is?” Thousands of responses poured in: The Beach Boys, The Allman Brothers Band, and The Velvet Underground kept surfacing among the many retorts (as did Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty; I don’t think you can really count either, because even though they play with backing bands, they’re solo artists.) I’m a Deadhead, but the strongest contender I saw was Creedence Clearwater Revival. CCR’s Willy and the Poor Boys remains one of the greatest rock records ever. You likely know “Fortunate Son” and “Down on the Corner,” but the album also features an awesome cover of “The Midnight Special”—I love the moment when the whole band kicks in just after the one-minute mark.

— John

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Are you on Bluesky? Let’s be honest: Probably not. The Twitter clone is still in beta and has been notoriously stingy with its invite codes. Its small size means that every time an influx of newbies arrives, the existing user base freaks out, filling the algorithmically curated “Discover” tab with incredibly overwrought complaints. A much-discussed recent post lamented that “Bluesky elders”—and here I should note that this is a service that launched a mobile version only in February—were suffering a degraded experience because of all the blow-ins. The phrase has become an instant meme.

You need to know only two things about Bluesky. The first is that its users are trying to make the word skeeting happen, although it’s an even worse alternative to tweeting than Mastodon’s tooting. The second is that it operates at a high emotional pitch at all times. Whereas scrolling Twitter’s “For You” tab is now like bobbing for apples in a bowl full of amateur race scientists and Roman-statue avatars lamenting that we no longer build cathedrals, the Bluesky equivalent features discussions of whether sending death threats to the site’s developers is acceptable if they really, really deserve it.

As far as I can tell, Bluesky is siphoning off both Twitter’s most emotionally dysregulated users and its most committed shitposters. I dare not post there—my account was briefly the most blocked on the app, according to a tracking service—but it’s nice to see that a small, tight-knit, and politically distinctive community has formed, albeit around shared interests that include hating me. Although it is a mere fraction of the size of the big social networks, Bluesky appears to have hit the critical mass needed to sustain itself, suggesting that Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter have irreparably fractured the service. We are now living in the post-Twitter era, literally and metaphorically. After Musk’s rebrand, X marks the spot where a large number of people no longer want to be.

Until recently, I doubted that even an owner as slapdash and capricious as Musk could bring down Twitter. The narcissists and addicts who linger there would put a barnacle to shame. The site has always been much smaller than Facebook, and it only mattered because politicians, journalists, and those who currently pass for public intellectuals were using it. Whether you read The New York Times or watched Fox News, you would encounter content that began its life on Twitter. When Twitter kicked Donald Trump off, it severely dented his ability to derail the news agenda, because journalists simply weren’t prepared to join Truth Social, the right-wing platform that the former president himself controls.

[From the May 2022 issue: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

Now, though, I can see the first glimmers of a post-Twitter world. The weirdos, early adopters, shitposters, furries, and scolds are trying out Bluesky, where they can complain about “Elmo” and his tenure in charge of “the bird site.” Actual young people are on TikTok. True Boomers never made it to Twitter and are still happily posting on Facebook about UFOs and Bunco nights. A handful of disgruntled tweeters tried Post and Mastodon, but the first is a graveyard, and the second is an obstacle course for non-techie users. The normies and the brands went to Instagram’s new Threads app, and then many of the normies promptly left because Threads was too boring without enough weirdos, furries, or scolds to add seasoning to the mix. (Corporations might love placing their ads next to unobjectionable inspirational content, but the cumulative effect is to make Threads like watching a television channel entirely composed of infomercials.) Grindfluencers—the type of people who listen to 15-minute summaries of Freakonomics and The Art of War—have always been happiest on LinkedIn, posting about their podcast drops and congratulating you on your “work anniversary,” which is not and never will be a real thing. Instagram is still full of hot people who are feeling #blessed and keen to demonstrate this humility by posing in a bikini by an infinity pool. (If these posters have a hot sister, she can wear a bikini too, and then they can observe that #familyiseverything.) Twitter is now the social network of choice for people who know what a Sonnenrad is and, moreover, believe it has been unfairly maligned.

And some people will have looked at all of the options above and decided, at last, to touch grass.

Many controversies in the early era of social media grew out of the assumption that users had a singular, coherent identity across platforms. The researchers danah boyd and Alice Marwick described the resulting discord as “context collapse”: Users invited criticism by speaking offhandedly, as if in a private room, before potentially limitless audiences on Twitter or Facebook. Too often, a joke that would have slayed between two close friends was held up for wider disapproval in a BuzzFeed listicle or a TV-news chyron. Now we have become better at sorting ourselves into different modes in different spaces, to the extent that I have seen people lament that they know who they are on Instagram and they know who they are on Twitter, but I don’t know who I am on Threads.

[Yair Rosenberg: How to redeem social media]

Given this trend, the surprise isn’t that Twitter has now splintered, but that it lasted so long. For many years, it was a coliseum where both the gladiators and the lions had volunteered to be. Twitter allowed the right to troll the libs, and the libs to mount cancellation campaigns against the slightly less lib.

Was that healthy? For a long time, I worried about the proliferation of what the Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser called “filter bubbles,” which he defined as “your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online.” Perhaps polarization was driven by our imprisonment in echo chambers, I thought, and we were succumbing to pluralistic ignorance—a lack of awareness of the majority view. Now I wonder if the past decade of social media drove us all too far in the other direction, toward spending too much time with people unlike ourselves, herded together in ways that exaggerated our differences.

In 2018, the rationalist blogger who goes by Scott Alexander published a short story called “Sort by Controversial.” In it, a tech-start-up employee invents a program that can spit out “scissor statements”—assertions that instantly divide groups down the middle. The world avoids falling into perpetual low-grade warfare only because she accidentally creates a scissor statement that tears apart the company before its work is finished. The story captured the sense of social media as a rolling referendum on every subject under the sun. Were you a plane-seat recliner? Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house? Was the dress blue or white? In political debates, that meant being force-fed the most head-banging obsessions of your political opponents. Take the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which exists purely to harvest ultraprogressive views from one social network and serve them up to another social network as rage bait. Its popularity makes me think that filter bubbles, at least in a mild form, might not be such a bad idea.

In order to thrive, communities need boundaries and norms—and even, God help us, elders. That’s why I enjoy sticking my nose into Bluesky and taking a deep huff every so often. It’s a walled garden for people with a mutual interest in anime genitalia and cruel jokes about Mitch McConnell. They’re happy there. You probably wouldn’t be. And that’s okay.

Mr Trump alleged that the US cable network's use of the phrase likened him to Adolf Hitler.

One day after new federal charges were filed against him, Former US President and 2024 Republican candidate, Donald Trump, addressed Iowa voters.

Updated at 6:48 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023

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.

Beer was once king. Now, with seltzers, canned cocktails, and other tasty beverages on the rise, what will become of brews?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else. Trump’s legal turmoil just keeps getting worse. All soda is lemon-lime soda. Alabama is defying the Supreme Court on voting rights.

The Decline of the Brew

It’s Friday, so I’ll go ahead and say it: I love cracking open a cold one. It’s not just the taste of beer itself or the alcohol. For me, drinking a beer is also about the pleasure of the ritual. Indeed, so much do I enjoy cracking open cold ones that I also often drink hop water, nonalcoholic seltzers flavored with hops. (They taste good and have the added benefit of making me feel virtuous.)

On Tuesday evening, I was lying on my chaise lounge, reading a magazine and sipping a new variety of hop water, which I had nestled into a koozie emblazoned with a crab and the words Don’t bother me I’m crabby. I was relaxed. So imagine my surprise when I looked at the can and discovered that the drink contained adaptogens and nootropics. I don’t really know what those are; I can barely pronounce the latter. I thought I was just drinking sparkling water with a bit of flavoring! Did I feel a bit weird because I was tired, I suddenly wondered, or because there were supplements in my hop water? Would this drink make me a genius?

In recent years, canned and bottled beverages of every stripe have proliferated. Canned cocktails, hard seltzers, ciders, nonalcoholic beers, CBD drinks, and hop waters share shelf space with traditional beer. It can be hard to keep up. Changing consumer preferences, the high costs of doing business, and competitive pressure mean that the beer industry is not the retail big dog it once was. Beer once held a hefty lead in the market over other alcoholic drinks. Not anymore. Lester Jones, the chief economist of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, told me that the market shrank by 3 percent in volume last year, continuing a downward trend that began around 2000, and we’re now in the midst of one of the worst years so far since beer’s decline began.

Part of the reason for the contraction in beer-volume sales is that people are diversifying their alcohol consumption, adding drinks such as spirits to the rotation. Whereas beer prices have roughly tracked with inflation over the past 20 years, liquor has gotten relatively cheaper, Bart Watson, the chief economist of the Brewers Association, a craft-beer trade organization, told me. For more than a decade, spirits have been gaining market share. Demographic shifts also tell part of the story: The American population is older than ever before. As Boomers age into retirement and Millennials enter their 40s, they are reaching for different drinks for different types of occasions. A retiree might enjoy an expensive bottle of wine with dinner, and a Millennial might mix cocktails for a birthday celebration. (Or, if you’re me, you might break out a hop water while chilling.)

The next generation is not waiting in the wings to replace them. Young people “are just drinking less beer,” Watson said, and many seem to be buying less alcohol, in general. Those who are drinking have a panoply of options to choose from. No longer are college kids just guzzling Natty Light and slapping bags of Franzia. Now young people are turning 21 and entering a market filled with relatively affordable seltzers, canned cocktails, and ciders—not to mention EANABs, the name my college dorm used to describe Equally Attractive Nonalcoholic Beverages.

For those who do still drink beer, preferences are shifting in how much beer they want to buy and what kind. “People are drinking less beer, but they are drinking higher-priced beer,” Jones explained, as some mass-produced beers have gotten more expensive, and pricier craft beer now occupies more of the market. Premium light beers have been losing market share for years, Watson told me.

Then, this spring, light beer got an unwelcome turn in the spotlight when a right-wing campaign to cancel Bud Light picked up steam. Consumers boycotted the beer after Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, posted a promotional video for the brand on Instagram. In June, after 20 years as America’s best-selling beer, Bud Light was surpassed by Modelo. That was not totally unexpected—“it was a question of when, not if” Modelo would reach the top, Watson told me, though the backlash accelerated the trend. For years, Modelo had been on track to surpass Bud Light as consumers began gravitating toward more expensive, imported beers.

In the aftermath of the backlash, two Bud Light executives went on leave. As it happens, I interviewed one of them, Alissa Heinerscheid, last January, before all of this happened. In her capacity as vice president of marketing for Bud Light, Heinerscheid told me at the time that the brand’s 2023 Super Bowl ad, featuring a breezy scene of a couple dancing while drinking the beer, was going for a “lighter and brighter” energy than in years past (notable past ads include Budweiser’s “Wasssuuuup” and Bud Light’s original party animal, Spuds MacKenzie). A couple of months later, on a podcast, she discussed her interest in reaching new audiences and making the brand’s image less “fratty” in hopes of turning around a brand in decline. In trying to carry out that mission to engage new customers, she met an audience—or at least a vocal portion of it—that was unwilling to accept changes that would make the brand more inclusive. (Asked for comment, Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, sent a statement from Bud Light’s current vice president of marketing, Todd Allen, emphasizing that “people want us to get back to what we do best: being the beer of easy enjoyment.” The brand’s current strategy, he said, “is really about reaffirming the role that Bud Light plays in people’s lives.” An Anheuser-Busch spokesperson added that Bud Light remains the top beer brand in the US in 2023.)

The beverage sector will likely keep changing—or at least keep trying to change—to meet the moment. For many alcohol brands, that could look like adding seltzers and other canned delicacies to the mix. Anheuser-Busch now owns seltzer, canned-cocktail, and hard-tea brands. And in 2020, Molson Coors Brewing Company undertook a telling rebrand: It’s now called Molson Coors Beverage Company.

Related:

The real mystery of Bud Light Hard seltzer has gone flat.

Today’s News

New charges were brought against former President Donald Trump and two of his associates, in an expansion of the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case. President Joe Biden signed a significant executive order altering the military legal system, ensuring that special prosecutors outside of the chain of command—as opposed to commanders—will decide whether to pursue charges in cases of sexual assault, rape, and murder. Nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population is under a heat advisory, flood warning, or flood watch.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Books that show you how to do something new can lend life new meaning, Gal Beckerman writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Chris Maggio

You’re Not Allowed to Have the Best Sunscreens in the World

By Amanda Mull

At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. The first memories I have of sunscreen are from the day camp that my brother and I attended in the 1990s, where we spent every day on a playground in the direct Georgia sun but were prompted to slather it on only once every two weeks, when we were bused to a community pool. On those days, mom dropped an ancient bottle of Coppertone, expiration date unknown, into my backpack, where I usually left it. In 2000, I started high school, just in time for the golden age of the tanning bed.

The preponderance of babies in rashguards and bucket hats that you now see at the beach shows how much has changed, and how quickly … Yet if sun protection, and specifically sunscreen, has become a very big deal in a relatively short amount of time, the UV blockers Americans are slathering on have barely evolved at all.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Frans Schellekens / Redferns / Getty

Read. On its 50th anniversary, The Jewish Catalog remains a case study in how grassroots efforts to modernize religious life can succeed.

Listen. Before “Nothing Compares 2 U” made her a household name, a single from Sinéad O’Connor’s first album established her as a creative force.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This may sound weird, but I promise it’s good: Try mixing amaro, grapefruit juice, and beer. I learned about this drink, “The Brunch Box,” from the aptly titled Amaro, a cocktail-recipe book by Brad Thomas Parsons that I received as a gift last summer. To make the drink, combine one ounce of Amaro Montenegro, one ounce of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, and five ounces of beer, ideally lager. The crisp beer is rounded out by the herby amaro and tangy juice. I have long been skeptical of mixing beer into things (I have not tried one of those beer margaritas and hope to never do so). But this one is a treat. Cheers!

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article has been updated to reflect a comment from Anheuser-Busch received after publication.

Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith secured a superseding indictment in the classified-documents case against Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta in federal court in Florida. The revised indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, as well as two new obstruction-of-justice counts for attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence.” The new charges stem from allegations that Trump, Nauta, and de Oliveira together attempted to delete surveillance-video footage at Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2022. This all allegedly occurred amid the FBI’s attempts to secure the return of a huge quantity of classified documents that Trump took from the White House—a frustrated effort that culminated in the government’s execution of a search warrant at the property on August 8.

The superseding indictment also adds a new count under the Espionage Act related to a document marked top secret and identified as a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country,” which Trump is described as waving around to people without security clearances at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club. It also charges de Oliveira with repeatedly lying to the FBI when asked about his knowledge of the boxes stored and moved around at Mar-a-Lago.

The case is only getting more damning for Trump.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Recall that the original indictment alleged that in May 2022, Nauta removed—at Trump’s direction—64 boxes of documents from “the Storage Room” at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta removed 11 more boxes on June 1, according to the indictment. Several photographs depicting stacks of disheveled boxes—one with what looks like a copy machine nearby—were reproduced in the indictment. The new obstruction charges involve the storage room and nearby security cameras, which could have picked up footage of people moving boxes after Trump’s lawyers claimed to the FBI on June 3, in a certified statement, that Trump had returned everything in his possession.

The superseding indictment alleges that Trump orchestrated a failed attempt to destroy the surveillance-video footage the day after he learned from his lawyer, on June 22, that they were expecting a grand-jury subpoena for production of “any and all surveillance records, videos, images, photographs and/or CCTV from internal cameras,” including from the “ground floor (basement).” On June 23, Trump called de Oliveira and spoke with him for 24 minutes. The subpoena was issued on June 24. The same day, a staff member texted Nauta, who was at Bedminster, that Trump wanted to see him. In less than two hours, Nauta changed his plans to travel to Illinois, instead heading to Mar-a-Lago. On June 25, Nauta and de Oliveira went to the ground-floor basement, “with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

On June 27, after confirming that the club’s IT director, referred to as “Employee 4” in the indictment, was available, de Oliveira walked with that person through the basement tunnel, where they had a conversation meant to “remain between the two of them.” De Oliveira told him that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.” Employee 4 refused, saying that he would not “have the rights to do that.” De Oliveira responded, “What are we going to do?”

Later that day, according to the indictment, Nauta and de Oliveira “walked through the bushes on the northern edge of The Mar-a-Lago Club property to meet.” Approximately two hours later, Trump called de Oliveira “and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.” Later in the summer, two weeks after the FBI conducted its search (it obtained the surveillance footage in July, and the warrant was issued in early August), Nauta called another Trump employee, saying, “Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good.” The employee responded that de Oliveira “was loyal” to Trump, who called de Oliveira “the same day” and told him that he’d get him an attorney.

A few things jump out from this narrative, all of which are bad for Trump. The attempt to erase the video footage occurred in direct response to a grand-jury subpoena for the video footage—not prophylactically, routinely, by mistake, or for some other noncriminal reason. This is a big deal for purposes of proving the crime of obstruction, and Trump’s role and influence in the effort to destroy potentially incriminating evidence of interest to a federal grand jury is unmistakable. The fact pattern also bolsters the government’s case that Trump’s efforts to induce others to hide and tamper with evidence were made “knowingly” and “with intent” under the relevant obstruction statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(2). (The new Espionage Act charge also blows apart Trump’s claim to the Fox News host Bret Baier that there “was not a document per se” involved in the audio recording of him discussing what appear to be military war plans with folks lacking security clearances.) Meanwhile, the superseding indictment rests on a stream of corroborating evidence—including, according to the indictment, surveillance-video footage; the testimony of several employees; and a trove of text messages and phone records between the key players, among them Trump himself.

The Mar-a-Lago case is one of two criminal trials Trump is facing so far—the other was brought by the Manhattan district attorney over alleged financial wrongdoing—with at least two more possibly impending, including one stemming from Trump’s involvement in the violent attempt to thwart the peaceful transition of presidential power on January 6, 2021, and another out of Fulton County, Georgia, over his recorded effort to sway the Georgia secretary of state to “find” enough votes to swing that state into his electoral column. In all of these cases, prosecutors’ task is unique in that the defendant is a former president of the United States and the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024—both historical firsts. Criminal juries must be unanimous in Manhattan and in federal court, so Trump’s legal team need only secure a single loyalist who will not convict in order to achieve an acquittal.

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s ‘horrifying news’]

Which is why it’s significant that the narrative underlying the new obstruction charges is so compelling. The tale is reminiscent of the hero’s journey in mythology and literature that was first articulated by Joseph Campbell in 1949 and that underpins countless Hollywood blockbusters, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. In this narrative, Employee 4 emerges as the hero who rejected Trump’s villainous urges and then came forward with the truth, at his own peril. Prosecutors and law-enforcement officials involved in the case have already faced substantial threats and harassment, both online and in person. Trump last week called Jack Smith “deranged.” Let’s hope this story ends well for the good guys.

Federal prosecutors yesterday (July 27) named a third person in the classified documents case against former president Donald Trump. Carlos de Oliveira, the 56-year-old valet-turned-property manager at Trump’s private club and residence Mar-a-Lago, was added to the obstruction conspiracy charge in the original…

Read more...

A revised indictment sets out new charges against Donald Trump, Walt Nuata and another employee.

Israel’s democracy is still intact, but the country has already lost something essential.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Fatigue can shatter a person. “I saw the movie ‘they’ don't want you to see.” American family life should not be this volatile.

Utter Collapse

As Israel nears the end of a week of turmoil, its democracy remains intact. On Monday, the country’s Benjamin Netanyahu–led ruling coalition—the most hard-right government in Israel’s history—passed one component of its planned judicial overhaul. The proposed legislation has inspired months of outcry from Israelis, many of whom believe, with good reason, that these changes would swiftly erode the country’s democracy. This past spring, my colleague Yair Rosenberg explained some of the most concerning aspects of the overhaul:

The radical wish list produced by Netanyahu’s coalition seeks not to reform the court but to neuter it, and would essentially allow the ruling government to appoint all judges and override their decisions. This plan was composed in the halls of conservative think tanks, with no input from opposition parties and no attempt to broker a national consensus. What’s more, this effort to fundamentally revise Israel’s democratic order came from a government that received less than half the vote in the last election.

As Yair noted today, the piece of legislation passed on Monday was actually the least significant of the proposed list. “Contrary to the far right’s pledge, the government did not enact its plan to subordinate the appointment of Supreme Court judges to politicians. Nor did it grant the coalition the ability to override judicial decisions,” Yair writes. But even so, Israel has already lost something that could be impossible to regain: basic trust among its citizens.

“Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israel’s citizens oppose the ruling coalition’s unilateral overhaul of the judiciary,” Yair explains, because “most Israelis simply do not trust the intentions of their own government. They do not believe that Netanyahu, let alone the extremist allies he depends upon to maintain his power, will be more reasonable than the unelected Supreme Court. And they do not believe that the coalition will stop with this small salvo against the judiciary when it has already announced its intentions to deconstruct the entire edifice.”

This lack of trust goes both ways, and it extends far beyond Israel’s standard partisan politics, Yair writes:

Rather than attempting to calm the waters and reestablish civic trust, Netanyahu’s far-right ministers have rubbed their recent victory in the opposition’s face and promised more of the same. “The salad bar is open,” crowed [Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir on Saturday night, framing the impending reasonableness reform as merely the appetizer for a much more forbidding buffet … He and his allies have cast the hundreds of thousands of anti-overhaul street protesters as “privileged anarchists” and foreign-funded enemies, rather than fellow citizens expressing genuine concern. Something has gone terribly wrong in a country where this is how leaders speak about those they are supposed to shepherd.

Israel’s “utter collapse of shared solidarity” is unprecedented in its 75-year-history, Yair notes. The country’s Supreme Court is set to rule on the legality of the new legislation this coming fall. But however it decides, Israel has “already lost a core component of any functioning democracy—the sense of collective concern among citizens.”

Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, points out how the erosion of Israel’s democracy threatens its citizens:

If Israel is not fully democratic, then the state—which holds together a remarkably diverse Jewish population—can come undone. For Israel’s Arab citizens, the struggle to find their place in Israeli society has been all the more difficult, but their economic, social, and political gains in recent years are also threatened as judicial limits to the rule of a political majority that usually excludes them are removed.

Writing from Israel earlier this week, the author Daniel Gordis painted a picture of a country falling apart—as he puts it, “a country of broken hearts.” Gordis described one particular example of the fracturing of Israeli society: Military reservists, who play a crucial role in the preparedness of the Israel Defense Forces (and who are generally seen as an apolitical group, given the country’s near-universal conscription laws), have pledged to drop out of voluntary service “by the thousands,” breaking with one of Israeli society’s core social contracts in protest over their government’s actions. As Gordis writes, “The tacit agreements that have held Israel together for 75 years are unraveling at an unimaginable pace.”

Related:

Israel has already lost. “The country’s already been destroyed.”

Today’s News

Economic growth in the U.S. exceeded expectations in the second quarter, reducing recession concerns. Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers reportedly met with officials in the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, indicating that federal prosecutors may be getting close to bringing an indictment against Trump in connection with his 2020-election-interference efforts. On Wednesday evening, soldiers in Niger declared a coup against President Mohamed Bazoum, who was elected in 2021 in the country’s first democratic transfer of power since it achieved independence.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

No One Deserves to Go to Harvard

By Jerusalem Demsas

No one deserves a seat at Harvard, but only some people are supposed to feel bad about the one they get.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action violated the equal-protection clause, spurring a news cycle about the admissions advantages conferred on certain people of color. The preferential admissions treatment that racial minorities received is just one bonus among many, however. A new study from the economic research group Opportunity Insights quantifies the advantages of wealth in higher education: The ultra rich are much likelier to gain admission to elite colleges than anyone else, even when controlling for academic success.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Tommy Cheng / AFP / Getty

Listen. Are you plagued by the feeling that everyone used to be nicer? Don’t succumb—it’s not true, Hanna Rosin explains in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. The Women’s World Cup (on FOX Sports and Youtube TV) showcases a flourishing U.S. women’s professional league—but it wasn’t always that way.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Carlos De Oliveira has been charged for involvement in ex-President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents.