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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

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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.

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Photography by Jędrzej Nowicki

On a hot summer day in Ukraine, two young boys named Timur and Slavik were playing on what used to be the banks of the Kakhovka Reservoir, part of the Dnieper River. I met them when I was visiting the area in July. The air’s tranquility was occasionally pierced by the sounds of fighting in a frontline town not far away. This region is a focal point of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and in June, evidence suggested that Russians, trying to slow down their enemy’s advance, blew up the Kakhovka Dam.

I wanted to witness the devastation firsthand. It soon became clear that the collapse would reshape the landscape for decades to come. Everything south of the dam was swallowed by the murky waters of the river.

Downstream, in the city of Kherson, the flooding forced thousands of people and animals to evacuate, many of them under Russian fire. Northeast of the dam, the reservoir has turned into a barren, muddy plain stretching to the horizon. The task of rebuilding from this environmental disaster is now added to the challenges facing Ukraine when hostilities with the Russians cease.

Built in the 1950s, the Kakhovka Reservoir was close to the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake and supplied water to all of southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. Water from the dam irrigated farms and orchards, and the electricity generated by the dam’s hydropower plant was used in villages throughout the region. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant also used reservoir water to cool its reactors. Now all of that is gone. In its place lies an uncertain future for the farming and fishing industries.

One day, I started a conversation with an old man who was washing his car behind a fence. His home was not far from where the shoreline of the reservoir used to be. Bob Dylan was playing from a tiny speaker. The man, who said his name was Ihor, invited me up on his roof to survey the scene. “There is no such view of our new desert from any rooftop around,” he told me. We sat together on the top of his dacha as the sun began to set on what I could see was now a surreal lunar landscape.

The receding water of the Dnieper River exposes a dock and fishing harbor in the village of Bilenke.

Anti-tank barriers along the road between Nikopol and Kherson, which runs parallel to the Kakhovka Reservoir A couple embrace where the water once flowed on the Dnieper River, in Zaporizhzhia.  

In the village of Marianske, a bridge has been blown up at the edge of the reservoir. Destruction of bridges has been a strategic tactic employed throughout Ukraine since the beginning of the war. Residents of the village of Oleksiivka in the aftermath of the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction A woman fetches water from the drying river in Oleksiivka.

A monument to watermelon, a symbol of the Kherson region. The irrigation canals that feed the region have dried up. Fish found at the bottom of the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River dry under the scorching summer sun. The dried bottom of the Kakhovka Reservoir On the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River, people struggle to access the remaining water. Residents of Nikopol get drinking water from one of the humanitarian-aid points in the city center. The city has been dealing with a water shortage in taps. A cow grazes on one of the farms in the village of Malokaterynivka, with the dried-up Kakhovka Reservoir in the background. In the village of Kushum, boys swim in the Dnieper River. The water level in certain areas of the river has decreased by more than five meters.

The Sukhyi Chortomlyk River, which flows through the village of Oleksiivka, has almost completely dried up since the dam’s destruction. A man pumps leftover water from the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River to irrigate apple orchards in the area. The receding water of the Kakhovka Reservoir

At least six people, including a 10-year-old girl, died in an early morning strike in Kryvyi Rih.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a naval parade in St. Petersburg on Sunday as Russia celebrated Navy Day.

Thousands of supporters of the junta that took over Niger in a coup earlier this week marched through the streets of Niamey, on Sunday waving Russian flags, chanting the name of the Russian president and forcefully denouncing former colonial power France.

Ukrainian official says summit will discuss Kyiv's peace formula, which calls for departure of all Russian troops.

These are the main developments as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its 523rd day.

Will we see Russian and Belarusian athletes in neutral uniforms at the Paris Olympics? The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said it will not set a specific framework for deciding on this issue and, in the meantime, qualifications for many Olympic disciplines are already underway.

Russian officials say one person has been injured after two drones crashed into offices

The Poland-Belarus border has already been a tense place for a couple of years, ever since large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa began arriving, seeking to enter the EU by crossing into Poland, as well as Lithuania.