Both Momika and Najem have repeatedly stated that they want the Quran banned completely in the Nordic nation, which has broad free speech laws.

Sweden's ambassadors summoned by various countries to lodge protest over incidents in Stockholm.

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A Trump-Biden rematch is inevitable in 2024, even though polling has shown that most Americans wish it weren’t (and even though the former president is possibly facing a third indictment). But the 2024 field is still quite crowded—and the contenders can tell us a few things about America’s politics and anxieties.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Gary Shteyngart: “I watched Russian television for five days straight.” Being anxious or sad does not make you mentally ill. Climate collapse could happen fast.

A Race for Silver

Today, the long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in a hearing organized by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. If the GOP using a Democratic presidential contender as an empathetic witness in a hearing sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. But the choice makes more sense when you understand how RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-theory-laden platform speaks to many voters, and how scores of right-wingers are promoting his candidacy.

RFK Jr.’s role in today’s hearing underscores his unique place in contemporary American politics, my colleague John Hendrickson, who recently profiled him, told me today. RFK Jr. is not the only 2024 contender who, despite low odds for winning the presidential race itself, has managed to hold on to something of a spotlight—or at least to elicit some fear from the competition. Below is a short guide to some of these candidates.

The first MAGA Democrat has real support.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign was initially written off by some as a stunt. But Kennedy’s support is not a joke, John noted last month: “So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent.”

Kennedy is “tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche,” John writes: “Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them … Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.” And Kennedy is promising to do just that. On the campaign trail, he speaks about collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. He has said that if elected, he would “gut” agencies like the FDA and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.”

Across the GOP, it’s a race for second place.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to lag far behind Trump in polling because “his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong,” my colleague Helen Lewis wrote yesterday. “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil.”

DeSantis has long believed that “mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt,” Helen writes. But his decision earlier this week to sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper suggests that he finally understands he needs the mainstream media’s support if he hopes to bolster his candidacy.

I called my colleague David A. Graham, who keeps up our 2024 election “cheat sheet,” to see how he’s thinking about the non-Trump GOP contenders right now. “Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are all in this interesting place where you could imagine them busting out of the pack to either match or supplant DeSantis as the leading non-Trump contender, but it’s hard right now to imagine any of them mounting a serious challenge to Trump,” David told me. In the end, he said, “it seems like this is all just a vigorous race for silver.”

And the third-party problem is coming into view.

The centrist group No Labels, whose founding chairman is the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, is preparing to back a third-party presidential ticket in 2024—“to the growing alarm of Democrats,” my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this week. (So far, the group has refused to discuss who its nominees might be.)

No Label leaders say they’re hoping to protect voters from a rematch between Trump and Biden. “But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House,” Russell notes. No Labels says it will decide whether to nominate a ticket in the spring of 2024. The group might be holding out for two unlikely scenarios, Russell explains: that Biden will change his mind about running for reelection, or that “Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, a long-shot candidate is inspiring outsize fear in the White House. The academic, civil-rights activist, and Green Party candidate Cornel West will probably not win, my colleague Mark Leibovich writes today, but West has Democrats worried all the same. “West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit,” Mark explains; Jill Stein, as you may recall, swept up votes in key battleground states in 2016 that exceeded the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states.

Democrats’ fear of a third-party candidate is not unfounded: As Mark notes, recent polling suggests that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit from the addition of a third-party candidate.

We may see the first real test of the GOP contenders next month, at the first Republican debate on August 23; Trump is reportedly considering skipping the event entirely. The Democratic National Committee, for its part, will not be holding primary debates, which is the norm for the party of an incumbent president seeking reelection. As we head into this next phase of the election, the race for silver will intensify. And other surprises could still await.

Related:

The humiliation of Ron DeSantis The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried

Today’s News

Wheat prices rose for a third day after Russia pulled out of a wartime deal that protected the export of Ukrainian grain, a move that could stoke a global food crisis. A planned burning of the Quran in Stockholm led to counterprotests in Iraq and the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from the country. New York City will pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arguing that unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters demonstrating after George Floyd’s murder.

Evening Read

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

By Amanda Mull

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Porn set women up from the start. The Zoom wave isn’t going anywhere.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty.

Read. Paula Marantz Cohen’s new book, Talking Cure, uncovers the secret to a good conversation.

Listen. Marriages aren’t what they used to be. So why can’t we quit weddings? In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks with our staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez about her years as a luxury wedding planner.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you, like me, are waiting for various loved ones to return to town before joining the Barbie-Oppenheimer fray (or if tickets are sold out), I’d suggest seeing Past Lives, a beautiful film released by A24 still playing in select theaters. My colleague Shirley Li put it perfectly: The movie is an ode to the kind of love that can be both platonic and romantic at the same time; somehow, that gives the film double the resonance and the depth of a classic romantic tale. It’s not overly sentimental, either; the movie is suffused with subtle wit throughout.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Muslim nations have expressed outrage since Salwan Momika desecrated the holy book in Stockholm last month.

"Our position is clear: the government supports Stockholm's accession to the Atlantic Alliance...Completing the ratification process is now just a technical matter", Hungary's Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday.

A recent incident at an authorised protest in Stockholm drew outrage from governments in several majority Muslim countries

Daryll Neita wins the women's 200m ahead of fellow Brit Dina Asher-Smith at a rainy Diamond League meeting in Stockholm.