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More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.

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

The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position

A Red Line

Alexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.

Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.

The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”

Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.

Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.

Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.

But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.

Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.

For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.

Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.

So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.

Related:

Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tony Evans / Getty

We’re All Reading Wrong

By Alexandra Moe

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.”

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan

I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.

— Charlie

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

The passage of the Ukrainian aid package by the House this past weekend is an extraordinary sign of political courage. But in the party of Donald Trump, this win for democracy may soon seem like a mirage.

(For further reading on Mike Johnson’s speakership and what the weekend’s victory could mean for him, I recommend Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile, “The Accidental Speaker,” published today in The Atlantic.)

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The politics of pessimism What Donald Trump fears most Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing

A Political Mirage

The mirages known as fata morgana, named for the character Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, are extraordinary sights. When atmospheric conditions are just right, rays of light bend, transforming boats, islands, mountains, and coastlines before the viewer’s eyes. Despite their beauty, though, these mirages soon fade away—which brings me to this weekend’s remarkable scene in the House.

On Saturday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson faced down the threats from his party’s Trumpist isolationist wing and delivered a resounding bipartisan victory for the forces of democracy. The $61 billion Ukrainian aid package passed with more than 300 votes—the final total was 311–112—including 101 GOP votes and the support of every Democrat in the House. The bill, which is expected to be approved quickly by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden, will provide the embattled Ukrainians with crucial support at what seems a decisive moment in the war against Vladimir Putin and his army of invaders.

The vote was a stinging rebuke to MAGA world and its leader. “Ukraine won,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this weekend. “Trump lost.”

We also got a vanishingly rare glimpse of political courage. For months, Johnson dithered over legislation to aid Ukraine, and his delays contributed to the unconscionable loss of Ukrainian lives as Russia rained death on Ukraine’s cities. His conversion was as welcome as it was astonishing. Although his ideological shift has been described as an evolution, it felt more like a road-to-Damascus moment. Having played the role of Neville Chamberlain for months, Johnson suddenly sounded almost Churchillian.

“History judges us for what we do,” he said last week. “This is a critical time right now. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different. But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

Unlike his party’s maximum leader, Johnson paid attention to foreign-policy experts, listened to the pleas of American allies, and believed the intelligence community rather than Putin. “I really do believe the intel,” Johnson said. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”

Johnson knew that the decision could cause him to lose his speakership. In this era of GOP political cowardice, his stand felt profoundly countercultural.

So did the House’s rare display of bipartisanship. The House Republican leadership (with the notable exception of New York Representative and vice-presidential wannabe Elise Stefanik) worked with Democrats to stand by Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

After years of dominating the public narrative, the GOP’s most extreme performers found themselves isolated and outvoted. Marjorie Taylor Greene had humiliation after humiliation piled on her; her amendments (including one funding “space laser technology” on the southern border) were widely mocked and then overwhelmingly defeated. Even Fox News seemed to turn on her, publishing a scathing op-ed calling her “an idiot” who is “trying to wreck the GOP” with “her bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy.”

The isolationists were left to vent their rage at displays of support for Ukraine, which included waving Ukrainian flags on the House floor. “Such an embarrassing and disgusting show of America LAST politicians!” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted. “You love Ukraine so much, get your ass over there and leave America’s governing to those who love THIS country!”

And yet, for a few hours, congressional Republicans almost looked like a functioning, rational, governing political party, one that saw the United States as a defender of democracy against authoritarian aggression. It was a party that Ronald Reagan would have recognized. But restrain your exuberance, because we most likely witnessed nothing more than a political fata morgana.

This is, after all, still Donald Trump’s party.

In the days before his legislative defeat, Trump tried to soften his message a bit, posting on Truth Social that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees,” he wrote, “Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!”

Frum noted in his recent article that Trump’s statement “was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.” (Perhaps the most bizarre spin came from Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, who went on Fox News to insist that “this would not have passed without Donald Trump.”)

But there should be no doubt what Trump’s election would mean for Russia, Ukraine, or NATO. And we have precious little evidence that the GOP would ever push back against a President Trump, who would side with Putin against our allies and our own intelligence agencies.

The directional arrow of the GOP remains unchanged: A majority of House Republicans voted against aiding Ukraine (the vote among Republican representatives was 101 for and 112 against); a majority of Senate Republicans is likely to vote no as well.

And the backlash on the right is just beginning. On cue, the flying monkeys of the MAGAverse came out quickly against Johnson and the Ukraine package. After the vote, Greene declared that Johnson was not merely “a traitor to our conference” but actually “a traitor to our country,” whose speakership was “over.” She continues to threaten to bring a motion to vacate the chair, which could plunge the GOP back into chaos and dysfunction.

Senator Mike Lee railed against what he called “the warmonger wish list” passed by the House. Denunciations of Johnson’s “treason” and demands for his removal flooded right-wing social media. Donald Trump Jr. fired a barrage of attacks against Johnson and the Ukraine bill, which he’s called a “garbage bill,” while posting his support for Greene’s attempts to derail it.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, the rumpled consigliere of Republican anarchy, is escalating his attacks on Republicans who voted for the package. “Traitors One and All,” the former White House aide wrote on his Gettr account. Bannon called Johnson a “Sanctimonious Twerp” who had “Sold Out His Country to Curry Favor with the Globalist Elites.”

The Trump ally Charlie Kirk railed: “Not only is the DC GOP collapsing the country by their anti-American actions, they are participating in the end of the constitutional order as we know it.”

In a rational party, these would be voices from the fringe. But Greene, Don Jr., Kirk, and Bannon still represent the id of the GOP, because they have Trump’s ear and remain far closer to the heart of the MAGA base than internationalist Republicans such as Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, and Mike Pence—all of whom have been thrown into Republican exile. In a recent Gallup poll, just 15 percent of Republican voters said they think the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine, while a strong majority—57 percent—think we are doing too much.

Despite the illusion of a rational foreign policy and this past weekend’s flash of courage and independence, Johnson and the rest of the GOP conference are all but guaranteed to rally to support Trump. Even as he stands trial on multiple felony charges, Republicans are lining up to pledge their fealty to the former president whether or not he is convicted; New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former Attorney General Bill Barr are merely the latest Republicans to bend the knee.

In just a few months, my hometown of Milwaukee will host the GOP’s re-coronation of Trump, affirming once again his absolute grip on the mind and soul of the party. By then, what happened this weekend will seem like a distant mirage.

Related:

Trump deflates. The accidental speaker

Today’s News

Lawyers in Trump’s hush-money trial in New York made their opening statements today. The head of the Israeli military’s intelligence directorate resigned, citing his department’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s attack on October 7. Hundreds of members of the teaching staff at Columbia University held a walkout to protest the administration’s decision last week to call in police officers, who arrested more than 100 students involved in a pro-Palestine demonstration.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Being busy has become a status symbol, Isabel Fattal writes. What do we miss when our focus is on staying productive above all else?

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Evening Read

Cavan Images / Alamy

It’s Really Hard to Rebuild a Marsh

By Erica Gies

The water in California’s San Francisco Bay could rise more than two meters by the year 2100. For the region’s tidal marshes and their inhabitants, such as Ridgway’s rail and the endangered salt-marsh harvest mouse, it’s a potential death sentence …

To keep its marshes above water, San Francisco Bay needs more than 545 million tonnes of dirt by 2100. Yet for restorationists looking to rebuild marshes lost to development and fortify those that remain, getting enough sediment is just one hurdle: The next challenge is figuring out a way to deliver it without smothering the very ecosystem they’re trying to protect.

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“At the long edge of the screen door keeping most of the flies out. / At the classroom door, smooth and tight fit.”

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Stephanie Bai 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.

Yesterday, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.

The context for the interview is important. Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024 GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump. Sununu has referred to him as a “loser,” an “asshole,” and “not a real Republican.” He has said the nation needs to move past the “nonsense and drama” from the former president and that he expects “some kind of guilty verdict” against Trump. “This is serious,” Sununu said last June. “If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

Most significant, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, five days after January 6, Sununu said, “It is clear that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.”

[Mark Leibovich: The validation brigade salutes Trump]

During the interview, Sununu didn’t distance himself from any of his previous comments; in fact, he doubled down on them. He reaffirmed that Trump “absolutely contributed” to the insurrection. “I hate the election denialism of 2020,” Sununu said. And he admitted that he’d be very uncomfortable supporting Trump if he were convicted of a felony. But no matter, Sununu reiterated to Stephanopoulos that he’ll vote for Trump anyway.

“Look, nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said.

It’s worth examining the reasons Sununu cited to justify his support for Trump. The main one, according to the New Hampshire governor, is “how bad Biden has become as president.” Sununu cited two issues specifically: inflation, which is “crushing people,” and the chaos at the southern border.

Let’s take those issues in reverse order. Any fair-minded assessment would conclude that Joe Biden has been a failure on border security—crossings at the southern border are higher than ever—and that the president is rightfully paying a political price for it. His record in this respect is worse than Trump’s.

But Trump’s record is hardly impressive. He never got close to building the wall he promised, and fewer people who were illegally in America were deported during the Trump presidency than during the Obama presidency. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were nearly 15 percent higher in Trump’s final year in office than in the last full year of Barack Obama’s term—when Trump called the border “broken.” Illegal immigration has bedeviled every modern American president.

More incriminating is that earlier this year, Republicans, at the urging of Trump, sabotaged what would arguably have been the strongest border-security bill ever, legislation supported by Biden. So why did Republicans, who have lacerated Biden for his lax enforcement policies, oppose a bill that included so much of what they demanded? Because they wanted chaos to continue at the southern border, in order to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election. That tells you what the Republican priority is.

As for inflation: During the Biden presidency, it soared to more than 9 percent—inflation was a global crisis, not specific to the United States—but has cooled to about 3.5 percent. (When Trump left office, inflation was less than 2 percent.) America’s inflation rate is now among the lowest in the world. More important, wages are rising faster than prices for ordinary workers, and low-wage workers have experienced dramatic real-wage growth over the past four years and for the first time in decades.

More broadly, the American economy is the best in the world. The United States recovered from the coronavirus pandemic better than any other nation. Interest rates are the highest in decades, but America’s GDP significantly outpaced those of other developed countries in 2023. The economy grew by more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, which is higher than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. Monthly job growth under Biden, even if you exclude “catch up” growth figures in the aftermath of the pandemic, has been record-setting. Trump’s record, pre-pandemic, isn’t close.

In 2023, we saw the highest share of working-age Americans employed in more than two decades, while the Biden administration has overseen more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent, the longest such streak since the late 1960s. At the end of last year, retailers experienced a record-setting holiday season. The stock market recently posted an all-time high; so did domestic oil production. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen to record lows under Biden. Trump claims that crime “is rampant and out of control like never, ever before.” In fact, violent crime—after surging in the last year of the Trump presidency (largely because of the pandemic)—is declining dramatically. As for abortions, during the Trump presidency, they increased by 8 percent after 30 years of near-constant decline.

Even if Republicans want to insist that Biden’s policies had nothing to do with any of this, even if these positive trends are happening in spite of Biden rather than because of him, America during the Biden presidency is hardly the hellscape that MAGA world says it is and at times seems to be rooting for it to be. On Biden’s watch, for whatever constellation of reasons, a good deal has gone right. And deep down, Trump supporters must know it, even as they wrestle with reality in order to deny it.

So the underlying premise that Sununu and MAGA world rely on to justify their support for Donald Trump—that if Biden wins, “our country is going to be destroyed,” as Trump said during a rally on Saturday—is false. Which raises the question: What is the reason Sununu has rallied to Trump?

It’s impossible to fully know the motivations of others, but it’s reasonable to assume that Sununu wants to maintain his political viability within the Republican Party. He’s undoubtedly aware that to break with Trump would derail his political ambitions. But for Sununu, like so many other Republicans, that partisan loyalty comes at the cost of his integrity.

Chris Sununu is not a true believer, like some in MAGA world. He’s not psychologically unwell, like others. He knows who Trump is, and what the right thing to do is—to declare, as Liz Cheney has done, that she will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances.

“I certainly have policy differences with the Biden administration,” she has said. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.”

Donald Trump has shown he’s willing to do that and more. Sununu is pledging fealty to a man who, among other things, attempted to overturn an election, summoned and assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol, and encouraged the mob to hang his vice president. He sexually assaulted and defamed a woman, paid hush money to a porn star, and allegedly falsified records to cover up the affair. Trump controlled two entities that were found guilty of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. He invited a hostile foreign power (Russia) to interfere in one American election and attempted to extort an allied nation (Ukraine) to interfere in another four years later. He has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges. And he has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, one of which begins today.

​​[David A. Graham: The GOP completes its surrender]

Trump has championed crazed and racist conspiracy theories, dined with avowed anti-Semites, and mocked war heroes, people with handicaps, and the dead. He has swooned over the most brutal dictators in the world, sided with Russian intelligence over American intelligence, abused his pardon power, and said we should terminate the Constitution. He obsessively told his staff to use the FBI and the IRS to go after his critics.

Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton look like Boy Scouts.

It’s not all that uncommon for politicians to put party above country, to bend and to break when pressure is applied. Courage is a rare virtue, and tribal loyalties can be extremely powerful. But this is not any other time, and Trump is not any other politician. He is a man of kaleidoscopic corruption. There is virtually nothing he won’t do in order to gain and maintain power. And he telegraphs his intentions at all hours of the day and night.   

Given all Trump has done, and given all we know, the claim that Joe Biden—whatever his failures, whatever his limitations, whatever his age—poses a greater threat to the republic than Donald Trump is delusional.

In his new book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf reminds us of something that Steve Bannon, who served as a close adviser to Trump and is one of the most influential figures in the MAGA movement, once said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Chris Sununu has now enlisted in that war. What is so discouraging, and so sickening, is how many others in his party have done so as well. They are Trump’s willing accomplices.