“I’m not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders. I’m just not going to do that. This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.”
— South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, in response to questions about a meeting she claimed to have had with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Truth: My Life, How It Really Happened, and What It Means for America—for which I conducted more than 500 hours of interviews with myself—contains an anecdote in which the late Samuel Beckett mails me his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and insists, in a long and heartfelt letter, that I deserve it more than he does. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir Just the Facts: Everything I Ever Did and the Order I Did It In—for which I embedded with myself on a series of dangerous solo military missions—contains an anecdote in which, after a boozy lunch with King Charles III, I invent the iPod. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir You Better Believe It: All My Realest Adventures—for which I accompanied myself on many trips to palaces, embassies, medieval mountain hideaways, global HQs, elite conferences, celebrity meditation retreats, and secret underwater laboratories—contains an anecdote in which I win Season 14 of Survivor but turn down a subsequent offer (from Jeff Probst himself) to host the show. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Honesty Gospel—for which I observed myself over seven sessions of ketamine therapy, supervised by myself—contains an anecdote in which I am visited by the archangel Gabriel. No adjustment has been made to this anecdote.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir No BS: Straight Talk From the Mouth of Reality—for which I spent several months on the set of a documentary about me, directed by me, and starring (as me) both Steve Martin and Eva Longoria—contains an anecdote in which I ask the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Listen, Bob, are you sure you want to split the atom?” This anecdote has been adjusted.

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

The Derby and the two subsequent races that make up the U.S. Triple Crown are normally the year’s highlights for American enthusiasts, but this season will be even more packed with equestrian sports. The Paris Olympics this summer will feature international riders in dressage, show jumping, and the hybridized “eventing” discipline, and these competitions may generate more interest than usual because France is, as the Fédération Equestre Internationale puts it, “heaven for horse lovers.” Equestrian sports first made their Olympic debut in Paris more than 100 years ago.

Equestrian activities such as racing, show jumping, dressage, and eventing are the only elite sports that feature pairs of athletes that are fundamentally unknowable to each other. No one can doubt that the horses are trained specialists. But it’s difficult not to wonder if they have any idea what’s going on.

Deciphering the precise extent of any animal’s cognitive abilities is a tall order. The size and structure of other species’ brains can tell us plenty about how their bodies function, but not what degree of conscious thought or human-style intelligence they’re capable of. What we know about horse cognition in particular is limited, in part because “horses are big and expensive research animals,” says Sue McDonnell, an animal behaviorist and the founding head of the Equine Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Most of the questions researchers have asked about what it’s like to be a domestic horse are about how they understand humans, not how they understand their surroundings. Horses, for instance, have been found to recognize emotion on humans’ faces and recall them later on. Some recent work demonstrates that horses may be able to perceive basic goals of the humans working with them. They may even attach emotional memories to specific human voices. Cognition-wise, we know that horses possess enough intelligence for basic creative problem-solving and limited working memory. But attempts to understand their internal experiences have been mostly inconclusive, and the data that do exist come nowhere near confirming that horses are able to conceptualize competitive sports (let alone the state of Kentucky).

[Read: Horses can read human facial expressions]

The question of what horses are thinking and feeling during a race, if not a desire for bragging rights or a flowery cape, is hotly debated among the people who study, train, and compete with them. “I can only judge by their expression, but I can say for certain that for most of them, it’s terror,” McDonnell told me. The big, loud crowd; the tight space; and the close presence of unfamiliar animals they can smell but not see prime racehorses to react with adrenaline and fear when the starting bell sounds, she said. “You’d never see that speed in the wild horse unless they were threatened and stressed.” Their fear would be justified: Though the rate of fatal racehorse injury is at a near-15-year low, more than 300 died in 2023, and sport horses experience health issues such as gastric ulcers and pulmonary hemorrhage at rates of more than 70 percent.

It’s quite likely that the horses we race, jump, and otherwise prance about with feel stress while competing: Multiple studies from the past several years have shown as much by testing cortisol levels and other physiological indicators of tension. And though stress isn’t always harmful, evidence suggests that the training racehorses in particular go through can alter, and perhaps damage, their immune health. And we have no way of quantitatively measuring their level of psychological distress, because emotions like anxiety and fear don’t always manifest uniformly.

But horses have also learned to communicate how they’re doing in ways that don’t require laboratory analysis. Like us, they’re incredibly social animals, even with members of other species. (One growing trend in equestrian sports is to provide a lifelong travel companion for jet-setting horses in the form of a pony or goat, McDonnell said. “They’re just much more relaxed when they have their pony friend traveling with them.”) People who spend lots of time with horses can reasonably expect to be attuned to their emotional state. No assessment of a competition horse’s experience is complete without considering the horse-rider relationship, says Rachel Hogg, a psychology lecturer at Charles Sturt University, in Australia, whose Ph.D. work focused on that bond.

[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]

Many equestrian professionals do not believe that their animal colleagues are plagued by fear and anxiety. “Horses enjoy sports when it’s within their capabilities, when they’re treated with respect, and when training practices bring their personality and athleticism out,” says David O’Connor, the chief of sport for the United States Equestrian Federation, and a three-time Olympic medalist in eventing. But how we value a horse’s enjoyment depends on their level of intelligence. Horses might not be capable of realizing that some of their stablemates aren’t at the Olympics or careering around a racetrack. Would their happiness matter more to us if they were?

Part of the reason O’Connor is so adamant that some horses enjoy sports is that he’s seen what happens when they don’t. In the nearly 30 years he spent riding for the United States, O’Connor told me, he regularly saw horses opt out of participating. “Sometimes you’ll get a horse in the starting gate, you’ll start the race, and one of them will just be like, I’m not doing it,” he said. “Or they go out there and take two or three steps and they’re done.” Recognizing a horse’s agency isn’t just good for morale—it can save a rider from potential embarrassment.

Cultivating relationships with horses in which those signals are never missed is the foundation of O’Connor’s riding and teaching, he told me. But not everyone follows that ethos. Sometimes, genuine cruelty is involved: “There’s this tradition in the horse world that you have to dominate them,” McDonnell said. But more often, the barrier to a trusting relationship between horse and rider is logistical. Even at the highest levels of the sports, athletes can rarely afford their own horses, let alone the costs associated with getting them competition-ready.

The Olympic disciplines, in particular, are not conducive to deep relationships between horse and rider. They’re dominated by a “speed dating” system where business-driven owners seek to optimize matches for specific competitions, rather than lifetimes, Hogg said. “Catch riding,” where a horse-rider pair will interact just one or two times before competing together, is more common than ever, she added; athletes can train with nearly two dozen horses in a single day. (At the U.S. collegiate level, catch riding is sometimes mandated to eliminate advantages.) As a result, Hogg told me, some riders see investing in emotional relationships with individual horses as a luxury they literally can’t afford with prizes on the line.

[From the July 1925 issue: Inside the sordid world of horse racing]

And yet the horses at international sporting events, which cannot open bank accounts, are probably more likely to enjoy themselves when paired with an athlete they know well, Hogg said. Research has found that horses prefer and can even be calmed by the presence of familiar humans, and evidence suggests that as a horse and rider get more familiar with each other, their patterns of brain activity begin to sync up during rides. “If a horse is motivated to be involved” in equestrian sports, Hogg said, “it’s because of their social connection with us.”

Redesigning equestrian sports entirely around horses’ psychological welfare would be like redesigning the NFL to completely eliminate injuries: The product would be unrecognizable, and a lot of powerful people would stand to lose a lot of money. It’s also unlikely to be a top priority in a sport where horses are still regularly injured or killed. But maybe just once, instead of holding the Kentucky Derby, a crowd could gather to watch 20 horses simply hang out together at Churchill Downs on live television. They could even bet on which one becomes self-aware first.

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By killing her dog, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have also killed her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. So who else is on the list? We’ll get into Trump’s options after four new stories from The Atlantic:

The blindness of elites What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? David Frum: What Joe Biden needs to say about anti-Semitism Mark Leibovich: “House Republicans showed up at a campus protest. Of course.”

Trump’s Big Decision

As a reporter, it is my duty to remind you that Trump’s team loves messing with the media almost as much as it loves jockeying for influence with the big man himself. Trump’s advisers might dish, for example, that after careful consideration, so-and-so is off the vice-president list, and you know who is back on. They might explain that, actually, some of the usual considerations of geography and gender aren’t playing a role in this VP decision.

But the truth is, none of these supposed insiders really knows much. No one has any idea what Trump is thinking, except for Trump himself. And the former president is quite famously unpredictable, with a well-established tendency to make decisions based on his most recent conversation. Predicting his Veep pick, then, is a bit futile. It’s also really early: Candidates don’t typically choose a running mate until around the party convention, in late summer. And Trump will likely try to milk as much media coverage as he can out of making people wait.

Still, without prognosticating too much, we can anticipate what Trump is probably looking for in a vice president. He’ll want someone who looks good on television but not someone who might outshine him. Someone who isn’t polarizing to the MAGA base but who demonstrates range. He’ll choose a candidate with experience, or at least with some record of being a winner. He is probably not looking for a politician to “balance” out his ticket like Mike Pence did in 2016, when Trump desperately needed to win over evangelicals.

Above all, of course, Trump will want someone unfailingly loyal to him. This time around, it’s not about logic or persuasion—it’s about personality. The Republican strategists Doug Heye and Mike Murphy, neither of whom are involved with the Trump campaign, walked me through some of Trump’s VP options.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott

Why does this name keep floating around? Well, the senator, who’s been in office for more than a decade, has always been popular. He’s a former insurance salesman who knows how to schmooze, and, Heye told me, he’s also a “prodigious fundraiser.” Scott never fully cozied up to Trump while the latter was president, but he didn’t criticize him much either. “He played it smart,” Murphy told me, by not getting too close or too far. The dynamic changed when Scott launched his own presidential campaign last year. “He was the puppy on his back, supplicant,” even while he was running against Trump, Murphy said, and that loyalty “will appeal to Trump.”

Scott could also—the thinking goes—help Trump appeal to Black voters, who have already started peeling off from Democrats, albeit in a small way. Trump and his campaign have seemed obsessed with this task as they try to avoid a repeat of 2020, and Scott could help them do it.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Trump’s former press secretary was on even the earliest iterations of his 2024 VP shortlist. She is in her first term as a state governor and has enacted plenty of MAGA-style legislation. She’s smart and spent two years working for Trump, which means that she’s familiar with handling the D.C. media and that Trump is probably pretty comfortable with her. Having a woman like Sanders on the ticket could help Trump pick up women voters, another demographic he’s struggled with. “She’s never going to have any agenda or not be the completely loyal type,” Murphy said. “And [she’s] less of a star, so no worry of [Trump] being diminished at all.”

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum

Burgum has been governor for eight years and seems well liked. He’s personally wealthy, like Trump, but not famous. He’s ambitious, but not in a way that intimidates Trump. He ran for president this cycle too, remember? If you don’t, that’s probably a plus for Trump.

When you pick a vice president, you should “pick a slightly less impressive version of yourself,” Murphy told me—like when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore, another moderate, Protestant white man. “When you’re John McCain, [if] you pick a Sarah Palin, it’s just trouble,” he said. Could Burgum be that slightly less impressive version of Trump?

New York Representative Elise Stefanik

This 39-year-old House Republican has been openly auditioning for the VP slot for years now. She’s a gifted fundraiser and easily the most powerful Republican in New York. She has establishment bona fides—Harvard, the George W. Bush White House, aide to Paul Ryan—but has devoted herself entirely to Trump’s defense and the MAGA cause. She’s a competent woman who could help Trump appeal to other educated women. The problem, of course, is that he may not find her particularly authentic. “She’d poison her mother to get two points on Election Day,” Murphy said. “And I think he would smell that.”

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance

The Hillbilly Elegy author and former venture capitalist seems to share Trump’s populist sensibilities. Vance was once a Trump critic but changed his tune when he ran for the Senate. He’s ambitious in a way that Trump might read as disingenuous—probably because it is. “If I were Trump, I’d be troubled by the fact that J. D. Vance was calling [Republican strategists] to ask about running as an anti-Trump Republican when he first looked at running statewide in Ohio,” Murphy said. Then again, he said, “Vance is a clever-enough chameleon to be able to suck up to Trump with skill.”

Former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson

Carson, a former neurosurgeon, ran for president against Trump back in 2016. He worked in the administration for a while, heading up HUD. We haven’t heard much from him since then, but he does seem to hang out in Trump’s circles, and has been spotted at Mar-a-Lago on more than one occasion.

Carson could, in theory, help Trump appeal to Black voters. But he doesn’t have quite the political credentials that Scott does. “I was meeting a friend for drinks back in February, and he said he knows for a fact that it’s going to be Ben Carson,” Heye told me. “I’m like, ‘Okay, well, one, it’s February. Two, why Ben Carson?’”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio

Rubio is young and telegenic, with two terms in the Senate (plus a failed presidential campaign) under his belt. The son of Cuban immigrants, he could theoretically help Trump appeal to Latino voters. The problem is, Rubio would have to resign from the Senate. He’d also have to change his residence, because the Constitution bars electors from voting for a president and a vice president from the same state. Trump picking Rubio is “completely far-fetched—with the caveat that when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, far-fetched things happen,” Heye said.

Kari Lake

The Arizona TV anchor turned Stop the Steal devotee would clearly love to serve as Trump’s vice president. (See her here, vacuuming a red carpet for the former president.) But Lake has never actually won a race, and Trump, as we all know, prefers a winner.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem

She’s still on the list, because in Trumpworld anything is possible. But shooting a dog in a gravel pit? It’s about the worst thing you can do for your political career.

Related:

Did Kristi Noem just doom her career? Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition

Today’s News

The Justice Department announced that Texas Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, have been indicted on bribery and money-laundering charges. In a statement, Cuellar said that he and his wife are innocent of the charges. The former White House official Hope Hicks, who once was one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, testified at Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. Canadian police arrested three people tied to last year’s killing of a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia, and are continuing to investigate allegations that the individuals were hired by the Indian government.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Poetry is an act of hope, Maya Chung writes. It can help us come closest to capturing events that exist beyond our capacity to describe them. Atlantic Intelligence: New consumer gadgets are coming out, and their entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence, Damon Beres writes. The broken-gadget era is upon us.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Racehorses Have No Idea What’s Going On

By Haley Weiss

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Medieval pets had one of humanity’s most cursed diseases. When writers silence writers What is Wagner doing in Africa? Marijuana’s health effects are about to get a whole lot clearer.

Culture Break

Michael Buckner / Deadline via Contour RA by Getty

Watch. I Saw the TV Glow (out now in theaters), the unsettling new film directed by Jane Schoenbrun. They’ve got some ideas about how to make a genuinely weird mainstream movie.

Read. “Noon,” a poem by Li-Young Lee:

“The tall curtains billow / with presences coming and going, impossible / to confirm.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

As a 30-year-old city dweller with a dog and no kids, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the role of friendship in my life. Making friends feels harder when you’re an adult—your days are suddenly so full of commitments, and interesting new people aren’t standing right in front of you at recess. Worse, at least in a place like D.C., where I live, friends tend to come and go with the seasons: They get new jobs, leave for grad school, have babies. I’m curious to hear from readers who’ve figured it out: What’s your best advice for making new friends as an adult? And what are your tips for keeping in touch with the old ones, as you all move along in life?

— Elaine

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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites

The Culture Survey: Kevin Townsend

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.

Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.

As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.

I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.

Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.

“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]

Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]

Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”

The Week Ahead

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum.

I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists

By Elena Dudum

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”

His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him …

Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”

Read the full article.

More in Culture

How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie? The godfather of American comedy The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory Hacks goes for the jugular. “What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago” Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk? The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting The diminishing returns of having good taste When poetry could define a life

Catch Up on The Atlantic

What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? Democrats defang the House’s far right. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues.

Photo Album

Shed hunters unpack their haul on the opening day of the Wyoming shed-hunt season. (Natalie Behring / Getty)

Take a look at these images of devastating floods across Kenya, a pagan fire festival in Scotland, antler gathering in Wyoming, and more.

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For The Atlantic’s June cover story, “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War,” staff writer Anne Applebaum reports on how autocrats in China, Russia, and other places around the world are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom everywhere. Applebaum’s story is adapted from her forthcoming book, Autocracy Inc. (publishing July 23), and draws from her exceptional reporting for The Atlantic.

Even in authoritarian states where surveillance is almost total, Applebaum reports, “the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society.” This has resulted in autocratic regimes slowly turning their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. Applebaum writes: “If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.”

To accomplish this, Applebaum reports, autocracies are now making systematic efforts to influence both popular and elite audiences, including via the use of state-controlled media—most notably China’s Xinhua news agency and Russia’s RT, but also Venezuela’s Telesur network and Iran’s Press TV, along with numerous others—to create stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies. These, in turn, are repeated and amplified in other countries, translated into multiple languages, and reshaped for local markets around the world.

When these stories make their way to the U.S., Applebaum reports, “a part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers.” The State Department has in the past decade created a division to preemptively combat (or “prebunk”) foreign disinformation operations. But no such agency exists to combat the spread of Russian and Chinese propaganda within the United States.

“One could call this a secret authoritarian ‘plot’ to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface,” Applebaum writes. “Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further.”

“Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War” was published today in The Atlantic. Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.