Hours before the U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on a crypto bill, president Biden released a statement saying that he is against the legislation, but he isn’t threatening to veto it.

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Updated on Friday, May 17 at 3:27 pm

Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.

Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama. I’ll recap: The scene unfolded during a meeting held to consider a Republican motion to—what else?—hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. So things were already off to a wild start. Then, after her line of questioning went off the rails, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took a jab at Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

The personal remark was rude and certainly lacked decorum, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out: “How dare you attack the appearance of another person?” She demanded that the words be struck from the record. Greene, of course, was not chastened.

“Aww, are your feelings hurt?” the Georgia Republican shot back at Ocasio-Cortez, in a pitch-perfect impression of a schoolyard bully.

“Oh, girl. Baby girl, don’t even play,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, letting decorum slip on her side. It looked as if the committee was about to witness fisticuffs. Moments later, Crockett chimed in with a question for the committee’s Republican chairman, Jim Comer of Kentucky, that was actually an idiosyncratic barb directed toward Greene: “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

Comer was clearly confused, “A what now?”

The exchange felt like a bizarro session of British Parliament’s famously combative, point-scoring Prime Minister’s Questions, only the accents were worse, the insults were at least 50 percent less clever, and instead of congressional business as usual, it felt like watching business fall apart.

At first, admittedly, seeing people stand up to Greene’s bullying was heartening. An unabashed troll, she pulled the stunt of wearing a MAGA cap and heckling President Joe Biden at his State of the Union address. And mocking the eyelashes of a colleague at a congressional hearing? That’s next-level mean-girl garbage.

Unfortunately, the unedifying display in the House Oversight Committee only produced more incentives for bad political behavior. Progressive posters on X praised Crockett’s alliterative insult. Even LeVar Burton, the former host of the children’s TV series Reading Rainbow, applauded her: “Words of the day; bleach, blond, bad, built, butch and body …” Burton wrote on X.

Really, no one comes off looking good here. This may sound sanctimonious, but: Members of Congress should be better than personal insults and body-shaming commentary. And both Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett have to know by now that, as the idiom goes, wrestling with pigs makes everyone look sloppy. What would Michelle Obama—the patron saint of Democrats, who famously instructed Democrats to high when Republicans go low—think of Crockett’s response?

Zoomed out, this unseemly episode is just one more sad example of partisanship and performance politics, two forces that continue to rile Americans up and drive us apart. Our politicians are not exactly covering themselves in glory right now. Back in 2009, Joe Wilson of South Carolina shocked the country when he yelled “You lie!” at then-President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address. Cut to January of this year, when Republicans heckled Biden, and he swapped jibes with them like a comedian at a low-rent comedy club.

While the leader of the Republican Party is on trial in New York, GOP lawmakers have been on a weeklong prostration tour, flying from all corners of the country to gather like eager groupies outside the courtroom, desperate for a chance to impress the boss. In addition, a Senate Democrat from New Jersey is on trial for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent, and a Democratic congressman from Texas is facing his own charges of corruption.

Biden, an institutionalist, likes to appeal to our better angels and assure Americans, This is not who we are. Maybe not. But this is definitely who we elected.

Correction: This article originally misquoted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as saying, “Baby girl, you do not want to play.” In fact, she said, “Baby girl, don’t even play.”

Illustration Sources: Nathan Howard / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.  

Ahead of next week’s closing arguments for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, the former president’s allies took turns appearing outside the Manhattan courthouse. Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator J. D. Vance, and Representative Matt Gaetz were among those who made appearances. This public-facing show of support from Republicans comes as speculation over Trump’s choice for vice president continues to unfold.

Meanwhile, in Congress, an exchange among Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left a House committee in chaos. The spat, which began during a meeting held to consider a motion to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, more broadly represents how political behavior could be mediated going forward. “We have a ways to go in our national devolution,” Susan Glasser said last night. “Institutions are unraveling, not just the institution of the U.S. Congress.”

Joining the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent for Politico; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition.

White House advisor John Kirby told Al Jazeera that the US military's floating pier in Gaza is now operational.

The United States Congress took six months to approve a supplemental spending bill that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The drama, legislative maneuvering, and threats to remove a second speaker of the House of Representatives have left reasonable people asking what, exactly, is going on with Republican legislators: Have they recognized the perilous state of the world and the importance of U.S. leadership? Or was the difficulty in securing the aid the real signal worth paying attention to—making Republican support for the assistance just a last gasp of a conservative internationalism that is no longer a going concern?

In the breach between these two narratives lies the future of the Republican Party—whether it has become wholly beholden to the America First proclivities of Donald Trump or can be wrenched back to the reliably internationalist foreign policy of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

Former President Trump has long questioned the value to the U.S. of international alliances, trade, and treaties, and involvement in global institutions. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, who propounds the Trumpian view, recently said of the fight over the supplemental spending bill: “Notwithstanding some lingering Cold Warriors, we’re winning the debate because reality is on our side.” And Vance may be right about who’s winning: 22 of the 49 Republicans in the Senate voted for the supplemental when it was presented in February, at a time when Trump was agitating against it; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson persuaded Trump to stay on the sidelines for the April vote, and five more Republican senators opposed the legislation anyway. That suggests a rising, not ebbing, tide.

If Vance is correct, this could be the last aid package for Ukraine—meaning that Ukraine will ultimately lose its war with Russia. Republicans will have the U.S. pull away from alliance commitments in Asia and Europe and withdraw from participating in trade agreements and international institutions.

[Anne Applebaum: The GOP’s Pro-Russia caucus lost. Now Ukraine has to win.]

But Republican lawmakers and voters are far from united around this worldview. Despite the onslaught against internationalism, Republican voter support for NATO has decreased only marginally, from 44 percent in 2015 to 43 percent currently. And despite some radical party members’ fulminating that Republicans who’d voted for the supplemental would be hounded by voters, no backlash actually took place.

Some Republican legislators who supported the supplemental spoke of it in terms redolent of the internationalist Republican tradition. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, said: “This House just showed tyrants and despots who wish harm upon us and our allies that we will not waver as the beacon of leadership and liberty.” Johnson, who’d formerly voted against aid to Ukraine, put his job on the line to get the bill passed, in the name of doing what he said was “the right thing.” Representative Mike McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, described the speaker’s reversal as “transformational … he’s realizing that the world depends on this.” And if that is indeed where Johnson stands, he does so in the company of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has indicated that he will commit his final two years in the Senate to restoring Republican internationalism.

Ultimately, the Republican Party’s direction will become clear based on the policies it chooses to oppose or support. The supplemental was one test; some of the others are less high-profile but at least as consequential, if not more so, because they concern the very building blocks of a conservative international order. Given that the leader of the Republican Party does not favor these ideas, creating policies to advance them will be difficult. But difficult is not impossible, as the success of the supplemental shows.

For example: Will Republicans fight to increase defense spending? The past four presidential administrations have failed to spend even what was needed to carry out their own national-security strategies—and this at a time when the world has been growing more dangerous, as U.S. adversaries have coalesced into an axis of authoritarian powers. Defense spending is popular with the public: In a Reagan Institute poll, 77 percent of Americans said that they favored bumping it up. But doing so will require a reordering of priorities, whether through reforming entitlements, raising taxes, shifting money from domestic to defense budgets, adopting policies that speed economic growth, or allowing deficits to continue to balloon. Republican willingness to make these hard choices in order to spend more on defense—particularly on ship building and munitions stocks—will be a leading indicator as to whether the internationalists among them are gaining ground.

So, too, will the Republican stance toward the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes rules for navigation and boundaries for the exploitation of maritime resources. The convention commits countries to recognizing that territorial waters become international 12 nautical miles from shorelines, and it delineates countries’ exclusive national zones for mining and fishing. In 1994, the United States signed the convention, which has also been signed by 168 other nations and the European Union. But the U.S. Senate has so far refused to ratify it. Conservatives are concerned that the convention impinges on U.S. sovereignty; even the urging of former President George W. Bush, when he was in office, failed to convince them otherwise.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea sets terms that the United States already abides by and enforces on other countries. Without it, America may be forced to comply with the rules its adversaries—chiefly Russia and China—prefer to establish, or else to spend time and money protecting itself and its allies against those countries’ maritime activities. Every living chief of naval operations advocates the convention’s passage. And countries contending with Chinese claims in the South China Sea view U.S. ratification as an indicator of American commitment to the rules-based order on which they rely. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and Democrats Mazie Hirono and Tim Kaine have introduced a resolution to ratify the convention. Republicans will have to decide whether they will provide the votes to pass it or make hostility to treaties a hallmark of their party.

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

Similarly, the GOP will need to decide exactly what its posture will be on international free trade. Efforts to integrate China into the global economic order on equal terms failed; as a result, both American parties lost their appetite for international trade agreements and turned instead to imposing punitive tariffs on China and restricting its market access. This approach has not been successful either. In fact, the bipartisan retreat from global trade agreements as a lever of international power comes at a time when more Americans—eight in 10—view international trade as beneficial to consumers such as themselves than at any other time in the past 50 years. My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors have argued for updating trade agreements in the Western Hemisphere—as the Trump administration did with the North American Free Trade Agreement—while prioritizing new agreements with Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. A truly internationalist Republican Party will pursue such a policy, which would strengthen the trade links among Western nations.

In recent years, the United States has withdrawn from dominant roles in numerous international institutions. Neither the Trump administration nor the Biden administration bothered to nominate judges for the World Trade Organization, greatly weakening that body. Meanwhile, China secured leadership roles in Interpol and in the UN agencies that regulate international telecommunications, air routes, and agricultural and industrial assistance. China nearly assumed leadership of the UN’s international maritime organization, which would have allowed it to rewrite the rules for freedom of navigation. Perhaps Republicans can be persuaded that ceding such positions to China is damaging. Much as with the Convention on the Law of the Sea, Washington and its allies can either lead the institutions that set and enforce rules or work to shield their interests from the reach of them. Setting the rules is more cost-effective.

How the Republican Party addresses these nuts-and-bolts national-security policies will reveal its true direction—whether it will continue to lurch toward Senator Vance’s America First policies or return to the values it came to embody after World War II. Even if Donald Trump—the avatar and motive force behind America First—returns to the presidency, Speaker Johnson’s adroit management of the supplemental bill shows that Congress is not powerless. By reasserting its constitutional prerogatives, the legislature can constrain the executive. But for that to happen on national security, Republicans have to believe that American security and prosperity require active engagement in the world.

The act is not expected to become law, but its passage shows the depth of the divide in the US over Israel policy.

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The past few years have not been easy on many American schools. Large infusions of federal funding helped alleviate pandemic-era pains—but that money is drying up.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu. In the game of spy vs. spy, Israel keeps getting the better of Iran. The study-abroad accent might be the real deal.

A Steep Fiscal Cliff

Summer break is on the horizon, but many schools are already bracing themselves for what next year will look like. It isn’t a pretty picture: By the time classes resume in the fall, budget reductions and teacher layoffs will be under way in some districts.

Across the country, the cuts have already started. District officials in Arlington, Texas, announced plans to remove 275 positions at the end of this school year. Dozens of teachers in Providence, Rhode Island, are getting laid off. Other districts are letting attrition do its work: Many schools are simply not replacing teachers who retire or quit, which is creating its own disruptions for students, Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab and a research professor at Georgetown University, told me. We may soon see schools shutting down altogether, she added; already, Seattle school officials are proposing to close about 23 elementary schools by the 2025–26 school year.

These seismic disruptions to classrooms come as a perfect storm sweeps through many American schools. Inflation, falling school enrollments, and recent state-tax cuts are all exacerbated by the imminent expiration of a huge tranche of COVID-era federal funds, known as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), which is set to end in September. Issued in three installments—$13 billion in the CARES Act in March 2020, $54 billion in the December 2020 stimulus package, and $122 billion more in the American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021—the ESSER funds made up the largest-ever single federal investment in public education, as students were beginning to fall behind in their reading and math skills, and test scores started to drop. Lower-income students were prioritized for funding; by the fall of 2022, annual federal spending per student had more than doubled in some high-poverty districts.

This infusion of federal cash allowed schools to boost salaries (at a time when many districts struggled to find staff), make improvements to facilities, and hire support staff such as nurses and social workers who could help students during a mental- and public-health crisis. Districts always knew that the money was temporary, so many focused on adding short-term programs and positions with the understanding that, come September 2024, they would be back to relying on state and local governments for the bulk of their funding.

Still, some schools used the federal funds to hire full-time teachers without a clear sense of how they would pay their salaries long-term. That went against most expert advice, my colleague Adam Harris told me, “but in some places it was simply unavoidable,” he explained. “The looming layoffs were always top of mind, but some districts were understaffed to begin with, and so hiring additional teachers or staff was a part of being able to properly serve students.” He noted that districts were hoping to find other funding sources for their new full-time roles; that may still be possible in some areas, but schools with more low-income students are looking down a steep fiscal cliff. (Because they received a bigger share of federal funding compared with more affluent districts, they will feel the difference more once the extra money is gone.)

The ESSER guidelines stipulate that schools cannot carry over funding to future years (unless they apply for and receive an extension), so school districts will need to finalize plans for the remaining funds soon—or lose them entirely. But budgeting will likely be tough: After struggling to find staff during the height of the pandemic—and, in many cases, paying premiums to recruit and retain teachers—districts are scrambling to shrink their costs. Though most of them are better prepared to handle the budget shortfall today than they were a year ago, Adam explained, they still face brutal choices. Even the districts that aren’t considering layoffs will have to weigh which programs are important enough to keep. Do they cut mental-health resources? Summer enrichment courses? Food pantries for low-income students? “Those became important services that students and staff relied on,” Adam said, “and students may be worse off without them.”

It has been a “very messy few years financially for school districts,” Roza told me. Though some federal money will still be sloshing around this fall, it won’t last. And we may see an even larger wave of cuts the following school year. The big question, Roza said, is whether schools are going in with clear eyes this budget season. “If we’re making disruptive cuts now because we didn’t plan ahead, then that’s the bigger tragedy.”

Related:

America isn’t ready for the school-funding crisis ahead. Why America’s public schools are so unequal (From 2016)

Today’s News

During Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial, one of his attorneys cross-examined Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and attempted to cast doubt on Cohen’s testimony. The House Judiciary Committee voted to advance a contempt-of-Congress resolution against Attorney General Merrick Garland, who refused to comply with a subpoena to turn over the audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert Hur interviewing President Joe Biden. The Biden administration submitted a proposal to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, which would reduce some federal-level restrictions on the drug but would not legalize or decriminalize it across the country.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “One of the thrills of reading Sylvia Plath is the abundance of versions to choose from,” Sophie Gilbert writes. The Weekly Planet: Hawthorns once proliferated wildly across eastern North America, but now they’re dying out, Robert Langellier writes. Should they be saved?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Bettmann / Getty; Disney.

The Cruel Social Experiment of Reality TV

By Sophie Gilbert

For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.

Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Arthur C. Brooks: How to be your best despite the passing years Conor Friedersdorf: The wrong way to fight anti-Semitism on campus The best hope for electric cars could be the GOP districts where they’re made.

Culture Break

Dean Rogers / Focus Features

Watch (or skip). Back to Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic (out tomorrow in theaters) renders her life with some intelligence and painterly craft, Spencer Kornhaber writes. But it also turns “a complex human being into a generic image.”

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, our staff writer Katherine J. Wu discusses the possible future in which male contraceptives are readily available and a routine part of men’s health care.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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A bipartisan bill that would prohibit American agencies from working with several Chinese biotech companies, thanks to national security concerns, was approved by a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Wednesday. But as it moves ahead, Chinese biotech leaders are jockeying to lobby the United States.

Read more...

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It’s common, in criminal court, for a defendant’s friends and family to join them in the courtroom as a show of love and support. That’s not exactly what’s happening in Manhattan this week. More, after these three stories from The Atlantic:

Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves. The art of survival The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.

Trump’s Courtroom Groupies

Donald Trump’s hush-money trial was already strange enough. A former president and a porn star walk into a Manhattan courtroom. But an additional cast of characters have recently inserted themselves into the drama. During this week’s testimony from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, Republican politicians of many different ranks donned their courtroom best and headed downtown to put on a show for the boss. Although these particular charges could be the weakest of the many indictments Trump faces, one got the sense that none of his party allies was there to discuss the finer points of the law.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who quite famously opposes pornography on religious grounds, nevertheless accompanied the man accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star to his trial yesterday. Outside the building, Johnson told reporters that the case is a “sham” and a “ridiculous prosecution.” At Monday’s session, Senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and J. D. Vance of Ohio apparently adopted the roles of Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot for the event, each offering running commentary on the “dingy” courtroom, with its “depressing” vibes; the disturbing number of mask-wearing attendees; and the “psychological torture” being inflicted on Trump (who, as a reminder, has been charged with 34 felonies in this case alone).

The former presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum took turns bemoaning the state of the justice system. Even a few bit players wanted in on the action, including pro-Trump Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, who flew all the way from Des Moines to stand before the news cameras and remind viewers that “politics has no place in a criminal prosecution.”

You might be wondering: Don’t these people have anything better to do? The answer is that, in today’s Republican Party, prostration before Trump is as much part of the job as anything else.

All of this showboating has been happening for several reasons. “At its most tangible level, what we’re seeing is a work-around to the gag order,” Sarah Isgur, a former senior spokesperson for the Trump-era Justice Department, told me. The ex-president was warned by the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, that if he talks or posts any more about the jury or the judge’s family, he could face jail time. So, just as in a political campaign, Trump’s surrogates are stepping up to stump for him.

Legally, Trump can’t ask these politicians to violate the order on his behalf. But why would he have to ask when they know exactly what he wants from them? “The playbook that Trump expects party members in good standing to follow is in public,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer and now an editor at Protect Democracy, told me. Trump’s given these acolytes their cues with his posts on Truth Social, and they’re dutifully following them.

Lower Manhattan has, over the past week, become a pilgrimage site for those vying to be in Trump’s inner circle, with a court appearance carrying the promise of a holy anointing. You could also think about this courtside display as another audition in the early veepstakes. For Ramaswamy, Burgum, and Vance, in particular, this moment is a chance to demonstrate their abiding loyalty to Trump in the hopes of being selected as his running mate. Others may have reasoned that a little time in front of the cameras yelling “Sham trial!” will go a long way toward snagging a plum Cabinet position in a second Trump administration. (A virtual unknown such as Bird, of course, probably doesn’t expect to get either of these things. But, as every climber knows, one must never miss an opportunity to ingratiate oneself with the boss.)

Which brings us to one final observation. “There’s a larger, more philosophical reason they’re all there,” Isgur said. “That’s what the Republican Party stands for now.” There is no real platform, no consistent set of principles. There is only Trump, and degrees of loyalty to him. These courtroom groupies are simply responding to the obvious incentives—“If you didn’t know that the Republican Party is now focused on Trump,” Isgur said, “I’ve got an oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.”

That’s their deal, but what about the boss’s? Trump no longer appears concerned only with shielding himself from political accountability. Now that he has almost clinched the nomination, he’s using the party to shield himself from criminal accountability, too. This has given the GOP a new rallying cry. “The Big Lie in 2020 was that the election was stolen,” Carpenter said. “The Big Lie 2.0 is that justice has been weaponized against him to deprive him of the presidency.”

Related:

Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial What Donald Trump fears most

Today’s News

Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot several times in an assassination attempt. He has been hospitalized and is undergoing surgery. President Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to two presidential debates. The first one will be hosted by CNN on June 27, and the second will take place on September 10, broadcast by ABC. A barge slammed into the Pelican Island Causeway in Galveston, Texas, causing a partial collapse and spilling oil in the bay below.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: This week, Google and OpenAI announced competing visions for the future of generative AI, Matteo Wong writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Alamy.

The New Workplace Power Symbols

By Michael Waters

If you walked into an office building during the second half of the 20th century, you could probably figure out who had power with a single glance: Just look for the person in the corner office. The corner offices of yore were big, with large windows offering city views and constant streams of light, plus unbeatable levels of privacy. Everyone wanted them, but only those at the top got them. Land in one, and you’d know you’d made it.

Fast-forward to today, and that emblem of corporate success is dying off. The number of private offices along the side of a building, a category that includes those in the corner, has shrunk by about half since 2021, according to the real-estate company CBRE. But today’s workplace transformation goes beyond the corner.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty

Look. The dogs at the 148th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show made a big splash. Check out the images from this year’s competition.

Read. “Tapering,” a poem by Jane Huffman:

“I’m tapering / the doctor says–– // It might feel / like you can hear / your eyes moving––”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For the past few months, it wasn’t exactly clear whether President Biden and Trump would meet on the debate stage before November. (Some, including The Atlantic’s David Frum, argued that they shouldn’t.) Well, folks, it looks like they’re doing it. The two presidential contenders agreed today to participate in two debates. The agreed-upon rules stipulate that neither event will have a studio audience—a welcome development for viewers who would rather watch a political debate than an episode of Jerry Springer.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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New polling shows Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in five out of six key swing states. Voters there say they want change—which presents a challenge for the candidate who won in 2020 on the promise of normalcy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden’s weakness with young voters isn’t about Gaza. The Real ID deadline will never arrive. The Atlantic’s summer reading guide

The Battleground States

Michigan and Nevada are two very different places. As are Pennsylvania and Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. Still, these six states share a quality of enormous consequence: They wield massive electoral influence because their voters tend to waffle on their political preferences. In swing states, a suburb here, a county there—totaling perhaps a few hundred thousand votes—may be enough to decide who will become the next president.

Earlier this week, a new set of polls from The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer found that, among registered voters, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania), and Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden carried all six of those battleground states, which helped him clinch the election. Though he doesn’t need every single one this time—wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, could help get him to 270 electoral votes—the polling signals some glaring challenges for his campaign in the months to come.

Americans are divided on policy issues—especially when it comes to the economy and Israel’s war in Gaza. But abortion is an issue that will resonate across the country at every level of the ballot, my colleague David Graham told me. And it’s one area where Democrats clearly “have an edge.”

The polling also gestured at a sweeping sense of dissatisfaction among 70 percent of respondents, who said that they want major changes in America’s political and economic system, or for it to be torn down entirely. And they don’t seem to think that Biden—who promised in 2020 a presidency steeped in normalcy—can bring that. Voters are divided on whether Trump would bring good or bad changes, but an overwhelming majority of them believe that he would indeed shake up (or tear down) our country’s political and economic system.

“If the election is a referendum on Biden, he’s clearly in trouble,” David told me. Here’s a look at the swing states and some of the issues that matter most to their voters.

Arizona

Arizona has voted Republican in all but a few presidential elections in recent decades, and its MAGA presence—though diminished in the 2022 midterms—is strong. Biden won the state by just 10,000 votes in 2020, and Trump has used this slim margin of victory to push his disproven claim that the election was stolen. Recent polling shows that the state is leaning heavily toward Trump, and Republicans are banking on people voting red in response to the rising cost of living and immigration. But abortion will be another significant concern; some Arizonans were up in arms last month after the state’s supreme court reinstated a Civil War–era law that banned most abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest. The governor has since signed a repeal of the ban—but abortion access will likely remain top of mind for some voters.

Michigan

Biden won Michigan by a smaller margin than expected in 2020, and a new confluence of factors is making his prospects there shaky. Times/Siena polling found that Biden was trending slightly ahead of Trump among likely voters, but trailing behind among registered voters. Voters in the state are worried about inflation and the economy. And as my colleague Ronald Brownstein wrote earlier this month, Biden has been “whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans” in Michigan. About 13 percent of voters (some 100,000 people) in the state’s February Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” in protest of Biden’s handling of Gaza, signaling that Gaza is on the minds of voters in the state, which has the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the country. Adding to the mix is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has managed to get on the state ballot and could inject uncertainty into the race and siphon votes from the major candidates.

Georgia

This bedrock of modern suburban conservatism delivered a victory for Biden in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. The triumph was a surprise in some ways. But it was also the culmination of a years-long crusade championed by Stacey Abrams, a former state representative, to turn the state blue. In 2020, Biden won over a coalition of voters in Georgia that included Black and Hispanic voters, suburban moderates, and young people—and he will need to try to retain their support even as their enthusiasm falters.

In a state with a restrictive six-week abortion ban, more than half of polled voters said that they thought abortion should be mostly or always legal, and issues including the economy and immigration were among their top concerns. Currently, Trump and his associates are also charged in Georgia with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, though it isn’t clear whether their trial will take place before the election is over.

Nevada

A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Nevada in 20 years, but voters in the state, which has a large Latino population, are favoring Trump in recent polling. Although Biden had managed to garner support in the Sun Belt in 2020, Nevada’s economy relies on tourism and hospitality, meaning that issues such as high inflation and unemployment are on voters’ minds. The Times/Siena polls found that a large share of registered voters in the state said they trusted Trump to “do a better job” on the economy than Biden. (Though the state is notoriously difficult to survey, in part because many people there are transient and work unusual hours.)

Wisconsin

Trump won this Rust Belt state in 2016—before losing ground in the traditionally conservative areas such as Green Bay and the Milwaukee suburbs that helped deliver a win to Biden in 2020. The economy is a key issue for Wisconsin voters. And abortion may be pivotal, too: Republican lawmakers approved a controversial bill in January that would ban the procedure after 14 weeks, with exceptions for rape and incest. As Ronald noted in The Atlantic, the election of a liberal state-supreme-court judge in last November’s closely watched race could signal that broader voter support for legalized abortion “has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP.” That could bode well for Biden, but it will be a tight race: He eked ahead there among polled registered voters in the Times/Siena surveys, though he trailed slightly behind Trump among likely voters.

Pennsylvania

In the 2020 election, Biden’s win in his home state pushed him over the 270 mark. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes, making it important to capture this time around. On his recent visits, Biden has tried to drill down on kitchen-table issues and burnish his blue-collar, all-American “Scranton Joe” image, my colleague John Hendrickson reported last month. To target working-class voters, Biden is focusing on taxes and attempting to draw a contrast with his opponent, whom he portrays as a friend to the rich. Registered voters in the state said that the economy was a top issue, along with abortion and immigration. It’s unclear whether they will coalesce around their hometown politician after going for Trump in 2016 and now showing RFK-curiosity in some areas. Among registered voters, Biden currently trails Trump by a small margin.

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Today’s News

House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York and lambasted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was on his second day of testimony. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Kyiv on an unannounced visit to affirm U.S. support for Ukraine and promise more weapons shipments, as Russia ramps up its attacks on Ukraine’s northeastern border. A bus carrying farm workers crashed on a Florida highway, killing at least eight people and injuring dozens more, according to officials.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Russell Bull / Star Tribune / Getty.

The Sad Fate of the Sports Parent

By Rich Cohen

A true sports parent dies twice. There’s the death that awaits us all at the end of a long or short life, the result of illness, misadventure, fire, falling object, hydroplaning car, or derailing train. But there is also the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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