UN nuclear watchdog holds meeting to discuss Iranian nuclear programme

Ahoo Daryaei was released from a psychiatric ward into the care of her family, Iranian authorities say.

Kianoosh Sanjari was an outspoken critic of Iran's leaders and had demanded the release of political prisoners.

US Central Command said nine targets were hit at two locations in Syria in response to an attack on US forces.

Iran's General Mohammad Bagheri calls for increased security cooperation between the two countries.

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The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

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What the left keeps getting wrong Conor Friedersdorf: The case for treating Trump like a normal president “You are the media now.” Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister

Today’s News

A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: AI-powered search is killing the internet’s curiosity, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: A century-old novel offers a unique antidote to contempt and despair, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose. The limits of Democratic optimism The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition The “Stop the Steal” movement isn’t letting up. Quinta Jurecic: “Bye-bye, Jack Smith.” Don’t give up on America.

Culture Break

Matt Wilson / Paramount

Analyze. The comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline has muddled the genre of political comedy, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In Miss Kim Knows, Cho Nam-Joo captures both the universality of sexism and the specificity of women’s experiences, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Justice Department charges Iranian man over alleged plot to kill Donald Trump

The US government alleges Iran's Revolutionary Guard instructed someone to devise a plan to kill Trump.

Waking up to the election results on Wednesday, many Americans who opposed Donald Trump may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness.

But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or exploited—authoritarianism, misogyny, conspiracism.

And yet: This country has always been a big, beautiful land of contradictions. As an Iranian Canadian socialist who moved here from Europe in 2017, I hear my share of anti-American chatter from left-leaning Middle Easterners, Canadians, and Europeans. Many seize on simple stories about America as a land of hyper-capitalism, violence, racism, and imperialism—and such stories are not in short supply. The United States remains the world’s only developed country not to have public health care. It is by far the world’s biggest military power. And expressions of racial animus can be loud, deadly, and persistent.

[Jennifer Senior: Focus on the things that matter]

But to reduce America to these clichés is to miss much that is extraordinary. This same country of megalomaniac capitalism is home to public libraries and research universities that are the envy of many European social democracies—institutions tended by millions of Americans deeply committed to their survival. Those who imagine America as a country of racists perhaps haven’t actually visited its small towns, where mosques, Hindu temples, and gurdwaras prosper next to churches and synagogues. In this supposedly immigrant-hating country, Trump banned entry to the residents of seven Muslim countries in 2017—only for thousands of Americans to show up at airports in protest. Thousands more Americans staff immigrant-rights groups. For a narcissistic country, the United States has a lot of excellent public museums that acknowledge historical injustice and encourage self-reflection.

This country got its start as a naively daring social experiment already riven with contradictions. A group of European slave owners on ethnically cleansed land pledged to establish a nation whose self-evident truth was the equality of all. And yet, what they founded was a breathtakingly dynamic republic whose tree of creativity has never ceased leafing. The hopes vested in the United States have been sometimes vindicated, sometimes dashed. Chattel slavery endured here long after it was eradicated in Britain. But in 1860, Americans did elect a president who brought about its abolition at the end of a bloody civil war. The postwar promise of Reconstruction gave way to Dixiecrat rule and Jim Crow, but the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s was to become the most inspiring example of civil disobedience of its era, encapsulated in the call of Martin Luther King Jr. for the United States to “live up to the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

American actions abroad have also been contested and contradictory. In the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Washington played the role of imperial power. The same Washington helped establish the League of Nations in an effort to end all war—before the U.S. Senate refused to join it, undermining its efficacy. The United States first vowed to stay out of World War II, then joined the Allies to help defeat fascism on the beaches of Normandy and the plains of Manchuria. After the war, the United States helped establish democracies in Japan and West Germany—during the same era in which it took part in organizing an antidemocratic coup in Iran.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.

Don’t give up on this beautiful country. Its best traditions are now in danger, and no special genius of constitutional design will automatically keep them intact. In the hands of a president who may wish to model himself on Vladimir Putin, democratic institutions will be tested like never before. Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level of government. Daunting as this task may be, I have faith that Americans will rise to it. Trump may be the Founders’ nightmare, but their dreams can still outlive him.

The Iranian-made satellites, Kowsar and Hodhod, were successfully placed into orbit by a Russian Soyuz-2.1 spacecraft.