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.

They don’t make Washington scandals like they used to. Consider the tale of Representative Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. In October 1974, Mills, a powerful Arkansas Democrat who led the Ways and Means Committee, was pulled over in D.C. while driving with his lights off. Foxe, a stripper, leapt out of the car and into the Tidal Basin, the shallow reservoir next to the Jefferson Memorial; she had to be fished out by police. The two had apparently had a physical altercation—they had bruises and scratches—though neither was charged. Mills was initially able to weather the next few weeks and win reelection in November, but after showing up drunk at a Foxe performance later that month, he was forced to relinquish his leadership of Ways and Means and didn’t seek reelection.

Now consider the circumstances in which another Representative Mills finds himself. The similarities are striking; the differences are alarming.

Last Wednesday, police responded to a call about an alleged assault at an apartment in D.C., where Cory Mills, a Florida Republican and strong Donald Trump ally, resides. A police report obtained by News4, a local NBC affiliate, stated that a 27-year-old woman there had what appeared to be “fresh” bruises. The report described her as Mills’s “significant other,” though he is married and the 27-year-old is not his wife. She also allegedly, according to the document, “let officers hear [Mills] instruct her to lie about the origin of her bruises.” Mills denies any wrongdoing and told Politico yesterday, “Both myself and the other individual said that what they’re claiming took place never took place and that’s been reported multiple times.”

Things got stranger: The woman recanted her story and now says there was no physical abuse. D.C. police provided the media with a second report saying officers responded but there was no probable cause for arrest, and then a third report saying police are investigating the incident. They are also, according to News4, investigating their own handling of the matter. Police sent a warrant to the local prosecutor’s office, but it has not been signed—in effect, a refusal to take up the case.

Because Washington, D.C., is not a state, it doesn’t have a typical local district attorney. Instead, it has a federal prosecutor, a position currently filled by the Missouri attorney and failed Republican congressional candidate Ed Martin. After the 2020 elections, Martin was deeply involved in Stop the Steal efforts, and after the January 6 riot, he represented defendants and sat on the board of a group that raised money for the families of people imprisoned for their roles. Trump appointed him acting U.S. attorney at the start of his term, and has since nominated him to fill the role permanently.

In an X post yesterday, Martin described the staff of the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” This is not, in fact, the statutory role of U.S. Attorney’s Offices—they serve the federal government, not the person of the president—but Martin very clearly approaches the job that way.

After taking over the U.S. Attorney’s Office in January, he fired attorneys who were involved in January 6 cases—line prosecutors who were simply doing their jobs by bringing cases about overt crimes—and launched an internal investigation into January 6 prosecutions. He has boasted about standing up against the Associated Press, which he said refuses “to put America first” by not adopting Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

Even while doing his best to support people involved in an actual violent assault on the Capitol, Martin has been sending letters to Democratic members of Congress threatening to investigate them for the standard, though overheated, language they’ve used in reference to Elon Musk and Supreme Court justices. Yet somehow, Martin’s office apparently doesn’t have any interest in pursuing a fairly straightforward assault allegation, including claims of inducing an alleged victim to lie.

Why not? The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about why the warrant wasn’t signed. But investigating a Republican member of the House would make life more difficult for the president and his allies on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to ram a politically volatile spending bill through with his minuscule House majority. Some members have already indicated that they may vote against the bill because of proposed cuts to Medicaid. Losing Mills for any reason would make the task harder. Republicans have already paused the confirmation of Representative Elise Stefanik to be the ambassador to the United Nations in order to maintain their numbers.

This delicate moment also shows why, without action from prosecutors, Mills may not go anywhere. So lurid a story used to be a death knell for a career, but politicians have learned that they can gut out most sex scandals if they are sufficiently shameless. President Bill Clinton pioneered the path, Senator David Vitter and Governor Mark Sanford perfected it, and Trump represents its apotheosis. Wilbur Mills was forced to step down by fellow Democrats—not only because of the scandal but because it was politically expedient: A younger, more liberal group of Democrats was tired of conservative southerners blocking their priorities. Political expedience is also why Republicans are less likely to push Cory Mills out anytime soon.

Trump often speaks about “law and order,” but he’s also made very clear that this means law and order only for some—those who disagree with him, or those whom he finds obnoxious. Those who are on his side receive leniency, even if they have committed a violent assault against the Capitol. The U.S. Attorney’s Office ignoring this case while harassing Democratic members of Congress is one very pure expression of this impulse. Meanwhile, Trump is interested in seizing greater control of Washington’s governance. “I think we should take over Washington, D.C.—make it safe,” he said last week. For whom?

Related:

Trump signals he might ignore the courts. It’s not amateur hour anymore.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“It’s a psyop”: Inside Elon Musk’s empty ultimatum America now has a minister of culture. Elon Musk thinks Democrats should love DOGE.

Today’s News

In a joint letter, 21 civil-service employees resigned rather than implement directives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. They formerly worked for the United States Digital Service and were being integrated into DOGE. House Speaker Mike Johnson will attempt to pass Donald Trump’s budget-plan bill this week, which would include $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts. Some House Republicans are reportedly hesitant about the cuts, which would affect federal spending on Medicaid. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate, announced his entry into the 2026 Ohio governor race.

Evening Read

Photograph by Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic

The Internet’s Favorite Sex Researcher

By Helen Lewis

Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people’s personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We’ll come back to that.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear James”: What if life’s problems are alcohol’s fault? Why the left should embrace pronatalism Hamas’s theater of the macabre The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Universal History Archive / Getty.

Listen. The latest episode of Good on Paper follows a human-Neanderthal love-story mystery.

Don’t shave. Because the players on the New York Yankees don’t have to anymore, thanks to a new rule.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy. Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation of what the world might lose when a Bronx Bomber goes unshaven.

The Yankees, as any Yankee fan will tell you, don’t have a mascot. They don’t put names on the back of their jerseys. And most crucially, they haven’t had a single player with a goatee, Van Dyke, or soul patch since 1976. This was the bedrock of Yankee exceptionalism. Although Joe DiMaggio famously said, “I want to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee”—the quote, printed on a sign, long greeted players as they entered the home dugout—the good Lord himself could never be a New York Yankee.

God, per many enduring renderings of him, still doesn’t meet the team’s grooming standards. Though the white-bearded God on the Sistine ceiling would no longer have to shave to play second base in the Bronx, he would have to trim his magnificent head of hair, which descends below his shirt collar. Or it would, if he wore a shirt collar. Baseball players don’t wear shirt collars at work, but the ban on over-the-collar hair still applies to the Yankees, for whom the mullet remains a bridge too far. After he was traded to the team in 2005, the Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson forsook his own Mississippi Mudflap, becoming business-in-the-front-business-in-the-back, which might as well be the Yankees’ motto.

[Mark Leibovich: How baseball saved itself]

Like a restaurant that still requires diners to wear a jacket, the beardless Yankees upheld a pointless standard long after the rest of society had moved on. “The vast majority of 20s, 30s into the 40s men in this country have beards,” the Yankees’ managing general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, said in reversing the policy implemented by his late father, George, an ex–Air Force man. He seemed to ignore  the fact that the clean-shaven Yanks were admirable, even aspirational.

These were men, I always inferred, who made their bed, shined their shoes, and flossed. My own ex-Army father, seeing me with a two-day growth of stubble, always said: “You stood too far from your razor today.” It was only after he died, last April, at age 89, having shaved until the second-to-last day of his life, that I dared to grow my own beard. “Going for a Hemingway thing?” a friend asked.

No, but the Yankees beard ban did impugn, by implication, the personal grooming habits of countless great men: Socrates and Shakespeare, Darwin and da Vinci, LeBron James and Lionel Messi. None would have been allowed to scratch himself in the home dugout at Yankee Stadium. It has often been said that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors. (That was in the middle of the previous century, when both factories were rolling out winners year after year.) If we may extend the automotive metaphor: The unbearded Yankees were a Ford (Whitey), not a Lincoln (Abe). This arrogance, this over-the-top exclusivity, suited the Yankees.

The rest of baseball abandoned classic home and road uniforms for the permanent casual Friday of “alternate jerseys” (beginning in earnest at the turn of this century) and “City Connects” (which Nike introduced in 2021), but the Yankees still only ever wear pinstripes at home—though those pinstripes are now sullied by a sleeve patch advertising an insurance company, another inevitable bow to modernity.

It’s a wonder the team held out this long on facial hair. George Steinbrenner instituted the no-beards-or-hippie-hair rule around the same time Archie Bunker was ridiculing his son-in-law, “the Meathead,” for wearing long hair on All in the Family. Even in 1976, Archie was an anachronism, and with their tonsorial rectitude, the Yankees instantly became one too. Barry Gibb, Bob Seger, and Kris Kristofferson were bearded gods in their pop-cultural prime in 1976, which was not just America’s bicentennial but also an annus mirabilis of magnificent facial hair. That October, the Yankees lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, who did have a mascot, Mr. Redlegs—he was clean-shaven then but now sports a cartoon-villain mustache.

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: Why are baseball players always eating?]

Until the past decade or so, Major League Baseball was a conservative institution, slow to evolve with the times. Ballparks still have signs warning visitors to stay off the grass. But the Yankees, with their fussy barbering rules, took “Get off my lawn” to another level. On the facial-hair front, they were Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud, King Canute trying to hold back the tide. And it worked. As those tides of fashion waxed and waned, the Yankees remained clean-shaven colossi, bringing their total number of World Series wins up to 27, 16 more than their nearest rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, with their bearded icons Ozzie Smith, Bruce Sutter, and Al Hrabosky.

All of that has changed now. “Our new vice president has a beard,” Hal Steinbrenner said by way of justification. “Members of Congress have a beard.”

And just like that, the Bronx Bombers have become a little more like everybody else, one more institution in flux. In the name of progress, they’ve emulated Congress. Talk about a beard-scratcher.

*Source Images: George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Sports Studio Photos / Getty.