The Atlantic will expand its flagship event, The Atlantic Festival, to New York City for the first time this fall, and host a one-day festival event in Washington, D.C., this spring. The Atlantic Festival will take place from Thursday, September 18, to Saturday, September 20, and be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, with other venues to be announced. Additionally, the event in D.C., On the Future, will be held Tuesday, April 29, at Planet Word. The speaker lineups are to be announced.

The expansion to New York City follows 16 years of The Atlantic Festival being held in Washington, D.C., and the growth of the event in scale, ambition, and attendance. The festival is the preeminent live exploration of The Atlantic’s journalism, bringing together more than 100 speakers to take part in events that examine the state of business and tech; culture and the arts; politics and democracy; and climate and health––all moderated by Atlantic journalists. The event will also host theatrical and musical performances, book talks with authors and essayists, exclusive film screenings, and podcast tapings.

Interviewees at the festival in recent years have included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jamie Dimon, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Spike Lee, Kerry Washington, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nancy Pelosi, former Senator Mitt Romney, and dozens of sitting Cabinet secretaries, governors, and members of Congress. The festival has screened a number of films and series, including The Vietnam War, Boys State, and Lee, and featured live performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael R. Jackson, and Chris Thile.

Candace Montgomery, executive vice president of AtlanticLive, says of the move: “We are thrilled to bring The Atlantic Festival to the cultural capital of the world. New York City is home to many Atlantic readers and subscribers and provides the festival with a global stage––giving us the opportunity to bring together fascinating speakers and build upon what has made the festival so successful.”

Last year was the third consecutive year that The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence by the National Magazine Awards; this year, the magazine is adding two more print issues, returning to monthly publication for the first time in more than two decades. The Atlantic is also hiring a number of writers and editors to grow its coverage of politics, defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas.

The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Allstate, Destination DC, Genentech, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.

Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.

On the Future: An Atlantic Festival Event
April 29, 2025
D.C.’s Planet Word, and virtually

The Atlantic Festival
September 18–20, 2025
Perelman Performing Arts Center, and virtually

Last week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy for Middle East peace—and immediately undercut her. “Early on Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson,” Trump wrote when he announced her hire on Truth Social. “These things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them.”

It might seem bizarre for an executive to employ someone they consider at odds with their agenda. But there is a design behind this seeming dysfunction, and it reflects one of Trump’s strengths: He is a nakedly transactional coalition leader with few, if any, core beliefs. This enables him to balance the demands of opposing constituencies without alienating them. Because Trump has few real commitments, he can take contradictory positions and appease rival factions—in this case, hiring a member of the GOP establishment that he has assailed as “freaks,” “warmongers,” and “neocons”—without paying a price for inconsistency. On the contrary, Trump’s unapologetic amorality is a proven electoral asset that allows him to do things other politicians cannot.

Trump’s transparent transactionalism permits him to assimilate the anti-vaccine support base of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into his camp while simultaneously trumpeting the success of Operation Warp Speed, with both sides believing they can leverage the president-elect to their advantage. It enabled Trump to deliver anti-abortion Supreme Court justices for the religious right but then declare on the 2024 campaign trail that he wouldn’t ban abortion—and to have voters believe him, because they rightly surmised that Trump genuinely doesn’t care about the issue. In the same way, Trump was able to say that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “for the evangelicals” and then appeal to Dearborn, Michigan, as the “peace” candidate who might one day do something for Muslims.

[Read: The real reason Trump picked Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel]

On most issues, Trump has no principles, and even on subjects where it seems like he might—such as China—he has shown remarkable flexibility, as when he moved to ban TikTok in his first term but then about-faced after one of the platform’s chief investors became a top donor. Because Trump believes nothing, he holds out the tantalizing prospect that he could do anything, and many people are willing to take him up on the offer.

Such overt double-dealing allows Trump to manage the many contradictions of his coalition by giving something to everyone: evangelical Zionists and Muslim anti-Zionists; Jewish conservatives and anti-Semitic white nationalists; devout Christians and libertine Barstool bros; elite Silicon Valley moguls and working-class union members. Outsiders look at Trump’s supporters and see an unruly rabble riven with irreconcilable tensions. But they miss what makes the entire operation tick.

By contrast, Democrats and most traditional politicians sell everything they do under a banner of moral conviction and coherence, which makes deviations from ideology hard to countenance, difficult to sell to the base, and unconvincing to the people they’re meant to reach. Vice President Kamala Harris was dogged throughout her decidedly moderate 2024 campaign by past progressive stances precisely because voters expected her positions to be consistent and reflect a principled worldview. As a result, she reaped the worst of both worlds: The left was disappointed in her defections from orthodoxy even while many swing voters did not buy them.

Likewise, presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and John Kerry were branded as flip-floppers for their shifts on key issues such as abortion and the Iraq war. Successful politicians avoid this fate by presenting their policy pirouettes as authentic “evolution,” but thanks to his unabashed reputation as a self-interested cynic in it for his own advantage, Trump is relieved of the need to even pretend.

[Read: Why Kamala Harris’s politics are so hard to pin down]

Of course, we demand moral consistency from our politicians for a reason. A politics empty of principle, in which everything is for sale, breeds corruption and public nihilism about the ability of democracy to deliver on its promises. That said, today’s politicians might take a less corrosive lesson from Trump: that there is value in honestly acknowledging the compromises inherent in governance rather than concealing them behind a mask of sanctimony that will inevitably slip. Balancing competing interests is what politics is about. The problems arise when those trade-offs are made in service of the leader, not the people.

Regardless of whether Trump’s mercenary approach to politics is good for the country, it has undoubtedly been good for him. Ironically, after failing as a businessman in Atlantic City, the president-elect has finally succeeded in creating a casino at the White House where everyone wants in on the action.