Washington Week with The Atlantic

"[President Trump] can't stop the economic impacts of this going on well beyond the military campaign. ... He can stop it on one level, but he can't control all the timelines that are related to it."

"This war — the preliminary estimates say that it's costing a billion dollars a day," said @nancyayoussef.bsky.social.

"I was on the ground in southern Iraq on the day that Saddam's forces left the southern city of Basra," said @sbg1.bsky.social.

"The American and British officers we spoke with had no idea what they were doing there. They didn't know what the goal was."

"This is a big gamble," said Karim Sadjadpour.

"If you're able to change the leaders in Iran and empower the people into some kind of a representative government, ... that would be a geopolitical game changer for the United States and huge victory for President Trump."

Why did President Trump decide to go to war against Iran?

"Why now is still an open question," said @peterbakernyt.bsky.social.

"I think a lot of reasons are he felt emboldened by Venezuela, and he's becoming increasingly comfortable with power as he goes further into his second term."

"We could learn a lot more after Trump is done being president now, because the precedent has been set," said @andrewdesiderio.bsky.social.

"The precedent has now been set that a former president can be compelled to testify before a congressional committee, right? Bill Clinton did that today."

"What's been so striking is how many of those very same Republicans who were calling for the release of the files, had promised to get to the bottom of them, are now saying things that are just the opposite," said Stephen Hayes.

Does the DOJ acknowledge that there are files that exist referencing Trump that they haven't released?

Tarini Parti: "We know that there are files with his name in it that we've reported exist. They just have gone back and forth in terms of releasing his name in some files and then removing them."

"The key thing to remember about the Epstein story is that it is a case that has been mishandled for decades," said @sfifz787.bsky.social.

"For the first time, Republicans in Congress and Democrats ... were willing to openly defy their leadership and call for the release of these files."

How are Republicans approaching not only President Trump's speech, but the agenda moving forward until midterms?

"The redistricting fight does not seem like it's going the way that they wanted it to. We don't know if that's going to save it," said @lisad.bsky.social.

"He has been obsessed with the idea of tariffs forever," said @eugenedaniels2.bsky.social.

"Donald Trump truly believes that this is a way to do economics. I mean, you look at his kind of economic plan, this is kind of it."

"The Supreme Court told the President of the United States very clearly, if you want these tariffs, get Congress to pass a law to issue these tariffs," said @sbg1.bsky.social.

"He's trying to bypass the way our system is supposed to work."

"[Trump] sees the Supreme Court as a political body. He doesn't see it as a judicial body in that sense," said @peterbakernyt.bsky.social.

"By the end of the day, he'd already put out a new order trying to reimpose tariffs under a different legal authority."

"It is hard to overstate [Stephen Miller's] power inside the Trump second-term White House, in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration," said @ashleyrparker.bsky.social.

"It includes trade. It includes foreign policy. It includes national security. It includes education."

"In January of 2016, [Stephen] Miller was one of the very first people to leave Jeff Sessions' office and go to [Trump's] campaign," said @lacaldwelldc.bsky.social.

"But Jeff Sessions, a month later, was the very first person — the first senator — to endorse Donald Trump."

"[Stephen Miller] is trying to change the perception in the nation toward immigrants to basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts and there's more of a tolerance for the policies he's trying to implement," said Zolan Kanno-Youngs.

Where did Stephen Miller's politics develop?

"The thing that most struck me in talking to him years ago when I was profiling him was how much of his political worldview was forged in opposition to his upbringing," said @mckaycoppins.bsky.social.

"Karoline Leavitt said that what the president actually meant was that he was supporting the Save Act," said @elizlanders.bsky.social.

"But [Trump] ... continued to double down on his own statement about nationalizing the election even after she said that's not really what he meant."

Why did the framers of the Constitution think it was important to devolve election supervision to local authority?

"In part to prevent exactly this, ... from a president or some sort of ruler to try to rig the system. The authorities should be in the states," said @jonlemire.bsky.social.

"[Trump] is using the full powers of the federal government, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other people in the Justice Department to suck up information to try and confirm the debunked theories he has about the 2020 election,” said @michaelscherer.bsky.social.

What does it mean to nationalize an election?

"I think for Trump, it means to go in there and run the elections in states and localities that he's lost," said @jonathankarl.bsky.social.

"He's talking about some sense of a federal takeover of the way the elections are run."

“They took that and they took some of the victories of that protest, including the conviction of the police officer who killed George Floyd. And they realized that they could win some victories by doing this kind of direct action,” Olorunnipa added.

... referring to the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a police officer.

Olorunnipa noted that while the city isn’t necessarily politically left-leaning, it has a long tradition of activism that was “supercharged” after the 2020 protests spread across the country and went global.

“One of the reasons Minneapolis has stood up to this — what they call an 'invasion' of their city — is because they’ve had practice. They had to come out to the streets in part because they saw the police killing someone on camera,” Olorunnipa said, ...

Washington Week moderator Jeffrey Goldberg asked Toluse Olorunnipa, a staff writer at The Atlantic, why Minneapolis has become a hotspot for community activism.

President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, and protests against the actions of federal agents, put both the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota in the national spotlight.

"You have a federal government that's responsible for election security and maintaining the sanctity of these elections, and then you have a president that obviously has been mobilizing his government towards the grievances of the previous election," said Zolan Kanno-Youngs.

Stephen Hayes: "It has been widely reported that Donald Trump was down on [Tulsi Gabbard], and there's nothing you can do if you are in Trump’s orbit that will get you back in his good graces sooner and faster than going and supporting his crazy arguments about the 2020 election having been stolen."

"This is the first time [President Trump] has ordered the arrest of a journalist," said @sbg1.bsky.social.

"One of the things that they're accusing Don Lemon of doing is peppering the pastor with questions. That is called doing journalism."

"One of the reasons Minneapolis has stood up to this — what they call an 'invasion' of their city — is because they’ve had practice," said Toluse Olorunnipa.

"It’s a city that has a long tradition of activism, and that tradition was supercharged by what happened in 2020."