\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made himself a spokesperson for Democratic resistance to Republican plans for a brazen mid-decade gerrymander, and on Sunday, he appeared on Meet the Press to state his case. \u201cIt\u2019s cheating,\u201d Pritzker said of the Texas redistricting that the president has demanded. \u201cDonald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he\u2019s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a clever line. But it would have been better if not for the fact that some of Pritzker\u2019s fellow Democrats, including the governors of New York and California, are now trying to redraw their state\u2019s maps to squeeze Republicans. (It might also have landed better if Illinois\u2019 maps weren\u2019t already gerrymandered, as Representative Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat, recently acknowledged.)<\/p>\n
If they\u2019re going to strike back, Democrats in some of these states don\u2019t just have to draw new maps\u2014they have to find ways to circumvent structures they enacted in recent years to make maps fairer. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has been the driving force behind Democrats\u2019 work for fairer districts, but he\u2019s now in the awkward position of calling for cutthroat maps. \u201cMy hope would be you have these temporary measures,\u201d he told The New York Times. Of course, everyone always hopes that. The political scientist Sara Sadhwani, who helped draw the Golden State\u2019s current maps, argued for tossing them, telling Politico\u2019s California Playbook, \u201cThese are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times often call for extraordinary measures.\u201d<\/p>\n
This reasoning feels both dangerous and alluring. Democrats pushed for fairer districts to bolster democracy; if they remain pure and Republicans rig the system, then it was all for naught. Yet if they abandon the push for fairness, what are they preserving? Saying that Americans should resist tyranny is all well and good, but the past decade has shown that resisting involves a lot of risky judgment calls. Part of Trump\u2019s political genius, and his threat, is that he forces his opponents to choose between bad options.<\/p>\n
During the first Trump administration, for example, some of his aides simply refused to execute on things the president told them to do\u2014or, in one case, reportedly even swiped a draft letter from his desk to prevent it from being signed. On the one hand, they were probably right on the merits: Trump has lots of bad ideas, some of which might have endangered the country if enacted. On the other hand, they were unelected officials refusing lawful commands from the elected president. What\u2019s right in the short term can set perilous precedents in the long run.<\/p>\n
This week, Trump dispatched the D.C. National Guard and federal officers to the streets of the capital. Five summers ago, amid major protests, he did the same\u2014and reportedly contemplated calling in active-duty soldiers. Then\u2013Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was able to talk Trump out of that, but the price he paid was participation in a photo op with the president as he walked across Lafayette Square from the White House. The resulting images \u201ccreated a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,\u201d as Milley put it. He quickly came to regret that decision and apologized. Knowing which choice was better is nearly impossible.<\/p>\n
Once Trump left office, federal prosecutors had to grapple with how to handle both his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Trump\u2019s misdeeds were not especially murky or covert: Everyone watched him try to subvert the election in real time, culminating in the January 6 insurrection; the documents in question were demonstrably at Mar-a-Lago, and the government had subpoenaed them.<\/p>\n
Declining to prosecute Trump for these actions would have encouraged his own further abuses and also fostered the impression that not everyone is equal under the law. Yet political leaders in functioning democracies generally do not charge their political rivals who have left office with crimes, because it injects partisanship into the system, eroding it for the future. Trump falsely accused President Joe Biden of engaging in banana-republic-style politics, but now that Trump is in power, his government is reportedly pursuing an absurd investigation against former President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Once criminal charges were set in motion, the judges presiding over the cases had their own challenges. Would they give Trump a gag order\u2014standard procedure to prevent a defendant from attacking witnesses publicly\u2014and create an opportunity for him to claim \u201celection interference,\u201d or would they allow attacks that no other defendant could get away with? (They mostly tried to split the difference.) The country ended up with perhaps the worst outcome: Trump faced charges, he reaped political benefit from claiming persecution, and now he has avoided convictions or even trials in all but one case, evading accountability by running out the clock.<\/p>\n
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser is now facing her own tough choice: If she forcefully opposes the president\u2019s temporary takeover of the city\u2019s police force, as well as other measures that he says he is taking to fight crime, then she risks inviting even more aggressive action from an angry Trump. If, however, she mostly acquiesces, then she is yielding the city\u2019s powers and surrendering her constituency\u2019s preferences to his. Meanwhile, university presidents are weighing whether to give in to Trump\u2019s attempts to seize control over their operations. Is it better to strike a costly settlement and regain some limited autonomy, or to fight the administration and risk even greater damage?<\/p>\n
\u201cExtremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,\u201d Republican Senator Barry Goldwater said during his 1964 presidential bid. \u201cModeration in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.\u201d Americans resoundingly rejected that vision at the time, but now many of Trump\u2019s opponents and targets are adopting it as a philosophy. Forcing Americans who care about democracy into these dilemmas is part of what gives him such power.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n About 800 National Guard troops have arrived in Washington, D.C., to support local law enforcement in carrying out President Donald Trump\u2019s order to deal with crime.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Trump is considering filing a lawsuit against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the Fed\u2019s building renovation, amid ongoing tensions over interest rates.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Ben Kothe \/ The Atlantic. Source: Clara Bastian \/ Getty.<\/p>\n Americans Are All In on Cow-Based Wellness<\/p>\n By Yasmin Tayag<\/p>\n A not-insignificant number of TikToks aim to convince the viewer that beef-tallow moisturizer will not make your face smell like cow. The beauty influencers who tend to appear in these videos\u2014usually clear-skinned women rubbing tallow into their face as they detail their previous dermatological woes\u2014describe the scent as \u201cbuttery\u201d or \u201cearthy\u201d or grass-like. Many of them come to the same conclusion: Okay, even if the tallow does smell a little bit, the smooth skin it leaves behind is well worth it.<\/p>\n Beef tallow (as both a moisturizer and an alternative to seed oils) is one of many cow-based products that have crowded the wellness market in the past five or so years. Beef-bone broth is a grocery-store staple. Demand for raw milk has grown, despite numerous cases of illness and warnings from public-health officials that drinking it can be fatal. In certain circles, raw cow organs\u2014heart, liver, kidney\u2014are prized superfoods \u2026<\/p>\n Woo-woo, it seems, is becoming moo-moo. America has entered its cowmaxxing era.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Jeff, 16, Fayetteville, New York, 1990<\/p>\n Look. In the 1980s and \u201990s, Adrienne Salinger photographed American teenagers in their natural habitat: their bedroom.<\/p>\n Read. In Xenobe Purvis\u2019s novel, The Hounding, a brood of odd siblings might be turning into dogs, Talya Zax writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made himself a spokesperson for Democratic resistance to Republican plans for a brazen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1295,2793,4441,504,1803,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-15372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bad","9":"tag-choose","10":"tag-forces","11":"tag-opponents","12":"tag-options","13":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n