{"id":40121,"date":"2026-01-03T06:39:43","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T06:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=40121"},"modified":"2026-01-03T06:39:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T06:39:43","slug":"the-presidents-busy-holiday-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=40121","title":{"rendered":"The President\u2019s Busy Holiday – The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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

Donald Trump spent the holidays drifting further and further from the \u201cAmerica First\u201d doctrine he campaigned on. The president who once promised to disentangle the United States from foreign conflicts has turned his focus abroad: On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, respectively, the U.S. bombed a dock in Venezuela and struck ISIS militants in Nigeria. And this morning, just over six months after the U.S. struck three nuclear facilities in Iran, Trump threatened to deploy military force in support of anti-government protesters in the country. \u201cIf Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go,\u201d he wrote on Truth Social.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s statement about Iran included no elaboration or specific plan for military action. But with only a few short lines on social media, the president effectively put Iran\u2019s government on alert. \u201cTrump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America\u2019s interests,\u201d wrote Ali Larijani, the head of Iran\u2019s Supreme National Security Council, on X. \u201cThe American people should know\u2014Trump started this adventurism. They should be mindful of their soldiers\u2019 safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

As my colleague Nancy A. Youssef put it, Trump\u2019s version of \u201cAmerica First\u201d has so far meant avoiding large-scale military incursions \u201coriented around nation-building.\u201d But the policy has also apparently allowed for aggressive interventions around the world, both to pursue America\u2019s enemies and to aid its allies. When the U.S. conducted its clandestine operation in Iran in June under the code name \u201cOperation Midnight Hammer,\u201d Trump gave a televised address explaining his thinking: forcible disarmament to further American security interests in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Other strikes can\u2019t be as easily slotted into \u201cAmerica First.\u201d After the U.S. launched more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles at ISIS camps in northwest Nigeria on Christmas Day, Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Maitama Tuggar said the strike had \u201cnothing to do with a particular religion.\u201d But Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that militants had \u201cbeen targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!\u201d (Although there have been several high-profile killings of Christians in northern Nigeria in recent years, Muslims have been deeply affected too\u2014and it\u2019s not clear what evidence Trump is drawing on for his claim that the rate of Christian deaths is the highest that it has been in centuries.) Trump\u2019s focus on the plight of Christians abroad is in line with his explicit defense of Christian heritage at home. But these actions don\u2019t seem to contribute to immediate American security needs, nor will they bring stability to the broader region. Military insurgency in northern Nigeria has been going on for decades, and these latest strikes aren\u2019t likely to end it.<\/p>\n

The Nigeria attack came a day after the CIA conducted a drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility. The White House has threatened Venezuela with land strikes for months as part of what my colleague Jonathan Chait has called a \u201cslow roll to war\u201d with the country: ostensibly a military campaign against drug cartels in Latin America, but also a kind of imperialistic push. Although Venezuela is a transit country for illegal drugs on their way to the U.S., plenty of other countries share that distinction. It could be that the conflict is a pretext for deposing the country\u2019s autocratic leader, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles recently suggested in an uncharacteristically candid interview, or for seizing Venezuela\u2019s oil wealth (a theory that Maduro advanced in an interview this week). But so far, the president\u2019s thinking remains largely unknowable.<\/p>\n

Over the past two weeks, Trump has threatened foreign governments, unleashed military strikes in sovereign territories, and pledged his support for at least one American ally looking to conduct campaigns of its own: During a recent summit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said the U.S. would back potential Israeli strikes on Iran. Rather than explicitly acknowledging the apparent shift in policy, Trump has simply slowed down on the \u201cAmerica First\u201d rhetoric.<\/p>\n

At the same time, his approach to announcing new foreign interventions has become more brazen. As my colleague Tom Nichols pointed out, today\u2019s ungrammatical threat to Iran arrived on Truth Social at 2:58 a.m. EST, as if it just couldn\u2019t wait. A \u201clocked and loaded\u201d country isn\u2019t what Trump promised, but it\u2019s what Americans should start to expect.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/p>\n

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Authorities said that sparklers attached to champagne bottles likely caused a fire in a Switzerland bar that killed at least 40 people and injured 119 people.<\/li>\n
  2. Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the mayor of New York City yesterday. He signed an executive order to rescind all orders that former Mayor Eric Adams issued after he was indicted on corruption charges in 2024.<\/li>\n
  3. House Republicans released the testimony of former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who spoke before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17 about his work on two cases against President Donald Trump.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Illustration by Ben Kothe \/ The Atlantic<\/p>\n

    The People Who Marry Chatbots<\/p>\n

    By Amogh Dimri<\/p>\n

    I met a 35-year-old woman with a human husband who told me about her love affair with a bespectacled history professor, who happens to be a chatbot. A divorced 30-something father told me that after his wife left him, he ended up falling for\u2014and exchanging vows with\u2014his AI personal assistant.<\/p>\n

    Most of the users I interviewed explained that they simply enjoyed the chance to interact with a partner who is constant, supportive, and reliably judgment-free. Dating a chatbot is fun, they said. Fun enough, in some cases, to consider a bond for life\u2014or whatever \u201ceternity\u201d means in a world of prompts and algorithms.<\/p>\n

    Read the full article.<\/p>\n

    More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n

    Culture Break<\/p>\n

    Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani \/ The Atlantic<\/p>\n

    Read. The true pleasure of literature can be found in demanding works such as Your Name Here, Robert Rubsam writes.<\/p>\n

    Watch (or skip). Stranger Things\u2019 final season (streaming on Netflix) settles for \u201ccompulsively watchable.\u201d Is that all we get?<\/p>\n

    Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n

    Stephanie Bai 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. Donald Trump spent the holidays drifting further and further from the \u201cAmerica First\u201d doctrine he campaigned on. The president<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,21624,1993,8877],"class_list":{"0":"post-40121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-busy","10":"tag-holiday","11":"tag-presidents"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40121","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=40121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}