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Remembering 9/11, 25 Years Later

2026-09-12T13:14:16-04:00

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

It has been 25 years since nearly 3,000 people died in a terror attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. “As far as I’m concerned, we can never talk about them enough,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, said last night. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined him for a discussion about the lives that were lost, and they examined the fallout from one of the most terrifying events in the nation’s history.

The Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Lemire was an intern at New York Daily News on 9/11. When he learned of the attacks on the Twin Towers, his editor sent him to nearby hospitals. “The most harrowing image from that day for me was you could look in” at the beds lined up, “and they stayed empty,” he said last night. “There weren’t the survivors that people thought could be rushed and saved.”

Joining Goldberg to discuss this and more: Ann Compton, a former White House correspondent for ABC News; Sally Jenkins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Lemire, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW; Graeme Wood, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Postscript to American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center

2026-09-11T10:33:38-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from the afterword to the 2003 paperback edition of William Langewiesche’s 2002 book, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. Langewiesche, who died in 2025, reflects here on reporting from Ground Zero as the only American journalist granted full access to the World Trade Center clean-up effort.

You can read part one of the American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center series here; part two here; and part three here.

American Ground was originally an Atlantic series, and an attempt to respond usefully to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As it became clear that the magazine was committed to a long and heavily charged project about the deconstruction of the World Trade Center ruins, I wanted to take some emotional distance from the tragedy, and to approach the narrative as if I were looking back on current events from several decades into the future. The result would be, I hoped, like a “history in the present tense.” It was a formulation that came often to mind as I proceeded.

My unwillingness to participate in the public displays of grief was partly just personal. But I also believed that the emotionalism surrounding the site, though at its origins genuine and necessary, had grown into something less healthy—an overindulgence, sustained by political forces and the media, that rather than serving as a catharsis only deepened the social anguish. And I thought that if American Ground was to have lasting value, readers should not be manipulated; they would bring their own feelings and thoughts to the text. My job was to observe for them, not as an “objective” journalist or an earnest encyclopedist, but more openly in the first person, as their agent on the ground. I spent six months immersed at the site, usually seven days a week, and another five months writing. I witnessed many sad moments, particularly when accompanying some of the families of the dead who came to contemplate their loss—but I did not write about that, because their grief was private, or should have been, and it was not my subject. My subject was construction, or more precisely deconstruction—the dismantling of the tangled steel and concrete, and all that this entailed. Now, nearly two years after the World Trade Center collapses, I still believe that the only way to communicate the essence of the cleanup, including the complexity of the emotions involved, was to maintain the narrative’s detachment. In American Ground the idea was to catch a glimpse of America itself, or of a certain slice of it at a certain time—unruly, unscripted, and in action. In the mix lay the bad as well as the good, but the book turned out to be hopeful—even celebratory—and all the more so because it wasn’t trying to be. Judging from the overwhelmingly positive response that followed publication, the narrative detachment did not diminish the book’s meaning to readers, or its emotional impact.

But the responses ran the other way, too. Some readers interpreted my refusal to embrace heroic imagery as disrespectful of the dead, or fundamentally biased against firefighters. They were also angry because the book mentioned looting at the site by firemen as well as by policemen and construction workers, and in particular described a confrontation that broke out when a crushed fire truck was discovered with new blue jeans inside. The street demonstrations in New York that followed the publication of American Ground were local, union-driven affairs, but when some of the press picked up on the story, American Ground became “controversial.”

In New York I was asked by reporters if I found the reaction surprising, and I answered no. I had seen and described these very same emotions in action on the pile, as the ruins were known. Moreover, the emotions were not unusual. Solidarity with a group, the possessive embrace of disaster, a sense of privilege, the searing or bittersweet sensation of sorrow—to various degrees most of us have known these feelings. I knew that the protesters had been through a tough and disorienting experience—the deaths of friends, co-workers, and in a few cases family, followed by the distorting glare of publicity and hype. Now time had moved on, but the feelings remained strong. I had written that the cool-blooded engineers had needed to learn a lesson—that the various emotions at the site had to be accommodated if the larger community was to function and the work was to proceed. America is a dynamic mess, not a dictatorship of rationalists. Now I was learning something, too, about writing nonfiction. “History in the present tense” can be so fresh that it’s alive—and still very raw. The book was becoming a small part of the story it told.

But the book was always just a partial history. Had a calm and open conversation been possible, I would readily have admitted that the account was biased in a particular way—in its emphasis on the deconstruction job. That is not to say that it was biased in favor of one group over another. When I first arrived at the site, I had warned Department of Design and Construction Commissioner Ken Holden and Mike Burton, the construction “czar,” that my presence represented a risk to them, because I would write about the project’s failure—if such it proved to be—as readily as I would write about the project’s success. Though I ended by admiring both men for their performance at the site, for many months this was not a sure thing, any more than success itself was guaranteed. Indeed, some of the principal construction men (and Burton in particular) were taken aback by the candor with which I described their motivations and work.

But for better or worse I certainly did pay more attention to the construction leaders than to anyone else. They were my subject, and this was no secret. From the very start I saw their role as interesting and forward-looking, in part because their challenges all lay ahead. That was the premise of my initial approach, and of the book that resulted, which, as the subtitle indicates, is about the “unbuilding” process. I wanted to tell the story fully, and this sometimes required me to grapple with implications and cross-connections, most significantly the extraction of the dead and the increasingly volatile social dynamics on the pile. But whenever possible I avoided straying into unrelated areas, of which there were many.

It has been suggested that I must have been glad to be the only writer with free access to the inner world of the Trade Center site, but the opposite is true. There was obviously more happening there than I alone could know or describe. More important, exclusivity is a cheap trick; transparency is good for everyone, and I would have preferred it. The presence of the daily press would have served the useful role not only of informing the public but also of clarifying the participants’ views of themselves. It is worth remembering that the Trade Center site was an intensely chaotic place. A huge number of worthy efforts were being pursued in all directions and almost spontaneously, in many cases with admirably little direction from above. For the first few weeks there must have been two dozen chiefs, each doing good work and believing to varying degrees that he or she was the one in charge. Certainly there was room for a variety of experiences and impressions. Volunteers working in the food lines would have had a very different view from that of the telephone-repair people, the National Guard, the police officers at the perimeter gates, or the sanitation crews working ferociously to clean up the surrounding neighborhoods. All of them would correctly have seen their roles as necessary for the functioning of the whole. But I was not writing about them.

I would hardly have mentioned the firemen either, had they not played such a pivotal role in the process of the unbuilding. Despite what the public believed, after the search for survivors ended, and the dust and smoke suppression was taken over by civilian water crews, the firemen’s role was not primarily physical. Beyond the increasingly careful raking of fine debris, and the immediate handling of human remains, which others could have done, the firemen’s position was largely symbolic. Their presence was crucial nonetheless, a forceful reminder of the human consequences of the attack, and of the importance of keeping people’s emotions in mind; it was also, as I have described, a source of friction and resentment on the pile, and ultimately a political challenge to the progress of the deconstruction. But in the climate of the times in New York, even short and neutral descriptions of any role or action that was not “heroic” constituted dangerous territory.

The demonstrators’ anger was real, and though it often seemed based on misunderstandings of the book, it also grew from a fundamentally different view of the Trade Center experience. This was to be expected, and there will surely be other, different versions, in print, of the story that I told. In the meantime, the demonstrating firefighters legitimately wanted to register their opinion that American Ground was wrong and unfair. I was doing my job, and they were doing theirs. They chanted and held up signs for the cameras, inflated a giant plastic rat (a well-worn union prop), and went home.

Heavily involved in these demonstrations was a group, small but vocal, that organized a campaign to have the book withdrawn and destroyed. Among others, its members included civilians who in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks had volunteered at the site, or in other ways had come into close contact with the firefighters, and had embraced their humanity and grief. They called themselves the WTC Living History Project, and announced their ambition to record and publish the oral history of this important event in the national experience. First, though, they fought against what they perceived as the injustice of American Ground. They organized e-mail campaigns against the book, disrupted public events, impugned my motivations, accused me of plagiarism, and pored over the text for factual errors. They found of course people from the site who were willing to dispute some of my observations and perspectives, and they called into question some of my information. They circulated to the press a long electronic document in itemized form, in which they attempted to lay out their case. Predictably, they had a more heroic “united we stand” view of the Trade Center site than did I. Again, all of this generated publicity, especially of the local television and tabloid kind.

It was reassuring to know that before publication, American Ground had been heavily vetted by The Atlantic’s rigorous fact-checking department. For five months, two veteran checkers had gone over the text full-time, verifying statements and descriptions, reading and rereading primary documents, and cross-checking details, often with multiple independent sources. Typically, with the campaign against American Ground under way, The Atlantic did not retreat into a hostile posture but called its readers’ attention to the Living History Project’s compendium (which was posted on the internet) and published angry and critical letters, along with some admiring ones. With an eye on the specific points raised in the various accusatory documents, it also undertook an extensive review of the earlier fact-checking.

I was very sure about the essence of what I had written. But despite the enormous effort that had gone into getting the details right, it was not unlikely that factual errors had slipped in. American Ground is a tight book, but a long and complicated piece of reporting. The publication of the paperback edition has offered the opportunity to make a few corrections. For example, the office into which Peter Rinaldi and Frank Lombardi escaped after the 1993 bombing was not associated with Brown & Root, as I had written, but rather with what was then the independent law firm of Brown & Wood. But the really striking result of the fact-checking review was that on item after item, the accusations proved to be incorrect.

As might be expected, there were gray areas. The emotional state of the American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong was described one way in initial press accounts and another way in some later ones; tapes of Ong’s phone call have not been made public. In the paperback edition, I have omitted any reference to her emotional state. Often the discrepancies involved not just sources and perceptions, but time frames. I was accused, for example, of underestimating the size of the Fire Department. Well, the Fire Department when? We stuck with the obviously approximate number (14,000) that the department itself had given to us as the most relevant count for the period in question.

Time and again there were fundamental misunderstandings by the book’s critics, either of the site or of the text. In a passage about Mike Burton’s difficulty in ceding power as the work matured, I had written that “by the spring” the construction company Bovis had taken over day-to-day management of the job. The critics countered with a January 1 date, confusing the moment when Bovis became the sole “prime” contractor (initially a paperwork and billing rearrangement) with the much slower process of gaining significant operational control.

One of the peripheral points of contention by the Living History Project was that there had never been, as I had written, an attempt (presumably by workers with a cutting torch and heavy tools) to break into a huge Bank of Nova Scotia vault containing gold and silver, underground in the old H&M Railroad station at the site. I knew that the bank had denied an attempted theft at the time, even as the bullion was being urgently transferred to another location; police thought otherwise, and said so to the press. Now in the Living History Project document, a Port Authority police lieutenant was cited as saying that there had been no sign of an attempted break-in. Later, to the press, he wondered why no one had spoken to him. I was in the vault several times, and heard about a break-in attempt firsthand from the police and others standing guard there, some of them with shotguns. I was also told about it by an independent engineer who had a supervisory role in helping with the removal of the bullion, and by city and Port Authority officials who were directly involved. Contemporary newspaper reports in The New York Times and elsewhere refer to an attempted break-in. In the end there seemed to be no good reason to change the text.

As noted, these criticisms and more were posted by the Living History Project on the internet, and some were offered up at the public demonstrations and to the press. I responded repeatedly to the more important points, but tried to avoid sinking into the swamp of confused allegations and misinterpretations, many of them based on erroneous and perhaps naive assumptions. Some of American Ground’s critics seemed to be unacquainted with the concept of “spin,” or with the notion that people in nominal positions of authority might not know what was actually transpiring on the ground. In the free-for-all of the pile, the titular authorities often didn’t even know that they didn’t know. In such circumstances, there were frequent discrepancies between official reports and reality.

One genuine error that did emerge pertained to the early dispute between Port Authority police officers and firemen over whether to free a dead Port Authority policeman’s body by expeditiously amputating his leg. Though the book’s description supports the firemen’s view that amputation was the right thing to do, I wrote, “The police pointed out—correctly—that no dead fireman would have had his leg cut off.” Information received later suggested that there were cases I was unaware of in which firemen’s bodies had indeed been freed through amputation. As a result, in the paperback edition the sentence now reads, “The police maintained that no dead fireman …” The rest of the passage is unchanged, however. The Port Authority police officers were indeed angry because they believed that the firemen were interested only in searching for their own. The officers’ view was too crude to be fair, and I described it as such. But there is no doubt that for an astonishingly long time (months), the various categories of the dead were treated with different levels of ceremony and respect. The denial of this pattern was among the more audacious criticisms of American Ground. The differential treatment of the dead constituted one of the most glaring realities of the Trade Center site, and it exacerbated the tribal resentments that occasionally erupted into fights.

I wrote about looting at the site in a few passages. I was told about it first by policemen on the pile soon after I arrived. The looting started before the South Tower fell, as I wrote, “with the innocuous filching of cigarettes and soda pop,” and it rapidly spread and became more ambitious in the hours and weeks afterward. It involved firemen as well as other groups at the site. This was an open secret on the pile, well known to people there, as well as to more distant police and city officials, and to some reporters. After the campaign against American Ground began, a number of eyewitnesses came forward (including police officers, city officials, construction workers, and reporters) and privately offered me their moral support. A few went further and offered, if need be, though tentatively and with trepidation, to go public in the book’s defense with personal accounts of the acts that they had seen. I thanked them, but because I still hoped that the book would not become the carrying horse for this particular topic, I turned them down.

I included what little I wrote about looting because the looting was pervasive, and it affected working relations on the pile. To have glossed over it would have been dishonest, and would have required me to omit descriptions of some of the most significant social challenges that faced the project. It’s obvious that only a small number of people engaged in the looting. But their actions greatly exacerbated the frictions on the pile, and for that reason became a necessary part of the story. As for the specific misdeeds, I never felt they were pertinent to my subject. In the story of the deconstruction it was the tribal perceptions of the misdeeds that counted, whether right or wrong. But that point was lost in the din of controversy. In tabloid reduction, American Ground became simply “the book that accuses the firemen of looting.”

The most controversial passage turned out to be the description of an argument that broke out on the pile when jeans from a retail store were found in a fire truck that had been crushed and buried under the pile. One of the book’s critics, a professional writer independent of the Living History Project but with ties to firefighters, put considerable effort into reconstructing that fire truck’s final moments on September 11, to make the case that jeans from a retail store (apparently the brand was Structure, not Gap, as I had been told) had essentially become enmeshed with the truck as it was hammered down through shopping arcades rather than having been placed in the truck before it was buried. A reconstruction of the truck’s fate had no bearing, however, on the story I was telling in American Ground. That story was strictly related to the emotional and divisive social dynamics of a day in late fall, three months after the towers came down. It was not an account of whatever happened or did not happen on September 11, and it was certainly not intended as an exposé of the last moments of the fire truck’s crew. Nor was it the report of a rumor: Detailed descriptions of the argument, and the immediate context in which it took place, were provided to me shortly afterward by multiple independent eyewitnesses. These were people well known to me, who for months had proved to be reliable and steady sources, and who held important jobs on the pile. The reactions of the construction workers seemed to me to be unnecessarily provocative—as my description sought to make clear. But the argument over the jeans did not come out of nowhere. It occurred against the background of differential treatment of the dead, as well as of extensive looting in which firemen were known to have been involved. By placing the episode after these subjects had been explored, casting it in the past tense, and deliberately suppressing the identities of those involved, I tried to keep narrative attention focused on what mattered: a growing threat to the social order on the pile, which seemed to me to be a more important subject than looting, and certainly more pertinent to the unbuilding. I made that point explicitly a few sentences later: “The site would never stand united, as sloganeers said it should.”

That said, it is clear that the passage has been misinterpreted by some of the public, including people beyond the book’s critics, as an accusation. One reason is that in the course of the campaign against the book, pieces of the episode were frequently torn from context and acquired a life of their own as printed snippets and disembodied sound bites. But misinterpretation may also be due to my unintentionally ambiguous choice of wording. The construction “It was hard to avoid the conclusion that … while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely” can be read as my own assessment, rather than, as was intended, the explanation of an assessment by others who were preconditioned to construe it that way. Therefore in the paperback edition I have added at the start of the sentence the phrase “In their eyes” to clarify my meaning.

The World Trade Center site was an extremely complex place, loaded with emotion and political symbolism, full of action and confusion, with many interpretations possible. Having restricted my view to the engineering and deconstruction process, I wrote about it with complete candor, expressing my opinions openly, as I always do. I realized that the approach I took might offend a certain number of people who subscribed to different views—including the essentially two-dimensional one that has received so much publicity, and depicts the Trade Center project in maudlin and “heroic” terms. I do not perceive the project that way—and did not when I was there. More impressive, I felt, was another sort of American greatness that emerged at the site—a complex weave that included diverse acts and motivations, and also a culture of improvisational genius that seemed enormously encouraging about the future. There was no need to engage in propaganda. I wrote about the Trade Center with the assumption that candid descriptions would serve the subject best.

The Backlash Against Data Centers

2026-09-05T10:24:35-04:00

On a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic, the Atlantic staff writer Josh Tyrangiel joined for a discussion about the future of AI and what, if anything, the U.S. government plans to do to address the rapid development of the technology.

Across the country, massive data centers are being built, and they’re “landing themselves without a whole lot of conversation” in American towns, Tyrangiel said last night. “It’s natural that all the fears about AI—about it taking your jobs, about it rendering human beings obsolete, about the values it changes—all are focused on” these data centers, he argued. “And politicians have been incredibly late to wake up to the anger around AI.”

“I don’t think people believe that they are going to partake in the wealth that comes from data centers in their community,” Tyrangiel continued. “Every community is going to make different choices, but what I’m sensing is that, particularly from Trump, the politics are out of line with where people are.”

Watch Tyrangiel’s full conversation with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, here.

How Did Trump’s Trade Fight With Canada Go So Sideways?

2026-08-29T15:36:00-04:00

In 1999, the creators of South Park were nominated for an Academy Award for their song “Blame Canada.” “South Park, of course, is caustic and anarchic satire. But today, somehow, it’s become real,” the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, said last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic.

What started as a fight over trade has gone dangerously, ridiculously sideways. Why does President Trump loathe Canada but respect North Korea? What might NATO members be thinking about Trump’s treatment of his supposed allies?

Joining Goldberg to discuss these questions and more: Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch, Idrees Kahloon of The Atlantic, Ashley Parker of The Atlantic, and Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg News.

Watch the full episode here.

The President’s Focus

2026-08-22T09:40:43-04:00

The national debt reached $40 trillion this week, but the president’s attention seemed directed elsewhere. Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss Donald Trump’s recent focuses, and more.

At a rally for Darline Graham in South Carolina last night, Trump opened the event and spoke about the White House ballroom, devoting several minutes to his project. “Not a day really goes by that he doesn’t talk about the ballroom or the Reflecting Pool or the Kennedy Center or the gold statues,” Matt Viser, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued last night. “I just don’t know that it resonates as deeply with voters across the country.”

Although residents in Washington, D.C., are watching changes to their city unfold, it’s not one of the “pocketbook issues that I think the midterms are probably going to be about,” Viser added.

Joining the guest moderator Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama to discuss this and more: Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; Mary Louise Kelly, the host of All Things Considered on NPR; Michelle Price, a White House reporter at the Associated Press; Viser.

Watch the full episode here.

Iran’s Long Shadow

2026-08-15T10:25:00-04:00

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said that the U.S. could maintain a blockade of Iran “indefinitely.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the political consequences of the continued conflict, and more.

The president has made “a total miscalculation” with Iran, Elisabeth Bumiller, a writer at large at The New York Times, argued last night. What has unfolded since the conflict began reflects “the reason that previous presidents did not do what Donald Trump did, because of the inevitable consequences” of “igniting a regional war in the Middle East and closing the Strait of Hormuz.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Bumiller; Adam Harris, the host of Radio Atlantic; Dan Lamothe, a national-security reporter at The Washington Post; Liz Landers, a White House correspondent at PBS News Hour.

Watch the full episode here.

How Trump’s Priorities May Shape the Midterms

2026-08-08T10:22:10-04:00

President Trump is facing low approval ratings, a weakening economy, and a prolonged conflict in Iran, but he seems focused on the Reflecting Pool and renovating the White House. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how this may impact the GOP in the midterms, and more.

Of all the challenges and setbacks for the president to address, he seems particularly focused on the U.S. courts that are “coming out against the ballroom construction,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times, said last night. “We’re talking about a break between the voters that Republicans are looking to build support with and the president and his attention and his priorities.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Kanno-Youngs; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Fauci’s Return to Capitol Hill

2026-08-01T10:10:48-04:00

Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill this week, where he faced attacks from Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss his response, and more.

“The hearing was such a perfect encapsulation of Washington at this moment, with a lot of raised voices and a lot of yelling and virtually no new information,” Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, said last night. “With a more serious government we would have gotten closer to answers through that hearing.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Hayes; Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

The Mounting Cost of War

2026-07-25T10:56:58-04:00

President Trump weighs escalation of the war with Iran as criticism of the conflict grows. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss some of the frustration from Republican lawmakers, voters, and conservative media.

Among Republicans in Congress, discontent is growing over “a lack of answers from this administration on what the objective is, what the timeline is, what the ramifications are, and what the end game actually is” in Iran, Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck, said last night. “When members of Congress are asked to fund billions and billions of dollars, when their constituents are the ones being put on the line for this, patience obviously wears quite thin.”

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Caldwell; Adam Harris, a host of Radio Atlantic; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

What Trump’s Speech Could Mean For Future Elections

2026-07-18T09:50:56-04:00

President Trump’s obsession with alleged election corruption featured heavily in his latest speech to the nation. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the president’s remarks, and more.

During his address, Trump claimed that American elections are in danger of being influenced by forces abroad—but the president has yet to produce any evidence supporting this, Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. What’s more, the United States has a “series of institutions that have been created going back decades, actually, that are designed to prevent foreign interference and other interference,” she continued. But “the Trump administration has pretty systematically dismantled them.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Applebaum; Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for MS NOW; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Carl Hulse, a chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

Can Democrats Salvage Their Chances in Maine?

2026-07-11T10:38:52-04:00

After Graham Platner officially withdrew from the Maine Senate race this week, Democrats are now in the process of naming his replacement. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss how the party is trying to salvage their chances in the state, and more.

Democrats have been looking to win races in states such as Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Alaska in the hopes of flipping at least four seats in the Senate during the upcoming midterm elections, Adam Harris, host of Radio Atlantic, explained last night. But the party’s scrambling over Platner suggests that Democrats may have learned the “wrong lesson from 2020 and 2024,” he argues. They were “looking for the prototypical candidate who can win back the isolated white male voters who they may have thought they lost to President Trump.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Harris.

Watch the full episode here.

What Trump’s Efforts to Change D.C. Reveal

2026-06-27T10:45:12-04:00

Donald Trump’s efforts to change the architecture of Washington, D.C. have included projects such as repainting the Reflecting Pool, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, and proposing the construction of a triumphal arch. Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what this may reveal about the president’s governing style, and more.

Trump’s ongoing discussions about these projects often focus on interior design and his desire to rebuild structures in his own vision. Trump is “a hobbyist who happens to be president,” Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued last night. “He’s getting to do his hobby with public taxpayer dollars to whatever extent he wants.”

The president “conflates national greatness with what he can do, and that’s part of his identity; it’s part of his politic,” Scherer said. D.C. will see “project after project, because it really is the thing that captures his imagination.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, a chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Scherer; Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

What Comes Next for Iran

2026-06-20T11:31:25-04:00

Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the signing of an agreement between the United States and Iran, and what Donald Trump’s deal with the regime may mean for other countries.

“The international community is looking at what happened not only in Iran but in Ukraine, and seeing that this idea of large powers coming in and definitively defeating other weaker nations is not necessarily the case anymore,” Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic argued last night.

What this may mean going forward is that militaries across the world, including the U.S., will look at their technological, drone, and AI capabilities to “figure out what advances they need to make given this rapid moving and changing battlefield dynamic,” she said.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Jonathan Karl, a chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Karim Sadjadpour, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times; and Youssef.

Watch the full episode here.

American Democracy, 250 Years Later

2026-06-13T13:09:10-04:00

Last night, panelists joined a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss the state of democracy 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, and the successes and challenges of the American experiment.

Compared with the nation founded 250 years ago, the United States of today appears to be in an “epistemological crisis,” Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued.“You have people who no longer share a lived reality, or no longer operate from a common baseline of fact and information.” What’s so striking, Alberta continued, is how people have “reached the conclusion that no one is looking out for them, that no one has their best interest in mind, that no one can be trusted.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, in this discussion about the nation’s 250th anniversary: Alberta; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Idrees Kahloon a staff writer at The Atlantic; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Ashley Parker a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode, “America: The Next 250,” here.

The Republicans Defying Trump

2026-06-06T11:21:10-04:00

President Trump could be facing Republican pushback from soon-to-be former senators. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the group known as the YOLO caucus, and more.

Breaks between the GOP and the president could have a particular effect on the ongoing Iran war, Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. “The idea that we’re starting to see fissures within [Trump’s] own party, I think, potentially gives Iran some leverage in terms of pushing for a deal that is more favorable to them,” she argued. “We’ve seen the president really toggle between trying to end this war as quickly as possible and also get some wide- reaching, headline-grabbing outcome out of it.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Annie Linskey, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal; Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Youssef.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Approach to Global Leadership

2026-05-30T10:58:17-04:00

On a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic, David Ignatius, a foreign-affairs columnist at The Washington Post, joined the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss the state of negotiations with Iran, what the future could hold for the war between Russia and Ukraine, and how Trump may view the U.S.’s relationship with Cuba.

A fear is spreading that America’s commitment to upholding the promises that underlie NATO and other global alliances is faltering, Ignatius argued last night. “The NATO umbrella is getting pretty tattered, and I don’t think Americans appreciate just how dangerous that is,” he said. “Other countries will go their own way.”

Watch the full episode here.

Hegseth’s Leadership of the U.S. Military

2026-05-23T11:20:48-04:00

Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to examine Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s role and influence in the Trump administration, and what his leadership may reveal about how he’s trying to reshape the U.S. military.

Over time, there has been “a tradition where defense secretaries attempt to minimize their overtly partisan behavior,” Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. “Because they are the safeguards of America’s sons and daughters, they try to, in the name of national security, act more as a nonpartisan actor.” But Hegseth, she argued, “has totally discarded that tradition, and we’re seeing him lean into his role as a partisan fighter.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Helene Cooper, a national-security correspondent at The New York Times; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Ryan; Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Visit to China

2026-05-16T11:59:37-04:00

Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping for a high-stakes summit in Beijing this week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss potential takeaways from the visit, and more.

“There was an enormous amount of trepidation looking in advance of the summit on the part of America’s allies,” Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker argued last night. “What Donald Trump has made very clear is that no matter what’s written on paper, no matter what laws are passed by Congress, there’s no permanent commitments or alliances, as far as he’s concerned.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Glasser; Mark Mazzetti, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times; Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Struggle to Find an Off-Ramp From the Iran War

2026-05-09T10:48:00-04:00

Is the United States still at war with Iran? If the war is over, who won and who actually controls the Strait of Hormuz now? Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss these questions and whether Trump has an exit strategy from the fighting he initiated.

As the conflict enters its third month, Washington and Tehran are in a standoff over the terms that would enable peace talks to begin. As President Trump ramps up pressure on Iran to accept his conditions, the prolonged crisis in the Strait of Hormuz continues to threaten the global economy.

U.S. forces struck Iranian targets Thursday after two U.S. destroyers were attacked in the strait, but Trump called this response a “love tap” and said that the exchange of fire did not represent a break in the cease-fire. The war remains in a state of “suspended animation,” Jeffrey Goldberg, moderator and editor in chief of The Atlantic, said last night.

Meanwhile, Trump has grown “bored” with the war, an outside adviser told the Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Lemire. But Iran appears comfortable with keeping the conflict going, possibly for many more months, Lemire has reported. He noted last night that Iran has more control over the strait now than it did at the start of the conflict.

Joining Goldberg to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Lemire; Amna Nawaz, a co-anchor at PBS News Hour; and Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

How the Iran War May Play a Role in the Midterms

2026-05-02T13:09:26-04:00

Fallout from the war in Iran may play a role in the midterm elections, particularly when it comes to the economy. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss this, and more.

“People have been feeling glum about the economy for a really long time,” Idrees Kahloon, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued last night. But the conditions created by the war in Iran, such as the effects on the global oil market, he added, are “not the set of economic priorities you want to be sending before you go to the midterms.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Kahloon; Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

How Trump Voters Are Reacting to the Economy

2026-04-25T11:07:09-04:00

President Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the economy seems to be dropping, according to a recent poll from The New York Times. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to examine how voters’ perception of the president may be shifting, and more.

Amid rising costs, some Trump voters have begun cutting back on spending, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night, referencing the voters she has spoken with while reporting in Arizona. “It is the sacrifices that they are having to make within their homes and within their own households to be able to afford this environment,” she added. To these voters, “psychologically, they feel like they are in a really bad spot.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Annie Linskey, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal; Seung Min Kim, a White House reporter at the Associated Press; Tyler Pager, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Sanchez.

Watch the full episode here.

The President and the Pope

2026-04-18T11:19:33-04:00

Editor’s Note: Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss growing opposition to President Trump’s attacks on Iran and what winning a war with unclear objectives could like.

Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV earlier this week for his comments about the war in Iran. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the president’s remarks, and what they may signal about Trump’s messaging on the conflict.

Pope Leo has become more vocal about his concerns over what’s happening in Iran, Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained last night. But in response to Trump’s backlash, Leo has “talked in even more aggressive terms … about how military leaders should not use religion to justify their actions,” Scherer said.

“Catholic voters are a real swing group in this country,” Scherer continued—and yet, “Trump has not backed down; he says he won’t apologize.” The president, Scherer argued, is not “operating from a position of strength.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Jonathan Lemire, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW; and Scherer.

Watch the full episode here.

The Iran War Is Putting Pressure on Europe

2026-04-11T11:00:23-04:00

President Trump’s war in Iran is putting economic pressure on many European countries. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the effects of the conflict on America’s allies, and more.

“It’s a very strange moment because, on the one hand, actually, U.S. and NATO allies are cooperating an enormous amount,”Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night, referencing the logistical and intelligence support that some European countries have provided the United States since Trump launched the war in Iran. The president, however, is also “looking for scapegoats, and he’s landed on Europeans,” Applebaum added.

Throughout Trump’s second term, America’s European allies have “been insulted, they’ve been tariffed, they’ve been attacked,” Applebaum argued. “And there does come a moment when people do start to say, What are we getting out of this relationship?”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Applebaum; Gillian Tett, a columnist at the Financial Times; Karim Sadjadpour, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

What Trump’s Address to the Nation Revealed

2026-04-04T10:11:14-04:00

Earlier this week, Donald Trump delivered his first national address since the war with Iran began more than a month ago. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the president’s remarks, and more.

“It’s always better for a president in a time of war to go to the public and explain what he’s trying to do, to explain the goals, to explain why it’s worth American treasure and lives,” Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times said last night. But Trump’s address on Wednesday “did not feel like a speech a month into the war saying where we’re going to go from here, and I think it left a lot of people confused.”

Joining guest moderator Vivan Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this, and more: Idrees Ali, a national-security correspondent at Reuters; Baker; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Michelle Price, a White House reporter at the Associated Press.

Watch the full episode here.

Trump’s Mixed Messages About Iran

2026-03-28T12:38:39-04:00

President Trump continues to offer different answers to what victory in Iran may look like. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss this, and more.

“In a tactical sense, there’s no question that overwhelming military power is brought to bear and Iran is being degraded,” David Ignatius, a foreign-affairs columnist at The Washington Post, said last night. But “the more I watch this process of a weak enemy being pounded and pounded, I’m reminded of the Gaza war.” After two years of fighting, “Hamas still controls most of the Palestinians in Gaza,” Ignatius argued. “Even with all that power, Israel wasn’t able to win—and I think that’s what we’re all worrying about.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Ignatius; and Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.