Seven hours and 37 minutes. That’s the now-infamous length of time for which there are no records of Donald Trump’s phone calls on the day of the Capitol riot in 2021. As the House January 6 committee continues to investigate the events of that day (the group interviewed Ivanka Trump earlier this week), the former president is busy crafting his own story about his time in the White House. Two of our writers look at the former POTUS’s at-times tenuous relationship with history itself.
- Trump has tried to influence the people chronicling his presidency. Last summer, the historian Julian E. Zelizer found himself on a Zoom call with the former president, who was there to defend his term as a “tremendous, tremendous success.”
- But he won’t be able to just erase history. The professor Tim Naftali, who once was the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, argues that the seven-hour gap in records on January 6 may be more easily recovered than the missing minutes from the Nixon White House tapes.
- Meanwhile, mini-Trumps are proliferating around the country. When it comes to the midterms this fall, “Trump may not be on the ticket, but a plethora of Trumps are,” Molly Jong-Fast writes.
The news in three sentences:
(1) The Senate officially confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.
(2) Russia was suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council following reports of atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine.
(3) Speaker Nancy Pelosi tested positive for COVID amid a coronavirus outbreak among Washington elites.
Latest dispatches:
Marilyn Vann is a Black woman descended from people enslaved by the Cherokee Nation. More than 150 years after emancipation, her fight for Cherokee Nation citizenship continues, our hosts report on the latest episode of The Experiment.
Tonight’s Atlantic-approved activity:
Try talking less and listening more when someone disagrees with you. Our happiness columnist Arthur C. Brooks offers this and other tips for navigating arguments with someone who has different values.
A break from the news:
Have Americans been mercilessly squashing a creepy bug for no reason?
Thanks for reading. This email was written by Caroline Mimbs Nyce.
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