THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

If you’re a Democrat looking for razzle-dazzle in your politicians, Representative Jake Auchincloss might disappoint you. During an October swing through South Carolina, Auchincloss told a group of military veterans, “I think we have to make politics boring again,” drawing more nods and chuckles than whoops of approval.At times the 38-year-old Auchincloss, young and ambitious though he is, seems to embody the change that he seeks in the world. Spend enough time with him, as I did over the past several months, and you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the evils of “cost disease” (and why inflation is worst in industries such as health care and education), the travails of family-owned pharmacies, and the importance of tutoring in public schools. You’ll be bombarded by an impressive and occasionally overwhelming array of statistics and factoids. (Did you know that Auchincloss’s highly engaged constituents in Massachusetts send him three times as much mail as in the average congressional district? I do now.) You might even start talking like you received a business degree from MIT, where taxes are called levies and everything is either “upstream” of this or “downstream” of that.Most of all, you will discover that Auchincloss has plenty of serious ideas about how the Democratic Party can earn back the trust of voters and use government to improve the lives of Americans. What he does not have right now is an obvious place to go with all of them. “The liberals need a new lion,” Auchincloss told me.Lest we get ahead of ourselves: Auchincloss will not be that lion—at least not yet. He is not running for president; he’s not even all that popular within his own caucus, having irritated colleagues with his willingness to criticize his party. But Auchincloss, who was registered as a Republican not that long ago, wants to have a say in who gets the Democratic presidential nomination and the platform that he or she campaigns on. To that end, he and the group he chairs, Majority Democrats, have summoned the many party leaders who are eyeing White House bids to Denver on Thursday for a postelection conference appropriately titled What’s Next.Auchincloss has found plenty to criticize in a party that lost two elections to Donald Trump, and even as it became clear that Democrats would do well last week, he did not view the elections as evidence that the party had… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Joel Webbon has a six-year plan to usher in the first Christian-nationalist president, and he’s sticking to it. Although some on the far right were shaken by last week’s rout of Republicans at the polls, seeing it as a setback for their own agenda, Webbon told me last week that he sees it as validation. Conveniently enough, the first phase of Webbon’s plan required that Republicans lose the midterms, getting rejected by voters after starting a wildly unpopular war that exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis.That defeat was necessary to clear the way for the rest of his plan, which he is expected to promote at a three-day conference outside Dallas this week. The gathering, hosted by Webbon’s company, NXR Studios, has been dubbed “Christ Is King: America After Trump.”Webbon is not bashful about his views. He is a Christian nationalist, a pastor, and a podcaster. The difference between the two parties, he told me, is that “you have gay Jews and war Jews.” Republicans are an “openly racist, closeted-gay political party.” Democrats are an “openly gay, closeted-racist political party.” “Either way,” Webbon added, “the winner is always world Jewry.” Despite his embrace of one of the most persistent anti-Jewish tropes, he claimed not to be anti-Semitic, and magnanimously offered this concession: So long as Jews don’t get in the way of white Christians, they will, in some future racial dispensation, be permitted to hold positions of power. Although Webbon is preoccupied with Jews, he has also expressed floridly offensive views about other groups. He has argued that women who have lied about sexual-assault allegations should be publicly executed and that “the greatest moment in history for any brown or Black country is the moment that the white man’s ships arrive on your shore.”Despite, or because of, his views, a roster of prominent Donald Trump–era figures has signed up to speak at the conference, including the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Tucker’s even more race-obsessed brother, Buckley Carlson. The event’s title reflects a shift on the far right in recent months, as it abandons Trump and searches for a new champion. Jones, the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, the conservative streamer Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson have already broken with the president over his decision to go to war in Iran. (Fuentes urged his followers to support Democrats in the midterms.) After the election, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called Trump “yesterday’s news”… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Susie Wiles should have been untouchable. She’d been with President Trump since his first bid for the White House. She was one of the few people who’d stuck around after the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, when just about everyone else thought his political career was over. And as his chief of staff for the past two years, she was a stabilizing force in an administration that sorely needed one. But Wiles—whom Trump jettisoned last week after Republicans’ devastating midterm losses—likely had at least one thing working against her: that second X chromosome.Since returning to the White House, Trump has refrained from the firing sprees of his first term, but he has shown a remarkable willingness to discard his female senior administration officials when they displease him. With the abrupt elevation of Stephen Miller to chief of staff last Friday, Wiles joined that most unenviable troop—The Scapegals.Including Wiles, Trump has fired or pushed out at least half a dozen top women this term, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. (Zacharia announced the departure of Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle from the White House podium—the only news she would share, it turned out—a mere three days before she, too, was summarily dismissed.) Other senior women have also left—Karoline Leavitt, who preceded Zacharia as press secretary, and Harmeet Dhillon, who ran the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, among others—albeit on their own terms. Most of the senior women who were forced out have since been replaced by men.When charges of misogyny pop up against Trump, as they have with regularity in both of his terms, his defenders are quick to claim that he is an equal-opportunity offender who is just as likely to attack, say, a white male journalist as he is a female reporter of color. But this time, counterexamples are hard to find. One of the few senior men to have been jettisoned is Mike Waltz, Trump’s first national security adviser, who was binned after less than four months, following his Signalgate mishap. (He ended up with a cushy consolation prize: ambassador to the United Nations.)A number of the discarded women had, shall we say, less than illustrious records. Zacharia—who failed the California bar yet repeatedly referred to herself as a lawyer—was fired after five… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Eight years ago, Democrats harnessed popular anger at Donald Trump to take control of the House. Promising to curb the administration’s excesses, they issued a pile of subpoenas and held Cabinet members in contempt. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan famously vowed to “impeach the motherfucker.” They tried that, twice. In the end, many congressional Democrats concluded, the exercise only hardened partisan allegiances and handed Trump a foil to run against in 2020 and again in 2024.Democrats think this time will be different. It’s not just that their margin in last week’s midterms was bigger, but that economic discontent lets them tie their investigations to their promise to address the cost of living. Pursuing the Trump family for self-dealing, they intend to argue, serves a higher aim—rectifying a political system rigged toward the rich. “One thing that’s important for people to recognize is that accountability and taking on corruption will make the lives of American families more affordable,” Representative Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, told me. “It will stop the Trumps from stealing from you and giving to themselves.”Corruption and the cost of living topped the list of concerns for those who gave Democrats their largest popular-vote margin in the House since 1976, when price increases and government malfeasance, exemplified by the Watergate scandal, also infuriated voters. Over the past two years, Republicans have largely ceded their legislative authority to Trump while adopting a see-no-evil approach to allegations of grift and bribery: the first family accumulating billions in crypto wealth, the president pardoning politically connected convicts, the government awarding contracts to firms funding his pet projects. On the campaign trail, Democrats heaped attention on this conduct. Controlling the Oversight Committee and other key bodies means they can try to do something about it. They can demand information and testimony from government officials as well as from private citizens, hold hearings, and make criminal referrals to the Justice Department.But a lot stands in their way, including divisions within the party over the centrality of accountability to the Democratic agenda. The biggest obstacle is the term-limited, lame-duck president to whom the Supreme Court has granted executive authority and criminal immunity that dissenting justices found more suited to a king. Enforcing subpoenas, in particular, will be difficult as long as the Justice Department remains in Republican hands. Attorney General Todd Blanche affirmed over the weekend on CNN that DOJ plans… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Stephen Miller spent his first weekend as White House chief of staff on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, huddling with President Trump and Natalie Harp, his executive assistant, about how to approach the next two years with the House and Senate under Democratic control. Katie Miller—the podcaster, political consultant, and wife of Stephen—spent the weekend in the Washington area, rearranging her own life. “I make every decision based on what’s best for my children and our family,” she wrote yesterday on X, before announcing that she had decided to wind down her podcast.But that was not all that was changing. For months, Stephen Miller has recused himself from matters of policy that involve Katie Miller’s other financial interests at the direction of the White House counsel. That meant that Stephen did not work on issues involving the media company Paramount, where his wife had been seeking a podcast deal, or anything to do with space policy or artificial intelligence, because his wife, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, also worked for SpaceX, the owner of the Grok artificial-intelligence assistant. All of that changed today.Katie Miller severed her employment with SpaceX, sold her stock in the company, and forfeited her right to future equity that had not yet vested under her contract, according to a person familiar with the moves. Over the weekend, she also ended a separate contract with Paramount for a planned podcast deal. As a result, a White House official told me this afternoon, “Stephen Miller is no longer subject to any recusals and may fully participate in all meetings and policy matters.” Katie declined to comment.White House lawyers had previously ruled that Katie Miller’s podcast advertising sponsorships from companies seeking official favor from her husband did not require recusals, because sponsorships carry a different ethical significance than consulting arrangements. Sugar-soda boosters at the American Beverage Association, the utility Southern Company, and the Merchants Payments Coalition, a group pushing for legislation to reduce credit-card swipe fees, had all purchased time on her show. But now even those potential conflicts will not be an issue, after a couple more already-recorded episodes from her podcast are released. “Nothing is more important than raising our four kids,” she wrote. “While I’ve loved the podcast, the time commitment is too great and now is the time to step away.”[Read: A chief of staff who ‘will crack skulls’]The Millers met during the first Trump… [TheTopNews] Read More.