THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Jason Boeshore, a grain-elevator manager on the eastern plains of Montana, fired off a rocket this month to the private Signal chat he shares with the 23 other members of the state Democratic Party executive board. He demanded that leaders make clear in newspapers across the state that the Democratic Party would support only Democratic candidates in the fall elections. The response was swift and not to his liking. Shannon O’Brien, the chair of the party, wrote that her staff, not the board, would set the messaging strategy. Then she addressed the unspoken concerns at the heart of Boeshore’s request. “Listen if ANY of you EVER find yourselves questioning my intentions, please call me,” O’Brien wrote. “I will continue to move forward to get Democrats elected. There’s no hidden agenda.”The problem for O’Brien is the belief among Boeshore and many other party stalwarts in Montana that exactly such a hidden agenda exists, pitting national, big-money Democrats—and maybe even some state party leaders—against the state Democratic apparatus. This internecine feud, full of rumors, speculation, and skepticism over the role of outsiders in state races, threatens to spoil one of the last best places for Democrats to pull a Senate majority from a difficult midterm map.At issue is Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who is running as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Steve Daines. Bodnar, 47, is young, moderate, a veteran, a Rhodes Scholar, and all in all the sort of person Montanans might elect in a year when Republicans are facing the prospect of steep losses amid President Trump’s declining popularity. Democratic mega-donors such as one of LinkedIn co-founders, Reid Hoffman; the cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz; and the Microsoft heir Rory Gates are all supporting Bodnar’s campaign, hoping he can yank the seat away from the GOP. Because Bodnar is running as an independent, it means part of his campaign in Montana is based on criticizing Democrats whose voters he needs to support him.Even the candidates running for the Democratic nomination have been drawn into the drama. They, too, are criticizing their own party leaders just weeks before the June 2 primary and seeking to make sure that party bigwigs don’t try to clear a path for Bodnar to face the GOP nominee in November.“There is clearly manipulation trying to happen there,” Alani Bankhead, a former Air Force intelligence officer and Senate hopeful… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Even in the best of times, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an awkward and ethically fraught affair. Journalists spend the evening partying with the president and administration officials whom they’re supposed to cover rigorously and skeptically. I’ve been to the dinner several times over the years. It’s typically crowded and a little chaotic, and the ratio of non-journalists to journalists is about 10 to 1. The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.These aren’t the best of times for White House correspondents or, for that matter, the First Amendment. And this year’s gala figures to be even more awkward and embarrassing than usual.After declining all invitations to the event throughout his years in office, President Trump informed the White House Correspondents’ Association last month that he would be attending this year’s dinner. His surprising decision sets up a bizarre dynamic: On Saturday night, the president will break bread with the same people he’s spent a decade calling “fake” and “enemies of the people.”[Andrew Ferguson: A republic too fractured to be funny]Trump easily qualifies as the most anti-press president in the dinner’s 105-year history. In just the past 15 months, he has sued news organizations, threatened to jail journalists, and repeatedly suggested taking broadcast licenses away from TV networks that have reported stories he didn’t like. His administration has defunded NPR and PBS, hobbled Voice of America, and driven mainstream journalists out of the Pentagon. A few weeks after Trump assumed office last year, his administration took control of the White House press pool, enabling the president to dictate who covers him when he’s inside the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or at Mar-a-Lago. The WHCA, which had selected pool members for decades, objected to being pushed aside. The White House ignored its protests.This state of affairs raises two questions: What explains Trump’s change of heart about attending the dinner? And why was he invited in the first place?The second question is the easier one to answer. The WHCA has always invited the president to its annual dinner; Calvin Coolidge became the first chief executive to show up in 1924. Trump has accordingly been invited every year that he’s been president, including last year, after he commandeered the press pool. Trump’s motives for accepting the invitation, however, are harder to parse. During his… [TheTopNews] Read More.

At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.[Read: The limits of the Democrats’ big tent]The Pod Save America appearance offers a case in point. While discussing his personal opposition to Israel’s founding, Piker marshals an unexpected ally: Albert Einstein. “My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism,” he tells the co-host Jon Favreau. The Jewish physicist, Piker said, “was actually asked to be the first president of Israel.” But Einstein, in Piker’s account, assailed the Israeli project from the start: He saw “the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in” before “the IDF existed, before Israel existed,” and “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.”Most listeners probably took little notice of this historical riff. Favreau does not remark on it. But for me, it was a flashing-neon sign. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages on two continents. And just about every bit of Piker’s potted portrayal is either misleading or false.Far from an opponent of the Zionist endeavor, Einstein assisted it for decades. In 1921, he raised money across America for the Hebrew University alongside Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. In 1923, he delivered a guest lecture at the school’s campus… [TheTopNews] Read More.

On a chilly Saturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over. He attached a just-published Washington Post article reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel was seeking to release files relating to a decade-old investigation into Swalwell that had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. If true, the Post story presented a publicity godsend to Swalwell’s campaign, further elevating his status as a nemesis of the vindictive president.The family-guy tableau of the Little League game felt consistent with the wholesome image that the campaign had been straining to project of late, for reasons that would become clear soon enough. Our interview occurred on the same weekend that Swalwell released a video of him and Brittany holding hands on a boardwalk stroll, while she called him a “really great dad” and a “really good husband.”As we sat together in the bleachers, Swalwell introduced me to Brittany, dropped the names of his better-known endorsers, and referred to Nancy Pelosi as his “work mom.” He also mentioned Adam Schiff, his former House colleague, whose trajectory into statewide office Swalwell had watched closely. Like Schiff, Swalwell had become a ubiquitous antagonist of Donald Trump—about as good of a credential as any for leading the de facto capital of Blue America.“I am the only candidate whose name the president knows,” Swalwell told me.[Read: Donald Trump’s gift to Adam Schiff]A few weeks later, a lot more people know Eric Swalwell’s name, which has now been stained immeasurably. He is leaving Congress; his campaign is over, probably his political career too; and the California governor’s race is even messier than the colossal fiasco it had been before.Swalwell’s collapse has been sudden and swift, if not surprising. Recurrent talk of bad behavior toward women had trailed him around Washington for years, and proliferated as he approached front-runner status. Late last week, the rumors detonated: Multiple women, one of them a former staffer, accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, unwanted advances, and explicit Snapchat messages. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in… [TheTopNews] Read More.