THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

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 Most of the senior women who were forced out have since been replaced by men.When charges of misogyny pop up against Trump, as they have with regularity in both of his terms, his defenders are quick to claim that he is an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.

Last summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it. Using data from the credit-reporting agency Experian, the state scrutinized its list of registered voters, searching for anyone who may have moved, left the state, or died. Tens of thousands of Mississippians had their active registrations shifted to inactive—a crucial step toward purging them from the rolls.On Tuesday, many of those inactive voters showed up at the polls, only to be told that they were not properly registered. Their best option was to fill out an affidavit ballot, a more involved process that increases the likelihood that a vote will not count. Now a Senate seat is on the line, and the Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, leads the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, by just about 2,500 ballots. And voting-rights advocates say that Mississippi, a state with a long history of voter suppression and discrimination, has once again undermined one of its citizens’ most sacred rights.Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way. Watson said in a social-media post that the inconvenience of having to fill out an affidavit ballot was “well worth the election integrity added by having cleaner voter rolls!” A postelection legal battle over the affidavit ballots is intensifying, as lawyers from the campaigns and voting-rights groups argue over how those ballots should be treated. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has called for affidavit ballots to be separated from regular ballots, suggesting that it may attempt to challenge their validity in the days ahead. Colom’s campaign has said there is no legal basis for treating affidavit ballots any differently once they are processed. The back-and-forth could be a precursor to a legal battle in which the courts could ultimately decide whether Colom or Hyde-Smith prevails.The situation is already drawing comparisons to Mississippi’s past efforts to systematically disenfranchise Black voters. In DeSoto County, inactivations surged in recent months, and the number of active voters declined by nearly 10,000 from September to October, according to state data. The county, just south of Memphis, is home to one of Mississippi’s largest concentrations of Black voters. A 2025 review of Experian’s voter-roll-maintenance data by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that supports election administration, found that zip codes… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Eight days after the 2024 election, I honored a presidential tradition by hosting a visit from the president-elect. Jill and I met President Trump and his entourage in the Diplomatic Reception Room, and then I escorted him into the Oval Office for our formal meeting, accompanied only by our chiefs of staff, Jeff Zients and Susie Wiles. He and I sat in chairs near a roaring fire; Jeff and Susie sat on sofas. Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on. It bordered on fawning.“You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.” I think I blinked, too stunned to respond. Then he kept going, as if intoxicated by the curious conversational path he had chosen. “Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together.” He said my performance on job creation had been “extraordinary.” He added that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me. I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand. I wanted to give him a wide-ranging overview of the issues that I thought would dominate his presidency. It was essentially a tour of the world, including Ukraine, NATO, Russia, Gaza and the Middle East, China, the Americas, and Africa. He nodded appreciatively. But I noticed a curious pattern: He focused on the personalities of the leaders, as if we were sharing gossip about people at a dinner party, not discussing issues of global significance. Still, I had a lot to share with him, and our conversation, scheduled for 30 minutes, ran for close to two hours.Despite that meeting, I was worried that the successful policies pursued by my administration would be on the chopping block. All presidents must confront a feeling that their legacy is vulnerable to the pendulum of politics and the whims of their successors. In my case, that feeling was magnified by the dismissive and destructive nature of Donald Trump, who seemed unable to tolerate the idea that someone else’s accomplishments might be worth building on rather than tearing down. This article has been adapted from Joe Biden’s forthcoming book, Promise Me, America. On day one, Trump reversed many of my decisions. I had rejoined the Paris climate accord on my… [TheTopNews] Read More.