THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

By the time Donald Trump was in his senior year at New York Military Academy, he had quit playing football and decided to join the varsity soccer team. Most of his teammates were from South or Central America, the children of diplomats and military officers: four Colombians, two Peruvians, and players from Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Venezuela.The coach wasn’t particularly good, former teammates told me, and the season was not particularly successful. The yearbook recorded three wins and eight losses, as recently reported by The Guardian. Latin music filled the team bus en route to away games, and the players’ pregame chant culminated in a plea for togetherness: “¡Nosotros! ¡Nosotros! Rah, rah, rah!”“It was like you were in another country,” Alfred Harrison, one of Trump’s teammates, told me. “You didn’t really get the ball unless you spoke Spanish.” Harrison recalls Trump being a decent player, working on the back line as a defender and kicking the occasional long ball over the midfield to start an attack. “He was fairly active on the field,” he said. “That guy had an abundance of testosterone, that’s for sure.”Trump didn’t seem to play much soccer beyond that year, and it’s unclear whether he watches or cares much about the game today. His son Barron played in Arlington and for the D.C. United Academy team during Trump’s first term as president, but there’s no evidence that Trump embraced being a “soccer dad,” let alone that he ever showed up to watch a game. He reportedly considered buying Rangers FC in Scotland, where his mother is from and where he owns golf courses, and the Colombian team Atlético Nacional, which was once linked with the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, but passed on both. When he was asked last year to identify his favorite player, he named Pelé but recognized that the choice was a bit old-fashioned. (Golf caddies also used to refer to Trump as Pelé for the number of times he kicked the ball on the golf course.) Most of all, Trump seems to love the spectacle around the game, especially the trophies and star players, and he has tried to brand himself as something of a soccer president, hosting both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo on separate visits at the White House.As the United States prepares to host the World Cup, along with Mexico and Canada, the president is expected to force himself… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When it comes to counting votes, there’s no rushing California. America’s most populous state is also home to the nation’s most frustrating political tradition—a lengthy wait to find out the winners of key elections. Californians only learned yesterday evening—a full week after they finished casting ballots in the state’s primaries—which candidates had been nominated for governor. The state also took several days to determine who will advance in U.S. House races that could play a decisive role in which party controls Congress next year. And the counting is far from done.California’s glacial vote-count is a function of its enormous size and generous ballot-access laws; most people vote by mail, and the state will accept ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive up to a week after. For years, Democratic state officials saw little urgency in hurrying the process, prioritizing accuracy and voter participation over speed in determining results. But this conspiracist political era, when the country’s loudest election denier happens to be its president, has started to change that mindset.[Read: The election deniers are winning]“We want to maximize participation and protect the fundamental right to vote. That being said, can California counties count more quickly? Sure,” Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state and top elections official, told us.President Trump has made baseless claims of fraud in California’s vote for nearly a decade; over the weekend, he became so agitated as he raged about California’s “rigged” primary that he stormed out of an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. The biggest difference between Trump’s rantings now and in 2017 is that top Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have joined the president in sowing doubts about the accuracy and legitimacy of California’s elections. In each of the past two congressional elections, the nation has had to wait more than a week to find out which party would control the House while California and other western states finished counting mail ballots. One tight race in California remained uncalled for nearly a month.In this month’s closely watched primary for governor, in which the top two vote-getters advance, Californians waited a week to learn that the Trump-backed conservative Steve Hilton edged out the progressive billionaire Tom Steyer for second place. He will face Xavier Becerra, a former Biden-administration Cabinet secretary and California attorney general, who came in first. Becerra is now the heavy favorite in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

If the conservative manosphere is associated with protein powder, pomade, and ancient Rome, then the conservative womanosphere is its aesthetic opposite: a frilly wonderland of gingham tablecloths and Bible verses, as soft as goose down and as cotton-candy pink as Polly Pocket’s Country Cottage. Which is why the cannons were so startling.Before each speaker took the podium at Turning Point USA’s annual Women’s Leadership Summit to advise feminine gentleness in all situations, tall columns of magenta smoke blasted from both ends of the stage, and the music’s bass dropped, rattling the skulls of all 3,000 women in the ballroom of the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter. This year’s event was full of such subtle contradictions.It is difficult to tidily define womanhood, or to attach to the term a set of clear expectations. Yet Turning Point, the conservative organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, professes to understand womanhood deeply—so deeply, in fact, that it holds a conference every June to elucidate the concept: Womanhood is getting married as soon as you can, and having babies—more “than you can afford,” as Kirk often advised. It is embracing God and renouncing feminism.But the messages from this year’s speakers and attendees were different than in years past: So diverse and inclusive that the summit occasionally felt, dare I say, a little feminist. “Never getting married is not a failure,” Alex Clark, the host of Turning Point’s Culture Apothecary podcast, said on the first day. Some speakers warned against the dreaded girlboss, but others seemed accepting of all types of women. The summit “is all about support and recognizing that everybody’s journey is different,” Alyssa Cromwell, a college junior from California, told me. “It’s just coming together, supporting women, and being a safe space to embrace ourselves.”Ariana Gomez for The AtlanticWhat was this, UC Berkeley? And what would Charlie think of it all? Before he was assassinated last year, Kirk had consistently advised women to skip college and prioritize marriage (or to go to college for an “MRS degree”). At last year’s summit, only weeks before his death, Kirk told the crowd, rather pointedly, that women who weren’t married by the age of 30 were less likely to find a husband and, therefore, less likely to have children. When his wife, Erika, who married him at age 32, tried to soften his message for all of the single 30-somethings in the audience, Kirk dismissed her… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Nate Langston PalmerDaniel “Chappie” James Jr. became commander of the Wheelus Air Base, near Tripoli, just after rebels under Muammar Qaddafi took control of Libya in a coup in 1969. In the midst of the insurgency, Qaddafi led an effort to break into the U.S. air base, but James managed to close the gate in time to prevent the young rebel from entering. The incident, which James recounted in a 1978 interview, would come to be the stuff of Air Force lore. As the two men confronted each other, the story goes, Qaddafi got out of his vehicle and reached for his gun. James had a .45 in his belt. He told Qaddafi that he’d better not pull the gun, or he’d regret it. They stared at each other for a moment as the future dictator considered James. Then Qaddafi pulled his hand away, got back in his vehicle, and drove off. The rebels never attempted a similar stunt again. One reporter later referred to James as a “black John Wayne.”By the time he was facing off with Qaddafi in Libya, James had already served in the military for 26 years. During World War II, he’d trained at the Tuskegee Institute, before joining the 477th Bombardment Group—the first unit of Black bombers in U.S. military history. He then flew 101 combat missions in the Korean War, and 78 more in the Vietnam War.James was eventually promoted to four-star general, becoming the first Black American in the history of the U.S. military to reach that rank. “If my making an advancement can serve as some kind of spark to some young Black or other minority, it will be worth all the years, all the blood and sweat it took in getting here,” he said at the time. The general became a hero to Black Democrats and white Republicans alike. At a 1987 ceremony dedicating an aerospace-science and health-education center at Tuskegee University to James, Ronald Reagan called him a “darned good pilot and a revered military officer and a truly great American.” In 2020, the state of Florida named a bridge after James; the bill was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis.But last year, after Donald Trump signed executive orders gutting DEI programs across the federal government and the military, people in the Pentagon noticed that a painting of James had been taken down from its prominent location in the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Illustrations by Tyler ComrieOn a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America’s great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch.In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the dismal state of American democracy. In dozens of focus groups that it had convened around the country, participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division—but requests to name the things that united them as Americans were generally met with nervous laughter. The commissioners themselves were convinced that the country needed a shared narrative, but were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they called in a handful of outsiders, myself among them, to help inject some fresh thinking into how to find one. The topic was so fraught that we all agreed, before attending, not to be quoted by name.Our first exercise, the facilitator explained, was intended to build trust—listing words or concepts that all Americans could endorse, even if our definitions might vary. He uncapped his marker and looked around expectantly. I sat there, surrounded by an uncomfortable silence, searching for a word so anodyne that no one could possibly object. I thought about the acute improbability of my own existence. One of my grandfathers was born to Greek immigrants from a village in the mountains above Sparta, the other to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Other ancestors had fled aboard the Mayflower from the persecution of Puritans in England, aboard a steamship from pogroms in Ukraine, aboard a schooner from Spanish repression in Cuba. Where else would a life like mine even be possible?[America at 250: The unfinished revolution]But my loyalty to this country is not merely biographical. I’ve traveled widely enough abroad to acquire real gratitude for the liberties that Americans enjoy, and for what its ideals have meant to those in other lands. I’ve also seen enough of the United States to be painfully aware of how often we fail to live up to those ideals at home. I knew that we were there… [TheTopNews] Read More.