THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Betting money puts the odds of constitutional collapse in the United States at about one in 25. Anyone can wager three or four cents on Polymarket, Kalshi, or PredictIt that will pay out $1 if Donald Trump wins a third term in the 2028 election—an impossibility, according to the plain text of the Twenty-Second Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic strategist, thinks that the chance of political apocalypse is about 20 times higher—and that Americans need to start preparing now. He recently secured dual citizenship for his family on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and is obsessively thinking through how people should respond if Trump tries to maintain power with the threat of force. He styles himself a doomsday philosopher of this worst-case scenario.On a Tuesday last month, this effort brought him to a co-working space… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

A year into Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Justice has become his private law firm, devoted less to the impartial administration of justice than to blackmailing, intimidating, and persecuting Trump’s foes while selectively enforcing the law to spare allies who break it. The chairman of the Federal Reserve reveals that the Justice Department has been attempting to blackmail him into lowering interest rates with the threat of a federal indictment. The governor of Minnesota, the mayor of Minneapolis, the former head of the FBI, the attorney general of New York, and a member of the Federal Reserve Board all face indictment or investigation for opposing or challenging the president.The decision to ignore evidence that demands investigation or prosecution can be equally nefarious, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, where federal authorities refused to investigate a masked government agent for shooting an unarmed mom in the face, and where half… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

A year into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of activity. Whether you think his administration has achieved great things or worry that it has unleashed terrible abuses, Trump sure looks to have done a lot.But if you view the year through the lens of the president’s powers, all of that action comes to seem more circumscribed. By neglecting some of the most significant formal and informal tools at his disposal, Trump has largely failed to advance durable policy change, at least on domestic matters. He has dominated a lot of news cycles, but at the expense of shaping the future—for good or ill.The American presidency is a framework of duties and powers. The president is formally required to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” for instance. He is also empowered and expected to propose measures to Congress and promote… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

By the time she faced her first oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pam Bondi had become a person she never really wanted to be. She had told a reporter once that in college she’d wanted to be a pediatrician, but she ended up becoming a lawyer. She’d said that she wasn’t sure she wanted to actually practice law, but she became a prosecutor. She’d told reporters that she “never dreamed” of running for political office, but she did that too, twice winning campaigns for Florida attorney general. She’d said that when Donald Trump eventually asked her to be U.S. attorney general, she “made it really clear” that she did not want the job. During his first term, she had confided to a friend that she wanted to be ambassador to Italy. But here she was in a Senate hearing room in October, a person who had once seemed so… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Among the greatest tricks Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing significant portions of the population that the slow erosion of their rights is not, actually, that big of a deal.After all, do undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos truly deserve due process? Is it really so bad to urge citizens to turn on their neighbors and co-workers for saying something outrageous? And is it problematic to punish journalists for reporting facts that the government would rather keep hidden? (Yes, yes, and yes! come the emphatic cries of constitutional-law experts, civil-liberties advocates, and others who care about this sort of thing.)A year into Trump’s second term, the emboldened president’s maximalist strategy—pushing every norm to its most elastic, and then a bit beyond, and from that new breaking point pushing yet again—conjures the boiling-frog theory, in which a frog placed in boiling water will immediately hop out, but a frog placed in… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.