THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Photographs by Joseph RushmorePresident Trump began his midterm-convention address last night by casting his spell on the crowd in Dallas. “This place is packed,” he announced from the stage, pointing to the back of the American Airlines Center, where everyone could see hundreds of empty seats. Those who looked up saw thousands more, whole sections without any people at all. But the crowd cheered anyway. A deal had been struck. Reality would be ignored. After more than a decade in politics, Trump is facing his last great electoral test—his popularity is waning, his party is down in the polls, Republicans could lose control in the U.S. House and maybe the Senate. He demanded greater complicity minutes later, seeming to invent a person in the back of the room. “He’s leaving for the bathroom. He’ll be back in two minutes,” he said, pointing. “They’ll take a picture of his seat while he’s gone. And they’ll say Trump did not fill up the arena.” Laughter joined with the cheers for their political wizard. It was working. Trump could say that he had passed “the largest tax cut in the history of our country,” even if that was not the case. He could claim to have won the presidency three times, when he’s actually done so twice. He could describe the recent past as “the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency,” despite six in 10 voters saying he had made the economy worse. He could promise to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans held both legislative houses, as if that sum did not amount to about 80 percent of the federal discretionary budget. He might even be able to convince the country to embrace the big fantasy, a chance to defy history and seal victory for Republicans in November. “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said. “I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic The night was all about Trump. He was the alpha and omega, the focus and the solution. Attendees wore pictures of the president on lanyards around their necks, the ticket for entry to the arena. VIP boxes were stocked with Trump was right about everything hats. Oversize photos of the president lined the hallways. Five hours before he arrived, he received his first standing ovation. A video montage played… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history.The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines. Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics.Trump himself remains at the forefront of this movement. Since returning to office, he has insisted that American elections are “rigged” against the GOP, fired Democratic election officials, threatened to “take over” voting across the country, and issued executive orders that would tightly restrict the vote. The president’s most far-reaching efforts have largely been blocked by the courts or Congress, at least so far. As in 2020, Trump in fact has little legal authority to interfere with elections, and this has given comfort to many Americans.But as November approaches, the most serious threats posed to free and fair elections no longer come from the White House itself. Instead, they are local, where much of the power over elections actually resides, and they stem from the continuing absorption of Trump’s Big Lie into our political culture. In statehouses and county offices, a cohort of election deniers has taken control of significant parts of the nation’s electoral infrastructure. Some of its members have replaced the officials and legislators who rejected Trump’s push to corrupt the 2020 race. A grassroots movement of Big Lie believers has meanwhile been organized and trained as poll workers or informal observers to sound alarms over local elections they deem suspect in any way.The November elections represent something new in American politics: For the first time, a coalition of partners at the local, state, and federal levels is ready to pull off the kind of election heist that eluded the president back in 2020. At the very least, the midterms could serve as a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Sasha ArutyunovaLike most New Englanders of a certain generation, my parents viewed New York City with distrust. They associated their neighbor to the south with “The Bronx Is Burning,” Bernhard Goetz, blackouts, bankruptcy, and the famous New York Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. The heart of Manhattan was a decadent playground for the wealthy, while outlying neighborhoods were plagued by desperate poverty and violence. I grew up only 200 miles away, and yet my parents never took me there as a kid.But if New York felt menacing and foreign to them, in reality, it is the most American of cities. New York is a symbol of the nation’s money and power, its diversity and freedom. It is our capital of culture, a proudly loud and bustling melting pot. And for those who wanted to humble the world’s sole superpower, New York was the perfect place to strike 25 years ago this week. Two of its signature skyscrapers were toppled, and nearly 3,000 lives were lost.The response underscored how much New York belongs to America. Rescue workers from red and blue states raced to help. Donations poured in from rich California cities and small Montana towns. American flags were seemingly everywhere. For the first time in decades, and less than a year after a bitterly contested presidential election, the nation felt unified.We’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. New York City has bounced back—revitalized and thriving—with a new skyline emerging from the dust. But the nation is deeply divided, with angrier elections and escalating political violence. The pandemic could have brought the sort of unity we felt after the terror attacks, but it instead largely fostered division and rage. There is a new conflict in the Middle East, one whose dubious origins evoke the misguided war launched there after the World Trade Center fell. And now, a quarter century after the September 11 attacks, a New Yorker is president, one who was in Manhattan that crystal-clear, late-summer day. But Donald Trump won’t be there on Friday.  My first visit to New York City included the World Trade Center. I was in high school when, in 1995, my brother and I joined a church-group trip down from Massachusetts (my parents still wanted no part of it) to Liberty and Ellis Islands. I remember the ferry ride back to Lower Manhattan at the day’s end, staring at those impossibly… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on September 9, 2026Where were you on 9/11? Every American old enough to remember the day has an answer to that question. President Trump has several.At a ceremony honoring first responders and victims’ families yesterday, Trump offered an elaborate account of where he was in the hours and days after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. “I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation; everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw—nobody had seen anything like it, ever.”The story presents significant problems in terms of its relationship to reality. Listeners could be forgiven for interpreting Trump’s remarks as a reference to his whereabouts on the day of the attack itself. (The president clarified that timeline last night: “I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.) It is true that two days after the attack, on September 13, Trump was interviewed by reporters while walking in Lower Manhattan. The president has previously made variations of the same claim—that he and the employees he sent downtown helped clear rubble in the days following the attack. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble—and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit” was his version of it on the 2016 campaign trail. But supporting evidence is scant, and the whole account is likely an exaggeration. Richard Alles, a retired New York City Fire Department deputy chief who had a supervisory role in the efforts, said in 2019 not only that he never witnessed Trump at the site, but that the account doesn’t add up: “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.” And, Alles added, if Trump had indeed sent workers, as he has claimed, there would be a record of it: “Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”Nevertheless, Trump pressed on, veering into territory even further detached from verifiable fact. The U.S. Steel Building—a skyscraper… [TheTopNews] Read More.

American socialists are convinced that they have a media-training problem.In the past year, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, have won electoral victories in places such as New York City and Michigan, drawing a spotlight that the group has struggled to handle.Last month, the DSA’s co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, gave several high-profile interviews that even many of their most fervent supporters agree were disastrous. The two leaders struggled to give straight answers to simple questions, and they defended outlandish policies, such as abolishing prisons and police. They seemed to present socialists exactly the way their opponents caricature them: as extremist, unserious, and unprepared.In damage-control mode, many of DSA’s defenders on social media are repeating the phrase media training as though it were a mantra. If only the group’s leaders had been better prepared to deal with media outlets, the thinking goes, they would have avoided this train wreck. The DSA’s communications director, Priscilla Yeverino, recently told Axios, “Our leaders aren’t politicians. They’re working-class people and new to doing media.”The idea that the DSA’s troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse.[Read: Why do rich kids love socialism?]This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA’s co-chairs were embarrassing, that’s a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.A closer look at the interviews confirms this. Romer, who belongs to the sectarian wing, evidently did not know what the 2000 Camp David Summit was and could not say what “taxing the hell out of millionaires,” as she demanded, would look like in practice. When asked about authoritarianism in Cuba, she praised the country’s constitution and suggested that Americans should learn from it.Maybe media training could have taught Romer what… [TheTopNews] Read More.