THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Here it is, August on Martha’s Vineyard, and Alan Dershowitz has barely been heard from.Well, that’s not exactly true. He has been heard from on many topics—because Dershowitz is who he is, and pretty much anyone can join Substack, and TV bookers can be hard to resist. Still, he has said little publicly about the maddening injustice he’s faced in recent years: his annual summer shunning at the hands of the island’s liberal social gentry. Has this perennial comedy of ill manners—the Vineyard cancellation of Alan Dershowitz—finally run its course?The story has become a familiar seasonal menace; as pernicious as ticks, and as hard to kill. Its particulars are known. Dershowitz, the inexhaustible Harvard Law professor who represented a gallery of notorious clients over several decades, was once a kibitzing dynamo here. But that was before the blacklists and the badgering.In his telling (and retelling), Dershowitz became socially radioactive during Donald Trump’s first term, when he began speaking out on the president’s behalf, and then joined his first impeachment defense team. Although he did not personally support Trump—he’d been a lifelong Democrat who’d voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and would support Joe Biden in 2020—his stock explanation was that everyone is entitled to legal representation. It was the same basic principle he had applied when representing the likes of Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein. It was no different, in fact, than the occasion of Dershowitz’s first-ever visit to Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, when he was enlisted to help in the defense of Ted Kennedy after his late-night accident at Chappaquiddick.Yet defending Trump was apparently too noxious for Dershowitz’s reputation. “I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard,” he lamented in a column in The Hill in 2018. According to Dershowitz, locals have urged his exclusion from various Vineyard businesses and institutions. Every summer, it seems, has brought a new episode in ostracism, cold shoulders in the hot sun.[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The right is changing the rules of the culture war]There was the Great Pierogi Incident last year at the West Tisbury farmers’ market, in which a vendor refused to sell half a dozen dumplings to Dershowitz, citing his representation of “several sexual predators and abusers, including Jeffrey Epstein.” Dershowitz claimed that he was being discriminated against over his vocal support for Israel and initiated a follow-up spectacle a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

We Americans remember our presidents in all sorts of ways, with monuments and statues, on coins and street signs. Another thing we do is wait—we wait until a president is safely out of office, or dead, before we bestow such honors.Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether. Trump has been putting his name on buildings since before most Americans were born. He built his political career atop his personal brand, and much of his second term has been defined by an obsession with leaving his mark. The result is something entirely new in the nation’s history. The more you look, the more you see Trump’s face, name, or signature all around you—on a government building, infrastructure project, banknote, taxpayer-funded website, or official document.COMPLETEDTrump’s face has appeared swiftly, often with little warning—and nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. To find a comparable leader so fixated on the proliferation of his image, the historians I spoke with reached across oceans and time: The face of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for nearly three decades, was printed on children’s schoolbook covers; Mussolini covered Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with a display featuring his head. Obviously Mao Zedong comes to mind. This creation of a cult of personality is partly how strongmen have sought to erase memories of their predecessors and “insert themselves into the social fabric,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism at NYU, told me. There may not be a perfect comparison, but past regimes offer clues, the scholars said, about how a leader’s ubiquity can help inure citizens to broader shifts in their relationship to their government.Kevin Carter / GettyTrump’s face—staring back at federal workers, residents, and tourists from banners draped on agencies such as the Labor Department—sends a message that “he is inseparable from these more impersonal institutions of governance,” says Lisa Wedeen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.Kevin Carter / GettyA banner featuring the president’s face appeared on the Agriculture Department (right) last year, but was taken down soon after. Banners similar to it remain on the Labor, Justice (left), and Interior (center) Departments, despite objections by Democrats over the cost and the message they send—especially at the Justice Department, which, particularly since Watergate, has tried to operate autonomously from the president, for all sorts of obvious reasons.Anna Moneymaker / GettyThe U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank, had Donald… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by KC McGinnisSomewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence. Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The semiquincentennial events that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended Great American State Fair and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.[Read: The YOLO presidency]When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator Pat McAfee, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough… [TheTopNews] Read More.