THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

On Monday morning, CNN reported that the United States and Iran had been on the verge of striking a deal to end the war when Donald Trump made a series of comments to reporters and on social media that undermined the talks. Sources told CNN that the president’s boasts angered the Iranians. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” complained one source, who apparently pleaded with his boss to stop undermining their work.This was Trump’s signal to begin binge-posting about the Iran negotiations. The Iranians may not have appreciated Trump’s stream-of-consciousness messaging, and apparently their American counterparts did not either. But one very important person did.Trump can’t seem to refrain from touting his genius, especially when the subject is dealmaking, his professed speciality. And so, in a torrent of commentary, the president made the case that he is winning very greatly.Already, despite the president’s surface bravado, an undercurrent of nervousness had emerged. Trump was favorably comparing his prospective deal with the Obama administration’s in 2015. “The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER than the JCPOA, commonly referred to as ‘The Iran Nuclear Deal,’ penned by Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden, one of the Worst Deals ever made having to do with the Security of our Country,” he wrote on Monday. Simultaneously touting your prospective deal while comparing it to the worst deal ever is a bit like saying, I’m a fantastic basketball player, much better than my late grandmother, who never played the game.[Tom Nichols: Maybe Trump should not have given this speech]In a follow-up post, five minutes later, Trump addressed concerns that the war had gone beyond his promised six-week deadline. His technique, once again, was to reframe expectations. “Despite World War I lasting 4 years, 3 months, and 14 days, World War II lasting 6 years and 1 day, the Korean War lasting 3 years, 1 month, and 2 days, the Vietnam War lasting 19 years, 5 months, and 29 days, and Iraq lasting 8 years, 8 months, and 28 days, they like to say that I promised 6 weeks to defeat Iran, and actually, from the Military standpoint, it was far faster than that, but I’m not going to let them… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump reportedly likes to go around asking aides about who his successor should be: J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio. If Trump were to ask his own voters the same question, he would, at least based on my recent experience, come away with a pretty clear answer.I run weekly focus groups, and the moderators regularly ask Trump voters whom they would like to see inherit the party in 2028 and beyond. More and more, what we’re hearing in response is a strange new respect for Rubio. Although Vance might seem like a more natural MAGA heir, many Trump voters see Rubio as a stabilizing force who comes off a lot better than many of his peers inside the administration, including the vice president.“Marco Rubio, I think, is an amazing dude,” said Ken, a Biden 2020/Trump 2024 voter from Georgia. “If anybody is left that we can see on the TV or C-SPAN that’s just genuine,” he said, “it’s Marco Rubio.” Ken called Rubio “a family man and still a stand-up politician,” and said, “He also is about putting America first, which I agree with.” (To protect participants’ privacy, we disclose only their first name.)In a recent group of Republican Jewish voters, Boris from Texas called Rubio “a real statesman in my eyes.” Steve from Florida said, “Marco Rubio, my former senator, is doing great as secretary of state. He will be a great president too.” And Andrea from Georgia said, “Marco Rubio’s been, like, killing it from an international-policy perspective.”[Read: Trump voters are over it]This is not what I would have expected, based on all my years of listening to Republican voters, who tend to abhor politicians of the pre-Trump vintage. Rubio was the driving Republican force behind the last serious push for comprehensive immigration reform, in 2013. He stood as the avatar for the new wave of moderate, sunny-dispositioned conservatism that was supposed to inherit the party after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. He was a staunch defender of NATO and of America’s role as a force for global stability. His 2016 campaign slogan was “A New American Century.” (He was, I admit, my preferred candidate for much of the Republican primary that year.)All of this is repellent to today’s Republican base, and anyone who has observed the past decade of American politics might have assumed that Rubio’s future political aspirations were DOA. Vance, who has spent the past… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.The battle is not over. The GOP-dominated Florida legislature will hold a special session next week to consider redistricting, and the Democratic victory in Virginia could help Governor Ron DeSantis win over lawmakers who are reluctant to press the Republican advantage too far. Officials in both parties expect the Supreme Court to issue a ruling in the coming months that will weaken if not eviscerate a key part of the Voting Rights Act, which would allow states such as Louisiana and Alabama to carve up districts now held by Black Democrats. (Such a decision would have an even larger impact in southern states come 2028.)But for now, Trump’s move to open this new front in a centuries-old gerrymandering war between the parties looks like an enormous tactical blunder. Republicans have appeared taken aback by the ferocity with which Democrats have responded—and the speed with which they’ve set aside their drive to ban gerrymandering in the name of good government. In both California and Virginia, Democrats swamped the opposition in campaign spending, using the redistricting referenda to rile up a party base seeking any opportunity to push back against an unpopular administration. The margin of victory was much narrower in Virginia, where Republicans accused Democrats—wishfully, it turned out—of overreaching with a push to take 10 out of 11 seats in a state that had a GOP governor… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the past 15 years or so, Democrats have won a lot of races because the opposing party’s primary voters decided to nominate right-wing ideologues (Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Kari Lake) rather than normal Republicans. In all of these races, the Republican establishment warned that nominating an archconservative would undermine their chances of victory, and was proved completely correct.Now Democrats finally have the chance to do the same thing. In Michigan, a purple state that Donald Trump won twice, the physician Abdul El-Sayed is running a competitive race for the party’s Senate nomination. If successful, he would turn a very likely Democratic win into a jump ball.El-Sayed has followed the classic strategy of adopting positions that appeal to a majority of his party’s voters—thus giving him an advantage over more cautious rivals—but that do not appeal to a majority of the general electorate. In El-Sayed’s case, those stances include supporting single-payer health insurance, abolishing ICE, and intensely criticizing Israel; at the same time, he positions himself as the most doctrinal left-wing candidate in the race.[Jonathan Chait: Israel moderates are losing the Democratic Party]The Middle East has become a special point of emphasis for El-Sayed, which makes sense: Israel is highly unpopular, especially among Democrats. The trouble with this issue is that it tends to divide the party’s base, especially in Michigan, which has large Arab and Jewish populations. The prominence of Israel as a campaign issue in 2024 cost Kamala Harris support from many Arab Americans (who blamed the Biden administration for supporting Israel’s war in Gaza) and many Jewish Americans (who blamed President Biden for attempting to restrain Israel).The Democratic Party’s interest is to tamp down the importance of Israel. But El-Sayed’s best strategy to win the nomination is to play up the issue, which drives apart the party’s base and allows him to claim the biggest slice.El-Sayed’s method of picking fights over the Middle East has included campaigning alongside the livestreamer Hasan Piker—a defender of Hamas, Hezbollah, and various Communist regimes. He has also campaigned with Amir Makled, a candidate for the University of Michigan’s board of regents who has shared pro-Hezbollah and anti-Semitic messages on social media. (El-Sayed has dismissed complaints about these comments as cancel culture, which is a very strange defense; nobody is saying that Piker or Makled should lose their jobs or platforms, only that El-Sayed shouldn’t tout their support.)A candidate could potentially win… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Jason Boeshore, a grain-elevator manager on the eastern plains of Montana, fired off a rocket this month to the private Signal chat he shares with the 23 other members of the state Democratic Party executive board. He demanded that leaders make clear in newspapers across the state that the Democratic Party would support only Democratic candidates in the fall elections. The response was swift and not to his liking. Shannon O’Brien, the chair of the party, wrote that her staff, not the board, would set the messaging strategy. Then she addressed the unspoken concerns at the heart of Boeshore’s request. “Listen if ANY of you EVER find yourselves questioning my intentions, please call me,” O’Brien wrote. “I will continue to move forward to get Democrats elected. There’s no hidden agenda.”The problem for O’Brien is the belief among Boeshore and many other party stalwarts in Montana that exactly such a hidden agenda exists, pitting national, big-money Democrats—and maybe even some state party leaders—against the state Democratic apparatus. This internecine feud, full of rumors, speculation, and skepticism over the role of outsiders in state races, threatens to spoil one of the last best places for Democrats to pull a Senate majority from a difficult midterm map.At issue is Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who is running as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Steve Daines. Bodnar, 47, is young, moderate, a veteran, a Rhodes Scholar, and all in all the sort of person Montanans might elect in a year when Republicans are facing the prospect of steep losses amid President Trump’s declining popularity. Democratic mega-donors such as one of LinkedIn co-founders, Reid Hoffman; the cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz; and the Microsoft heir Rory Gates are all supporting Bodnar’s campaign, hoping he can yank the seat away from the GOP. Because Bodnar is running as an independent, it means part of his campaign in Montana is based on criticizing Democrats whose voters he needs to support him.Even the candidates running for the Democratic nomination have been drawn into the drama. They, too, are criticizing their own party leaders just weeks before the June 2 primary and seeking to make sure that party bigwigs don’t try to clear a path for Bodnar to face the GOP nominee in November.“There is clearly manipulation trying to happen there,” Alani Bankhead, a former Air Force intelligence officer and Senate hopeful… [TheTopNews] Read More.