THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Halfway through President Trump’s first term, as construction crews were busy installing hundreds of miles of barriers along the southern border, a puzzling edict came down from America’s aesthete in chief. Trump wanted the border wall painted black.The president had already lost an argument about what his “big, beautiful wall” should look like. Trump envisioned a solid-concrete structure, like the one Israel has built through the West Bank. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection already had a preferred prototype, consisting of vertical steel bars that, crucially, allowed border agents to see through to spot potential threats on the Mexican side. The competing visions pointed to a larger fundamental question: Whose border wall was it?How quaint that seems now. Trump in his second term treats federal property as his own, demolishing the East Wing of the White House, adding his name to the Kennedy Center, and ordering the construction of a 250-foot arch opposite the Lincoln Memorial. His fixation with paint continued as he ordered a blue coating on the Reflecting Pool that turned it into a slime lagoon. He also wants to cover the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s granite in white paint to make it better match the White House, next door.Trump in 2017 was still willing to defer to experts, especially those in uniform. Although CBP officials managed to talk him out of the concrete-wall idea, along with a proposal to add sharp spikes to the top so that climbers would risk impaling themselves, they relented on the black paint. Trump saw it as another way to deter migrants. He told a story—since recited many times—about his golfing buddies scalding their arms after he installed a black-granite countertop at the snack bar of one of his clubs. The president even had a specific shade of paint that he called “flat black,” whose heat-retention properties he deemed superior. Potential border jumpers would burn their hands if they tried to touch the steel bars, Trump insisted. The president seemed to enjoy discussing the various ways that migrants could be injured or killed by the wall, according to his aides, who said often that he talked about grisly scenarios as the best way to prevent illegal crossings.Neither CBP nor the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the construction of the wall, thought that the paint was a good idea. It would add hundreds of millions in costs and saddle the structure with… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the weeks after he was elected mayor of New York City last fall, Zohran Mamdani worked behind the scenes to torpedo a bid by one of his allies, a charismatic young democratic socialist, to challenge the reelection of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Brooklyn. Such a high-profile primary fight, Mamdani reportedly argued at the time, could slow his agenda for the city.In light of what happened last night, Mamdani’s intervention might have saved the political career of a man who could become the nation’s first Black House speaker next year. Mamdani picked other primary battles across the city, and he won them all. Candidates whom the mayor backed defeated two House Democratic incumbents: Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Harlem Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In an open-seat race, the Mamdani-endorsed state legislator Claire Valdez swamped a Democrat who had the support of much of the party’s local establishment.The insurgent victories exposed a striking dynamic with significant implications for national politics: America’s two most powerful Democrats, Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both hail from New York City, but they are not the dominant force in their own hometown. For the moment, that distinction belongs indisputably to Mamdani, the 34-year-old whose winning mayoral campaign last year took both men—and almost everyone else—by surprise.Mamdani first endorsed Brad Lander, a rival turned ally in last year’s mayoral race. Lander trounced Goldman, a second-term Democrat and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, largely by playing up their differences over Israel in a district that includes some of the city’s most progressive neighborhoods. The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.[Read: The liberal district that could oust… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsWho gets to be an American? It’s a simple question—one that was answered when Congress passed, and the states ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment’s first sentence states. Thirty years later, in 1898, the Supreme Court cemented this principle in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.But last January, on President Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that would challenge the Court’s precedent—and, it has been argued, the purpose of the amendment. “The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” the president’s order says. It would deny citizenship to babies born to parents who lack legal justification for being in the country—or born to those who are here only temporarily. The order was challenged in court within 24 hours.Now the Supreme Court will decide whether the Constitution means what it says; it will decide whether “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”—save for those who are here under unique circumstances, such as children of foreign dignitaries—are citizens of the union. This week on Radio Atlantic, I’m joined by Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer to explore birthright citizenship and what it means to be an American.The following is a transcript of the episode:Adam Serwer: So you think about today’s discourse about birthright citizenship and these, you know, sometimes veiled, sometimes overt assertions that America is a white man’s country. You know, the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment did not believe that. They insisted that that was wrong, and they inscribed the equality of man into the Constitution in a much more sincere way than the original Founders.Adam Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic. And this is our first Monday episode of the show.Today, we need to talk about birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court has before it a case that could redefine who gets to be an American. That’s not hyperbole.Justice Neil Gorsuch: So you’re really at the end of the day, then this is a straight up constitutional ruling you want from this Court, win, lose, or draw.Harris: The citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Not so long ago, the Republicans who ran elections in one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds—Maricopa County, Arizona—largely got along. There were egos and quibbles, sure. But in the face of unyielding attacks on elections led by President Trump, the recorder and board of supervisors—which together split election duties—resolved conflicts without blowing up a delicate system built on trust and cooperation.Today’s recorder and board, a mostly new cast chosen by voters in 2024, are different. They’re locked in an all-out war over the machinery, money, and operations that make the democratic process possible. Both sides agree that the standoff threatens their ability to carry out November’s midterm elections free of complications for the county’s 2.6 million voters, more than half the state’s total. The recorder’s side describes the situation in dire terms, writing to a judge that “the legal validity of the election results themselves” is at risk. The recorder’s critics fear that the fight could be used as pretext to cancel results MAGA doesn’t like in elections that could tip the balance in Congress.Before this battle for control fully exploded in recent weeks—with the recorder insisting the Republican-dominated board pay six-figure contempt-of-court fines and election staff facing possible prosecution for setting up ballot drop boxes—he floated an idea through his attorney. Recorder Justin Heap, a Trump ally who was elected two years ago on a pledge to “end the laughingstock elections,” suggested that the two sides mediate their dispute using Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer and election activist who worked closely with Trump to try to reverse his 2020 defeat. “Ms. Mitchell would be ideal,” the attorney wrote, according to records I obtained, which cited “her expertise.”The suggestion that Mitchell be brought in to broker the conflict astonished county staff still haunted by a 2020 cycle that drew protests at the tabulation center, pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn his loss, years of death threats, and ceaseless trolling from critics. In February, Mitchell told me that “Maricopa County is a complete disaster” and that federal investigators should turn their attention to the desert swing county. The recorder’s proposal to bring her in as a mediator of the dispute went nowhere. But the very idea that a lawyer who plotted to overturn the 2020 election could be a neutral arbiter signaled how differently Heap and the Board of Supervisors see the situation, people involved in the private deliberations… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The Democrat Mary Peltola has led in every public poll since she declared for the U.S. Senate election this year in Alaska, a state that Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024. A former U.S representative, Peltola is a culturally moderate mother of seven whose top issue is fish. Unlike the candidates dominating national headlines, she’s neither a social-media sensation nor a charismatic progressive. Most people outside Alaska have never heard of her. That’s a problem from a fundraising perspective—but an asset from an electoral one. If Peltola is a little boring, that’s exactly why she’s the Democrat most likely to flip a red-state Senate seat this year.Peltola does not resemble a stereotypical Democratic politician. Both her biography and her political positions suggest someone attuned to the importance of environmental preservation—and to the simultaneous economic value of resource extraction. She has worked as a commercial fisher and a spokesperson for a gold-mining company, a job she quit after the company spilled toxic waste into local waters. Peltola, who is Yup’ik on her mother’s side, then became a tribal lobbyist and worked at a tribal fishing commission. Fishing is a huge part of her political brand. Her campaign slogan in every federal race she has run in has been “Fish, family, freedom,” and one of her top policy goals is to enact stricter regulations, favored by small-scale fishers, on the use of dragnets by industrial fishing companies. At a time when even local races can easily get subsumed by national politics, this approach has helped Peltola come across as singularly focused on Alaska-specific issues—as she puts it, “Alaska first.”[Elaine Godfrey: The Democratic base is ready to go]In 2022, Peltola won two statewide elections: first in a special election to become Alaska’s at-large House representative, and then again by a larger margin that November, even as Republicans gained seats in the House. In 2024, when Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points, Peltola lost her seat by fewer than three points.During her two years in office, she followed a middle lane on mining and drilling. She pushed for the Biden administration to approve the Willow oil-drilling project in 2023, and when the same administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she became the only Democratic sponsor of a bill to overturn the decision. But she opposed a Republican move to use the bill to remove environmental… [TheTopNews] Read More.