THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

In 1946, the year that Donald Trump was born, the pinball machine offered everything but control. The bumpers were propulsive, the lights flashed, but the player’s only honest move was to pull a spring-loaded plunger. After that, the ball belonged to the machine, zinging and zooming wherever the bumpers sent it.This is how many Americans experience the Trump presidency today: antic caroming that they can do little more than watch. The ballroom. The Iran war. The threats against Canada. Greenland. Portraits of himself as Christ, a decorated general, or the pope. The arch. The Kennedy Center. Prosecution of enemies. Pardons. Imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals. Federal incursions into voting. Tariffs on. Tariffs off. Tariffs on again. The Qatari plane. Endless promises—to release tax returns, to end corruption, to deliver $5,000 checks—that never materialize.No president has been more with us than Trump, because no president has been better at seizing public attention. But there is a difference between getting attention and doing something with it. For months, the president has been unable to convince the public that he’s up to the job. In a CNN poll released at the end of July, 65 percent of respondents said that his policies had worsened the economy, and only 28 percent approved of his handling of Iran.Voters have watched the caroming and have concluded that he doesn’t have his eye on the ball. They care about the economy, and he seems to care about everything else. Only 27 percent of adults told CNN that Trump has the right priorities, down from 45 percent when the term began. And a record 73 percent said he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important issues. In June, while Trump was fixated on the Reflecting Pool and stopping widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist, a bipartisan housing bill aimed at high costs reached his desk. He called it “a big yawn” and said he hadn’t decided whether to sign it. In July, he let it become law without his signature.This is a problem for Republicans in November 2026, but it’s an opportunity for voters looking to November 2028. Once a roster of candidates emerges, their supporters will discover that the office demands—wouldn’t you know it?—exactly the qualities that their preferred candidate happens to possess. Now, when there’s no one horse to back, is the time to use the current president’s rat-a-tat treatment of our attention to ask… [TheTopNews] Read More.

If you’re a Democrat, attending a Jon Ossoff rally feels very good. Therapeutic, even. Many Democrats feel as if every day of the second Trump administration has brought some fresh horror: a discouraging development in the never-ending Iran war; a new vow of retribution from the 80-year-old leader of the free world; or the revelation of yet another money-making venture cooked up by the Trumps.But now, from the South, a young senator has emerged, with a deep voice promising change and a speaking cadence not unlike Barack Obama’s. His dark hair sits just so; his skin is perfectly even—is that makeup he’s wearing? Never mind. We’re looking at his sleeves now, which are carefully rolled up and emphasize biceps that are, well, quite noticeably larger than they were when Georgia voters sent him to Congress in 2021.More important, this senator sounds different from other Democrats. Ossoff is doing something on the campaign trail that basically no one else in his party seems able to pull off: elegantly and comprehensively skewering the Trump administration, while earning some Republican support.He’s doing this in speeches at his campaign events, such as the one I attended on Sunday in Athens, Georgia. But those speeches seem carefully calibrated to be heard by an audience much farther away: Every week, millions of Americans are encountering Ossoff on their phones, through perfectly produced clips of the senator unveiling a new insult or innovative critique of the Trump administration. “He’s trying to put his face on the money. Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself,” he said in May. “He’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone.” Last month, the senator’s reference to the zealous Trump aide Natalie Harp spiked Google searches for Harp by 5,000 percent.[Read: Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ moment]The revelation of Ossoff’s particular talent explains why the senator is suddenly all over the news and Instagram, and why so many people in his party are breathlessly positioning him as the new favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 2028. Premature? Maybe. Ossoff might not be well suited for such a task. But Democrats are desperate for leaders and feel that the senator has pierced the party’s gloom like a beam of warm light. (Ossoff, through a spokesperson, declined an interview for this story.)Outside the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Judith McWillie struggled to explain how she felt about her… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In a conversation at The Atlantic Festival with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg warned fellow members of the Democratic Party to resist the urge to revert to “the previous status quo” if they regain power in the midterms.It would be a mistake, Buttigieg argued, for Democrats to try to reverse “the damage” of the past two years of the Donald Trump presidency by trying to restore the country to how it looked in 2022 or “whenever we think that America was great.” He said that Democrats instead need to build for the idea that “the next quarter century between here and 2050, which is kind of a make-or-break quarter century for the whole American project, is subject to very different conditions and problems than the ones that we inherited.”Buttigieg—whom many analysts see as a potential 2028 presidential contender—offered examples of what that vision might look like. He called for banning gerrymandering and passing a constitutional amendment to address the deluge of money in politics. “This idea that it is somehow beyond our power to use what is probably the single most elegant feature of the Constitution, which is its capacity to be amended—right?—is a complete failure of ambition and imagination,” Buttigieg said.When asked by Goldberg about the Democratic Socialists of America, Buttigieg responded that he thinks “there’s a temptation to imagine that being bold is the same thing as being kind of maximally ideological.” Sometimes it is the case, Buttigieg said, that the leftmost idea is the boldest. But other, more ideologically moderate projects may require “radical reform to our institutions,” he noted.“I know the commentariat wants to get it all fixed on some left-to-center-to-right spectrum,” Buttigieg continued. “To me, what’s more interesting is: Do we have the right package of base hits and big swings, and are we going after both of them, at the same time, all the time?”The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to get to the state of our civilization, but there’s this thing—and we’ve talked about this already—there’s this thing that’s been bothering me more than most things bothering me in the past few days. The fact that a Vladimir Putin–aligned oligarch, extremely dubious past—as opposed to the oligarchs with a wholesome past—(Laughter)Extremely dubious past, funded openly—or not openly, it was discovered, but there’s no secret—funded a two-day celebration for the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Few reporters understand as much about Donald Trump’s thinking, motives, and behavior as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has been covering the president closely for more than a decade at The New York Times; she started with his first campaign in 2015, and her record of scoops quickly brought her into the public eye. Swan was, for many years, her chief professional rival: He worked for Axios, where he landed a controversial 2018 one-on-one interview with Trump. In late 2022, the Times announced that it was hiring Swan, turning the rivals into colleagues.This past June, they published Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book, an instant best seller, advances a new understanding of the first year of Trump’s second term, relaying in minute-by-minute detail how, since retaking office, he has pursued his personal goals with few limits on his power. The Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta sat down with both authors at The Atlantic Festival, where he asked them about the 2028 election and the future of the presidency and the Republican Party. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Tim Alberta: Maggie, this country has been through a lot, and I’m wondering if you could help us understand how a “regime change” of this sort came to be.Maggie Haberman: Essentially, we have had a series of national traumas since 9/11: two forever wars, a fiscal crisis, immense populist anger that started rising in 2010. To me, that was the year that set the tone. It was also the year that the proto-Trump, Carl Paladino, was the Republican nominee for governor in New York State. One of the issues that he ran on was the planned mosque to be built near the World Trade Center; it became known incorrectly as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and it became a clear avatar of a change in this country after the era of George W. Bush. So you get to 2014, when immigration and particularly border crossings were on the rise under President Obama. Suddenly, this became a massive issue within the Republican Party. You had this mix of anger over the wars, anger over the massive accumulated debt under President Bush, then Obamacare, anger about immigration, and a shifting job market. The time was ripe for a candidate who presented himself as a fighter—and who was already known to most of the Republican electorate, not… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Bethany Mann has put thousands of miles on her 2014 Toyota RAV4 while campaigning for office in Missouri’s Third Congressional District. The problem for Mann, her opponents, and the hundreds of thousands of voters who live there is that for months, no one has known precisely where the district’s boundaries are.Missouri jumped last year into the nation’s redistricting wars, pushing through a new congressional map backed by President Trump that would secure an additional Republican House seat in November. The plan has mostly collapsed, leading to a year of legal fights and confusion for voters. The partisan battle reached the Supreme Court last week and spurred a chaotic back-and-forth among the courts that changed the boundaries multiple times within a single hour. For now, the old map, which was adopted in 2022, is back in effect, but Republican candidates are still battling. A hearing in a federal appeals court is set for tomorrow—one day before the state is required to start making absentee ballots available to overseas voters.[Read: The election deniers’ long game]The mayhem in Missouri is the latest example of how uncertain and volatile the midterm elections have become. Republicans started the redistricting battles last year to gain partisan advantage during the midterms, and Democrats quickly followed. Missouri and nine other states have since redrawn their maps. On Monday, the Court blocked a Trump executive order that would have dramatically restricted voting by mail, a decision that Trump called a “big loss for Republicans, and America itself.” Voting-rights groups celebrated the decision, which they say prevents chaos. But with fewer than two months until Election Day, election-related litigation is still winding its way through the courts, and Trump continues to claim that the electoral system is rigged.“We’re talking about last-minute changes to election infrastructure, which could lead to either confusion or affect the outcome of the election,” Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, told me. “And it is a serious problem, particularly in our current context when voter confidence in the election infrastructure has collapsed.”Missouri’s saga began shortly after the state legislature passed the new, GOP-friendly map at the urging of the White House last September. Opponents seized on a quirk in the state constitution that empowers citizens to petition for a referendum on an act of the state legislature. In December, an advocacy group submitted more than 305,000 signatures asking for a vote before the new map… [TheTopNews] Read More.