THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

“Deportations will continue,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote in a post on X the day after voters punished his party in the midterm election. The three-word statement appeared to be aimed at quieting an incipient debate among Republicans over whether President Trump should ease his ICE crackdown. Two years after he won back the White House promising the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history, Trump and his party suffered monumental losses in states such as Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, where voters—especially Hispanics—swung hard to Democrats. More moderate Republicans have urged the administration to adopt a quieter enforcement approach, focusing more narrowly on criminal offenders.Although the president has reportedly expressed concern to those close to him that some ICE tactics have gone too far, he has not ordered specific policy changes, according to three senior officials I spoke with at DHS. Those officials and others I’ve talked to told me they aren’t expecting a pullback, either. Trump’s decision to name Stephen Miller as his chief of staff yesterday places the chief architect and principal ideologue of the ICE campaign in charge of his administration. Miller’s promotion will give him even more power to mobilize other federal agencies to help ICE maximize deportations.Since Trump’s return to the White House, Republicans in Congress have given the administration nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars for the crackdown, aiming for 1 million deportations a year. ICE has obtained upwards of $110 billion, more than 11 times its annual budget, and the funding surge has created a powerful inertia. Absent a major policy reversal from Trump or a successful intervention by Democratic majorities in Congress—a longshot, experts say—Trump’s mass-deportation campaign will continue with its mandate to add more officers, more deportation flights, and more immigration jails. The campaign includes handing out wads of cash to local police and sheriff departments, which help the agency boost arrests. Prior to the midterms, ICE launched a hiring push to add 5,000 more employees—mosty deportation officers—by the end of the year.“Regardless of the political pressures that the White House may be feeling on immigration enforcement, the money creates a huge amount of momentum on its own,” Sarah Pierce, an immigration policy expert at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. ICE has so much money that it will have to double its rate of spending to use it all before its deadline at the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the days before MAGA’s midterm disaster, President Trump began complaining about his presidency. He felt stuck. The war in Iran wouldn’t end. Inflation wouldn’t subside. Little was going his way. But in the president’s mind, there was one exception: “Stephen is the only one who gets stuff done,” Trump repeatedly griped, a person close to the White House told us. “I need more people who get stuff done.”Stephen Miller, one of the president’s hardest-charging and longest-serving aides, had managed to maintain Trump’s trust, even though he is the architect of the administration’s sweeping mass-deportation campaign that many in the GOP blame, in part, for the Republicans’ historic wipeout this week. Today, Trump announced that Miller would replace Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, completing his decade-long journey from congressional staffer to the most powerful aide in Washington.Where Wiles served as something of a guardrail—making sure Trump was fully briefed and that he understood the risks and pitfalls of any decision—Miller has played the role of an accelerant for a president who already has rash tendencies. One issue on which Wiles and Miller seem to diverge: how to force journalists to reveal their sources in the government. Trump has pushed the Department of Justice to pursue criminal-leak investigations on national-security grounds, and there have been discussions in the White House and at DOJ about various tactics they could use—including arrests—as part of those efforts, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of those people said that Wiles had pushed back. Miller, though, was in favor and insisted that it wouldn’t take long for journalists to give up their sources, they told us. A DOJ spokesperson told us via text that “this is absolutely false” but declined to elaborate. A White House spokesperson told us in a statement that unauthorized leaks will “NEVER be tolerated” and those responsible “must be held accountable.”One person familiar with Trump’s decision to elevate Miller told us that the president wants somebody who “will crack skulls,” adding that Trump “doesn’t want to be reined in.” Another described Miller as someone with significant Capitol Hill experience who could manage the coming clashes with Democrats. White House officials have held high-level conversations in recent days, including with Miller, about areas where they can work with Democrats. But another person familiar with Trump’s thinking said there was no need for a chief of staff who could work the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the final weeks before the midterms, the name Epstein was everywhere—in political ads, in stump speeches, on T-shirts at campaign rallies, and even in a scandal on The Real Housewives of New York City. Two years ago, invoking Epstein was a winning part of the Republican playbook. This time around, not so much.As Donald Trump ran for reelection, he told voters that his administration would release the Epstein files and filled its ranks with people who had fanned lurid interest in the case, including Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and J. D. Vance. But then, once in office, they botched the process, turning off voters who had been essential to Trump’s movement.The president’s decision to go to war with Iran and the resulting spike in gas prices may have been the front-of-mind issues for most voters in the 2026 midterms. But members of Congress, pollsters, political operatives, and campaign staff all told me that Trump’s mishandling of the Epstein issue meaningfully contributed to the GOP’s drubbing. The Republican pollster and strategist Brent Buchanan told me that Epstein became “a proxy for corruption” in the midterms. Another Republican close to the White House described the Epstein issue to me as the “nuclear fuel” that accelerated a new form of American populism. First, it boosted Trump. But on Tuesday, it worked against him, helping bring him to the lowest point of his presidency. Many of Trump’s voters viewed his handling of the matter as a betrayal. Pollsters told me it had cracked the bond between Trump and his coalition—and changed the course of the midterms.Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a news conference Wednesday that the midterm election was as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.” Among the causes for catastrophe, in DeSantis’s view: The party should have voted to release the Epstein files sooner.The reluctance of Republicans in Congress, and Trump himself, to do so was the stuff of Democratic-campaign messaging throughout the fall: Candidates and super PACs spent tens of millions of dollars on Epstein-related ads. In Texas, James Talarico boasted, “I’ve never given a sweetheart deal to a pedophile.” In Georgia, Jon Ossoff’s campaign charged that his opponent had “protected powerful elites” by voting against the Epstein-files disclosure. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown accused his opponent of taking “the most money from associates… [TheTopNews] Read More.

James Talarico talked a lot during his campaign about the so-called wilderness—as in, the electoral wasteland and morale morass that Democrats had been languishing in since President Trump’s reelection, in 2024. In Texas, this felt like something of a permanent condition. Talarico preferred a more sanguine interpretation of wilderness, something I’ve thought about after he became the first Texas Democrat to win a Senate race since 1988. The wilderness, he said from early on in his campaign, could in fact prove a fertile ground for reinvention.“There is an opportunity to redefine the Democratic Party,” Talarico told me. “And you can’t do that if the brand is super set, or if there’s a strong leader at the top of the party.” This was a little over a year ago, and we were sitting in the lobby bar of an Arlington, Texas, hotel. “The wilderness,” Talarico continued, “is where new ideas and new leaders and new movements come forth.” At the time, I was inclined to dismiss this as a rationalization from another one of those fool’s-gold Democratic hopefuls in Texas. In retrospect, maybe Talarico was onto something.If nothing else, the Democrats’ midterm rout of Trump and his supine coalition of Republicans would seem to put to rest, at least for now, the long-running discussion of Democrats as a party out of touch, ill-defined, lacking in purpose, and perpetually ambling in this “wilderness.” I admit that I participated in a fair amount in this Democratic-doldrums discourse myself, including in an opus about the party adrift that ran in February, which now feels like a decade ago. I stand by that story. It was true then, and had been for nearly four years, if you start the clock with the 2022 midterms and the disastrous denouement of the Biden years.[Read: Democrats will likely disappoint voters soon]The sheer magnitude of Tuesday’s drubbing of Republicans should provide an antidote to the wallowing that Democrats can be prone to. It’s impossible not to see the geographic reach of their victories, the generational ascent of so many potential stars, and the stunning margins that Democrats ran up across the country and not conclude that the party has legitimate reason to feel good about itself. This was a bona fide “thumpin,’” as another unpopular Republican president, George W. Bush, called his own midterm debacle 20 years ago.The requisite chest-thumpin’ from Democrats commenced immediately on Tuesday night. “We have… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It was the morning after the midterm elections, and Jeff Flake couldn’t stop laughing. Not necessarily a mean laugh—Flake, who is preternaturally good-humored, tends to chuckle amiably through most conversations. But I thought I detected a quantum of vindication or glee in the voice of the former senator from Arizona.I’d called Flake to ask what he made of his party’s historic electoral meltdown. “It feels literally like a 10-year fever just broke,” he told me. “I’ve been saying to my wife, It’ll break. It’ll break, and she’s been saying, When? When? When? And it looks like it has.”During the first Trump administration, Flake distinguished himself as one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken Republican critics of the president—of his character, his policies, and his coarsening of America’s political culture. Flake was heartbroken by his party’s craven accommodation of Donald Trump and routinely called it out. “One day in the not too distant future,” he’d predicted in 2019, “Republicans will wake up and say, ‘We did this for this man?’”Flake believes that day has finally arrived. “Republicans have to be asking themselves, ‘What did we get out of this?’” he said. “Twelve trillion dollars added to the national debt during the two Trump terms so far? Our trade deals in tatters? Our allies don’t trust us? China has not been restrained?”Yes, Flake conceded, the border has been secured (though many of Trump’s immigration policies could be undone by a swipe of his successor’s pen). And yes, the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority (though any Republican president would have achieved that, and the current 6–3 majority owes more to Senator Mitch McConnell than to Trump). But the trade-off for even these qualified accomplishments, Flake argued, has been that “the party has lost its soul.” He pointed to the “sickening” crony capitalism that dominates the president’s orbit, and to the GOP’s continued support for Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.[Eugene Robinson: The end of the Trump era]And now, after thoroughly remaking the party in his image and purging it of anti-MAGA dissidents such as Flake, Trump has handed his party a generationally devastating midterm wipeout. “That’s what I think Republicans looking in the mirror are saying: ‘We did this for this man? Was it worth it?’”I reminded him that one of those Republicans, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, once derided Flake’s principled resistance to Trump as feckless and self-defeating. No… [TheTopNews] Read More.