THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.He couldn’t do it.As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows: One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia. Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor. Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C. Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform: We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.But the similarities mostly end there. In New York, an inspiring young leftist competed against a boorish, but experienced, former governor to replace a corrupt mayor. In Los Angeles, the leftist insurgent isn’t inspiring, and the boorish challenger—the former reality-TV villain Spencer Pratt—is inexperienced. The incumbent isn’t corrupt, just feckless. Despite their overwhelming weaknesses, two of these candidates will advance from Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary, and one will win in the November general election. Los Angeles is unlikely to be better off.On paper, Raman seems like a natural heir to Mamdanism. In 2020, she became the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to be elected to L.A.’s city council and the first challenger to unseat an incumbent there in 17 years. Now she’s running as a housing wonk who knows what it takes to deliver affordability.Unfortunately for Raman, she appears to have neither Mamdani’s charisma nor his mastery of modern campaigning. She has few social-media followers and none of the sleek vertical videos that made Mamdani famous before he was polling well. (Instead, she has posted strange scripted Instagram videos with such captions as “Hayley’s landlord gave her an impossible ultimatum, but Nithya Raman said ‘NOT TODAY! Now she still has her apartment… and a new boyfriend?”) Her website’s homepage features a video of her reading a speech off her phone. Her performance in a televised debate a few weeks ago was widely panned after she gave word-salad answers to yes-or-no questions such as whether noncitizens should vote in local elections. She was “not ready for prime time and certainly not ready to step up and be mayor of the second biggest city in the U.S.,” Garry South, a longtime L.A. political consultant, told me. Her odds of becoming mayor on the prediction site Kalshi went from 51 percent to 18 percent in the two days that followed.When I spoke with Raman a few weeks ago over Zoom, I asked for her elevator pitch on… [TheTopNews] Read More.

THe morning after Louisiana’s House primaries were scheduled to take place, worshipers at Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge were on their feet, swaying to the gospel music that vibrated through the wooden pews. Just days earlier, the vote had been abruptly postponed as Republicans scrambled to redraw congressional boundaries in a way that would erase one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts and dilute the political influence that many in the congregation had fought for. From the pulpit, Reverend Renè Brown said that all of this was on his mind. “The pastor,” he declared after reading a passage from the Book of Numbers about the allotment of land, “wants to talk about biblical redistricting.” Two giant television screens had just displayed the U.S., Confederate, and Christian flags and the words BIBLICAL REDISTRICTING. Churchgoers gasped and glanced at their neighbors; some burst out laughing. “Oh Lordy,” one man said under his breath, his eyebrows arching nearly up to his hairline as he braced for an intense sermon. Some might wonder why the debate over representation is being framed in racial terms, Brown told his congregants. “The reason many people ask that question is because it doesn’t affect their race,” he said. “It is about race. People make race-based decisions regardless of what they are and what they know.”  In the weeks since the Supreme Court hollowed out the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the past has felt especially present to many at Mount Zion. Over the arc of their lives, the elders gathered inside the sanctuary had experienced the promise of the law, its reality, and, now, its narrowing. The Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais could return the country to an earlier era of weakened Black voting power, and comes amid a partisan gerrymandering battle mounted by President Trump. The Court’s ruling has supercharged Republican efforts across the South—in states including Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia—to redraw congressional districts in a way that benefits white citizens at the expense of nonwhite voters who primarily cast ballots for Democrats. In Louisiana, where about one-third of the state’s residents are Black, the state legislature on Friday redrew a majority-Black district held by Representative Cleo Fields, a Democrat, making it far more Republican-rich. The map with the redrawn district, which includes Mount Zion, is expected to be signed into law by Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican. The GOP would then be favored… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump has never really cared about the Republican Party per se. He basks in its adulation, and it’s beneficial to him when the GOP controls Congress. But he’s never adhered to its orthodoxies or honored its heroes. Neither has he been willing to brook internal dissent in the name of the party’s big tent. He demands absolute fealty but displays little loyalty. He can’t help obsessing over his personal priorities—such as his proposed ballroom or his retribution campaign against perceived tormentors—to the detriment of his party’s political interests. On ballots, Donald Trump (MAGA) would be more accurate than Donald Trump (R).With little more than five months until the midterms, that divergence between what Trump thinks is good for Trump and what is good for the Republican Party has never been wider. Trump’s priorities appear in many ways to be hurting the GOP’s chances in November, when it already faces stiff odds of keeping control of Congress. The war he started with Iran put Americans’ economic struggles front and center when the price of gasoline jumped. Any semblance of a national legislative agenda has evaporated as he pushes long-shot bills that his own party declines to take forward. And his obsession with construction in and around Washington, D.C., it is safe to say, doesn’t suggest a chief executive focused on the problems of everyday citizens.Meanwhile, Trump has wielded his clout inside the party like a broadsword, endorsing primary opponents in races against incumbents who defy him. Trump has a perfect endorsement record this year: All 118 candidates—for House, Senate, and governors’ races—he has backed in primaries have won, according to a Fox News count (though many of these races were not really contested). Even though Trump’s power over his party appears at its pinnacle, many Republicans believe that the president has actually accelerated his own political decline. Many of those primary winners may struggle in November, darkening the GOP’s prospects for keeping control of Congress. And at least some of the defeated incumbents, who will serve on Capitol Hill until next January, now feel liberated to push back on what they dislike in Trump’s agenda. Others in the Senate who are not up for reelection are bitter about the president’s role in their colleagues’ defeat and have shown little interest in helping him pursue his personal-grievance campaign.“The problem is he has nobody around him who is willing to tell him,… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump delights in playing what he calls “the gay national anthem” whenever he wants to rev up a crowd. He’s obsessed with Elton John, was once friendly with Liza Minnelli, and has a Liberace-esque flair for gilded interiors. One of his favorite sports to watch—mixed martial arts—is basically sweaty, semi-naked dudes. And he is a deep and vocal admirer of the physique of fellow men, often announcing which ones he would cast in a movie: “They’re perfect specimens,” he said last year of the military pilots who had visited him in the Oval Office; “He looks like the Marlboro Man,” he cooed about a former Iowa state senator; “Young, handsome guy. It’s always nice to be young and handsome,” he complimented the president of Paraguay.Some of Trump’s allies note that years before gay marriage was legalized, Trump had gay friends, took pro-gay stances, and allowed gay people to join his private club in Palm Beach starting in the mid-1990s. Ric Grenell became the first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet position when Trump appointed him acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, who is now the president’s envoy for special missions, once called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history,” a title that Trump said he was honored to have.To be clear: Trump says he is attracted only to women and, in fact, has been married to three of them. He once hosted the Miss Universe pageant, was caught on tape saying that he loves to grab women “by the pussy,” and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman. Loads more have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied the accusations.) “Women—I like. Men—no, I don’t have any interest,” Trump affirmed at a Board of Peace meeting earlier this year.But there’s also little doubt that Trump has unabashedly embraced the aesthetic—the je ne sais quoi—of a certain kind of gay man. Some who are sympathetic to the president have gone even further. Blaze Media, a conservative outlet started by the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, ran a story in 2024 headlined “Donald Trump: Our First Gay President,” much in the way people talked about Bill Clinton as having been the first Black one. The story notes, in a section titled “Queen of Queens”: “He blows kisses to Hulk Hogan, weighs in on Fashion Week (‘used to be so glamorous and exciting! No stars, no fun—just boring’),… [TheTopNews] Read More.