THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Even in an age of unintended metaphors, few can compare to the scene that unfolded one winter morning five years ago on a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C.A group of men gathered in front of the seven-story building at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street Northwest, just a short walk from the Capitol, and prepared for an act of careful destruction. Their task was to do away with the colossal facade overhead. Slab by slab, they removed the Tennessee pink marble. The 45 words of the First Amendment had been there for years, giant letters carved in stone. Now that message was gone.Although the symbolism was impossible to ignore, the backstory bordered on mundane: The Newseum, a museum devoted to the history of journalism, had run out of money and closed. So down went the tribute to the First Amendment, sent in pieces to Philadelphia. The marble was reconfigured by the National Constitution Center, which is all well and good for those who want to pay $24.95 to bask in freedom’s most glorious words. But those words are no longer displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue, where anyone traversing the street that connects Congress to the White House would once have seen them.The facade was only ever a blip on the radar screen—installed in 2007, dismantled in 2021. And if you’re looking for razed history, there’s plenty more at that exact intersection. A century before the First Amendment (briefly) towered over passersby, two rival hotels stood at the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth. One had a tavern that held the distinction of being the first public place in Washington where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung, in 1814. The other, the National Hotel, was where John Wilkes Booth slept the night before he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in 1865.miralex / GettyFrom 2007 to 2021, the facade of the Newseum reminded passersby in downtown Washington of their First Amendment freedoms.My point is: America is in a constant state of change. Anything that persists for a time does so only through a combination of fortune and choice. Our core freedoms may be enshrined in our founding documents, but they are guaranteed to us only in principle. Advancing the cause of freedom in practice is another matter.Americans must try to better understand what freedom demands of them. One requirement of self-governance is the relentless pursuit of truth, which necessarily involves questioning people in positions of power in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

“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.