THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Robert Mueller III was a Bronze Star Marine veteran, an FBI director, and an American citizen. When the president of the United States heard the news that Mueller died today, he put it this way: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”Mueller was honored for his service in Vietnam, and served presidents of both parties as the director of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency. Donald Trump, whose diagnosis of bone spurs kept him from being sent to that same war, has repeatedly denigrated the American war dead as “losers” and “suckers,” and has expressed disgust in the presence of wounded troops (“No one wants to see that, the wounded,” Trump once complained to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).Trump has never tried to be the president of all Americans. That deficiency was on grotesque display as he celebrated the death of someone who devoted his life to the country Trump now leads. Of course, Mueller spearheaded the investigation into whether there was collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump never forgave him.Even by the low standards that Trump has set, cheering the death of another man is abhorrent. Not that it hasn’t happened before. Just four months ago, Trump posted on social media that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their own home because Reiner was a frequent Trump critic. (The couple’s son has been charged in their killing, and investigators have not said that politics played a role in the murders.) Generally speaking, ugly personal attacks are Trump’s go-to mode: He has repeatedly made fun of women’s looks. He called African nations “shithole countries.” He embraced the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He made a punch line out of the brutal assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The list goes on from there.Mueller, in recent years, had retreated from the spotlight. He made few public appearances after his 2019 testimony before Congress at the end of his investigation into Trump; his performance then was, at times, faltering and confusing. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years later. He died at the age of 81.Trump, with his nation at war, spent the day golfing near his lush Palm Beach estate. He was still at his club when news of Mueller’s death broke. Trump fired off his reaction a short time later. The pushback was swift. Representative Seth… [TheTopNews] Read More.

You could measure the on-and-off feud between President Trump and the comedian Bill Maher in weeks, years, or decades. Last month, Trump called Maher a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” in a lengthy Truth Social post. Years ago, he briefly sued Maher for suggesting that his father was an orangutan.All of which makes Maher an unlikely pick—at least at first blush—to receive the last marquee honor at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts before it shuts down for two years, at Trump’s direction, in July. Maher has been chosen to receive this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, two people familiar with the selection told us. One of them, who works at the center, said an announcement is expected soon. A third person said that Maher had been offered the award—and that Trump had been supportive of the idea—but was not sure whether Maher had accepted it. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because Maher has not yet been officially announced as the award recipient. As with all decisions involving this president, the move could still be reversed until publicly announced. The White House declined a request for comment.The Twain Prize ceremony, which streams on Netflix, is one of two major broadcast events at the Kennedy Center, along with the Kennedy Center Honors. Trump took over the Kennedy Center last February by replacing its trustees with loyalists, and was soon fantasizing to them about selecting the Honors recipients himself. Although he would go on to personally approve the honorees (including Sylvester Stallone and the glam-metal stars KISS), it was too late to swap out the 2025 Twain winner, Conan O’Brien, who had been tapped by the previous Kennedy Center leadership. The event functioned as a last hurrah for the old Kennedy Center, with Will Ferrell and Sarah Silverman among the comics roasting both O’Brien (who was there) and Trump (who was not). John Mulaney’s best line was that the Kennedy Center would soon be renamed the “Roy Cohn Pavilion of Big Strong Men Who Love Cats.”In fact, the board of trustees eventually renamed it “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” a change that prompted a new wave of artist cancellations (Philip Glass, the San Francisco Ballet) and more anemic ticket sales. By this February, when Trump said the center would close for a two-year renovation, the attractions on the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago.Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things.Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot.The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. (Some Republicans and election experts say that these claims are greatly overstated.) In the president’s estimation, the bill’s passage could seal a Republican win in this year’s elections. “It will guarantee the midterms” in favor of Republicans, Trump told the House GOP conference earlier this month.The president’s problem is that even the SAVE America Act’s GOP supporters believe that it stands little chance of becoming law. For that to happen, at least nine Democrats would have to join Republicans to defeat a filibuster—a scenario about as likely as Democrats agreeing to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. A slightly more realistic path would be for Republicans to end the filibuster altogether, which Trump has been urging them to do since his first swing through the White House. Although nearly all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans support the SAVE America Act, far fewer of them are willing to blow up the institution’s most controversial quirk to get it passed.None of these challenges has stopped Trump or his most fervent allies from demanding that Senate Republicans take up the SAVE America Act and try their best to pass it anyway. The president has threatened to not sign any legislation—even a resumption of funding for the Department of Homeland… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.A touch of annoyance flashes across Cory Booker’s face as we talk about fighting. “Why do people preemptively, continually, mistake kindness for weakness?” he asks. By “people,” he means, at this moment, me. I had just brought up the festering concern, expressed by fans and critics alike, that he is simply too nice to win the presidency. Booker has been trying to convince me that he’s tough enough for this uncivil American era—that a pathologically genial New Jersey Democrat who preached love in his (mostly unloved) 2020 campaign could, if called to, knock a guy on his ass.To make this case, Booker must reach back more than 30 years, to his days as a second-string tight end at Stanford. He told me how he almost started a fight with Junior Seau, the future NFL Hall of Famer, after the first snap in a game against the University of Southern California. (A teammate wisely pulled him away.) A coach once told Booker, “Between the whistles, when the play starts, you are ferocious. But when the whistle’s over, you help the guy up. And there’s something about that that’s even more scary to those who go against you.”Booker is telling stories like these to audiences around the country for a reason. Over his dozen years in Washington, his image has grown soft, and he needs Democrats to remember the brash up-and-comer who became mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (Declarations such as “I love Donald Trump” in response to an insult from the then–presidential candidate may have helped his reputation among Christian theologians, but not necessarily with voters.) Booker has criticized his party for not confronting the president aggressively enough during his second term; during a debate over police-funding legislation last summer, he angrily accused two Senate Democratic colleagues of complicity. Most memorably, Booker spoke out against the Trump administration for more than 25 hours, breaking Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech—and performing miracles of bladder control.Booker’s shift over the past year isn’t a complete transformation. He still gives out hugs and selfies, tells dad jokes, and occasionally sounds like a motivational speaker, sprinkling half a dozen inspirational quotes into any speech he delivers. But he wants the country to know that he’s got an edge to him, too. “You can be someone who believes in the values of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Philip CheungAt Coronado National Memorial in Arizona, the demolition crews blowing up national-park land tend to announce explosions at least a day in advance, as a warning for hikers to stay away. The crews have been working their way up the western slope of the park for the past couple of months, right along the international boundary with Mexico. President Trump’s border wall needs a smooth, straight path, and there are mountains in the way.Trump didn’t build along this stretch of the border during his first term, but his crews are now working at a furious pace. They have already completed about five miles of 30-foot-tall barrier, painted jet black at the president’s insistence because he thought it looked more intimidating and would be hotter to the touch.I watched them on a recent afternoon from an overlook, at a safe distance from the blast. To the west was the San Rafael Valley, a rolling yellow grassland that is one of the last wild open spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ringed by mountains, it has served as a setting for John Wayne Westerns and episodes of Little House on the Prairie. I saw no power lines, paved roads, or other signs of human presence, aside from the new camp where Trump’s workers were sleeping in trailers and crushing rocks to make concrete for the wall’s base. They had about 20 more miles to go to finish the whole valley, one of the last places in southeast Arizona that hasn’t been walled off.Trump spent about $11 billion to build 450 miles of border barrier in his first term, one of the most expensive federal-infrastructure projects in U.S. history. He faced a lot of pushback too. The federal government shut down in December 2018 for a then-record 35 days when Democrats refused to give Trump $5 billion for border-wall funding. But last summer, Trump got nearly 10 times that amount for the wall—$46.5 billion—when Republicans pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.The money has imbued the project with an aura of inevitability, wiping away the financial and topographical considerations that restrained Trump’s first-term ambitions. John F. Kelly, Trump’s first homeland-security secretary, used to say that building a wall “from sea to shining sea” made no sense over steep mountain ranges where few people enter illegally. Construction through those areas can be wildly expensive, costing more than $40 million a mile.… [TheTopNews] Read More.