THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

On Monday, March 24, The Atlantic published a story detailing how editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat of Trump-administration officials discussing attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen. After the president and numerous officials downplayed the significance of the breach, The Atlantic published a second story with the full transcript. The fallout from “Signalgate” included Congressional hearings, denials and attacks on The Atlantic from the White House, and hundreds of memes.This week, Goldberg will discuss his reporting on the breach with Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker in a virtual event just for subscribers. To join their conversation, return to this page on Thursday, April 3 at 11:30 a.m. ET. ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Donald Trump’s interest in seeking an unconstitutional third term as president, like many of his most dangerous or illegal ideas, began as a joke. Trump would muse on the stump that he deserved an extra term because he was robbed of his first (by Robert Mueller’s investigation) or his second (by imagined vote fraud in 2020) without quite clarifying his intent. But in an interview with NBC News this weekend, and then in remarks on Air Force One, Trump said he was completely serious about at least exploring the notion.“A lot of people want me to do it,” he told NBC, adding, “I’m not joking.” When he was asked if the method he envisioned was to have J. D. Vance run at the top of the ticket, and then pass the baton to Trump, he said, “That’s one.” Later, on Air Force One, reporters asked him if he intended to… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Across the press-briefing room in the West Wing, past the lectern where the beaming blond press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, admonishes members of the meddlesome press, behind a blue sliding door, past a bored-looking security guard, and inside a small, cluttered office, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung is on X, trolling his boss’s enemies.“The camera can’t stabilize because the watermelon head is wobbling precariously on a pencil neck,” he wrote on March 13, above a video of Representative Adam Schiff of California. Watching CNN’s Erin Burnett talk about economics, he posted on March 10, “is like watching a donkey try to solve a Rubix [sic] Cube.”This is standard internet talk for Cheung, who, during the 2024 presidential primary, publicly referred to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as a “desperate eunuch” and asked why he would “cuck himself” before the country. But it’s a new tone for a White House communications director.Although… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.