THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Illustrations by Mike McQuadeThe courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.”A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. “What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics,” he said on the podcast a few days after the event. “He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.” Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag.” These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from—but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place. One prominent traveler who had already shown the way was a guest at the fundraiser—Senator J. D. Vance, whose attendance helped close the deal on his selection as Trump’s running mate. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.Opportunist doesn’t really describe Sacks. He doesn’t come across as slippery or two-faced. There’s no evasive glance or roguish smile. He can argue at great length, in a steady sinal drone, with an aggressive debater’s ability to make an evidence-based case for any position he holds—but the position always happens to coincide with his benefit. The only consistent principle of his career is a ruthless devotion to self-interest. Sacks has identified as a “libertarian conservative” all of his adult life,… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Florida Republicans have approved a new congressional map that could hand them as many as four House seats that Democrats currently hold. Their goal is straightforward and universally understood: They want to bolster the GOP’s majority in Congress and retake the lead in a yearlong, nationwide partisan gerrymandering showdown with Democrats.Good luck, however, getting top Republicans in the Sunshine State to openly admit that.In contrast with other states that have held lengthy and freewheeling public debates over redistricting during the past year, the drive to redraw maps in Florida has been marked by secrecy and obfuscation. Republicans can’t acknowledge the intent of their gerrymandering proposal, because the state constitution expressly prohibits partisan redistricting. As a result, Florida GOP officials—starting with Governor Ron DeSantis and extending all the way to lowly political operatives—have treated the subject of gerrymandering like a defendant respecting a Miranda warning: Do not say anything that could jeopardize these new maps in court.“Anything you say will get you subpoenaed,” one political consultant who works for Republicans in the state told me. The consultant spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, too, does not want to be hauled before a judge when Democrats inevitably challenge the new maps as violating the ban on partisan gerrymandering. “You can’t say, ‘We need to make more Republican seats.’ You’re done. You’re toast, and then your map’s invalidated.”No Republican has followed this fight-club rule more carefully than DeSantis, who called the legislature into session less than a week after Virginia voters evened up the national gerrymandering race by narrowly approving an aggressive Democratic redistricting plan. The Florida governor’s office drew lines based on the likelihood that the Supreme Court would announce a decision weakening enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, insulating the proposal from a challenge in federal court. The justices proved DeSantis’s presumption not only correct but exceptionally well timed: The Court handed down its ruling this morning while Florida legislators were preparing to vote on the new districts, and they paused their debate to read the decision. The 6–3 ruling voided a Louisiana voting map that included a new majority-Black district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. It could lead other GOP-led states to eliminate House seats drawn to boost minority representation in Congress in the months and years ahead. The court did not touch Florida’s state ban on partisan gerrymandering, however. The governor’s proposed map eliminates a district created… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Cannons fired. Fifes and drums played “Yankee Doodle.” A quartet of F-35s flew overhead, and dozens of military service members held American and British flags. It was about as much pomp as the United States can muster. This 250th anniversary of America, for the Brits, can be … a bit awkward. It’s like celebrating a divorce with your ex, decades after the breakup. But here was King Charles III, ready to toast the land that his great-grandfather five times over allowed to get away. And here, too, was President Trump—who has long admired, complimented, and envied the Royal Family—doing little to tamp down suspicions that he strives to become a monarch in his own right.Charles’s visit to Washington was part of the celebrations for an anniversary Trump is eager to mark, and the president was keen to impress the King who’d come across the Atlantic. As Trump took the stage yesterday on a dreary morning filled with spitting rain (“What a beautiful British day this is!” he said), he also reveled in the unlikeliness of the onetime subjects welcoming the monarch. “In the shadows of monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, honoring the British king might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence,” Trump said. “But in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate.”He spoke of how far America had come since a ragtag crew of rebels threw off control by their imperial masters. All around him, however, was evidence of his desire to make the nation’s capital a little more, well, regal. Gilded flourishes now predominate at the White House. Outside the gates, Lafayette Park remains a construction site. The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is closed off as Trump has it painted a bright blue. During the welcoming ceremony, cranes swung back and forth above the site where Trump last year tore down the East Wing—and now hopes a monumental ballroom will rise.Throughout the day it was clear how much Trump admired, and wanted to emulate, Charles. In Britain, when one monarch dies, they quickly update the currency with an image of the new king or queen. In America, a gold coin with Trump’s image is in the works, as are National Park passes and passports that will bear his likeness. In Britain, there are elaborate shrines marking the history of an empire. In America, Trump plans a giant triumphal arch… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more  as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”The tendency to self-aggrandize is as fundamental a feature of Trump as his sculpted hair and overlong red ties. But it has become even more important in setting his priorities and steering his actions as he hurtles through his final term in office. He no longer has to worry about the judgment of voters and can instead focus on what he’s decided really matters: ascending to become one of history’s so-called great men and leaving an enduring—and, in many cases, physical—imprint. The result, at least so far, has cost many lives and billions of dollars, damaged the world economy, strained already fragile alliances, and cratered the president’s standing with the public. But those around him cast his new focus as a liberation. “He is unburdened by political concerns and is able to do what is truly right rather than what is in his best political interests,” the administration official told us. “Hence the decision to strike Iran.”What the American people think—and what near-term consequences they may face—has mattered less to Trump than his own designs to remake the world by bombing seven countries, toppling two world leaders in as many months, threatening to seize Greenland, and undermining the NATO… [TheTopNews] Read More.

To describe Donald Trump as a corrupt aspiring authoritarian is not to conclude that he should be murdered.This ought to be a simple point to understand. Yet it is lost on a large swath of the American right, who insist that calling Trump what he is causes at least some of his opponents—among them, the accused shooter Cole Tomas Allen—to believe that violence is justified against the president.In an interview with CBS following the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Trump blamed the most recent attempt on his life on “the hate speech of the Democrats,” which he called “very dangerous.”The New York Post asked on Sunday, “Where did Allen get such ideas about Trump and the need to remove him, via murder?” It answered the question like so: “Almost certainly from the left, including from Democrats in positions of power. Barely a day goes by without some Dem calling Trump an autocrat, a king, a dictator, Hitler.”Also on Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Representative Jamie Raskin to engage with the premise. “You and many of your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president,” she said. “Do you think twice about that when something like this happens?” And yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt charged, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”This claim suffers three serious defects. First, it assumes that violence is the only logical response to an attempt to undermine democracy. In reality, Trump’s assault on democratic norms can be—and in fact, is being—successfully resisted through democratic means. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán had carried out a more advanced version of the same power-consolidation strategy that Trump is attempting now, and voters defeated him through peaceful organizing.[From the September 2024 issue: American fury]The second problem with a moratorium on calling your opponents authoritarian is that Trump himself routinely violates it. The president has spent a decade calling his rivals communists and traitors, among other hyperbolic insults. He has specifically claimed that Democrats rig elections as a matter of course. Taking violent steps to stop undemocratic political leaders follows much more closely from Trump’s rhetoric than from anything Democrats have said about him.And third, the conservative principle would seem to rule out any criticism of authoritarian tendencies, however real they may be. If calling… [TheTopNews] Read More.