THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Driving back to his Marine Corps base in North Carolina alone after attending his grandmother’s funeral, a despondent J. D. Vance was steering through Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains when a combination of slippery roads and bad luck sent his car hurtling toward a guardrail. What came next, he describes as an almost “supernatural experience.” Instead of crashing through the guardrail and sliding off the mountain, the car, he says, mysteriously stopped.“Even during my later years as a strident atheist, the experience sat there inconveniently in the back of my mind,” Vance writes in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “It was as if it existed to annoy me, to challenge the confidence I had in the laws of the universe and the idea that I sat firmly—and alone—in life’s driver’s seat.”Communion, a copy of which I obtained in advance of its release tomorrow, reads as a sequel to Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy. It is billed as a conversion narrative, a reflection on Vance’s 2019 embrace of Catholicism. In an interview, Vance told me that he believes it is appropriate for political leaders “to talk about what influences them, what motivates them, what inspires them.” He added that there is a certain “humility and grace” required of political leaders and said it was his aim to project those things in the book.A memoir is a rite of passage for anyone contemplating a run for president. Vance’s first book catapulted him to prominence with its portrait of working-class white America. In the decade since it was published, however, much has changed—both for the country and for Vance.Communion also tells the story of Vance’s other conversion: from ardent Never Trumper to Donald Trump’s vice president, a shift that he argues was driven not by ambition but by the belief that Trump had proved himself an effective president. Not that he expects everyone to believe that. “To my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I’ll ever change their minds,” he writes.Much of the book is a rumination on matters ethical and spiritual—a perhaps not-so-subtle way to show how he’s different from the man currently in the White House, whose office Vance is widely expected to seek two years from now. Although the book doesn’t directly address whether the vice president intends to run in 2028, it offers some clues, including a notably softer… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When my mom found out I was planning to travel to Dallas to play in a Lunar New Year mah-jongg tournament, she texted a reasonable query: “Don’t they require some level of competence?”And yet, during the third week of February, I found myself first at a dazzling private home in Dallas, and then at a luxury hotel, sitting down with my more refined counterparts to play in a competition in the epicenter of the country’s American mah-jongg resurgence.  First, a bit about how I got here. One of my oldest friends, Catherine—who, like seemingly half of all women in my middle-aged-mom peer group, had suddenly become obsessed with the game—came over to visit one afternoon when I was back in my childhood home for a stretch last summer, helping my mom recover from surgery. Catherine brought her mah-jongg set, along with the promise that she’d teach us and we’d love it and it would be so much fun. Initially, it did not feel particularly fun; it felt like learning a confounding new language, with Chinese characters, complicated rules (and exceptions for every rule), and hard-to-recall new words: crak, pung, chow, bam (and birdbam, another name for one bam, and also an excuse for players drinking alcohol to clink glasses and take a sip). At one point, I realized my brow was actually furrowed, my hands were on my head, and I was having flashbacks to BC Calculus—brain fully engaged, answer still elusive.“At some point,” Catherine assured us, with a sunniness I did not yet feel, “you’ll even be able to chat while you play.”I wasn’t hooked, but I was intrigued. I liked the way the tiles—colorful and sleek, each the size of a chunky domino—looked and felt, slightly weighty in my hand. I liked how they clacked when I swirled them together or stacked them in neat rows. I liked that I hadn’t checked my phone—hadn’t been able to, such was the required concentration—as we played. And I liked the promise of the game: that if I put in the effort to learn the tiles and the language and customs and the rules, I could become privy to a subculture of sorts, an activity that connected me not only to my peers but to those who came before. I also realized that to get good, or even competent, I needed to play regularly and continue to be taught, and that is… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Graham Platner’s victory this week in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary would have been a stunning achievement for a political newcomer under any circumstances. What makes it truly remarkable is that Platner pulled this off despite a decades-long trail of questionable behavior: a Nazi tattoo; contemptible written statements about sexual-abuse victims, Black people, and women; admissions of past substance abuse and marital infidelity; allegations of demeaning, disturbing, and physically threatening behavior toward former girlfriends. (Platner has denied any physical intimidation or violence.)Platner and his surrogates have rolled out a catch-all excuse, meant not only to clarify how he could have made so many bad decisions, but also to shame people who criticize him: Platner, a Marine Corps veteran, was dealing with the heavy emotional burden and mental toll of the wars this nation sent him to fight. It’s not his fault. And he’s a better person now.But that argument—and I say this as a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—is nonsense, a convenient answer intended to divert the conversation from legitimate questions about Platner’s many flaws. It plays on Americans’ sympathy for those who have fought in war and overplays the distinction between veterans and civilians. Whether this justification is used cynically or sincerely—or ignorantly—it is insulting to veterans. Many of them suffer from their time in combat but don’t engage in the kind of behavior that Platner has. And many of them—despite, or because of, their wartime experience—are among our nation’s most accomplished, ethical, hardworking, and patriotic citizens and leaders.Let me put this as plainly as possible: I know quite literally hundreds of combat veterans and the soldiers I fought with, to my knowledge, all somehow managed to avoid getting Nazi tattoos. It doesn’t take much effort to avoid being inked with an SS symbol.[Mike Nelson: Condemning a Nazi tattoo shouldn’t be this hard]Platner himself has said repeatedly that much of his bad behavior stemmed from his war experience. “I’ve been very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” he recently told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, admitting to “not being a good boyfriend” and “self-medicating with alcohol.” He has spoken about having PTSD and, in an interview with The New York Times, described an incident in which his friend was badly injured when their vehicle got hit by an IED… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Donald Trump is old. The president turns 80 on Sunday, becoming the second man to mark that milestone birthday in office. The other, of course, was his predecessor, Joe Biden. Neither particularly likes to be reminded of his age, and both have had White House aides furiously try to stymie any attempts to question their fitness for office. But that’s about where the similarities end when it comes to how each man prepared to ring in his ninth decade.Biden said little about his 80th as it approached, in November 2022, as if wishing to avoid contributing to the debate over whether he was too old to seek reelection. He stayed out of sight and quietly marked the occasion with an understated brunch that fell between his granddaughter’s wedding and a Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket. Trump, however, is building an illuminated octagon with a 92-foot-tall portable-canopy stage, known as the “Claw,” on the White House South Lawn, where he and thousands of spectators will watch half-naked men brutally assault each other. To each their own, I guess.Trump’s fight night is not solely for his birthday; it’s part of several weeks of events in Washington, D.C., to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary—and, hey, it’s also Flag Day. But it’s mostly about celebrating Trump, who first suggested staging a UFC fight at the White House not long after he won the 2024 election. The White House soon connected the fight with the birthdays of Trump and the nation. The more than $60 million event is so Trump; he is fond of over-the-top spectacles, he’s pals with UFC President and CEO Dana White, and he has attended multiple mixed martial arts fights across his two terms (I was in the press pool covering one in 2019 when a fighter got knocked unconscious right in front of us).[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]He’s certainly getting a spectacle. The Claw towers over the executive mansion and has clear sight lines to the Washington Monument. It’s lit up in patriotic red, white, and blue, and sometimes blasts Vegas-nightclub-style spotlights into the sky. The bleachers can seat 4,300 people for seven fights on Sunday night. A few of the fighters may even enter the octagon from the Oval Office. For some, this is Trump’s latest assault on the character and history of “the People’s House,” following the destruction of the East Wing for a proposed ballroom and the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Years before Poison’s Bret Michaels, Young MC, and the Commodores dropped out of this summer’s concert series on the National Mall celebrating America’s 250th birthday, planners envisioned a Smithsonian-led blockbuster festival stretching from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol that would be open to all and free of partisanship. They wanted a party bigger than the Folklife Festival, an annual two-week summer exhibition, and much longer-lasting. This new “Festival of Festivals” would focus on the semiquincentennial, with four to six weeks of performances, workshops, and displays to “celebrate the nation’s successes,” “contemplate the consequences of our history,” and “commit to advancing our multicultural democracy,” according to a November 27, 2023, memo that I obtained.But last summer, with little fanfare, President Trump took control of the event and renamed it. While campaigning, he had promised to work with all 50 state governors to put on his own “Great American State Fair” at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Last July, he traveled to Iowa to announce a change of plans: “a giant patriotic festival next summer on the National Mall featuring exhibits from all 50 states.” The announcement got little attention, because at the same event, Trump said this about congressional Democrats: “I hate them.” The Smithsonian quietly recast the Festival of Festivals as a series of events around the country.So began Trump’s multipronged takeover of the historic celebrations, which will culminate on July 4—the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—amid growing disarray and conflict, according to documents I obtained and interviews with 10 people involved in the planning or oversight of the event, most of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.They described frayed trust and growing conflict that has become so acrimonious that the Department of Interior is refusing to honor a December agreement with America250, a bipartisan group authorized by Congress in 2016 to plan the nation’s festivities. A memorandum of agreement I obtained shows that the department pledged to transfer $50 million in congressional appropriations by February 1, but only $25 million has been delivered so far. “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended,” the Department of Interior press office told me yesterday in an unsigned statement, when I asked why the America250 money had not been transferred. “This… [TheTopNews] Read More.