THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte, was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back. “That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant. In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives. He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that eliminated the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial. Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me.[Read: Trump Has a Bill Pulte Problem]The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved. The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason. “Mostly it was operational. We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters. “With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team. It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as… [TheTopNews] Read More.

How many words does it take to trigger MAGA world? Three, it turns out.When Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a rally on Sunday that President Trump wants to “travel with Natalie”—implying an untoward relationship between the 80-year-old grandfather and his 35-year-old special assistant, Natalie Harp—the outrage from Trump allies was as loud as it was predictable: Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, and Laura Ingraham, among others, accused Ossoff of misogyny, despite having previously defended Trump’s own sexist comments. (The word hypocrisy feels inadequate here.)But as this debate over propriety unfolds, a dedicated swath of the Democratic base is delighted. Since Trump’s reelection, these voters have been hankering to see their leaders show, well, a little more fight. So far, most of that fight seems to have come from midterm candidates on the far left, who often target the Democratic Party itself or the so-called establishment. To hear Ossoff, a more moderate Democrat in a reddish-purple state, direct a sharp—albeit petty—jab directly at the president thrilled such voters.Some, in fact, found it almost cathartic. “Someone finally said something,” a 52-year-old woman named Rebecca, who attended Ossoff’s Atlanta rally, told me, sounding delighted. Bring on the “smoke,” Aaron Whitely, the chair of the Democratic Party of Chatham County, in Georgia, told me. “The younger folks are looking for it. The older folks are loving it.”Ossoff appears to know this. It’s why viral clips of the senator, who is running for reelection, seem to pop up every few weeks like zinnias in summer. It’s also why you can’t have a conversation about the 2028 presidential race without mentioning his name. But just because the base loves the smoke doesn’t mean every other Georgia voter will.Throughout Ossoff’s reelection campaign, Democratic talking heads have credited the senator for succinctly calling out the Trump administration’s alleged self-dealing. His speech at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta, on Sunday afternoon contained his usual anti-corruption message: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile,” he told the crowd, “while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”But this time, about 10 minutes into the speech, Ossoff threw in the comment that lit up social media and group chats. “The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he… [TheTopNews] Read More.

You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration—often seen in public but rarely heard from—and her presence has turned into a curiosity. Although she got some mentions in the press as well as… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Normally, when a primary candidate finishes with 10.5 percent of the vote, it is a clear signal of their irrelevance.James Fishback finished third in Tuesday’s Florida Republican gubernatorial primary, and at no point in the race did it seem like he ever had a chance. In fact, at no point in his broader career has the 31-year-old, who is known for his racist slurs and unabashed bigotry, achieved anything of note. The high-school-debate nonprofit he founded was hit with allegations that he had sexually groomed a 17-year-old employee. A hedge fund where he’d once worked said that it had planned on firing him before he resigned, and accused him of claiming a job title that had never existed at the firm. He founded his own investment firm but left after the board decided to shut down the funds he managed. Fishback told me that he had left the firm to run for governor. He claims to have been an adviser to DOGE—but former senior DOGE officials have denied it.However, Fishback is defiantly proud of his showing, despite losing the primary to Representative Byron Donalds and also finishing well behind Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. “I would much rather have gotten 10 percent and done all of this and really moved the needle in political discourse,” he told me today, “than have gotten 24 percent like Jay Collins did and have nothing to show for it.”Despite his penchant for spectacular, serial failure, Fishback matters because he managed to figure out at least one thing: how to capture attention from the youthful right. Heading into Election Night, this was the one area where Fishback appeared to excel. A February poll from the University of North Florida found Fishback to be the leading candidate among GOP primary voters under 35, with 31 percent supporting him. By July, that number was up to 51 percent, according to a Change Research poll paid for by the conservative nonprofit Freedom Project USA. His candidacy was, in some respects, a test run for what might work with the next generation of Republican voters. What seems to be working is unrepentant bigotry.[Read: Young Republican activists are turning against Trump]Fishback’s appeal to younger voters can be explained by a few other things: He is relatively young. He ran a ragebait campaign that met young people where they are, maintaining a heavy digital presence with posts and appearances on the livestreams… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump gets what he wants, when he wants it, from the National Park Service. One and a half million dollars to replace brick pavers in Lafayette Park, across from the White House? Contracting officials at the NPS Washington headquarters found the money within five days last month. A $170,000 request to remove a fence around the Hains Point golf course, preparing the ground for a new “championship-quality” layout? Six days this summer. And the more–than–$5 million project to gild equine statues along the nearby Memorial Bridge? That took 12 days.The rapid-approval system is specific to projects Trump wants, thanks to a reorganization at the Interior Department led by Secretary Doug Burgum. Trump issued an executive order to make the District of Columbia “safe and beautiful,” justifying the creation of an NPS docket of “White House priorities” that is handled separately from other park projects and is prioritized both for funding and contracting resources, according to documents I obtained and interviews with five current or former NPS officials. Meanwhile, many other projects throughout the nationwide system of parks are languishing.The list I received includes Trump’s well-known projects on the National Mall and the refurbishment of the White House, along with several lesser-known efforts: The hiring and equipping of 450 new U.S. Park Police officers in the Washington region, and more than $12.8 million—some of which came from the Department of Justice—for police equipment, including new Flock license-plate-reading cameras, radios, tasers, laptops, body cameras, and body armor. Internal documentation for park projects typically includes “Consequences of Failure to Act,” which scores the urgency based on health and safety measures. When work began in January on fountains near the White House, officials described the need for the work in this way: “Such failure will disappoint visitors, as well as residents and employees of the White House.”The new project-funding system was described by a contracting officer during an April meeting with NPS officials. “There’s three different lists: White House priorities, high priorities, and low priorities,” the official told colleagues on the virtual call, according to a written account that was provided to me. Those on the call, who do not work on White House priorities, were advised that projects on the low-priority list likely would not be completed, so they should attempt to get their needs moved to the high-priority list.  White House priorities, meanwhile, were nonnegotiable. As Washington is beautified at great… [TheTopNews] Read More.