THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from National Parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from National Parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. “I’m so proud of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said Wednesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary-general of NATO. “It’s become one of the hottest cities in the world.”But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include… [TheTopNews] Read More.

A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.And that was just yesterday.For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.[Read: Trump in defeat]This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For one night, in the heart of deep-blue Washington, D.C., a fenced-off section of the National Mall became an oasis for members of the MAGA base. They had believed in President Trump from the beginning and carried him triumphantly back to power in 2024, and now they came to the grand opening of America’s 250th-birthday celebration in red-white-and-blue headbands, draped in flags, and sporting dangly blue AMERICA earrings. Doubts about anything related to  Trump—his abysmal approval ratings, inflation accelerated by the war he started in Iran, his clashes with Republican senators earlier in the day—were, for an evening, drowned out by the roar of fighter jets overhead.Last night’s festivities were meant to kick off two weeks in which Americans could come together and commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. But a string of artists had pulled out of events in Washington amid concerns that the celebrations would become the Trump show. And indeed, the evening felt like a Trump rally, with a montage of hits that his most die-hard fans know and love, including Trump’s favorite tenor singing “Ave Maria.” The president declared that America is “the hottest country anywhere in the world” and rattled off a list of ways in which his administration continues to “Make America Great Again.” “The best is yet to come!”The crowd agreed. At this moment, attendees told me, when so much seems uncertain, the most logical thing for them to do is to put their faith in the president.[Read: Thank you for your attention to this birthday]Karen and Paul Depperschmidt are living the retirement they always dreamed about—road-tripping around America, visiting national parks. They live full-time in Wilmington, North Carolina, and they made the six-and-a-half-hour trip up to D.C. for the Great American State Fair—and the rally especially. The trip came with an added bonus—the chance to share RV parks with international visitors here for the World Cup. They met a family from Brazil and three Scottish tourists who were en route from Boston to Florida. “The nicest guys, they are having the best time,” Karen told me. “They love this country.”The Trump rallies they’d previously attended—Karen’s been to two, Paul to three—had been a blast, they said. “Everybody’s so nice.” And, as lifelong conservatives originally from Texas, they wanted to show support for a president who they believe is keeping his word. “A lot of people don’t like it, but he is doing exactly what he… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Halfway through President Trump’s first term, as construction crews were busy installing hundreds of miles of barriers along the southern border, a puzzling edict came down from America’s aesthete in chief. Trump wanted the border wall painted black.The president had already lost an argument about what his “big, beautiful wall” should look like. Trump envisioned a solid-concrete structure, like the one Israel has built through the West Bank. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection already had a preferred prototype, consisting of vertical steel bars that, crucially, allowed border agents to see through to spot potential threats on the Mexican side. The competing visions pointed to a larger fundamental question: Whose border wall was it?How quaint that seems now. Trump in his second term treats federal property as his own, demolishing the East Wing of the White House, adding his name to the Kennedy Center, and ordering the construction of a 250-foot arch opposite the Lincoln Memorial. His fixation with paint continued as he ordered a blue coating on the Reflecting Pool that turned it into a slime lagoon. He also wants to cover the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s granite in white paint to make it better match the White House, next door.Trump in 2017 was still willing to defer to experts, especially those in uniform. Although CBP officials managed to talk him out of the concrete-wall idea, along with a proposal to add sharp spikes to the top so that climbers would risk impaling themselves, they relented on the black paint. Trump saw it as another way to deter migrants. He told a story—since recited many times—about his golfing buddies scalding their arms after he installed a black-granite countertop at the snack bar of one of his clubs. The president even had a specific shade of paint that he called “flat black,” whose heat-retention properties he deemed superior. Potential border jumpers would burn their hands if they tried to touch the steel bars, Trump insisted. The president seemed to enjoy discussing the various ways that migrants could be injured or killed by the wall, according to his aides, who said often that he talked about grisly scenarios as the best way to prevent illegal crossings.Neither CBP nor the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the construction of the wall, thought that the paint was a good idea. It would add hundreds of millions in costs and saddle the structure with… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the weeks after he was elected mayor of New York City last fall, Zohran Mamdani worked behind the scenes to torpedo a bid by one of his allies, a charismatic young democratic socialist, to challenge the reelection of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Brooklyn. Such a high-profile primary fight, Mamdani reportedly argued at the time, could slow his agenda for the city.In light of what happened last night, Mamdani’s intervention might have saved the political career of a man who could become the nation’s first Black House speaker next year. Mamdani picked other primary battles across the city, and he won them all. Candidates whom the mayor backed defeated two House Democratic incumbents: Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Harlem Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In an open-seat race, the Mamdani-endorsed state legislator Claire Valdez swamped a Democrat who had the support of much of the party’s local establishment.The insurgent victories exposed a striking dynamic with significant implications for national politics: America’s two most powerful Democrats, Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both hail from New York City, but they are not the dominant force in their own hometown. For the moment, that distinction belongs indisputably to Mamdani, the 34-year-old whose winning mayoral campaign last year took both men—and almost everyone else—by surprise.Mamdani first endorsed Brad Lander, a rival turned ally in last year’s mayoral race. Lander trounced Goldman, a second-term Democrat and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, largely by playing up their differences over Israel in a district that includes some of the city’s most progressive neighborhoods. The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.[Read: The liberal district that could oust… [TheTopNews] Read More.