THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term. All that stood between tens of thousands of federal employees and their paychecks was a similar vote in the House.But House Republicans would not agree. Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.“It’s a failure of everyone,” Representative David Schweikert, a Republican who represents a politically divided district in Arizona, told us.Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing  celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.Back in their districts, members of Congress—particularly swing-seat Republicans—seem to be in hiding. Hardly any are holding town halls or other well-publicized events that could put them face-to-face with frustrated voters. We contacted the offices of more than a dozen House Republicans in tight reelection races this year. Only Schweikert responded. No one else would agree to interviews about what they were hearing from constituents, nor would they disclose the events they were holding to solicit public feedback. (One of those members, Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, was spotted by TMZ on a trip to Scotland with several colleagues.) A spokesperson for Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, a Republican who won her last campaign… [TheTopNews] Read More.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Like Donald Trump, I, too, once underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the fall of 2004, as an underemployed freelance journalist drawn to heady stories about international politics, I had the bright idea of traveling to the notoriously closed country on a tourist visa. Press visas for Iran were hard to come by, and my travel was exploratory—I had no particular assignment. My profile was low, I figured. Who would care if, between the obligatory sightseeing expeditions, I rattled around Iranian cities meeting political analysts, philosophers, students, filmmakers, and the relatives of Iranian expats I knew?The Islamic Republic was not to be messed with in this way. Its visa regime was deadly serious; so was the official paranoia about foreigners. American tourists were required to travel with a specially vetted guide. For four weeks, I strained to see past the diminutive figure of a young woman I’ll call Pardis, who pretended to be a tour guide while I pretended to be a tourist. Pardis excelled at her job, which was not only to make sure that I adhered to the terms of my visa, but also to report on all of my movements and conversations, and to obfuscate everything I saw.One day I watched a bus disgorge a troop of uniformed Basij militiamen at an intersection in central Tehran.“Who are they?” I asked Pardis.“Oh,” she said. “They’re a youth group. Sometimes they help the police.”Because Pardis stood between me and all that I was truly curious about, I studied her. She was not a dour Islamist but a fun-loving 31-year-old who had hair flowing out of her headscarf and risqué online flirtations with men overseas. She was an orphan, unlucky in love, and ambitious in her minder-ing, circumstances that rendered her marginal—an unmarried career woman living with a roommate. She was also relentlessly trivial, with a knack for diverting any potentially substantive encounter I might have with her country or anyone in it into an endless stream of repetitive inside jokes and girlish banter.[Read: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]We wandered through bazaars, threatening to buy each other the ugliest items we saw—a giant pair of red satin underwear, a wig, a dowdy zebra-print skirt. We flew to Shiraz on IranAir, a black-turbaned cleric across the aisle from us. Pardis took out… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump clearly wants out—and soon.The war that the United States and Israel started with Iran delayed what Trump sees as a landmark visit to China, which he postponed until mid-May, suggesting that he thinks he will be free to travel by then. He said in a Cabinet meeting that most of Iran’s military capabilities have been destroyed, implying a high degree of success. And, having twice left the negotiating table with the regime in the past year, he now appears keen to make a deal of some sort that will allow U.S. and Israeli forces to withdraw and, he presumably hopes, reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that the stock market can rise and oil prices can fall.But wars rarely, if ever, wrap up neatly, or perfectly solve the problems they aimed to address. Sometimes they lead to new problems. And how they end is always hard to predict. Four weeks into World War II, no one could have anticipated how it would end. By the first month of the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban-led government was collapsing. Less than a month after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, in what turned out to be the apex of the U.S. military campaign. (Saddam was captured nine months after the invasion.)One month into the war with Iran, U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully degraded Iran’s military capabilities. But Tehran has proved adept at counterpunching in asymmetrical ways, blocking the Strait of Hormuz and targeting U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf with drones. The regime’s allies, Houthi rebels in Yemen, launched at least two missiles toward Israel over the weekend. Those attacks again expanded the battlefield and raised fears that the Houthis could stop ships from using the Red Sea, as they did shortly after the start of the war in Gaza in 2023.Trump—as his advisers repeatedly remind the public—has options. He is sending ground forces to the Gulf at the same time as he is considering dispatching senior members of his administration to talk peace. Trump said he was extending a pause on strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure until April 6, while the negotiations continue.None of Trump’s four current options to bring hostilities to an end comes close to achieving the grand ambition the president outlined on the first night of the war—regime change in Tehran—in the weekslong timeline he promised. Whether his other… [TheTopNews] Read More.

About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback.But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump's handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Tim Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.”The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.”The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Markwayne Mullin cultivated a reputation in Congress as a brawler, but he sounded more like a peacemaker as he was sworn in this week as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t care what color your state is. I don’t care if you’re red or you’re blue,” Mullin, a former mixed-martial-arts fighter, said during the brief Oval Office ceremony, with President Trump looking over his shoulder. “My job is to be secretary of Homeland and to protect everybody the same.”Mullin’s conciliatory tone has concerned some of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s immigration crackdown. They worry that the president has lost his nerve after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, and that firing Kristi Noem signaled a retreat from his promise to conduct the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history. Some Trump opponents have a similar view; they are hopeful that the civic resistance displayed in Minneapolis stopped the administration’s authoritarian march in its tracks.Although Mullin gives Trump a different face at DHS, his arrival doesn’t change the administration’s overarching goal—enshrined into law last July by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—to remove 1 million people a year from the United States. Noem fell short of that during her tenure at DHS (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement completed about 400,000 deportations last year), but she didn’t have the full kit of mass-deportation tools at her disposal, and her team was internally divided and often dysfunctional. Mullin inherits a rapidly expanding immigration-enforcement apparatus at DHS, amped up by $170 billion in additional funding.Since Valentine’s Day, the Transportation Security Administration and several other DHS agencies have been shut down amid a bitter fight over ICE’s tactics. Early this morning, after Trump said he’d order Mullin to pay TSA staff, senators reached a deal that would fund everything in the department with the exception of ICE and Border Patrol. The deal, which now goes to the House, does not include the changes Democrats have demanded to ICE tactics. The lack of an annual budget will hardly be a roadblock to mass deportations. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch of the agency focused on arrests and deportations, has an annual budget of $5.3 billion, but the OBBBA provided nearly six times that much—$30 billion—in operating funds. The shutdown, in other words, hasn’t been a fight about money or about stopping Trump’s mass-deportation plan. It’s been about whether… [TheTopNews] Read More.