THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Photographs by Cassandra KlosKathie Purdy doesn’t mind the phone calls. And there have been a lot of them—producing a sustained buzzing from her iPhone throughout the nearly two weeks since Graham Platner announced that he would drop out of the Maine Senate race. At one point, Purdy’s device grew so hot that she had to take it out of its case to let it breathe. But that was okay, she told me. As chair of the York County Democratic Committee, it was her job to help guide Mainers through this confusing moment.What Purdy did not appreciate was the insinuation—from other Democrats, from members of the media, from online trolls—that the process to replace Platner was somehow undemocratic. “This is what I’m talking about,” Purdy told me on Sunday, showing me a text from a voter asking whom “leadership had picked” for the nomination. It was early afternoon in the Sanford Performing Arts Center, and we were sitting side by side on the stage, looking out over the democratic process in action. Purdy rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Actually, right now we are conducting the caucus-type meeting in Sanford where the participants vote for a group of delegates,” she replied, using voice-to-text. “That’s the folks who’ll be voting for your Senate candidate.”Choosing those delegates was not a tidy affair. All morning, the room had been crowded, even though the state party had urged people to please consider voting from home. Mainers who wanted to be delegates and Mainers who came to meet delegate candidates and campaign volunteers proffering lists of allied delegates wove in between the aisles of red-upholstered chairs, shaking hands and arguing and complaining about various parts of the process in which they were taking part. Some struggled with the Wi-Fi. Occasionally, Purdy took the stage to make an announcement: We found a pair of car keys. Please come to the stage if they’re yours!Looking around, I imagined that, somewhere a few hours north, Susan Collins was rubbing her hands together with delight. Maine Democrats have failed to unseat her for nearly three decades, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that in three months they’ll come up short again. Zoomed out, the situation is, objectively, ridiculous. Maine Democrats nominated Platner despite a bouquet of red flags, including a Nazi tattoo and allegations of volatile behavior from past girlfriends. Now that an accusation of rape has toppled Platner’s candidacy, the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.The most important policy decision made by Markwayne Mullin in his short tenure atop the Department of Homeland Security stood for barely a day. ICE officers had just killed two people: a Mexican construction worker with three American sons in Texas, and a Colombian delivery driver whose 3-year-old daughter saw him lying dead in the street in Maine. In each case, the officers had been looking for men other than the ones they killed. DHS officials claimed that the officers had fired defensively during chaotic vehicle stops, but they offered no body-camera footage to back those claims. After phone calls with Maine’s senators, including Susan Collins, the secretary ordered an emergency halt to most traffic stops. But the decision surprised many in the White House, including President Trump, who reversed the order in a social-media post the next morning. Mullin wasn’t fired, but his authority was undercut, to the delight of the online MAGA mob that had been hammering the former Oklahoma senator as a wuss.Mullin declared on social media that he and Trump were “on the same page” on ICE enforcement tactics and priorities. But for a secretary whose views on the department he leads are still vague, the phrasing posed a question: What page are they on, exactly?Trump seeks the removal of millions of immigrants from U.S. cities and communities, and Mullin was brought in to do that more quietly and cheerfully than his predecessor. Kristi Noem was ousted after the killings in January of two U.S. citizens protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But Mullin, who started in March, is already being squeezed by the same forces that led to her removal. Trump’s supporters want to see the record-breaking deportation campaign that Trump promised them. But when DHS dials up the intensity of ICE enforcement, the broader public recoils from the violence it generates.Mullin, who dropped out of college to run his father’s plumbing business in eastern Oklahoma, took an unusual path to leading the most important domestic-policy initiative of Trump’s second term. He came to the job as somewhat of a blank slate, lacking both the ideological zeal of Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration-policy chief, and the icy resolve of Noem, who pressed Trump’s mass-deportation campaign with a ruthless determination.Mullin was an improbable choice in other ways. He is not from a border state and did not arrive with deep knowledge of immigration… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Philip CheungRead more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.“My wife, Gabby, was shot in the head.”Obviously, I knew this. Senator Mark Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and grievously wounded in a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway in 2011. It was one of the most notorious acts of political violence in America. In several recent conversations with Kelly, however, I was struck by how often and how bluntly he repeated these exact words. Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut, seems to appreciate the curt repetition of the statement: My wife was shot in the head. It captures how stark and defining this incident was, and continues to be, in his life.  The near-assassination ended Giffords’s career in Congress and his in space. She was left with acute damage to the area of her brain that controls speech. Kelly was compelled by circumstance to create a new course for himself as a caregiver to his wife, Democratic senator, possible candidate for president, and severe critic of President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. Fifteen years after the shooting, Kelly and Giffords remain a singular entity in American public life. I went to Arizona to join them at a series of events around Phoenix. We met at a coffee shop. It was a Friday afternoon, with triple-digit heat, and had already been a grind of a day for both of them. From our meeting, they would go to a reception, followed by a dinner, and then Giffords would fly to Louisiana, where she would attend a memorial service for eight children who’d been slaughtered in a mass shooting a few weeks earlier.Interviewing Giffords and Kelly was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in 25 years of reporting on politics. In our time together, I kept snagging on the same inescapable question: How would their unparalleled dynamic play within the merciless spectacle of a presidential campaign? “I’m Gabby.” She says this by way of introduction, and as a wistful acknowledgment of her name’s cruel irony. Even by politician standards, Giffords was quite the chatterbox. In their joint memoir, Gabby: A Story of Courage, Love, and Resilience, Kelly estimates that before she was shot, Giffords did about 60 or 70 percent of the talking between them. Kelly was the reticent one in the couple, happy to let his wife gobble up the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.J. D. Vance’s new book, Communion, answers a question no one had thought to ask: What would Augustine’s Confessions have looked like if the saint’s greatest literary influence had been Hillary Clinton’s immortal classic, Hard Choices?One of the best-selling nonfiction titles of 2014, Hard Choices runs to more than 600 pages, many of which consist of factoids copied and pasted from Clinton’s old speeches. It is possibly the least introspective book ever written. Her ghostwriters’ modus operandi was to take a bunch of platitudinous abstractions from her time at the State Department (“The strategic fundamentals of our relationship—shared democratic values, economic imperatives and diplomatic priorities—are moving us closer to an understanding and a trust that reflects the convergence of values and interests”) and switch the tenses (“The strategic fundamentals of our relationship with India—shared democratic values, economic imperatives, and diplomatic priorities—were pushing both countries’ interests into closer convergence”).Vance’s book never quite sinks to this level, but it does make me wonder why it was published, and for whose edification. Even by the standards of faith-driven airport nonfiction, Communion is not very interesting. Despite what the jacket copy suggests, the book is not “the story” of Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which had already been recounted in an essay published six years ago in the journal I edit, The Lamp. (Unaltered passages from it appear in the present volume without acknowledgment.) If anything, the book, from its Methodist-church-emblazoned cover on, seems oddly squeamish about the Catholic Church, couching most of its arguments concerning religious questions in a generically Christian register. When Vance does address specifically Catholic subject matter, his language is in some cases awkward and in almost all curiously unidiomatic. At one point, he describes himself attending “a Mass mourning Christ’s passion,” a phrase so theologically defective that it could be the subject of an entire ecumenical council.Like Hard Choices, Communion is full of what might loosely be described as anecdotes. Take the one about Vance’s future wife, Usha, recommending Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking while they were students at Yale Law School. Usha said she found it “cathartic,” prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.Pete Hegseth wants us to watch him sweat. Videos of the secretary of defense in a T-shirt and shorts working out alongside military personnel have become a trademark of his tenure. He has been filmed running on Omaha Beach, swinging a kettlebell on a university campus, and doing jumping jacks on an amphibious assault ship. In one clip, Hegseth pumps iron with troops at the Guantánamo Bay naval base—or, as a Defense Department X account put it, “America’s @SECWAR CRUSHED 44 reps on the bench after a morning run.”But did he really crush those reps? Each time a new episode of Boot Camp Pete drops, critics skewer his form and mock his endurance. They insist that he’s all flex and no fundamentals. In that bench-press clip, for example, he doesn’t fully extend his arms, making the exercise far easier and inflating his total. A few seconds into the clip, you can hear someone yell, “All the way down, all the way up!” Hegseth fails to heed that helpful cue.Such nitpicking would be uncharitable if Hegseth were just another 40-something dad getting a lift in at Planet Fitness. But these are highlight reels, posted by the Pentagon. Plus, the former Fox News host isn’t exactly known for withholding judgment himself: Recall how, last September, he gathered the nation’s generals and admirals together so that he could upbraid them for being overweight. He told them that leaders set the standard and that when “you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes.”With Hegseth’s wisdom in mind, let’s examine what the United States military’s training manuals have to say about proper exercise form. Short answer: a lot. You’ll find hundreds of pages spelling out precisely how to perform all manner of movements, including how to stretch your thighs (“grasp the left ankle and pull toward the left buttock”), how to plank (“forearms flat on the ground, forming a triangle”), and how to throw a four-pound ball from a seated position (“do not throw the medicine ball like shooting a basketball”). These manuals are replete with charts, bullet points, and illustrations. The Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness Testing manual provides detailed instructions, accompanied by photographs, on the bench press, warning that you must not “jerk or shrug the shoulders, arch the back, or allow the hips to rise off the bench” (note to Secretary Hegseth: p.… [TheTopNews] Read More.