THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s critics are starting to think they got her all wrong. “You are a very different person than I thought you were,” The View’s Sunny Hostin marveled last week, when the Georgia representative joined the show for a largely genial discussion. Recently, Greene has criticized the GOP’s shutdown strategy, lack of a plan to address health-care costs, and refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. This turnabout has excited some liberals and media outlets, sometimes to the point of credulity.Greene sits on the potent House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees. She has openly entertained runs for higher office, including for governor and Senate, and was recently reported to be pursuing the presidency. (She denied it.) Yet watching the softball sit-downs with her on TV, one gets the sense that Greene is being treated as a curiosity rather than as one of the most powerful people in the country,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Since his return to office, President Donald Trump has missed few chances to flex the power he wields over the nation’s most formidable institutions and its wealthiest people. So when the White House announced that Trump would host the latest in a series of dinners with top business executives, this time including JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon and the chief executive of Nasdaq, reporters in the White House press pool prepared to watch Trump show off.Nope. Last night’s dinner was closed to the press. No reporter was even given a glance. And later, when the White House held a signing ceremony for the president to officially end the longest federal-government shutdown in history, the reporters present were quickly whisked out of the Oval Office. Today, too, he didn’t talk to the press after signing an executive order alongside the first lady in the East Room. The president, to be clear,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The jurors in the case of The United States of America v. The Sandwich Guy (as Sean Charles Dunn is better known) sized one another up before the final group had even been selected, asking, “Did you attend the ‘No Kings’ march?”“It’s like, You’re damn right I went,” one juror told me, referring to the anti-Trump protests throughout the country last month, including in Washington, D.C. (The juror, who spoke with me several days after she and 11 of her peers found Dunn not guilty of assault, did so anonymously because, as she explained, Donald Trump’s administration is “very vengeful,” and she fears retribution.)The facts of the incident are ostensibly simple: In the early days of Trump’s militarization of the nation’s capital, Dunn—a 37-year-old Air Force veteran and, at the time, Justice Department employee—screamed at federal officers stationed in a popular nightlife corridor, repeatedly calling them fascists, and then hurled… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

For a president who wants to project vigor and command at all times, Donald Trump made the worst possible spectacle of himself in the Oval Office last Thursday.It came in the form of two images captured during a press event to announce cheaper weight-loss drugs. The first materialized when a participant fainted and several officials on hand rushed over. Not Trump, however, who, after turning to look at the fallen man, stood a few feet away at the Resolute Desk with his back to the action, wearing an indifferent expression. This was pointedly reflected in news photos that instantly went viral.The second image, less noticed but possibly more damning, was memorialized just beforehand: As Mehmet Oz, the administration’s head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, delivered remarks, Trump appeared to be nodding off at his desk. The Washington Post, in keeping with its dogged Watergate-era traditions, undertook a… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The longest-ever government shutdown has ended with a negotiated whimper rather than a glorious Resistance victory, and many Democrats are furious at their leaders. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut argued on Bluesky that the Senate’s vote to end the suspension leaves President Donald Trump stronger, not weaker. Representative Ro Khanna of California wrote on X that leaders must pay. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, he argued, “is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”There was, in fact, a strong moral case for ending this shutdown. The Democrats’ decision to back down, however painful, will save tens of millions of poor and working-class Americans who had lost food stamps from going hungry. Millions more travelers will be spared chaos at airports. Federal employees will no longer have to pay mortgages and bills… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.