THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

On the morning after he won a second term as president, Donald Trump placed an unexpected call to his top fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke. The night before, he’d told a ballroom of supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, that he had held his last political rally—“Can you believe it?”—and was ready to focus on governing. But his message to O’Rourke after the break of dawn was different. “I want you to keep going,” he told her.Within weeks, that message had gone out to his Republican donors, as well as to Fortune 500 companies and billionaire investors who typically avoided electoral politics. Their first opportunity was his second inauguration committee, which would eventually raise $241 million, about $90 million more than organizers needed to fund the events—and nearly four times as much as Joe Biden had raised for his own inauguration, in 2021. But that was just the beginning.Trump wanted money for… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The scandal that briefly made Brendan Carr a household name this fall was an outlier several times over. For one thing, FCC chairmen rarely make news. More than that, Carr usually knows better than to draw too much attention to himself. A seasoned bureaucrat, he has a knack for pulling the strings of power in ways that escape public scrutiny. But when he issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—he made the Trump administration’s appetite for censorship unignorable.Most of the administration’s efforts to manipulate the media up to that point had retained at least a patina of deniability. Here, by contrast, was an uncomplicated threat of government interference—one that prompted Disney, ABC’s parent company, to fall in line by suspending Kimmel’s show. This was too much even for some of the Trump administration’s biggest… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

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.