THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

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.

Robert Mueller III was a Bronze Star Marine veteran, an FBI director, and an American citizen. When the president of the United States heard the news that Mueller died today, he put it this way: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”Mueller was honored for his service in Vietnam, and served presidents of both parties as the director of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency. Donald Trump, whose diagnosis of bone spurs kept him from being sent to that same war, has repeatedly denigrated the American war dead as “losers” and “suckers,” and has expressed disgust in the presence of wounded troops (“No one wants to see that, the wounded,” Trump once complained to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).Trump has never tried to be the president of all Americans. That deficiency was on grotesque display as he celebrated the death of someone who devoted his life to the country Trump now leads. Of course, Mueller spearheaded the investigation into whether there was collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump never forgave him.Even by the low standards that Trump has set, cheering the death of another man is abhorrent. Not that it hasn’t happened before. Just four months ago, Trump posted on social media that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their own home because Reiner was a frequent Trump critic. (The couple’s son has been charged in their killing, and investigators have not said that politics played a role in the murders.) Generally speaking, ugly personal attacks are Trump’s go-to mode: He has repeatedly made fun of women’s looks. He called African nations “shithole countries.” He embraced the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He made a punch line out of the brutal assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The list goes on from there.Mueller, in recent years, had retreated from the spotlight. He made few public appearances after his 2019 testimony before Congress at the end of his investigation into Trump; his performance then was, at times, faltering and confusing. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years later. He died at the age of 81.Trump, with his nation at war, spent the day golfing near his lush Palm Beach estate. He was still at his club when news of Mueller’s death broke. Trump fired off his reaction a short time later. The pushback was swift. Representative Seth… [TheTopNews] Read More.

You could measure the on-and-off feud between President Trump and the comedian Bill Maher in weeks, years, or decades. Last month, Trump called Maher a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” in a lengthy Truth Social post. Years ago, he briefly sued Maher for suggesting that his father was an orangutan.All of which makes Maher an unlikely pick—at least at first blush—to receive the last marquee honor at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts before it shuts down for two years, at Trump’s direction, in July. Maher has been chosen to receive this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, two people familiar with the selection told us. One of them, who works at the center, said an announcement is expected soon. A third person said that Maher had been offered the award—and that Trump had been supportive of the idea—but was not sure whether Maher had accepted it. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because Maher has not yet been officially announced as the award recipient. As with all decisions involving this president, the move could still be reversed until publicly announced. The White House declined a request for comment.The Twain Prize ceremony, which streams on Netflix, is one of two major broadcast events at the Kennedy Center, along with the Kennedy Center Honors. Trump took over the Kennedy Center last February by replacing its trustees with loyalists, and was soon fantasizing to them about selecting the Honors recipients himself. Although he would go on to personally approve the honorees (including Sylvester Stallone and the glam-metal stars KISS), it was too late to swap out the 2025 Twain winner, Conan O’Brien, who had been tapped by the previous Kennedy Center leadership. The event functioned as a last hurrah for the old Kennedy Center, with Will Ferrell and Sarah Silverman among the comics roasting both O’Brien (who was there) and Trump (who was not). John Mulaney’s best line was that the Kennedy Center would soon be renamed the “Roy Cohn Pavilion of Big Strong Men Who Love Cats.”In fact, the board of trustees eventually renamed it “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” a change that prompted a new wave of artist cancellations (Philip Glass, the San Francisco Ballet) and more anemic ticket sales. By this February, when Trump said the center would close for a two-year renovation, the attractions on the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago.Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things.Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot.The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. (Some Republicans and election experts say that these claims are greatly overstated.) In the president’s estimation, the bill’s passage could seal a Republican win in this year’s elections. “It will guarantee the midterms” in favor of Republicans, Trump told the House GOP conference earlier this month.The president’s problem is that even the SAVE America Act’s GOP supporters believe that it stands little chance of becoming law. For that to happen, at least nine Democrats would have to join Republicans to defeat a filibuster—a scenario about as likely as Democrats agreeing to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. A slightly more realistic path would be for Republicans to end the filibuster altogether, which Trump has been urging them to do since his first swing through the White House. Although nearly all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans support the SAVE America Act, far fewer of them are willing to blow up the institution’s most controversial quirk to get it passed.None of these challenges has stopped Trump or his most fervent allies from demanding that Senate Republicans take up the SAVE America Act and try their best to pass it anyway. The president has threatened to not sign any legislation—even a resumption of funding for the Department of Homeland… [TheTopNews] Read More.