THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Lately, I’ve come to notice that the strangest and most terrible pieces of my childhood are roaring back. I was born in 1933, and much of what I remember as a little girl was defined by either the war or what we called, simply, sickness.I myself was blessed with exceptionally good health, but my friends, family, and community were regularly struck with childhood diseases. Neighborhoods were frozen in fear when maladies suddenly erupted: pool closures during polio epidemics, quarantines when mumps or measles raged. I remember one particularly galling time when my older sister Mimi and I were confined to the house, morosely watching our friends playing on the construction site of a new house across the street. We were fine; they all had whooping cough. Whooping cough was often deadly for babies and toddlers but among the less debilitating of childhood diseases past for older children, thus the freedom to play while coughing. Neither Mimi nor I ever caught it—a fact I was grateful for 40 years later, when I met with a pulmonologist about my cigarette-compromised lungs and he remarked, “At least you never had whooping cough.”We did, however, catch chicken pox simultaneously with our older sisters, Jane and Helen; we were then 5, 7, 11, and 13. Just thinking of it can resurrect the itch. (And lest I forget, some 70 years later, following a time of extended stress, that long-dormant varicella-zoster virus returned as a bout of shingles.) But that was nothing compared with the measles Jane contracted. Memories of those days, among the most vivid of my early life, still evoke tremors in the bottom of my stomach. There was widespread fear of measles causing blindness, which had indeed happened to a young family acquaintance. So for several days at the height of her illness, Jane was quarantined in one bedroom while Helen moved in with Mimi and me. The shades were drawn and curtains closed in Jane’s room, and the door was opened only after the hallway was darkened. She survived—and later went on to become a wife, mother, and well-regarded artist. But that was just the luck of the draw. Measles killed some 10,000 American children in the 1930s and ’40s—roughly 500 kids died every year. In my generation, we were the guinea pigs for what science would soon discover: This pesky childhood sickness increases the risk of stroke, chronic lung problems, and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Just hours before Stephen Miller arrived at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on New Year’s Eve—where he would welcome 2026 by dancing next to the soon-to-be-defenestrated homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, as the 1990s cultural relic Vanilla Ice performed—he won a great, though ultimately fleeting, victory. The Labor Department’s Foreign Labor Certification office  announced that the  Trump administration would cut the number of approved visas for seasonal workers by about 50 percent. Miller had been trying since his days as a Senate aide to reduce reliance on visas granted annually to the hospitality, construction, and landscaping industries.But the plan unraveled within weeks. After the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis, President Trump reversed the visa cuts as part of a late-January retreat from Miller’s hard-edged goals. Miller was not involved in the walk back, according to two people with knowledge of the process and who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Instead, Trump made the decision with the “border czar,” Tom Homan, and others after hearing about concerns from hospitality-industry employers,  they said.The reversal was one of the earliest signs that Miller’s influence is on the wane. Others have followed. The White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser designed Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. But weeks into the new year, the president dismantled the roving Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had encouraged; turned on Noem, who had carried out Miller’s aggressive instructions; and handed control of the deportation program back to career law-enforcement officials.White House insiders said that Miller remains a top adviser to the president, that he has a singular relationship to Trump built over the past decade, and that his job is not in jeopardy. Immigration enforcement remains a central theme of the administration and is expected to feature prominently in Trump’s midterm-election messaging. They said that Miller has always seen himself as a staffer who subordinates his own opinions on policy to the agenda of the president, even when it shifts. “The President loves Stephen,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”But Trump, who has previously joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are so extreme that they should not be aired publicly, has also told others in recent weeks that he understands Miller sometimes goes too far, advisers told us. They said that Trump recognized immediately after the second killing in Minneapolis, of the protester… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It’s a low bar, perhaps, but no one in the Trump administration seems to be having more fun at the moment than Marco Rubio. Last weekend, he was acting as a DJ at a family wedding, headphones to his ear with head and hand pumping to the beat. Midweek, the secretary of state was at the podium in the White House briefing room, spitting rap lyrics and cracking jokes. (“Two more questions!” he said, before entertaining seven more.) And toward the end of the week, he was in Vatican City, being escorted through marble hallways by members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard for an audience with Pope Leo XIV, who has been criticized by the president and vice president.Rubio comes across as the happy warrior, not the angry one—the one offering lighthearted jokes more than brash confrontation.In a more normal time, he would seem like just another glad-handing politician. But consider the moment: Gas prices are rising, the GOP midterm outlook is dimming, and the war that President Trump launched against Iran continues with no tidy ending in sight. The president faces record-high disapproval ratings. Three Cabinet members have been ousted, and others worry they could be next. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is up on Capitol Hill testifying about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and FBI Director Kash Patel faces questions about his alleged excessive drinking, which he denies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is navigating the war with Iran and a closed Strait of Hormuz. Vice President Vance, despite his original reservations about that war, has been pulled in as a negotiator and defender.But Rubio—the guy who once became a meme because of the way he sat uncomfortably on an Oval Office couch, looking exhausted with his many jobs—suddenly looks joyful and light. He seemed to be everywhere all at once this week, followed by a hum and then a buzz of: Hmm, he sure looks like he’s running in 2028. That’s the murmur that once followed Vance. Although people close to Rubio and Vance downplay any rivalry—insisting that they are close friends and ardent allies—it’s hard not to see a shadow Republican presidential primary beginning to emerge. Vance made his first trip to Iowa as vice president on Tuesday, to campaign for vulnerable midterm candidates, raise money for the party, and stoke interest in his own political future.Toward the end of the Tuesday briefing, a reporter from the Christian… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.Tennessee yesterday enacted legislation that splits much of Memphis among three separate districts, diluting the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an additional House seat. The move was the first, and surely not the last, GOP legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision last week gutting enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Across the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, they believe they are no longer required to reserve for nonwhite voters, who predominantly cast ballots for Democrats.Voting-rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the ruling to escalate a nationwide gerrymandering race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response has been astonishing. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers usually meant for natural disasters to suspend a primary election that was already under way to give lawmakers time to redistrict. Alabama Republicans held votes during a tornado watch while a storm flooded the state capitol to allow for new primary elections if federal courts clear the state’s path to redistrict. South Carolina legislators also took an initial step toward gerrymandering the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.Collectively, the moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court struck down a statewide referendum designed by Democrats to give them as many as four additional House seats.The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, but the Callais ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative members, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like the echoes of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This is diluting Black political power.” When the Court issued its ruling last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an event at the Equal… [TheTopNews] Read More.

There are a few ways to think about Iowa. You might imagine America’s 29th state as the land of corn and pigs (20 million hogs can’t be wrong, reads my favorite T-shirt for sale at the Eastern Iowa Airport). Maybe you associate it with Field of Dreams, Caitlin Clark, or the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.You might also picture Iowa as flat, like a pancake. But you would be wrong. Iowa is not even in the top five flattest U.S. states, which is a fact I was considering last month as I watched Josh Turek size up a daunting set of stairs in a hilly Cedar Rapids neighborhood. After a moment’s consideration, the 47-year-old Democrat, who uses a wheelchair, shook his head, deciding against it. It would be the only house that Turek would skip that afternoon as he knocked on doors in the warm spring sunlight. At all the other homes, he followed the same elaborate routine without appearing to break a sweat: lowering his body out of his chair and onto the ground; hoisting himself backwards up a step using just his arms; yanking the wheelchair up after him; and repeating that until he reached the doorbell, which is when he would announce, “Hi! I’m Josh Turek, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate!”In his bid to replace Republican Senator Joni Ernst, Turek is hoping to correct what he believes is another popular misconception about Iowa: that it is a red state. For the past decade, if not longer, many Americans have thought of Iowa this way—and for good reason. Although voters here famously helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency by choosing him in the 2008 Democratic caucuses, they later chose Donald Trump in three consecutive elections. Every member of Iowa’s congressional delegation is, at present, a Republican. Terrace Hill, the governor’s mansion in Des Moines, has housed a member of the GOP for the past 15 years.But lately, a sense of deep frustration—with rising costs, with Trump, with Republican leadership in general—is rippling across Iowa.As a result, Iowa Democrats have found themselves in an unusually charmed electoral position. This year, they’ve got a more-than-decent chance of winning back not just a Senate seat, but at least two seats in the House, plus the governor’s office. The November midterms could, in other words, mark the beginning of a shift for Iowa, a turn back toward… [TheTopNews] Read More.