THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

In the months before the election of the young democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, panic seized members of New York’s elite business community. Real-estate moguls, hedge-fund princes, and a well-known supermarket-chain magnate forecast disaster. Several of them vowed to move to Texas or Florida, or at least Hoboken, if Mamdani was elected. So far, however, the city hasn’t seen an exodus of its richest residents, and their alarm has lapsed into glum acceptance.I recently asked Kathryn Wylde, the soon-to-be-retired president of the Partnership for New York City—a sort of chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate, and tech barons—how her members now view Mamdani. Has anything changed? Wylde, who voted for the new mayor, paused. “I would not say it’s positive,” she said. “But those who are at all open to him recognize that he’s smart, and they know that their kids voted for him. Now they are waiting to… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsIn July, we published a series of stories about San Francisco’s attempt to address the growing number of homeless and addicted people living on the streets. We followed Evan, who had been homeless for years, as he sought to escape the addiction that was threatening his life. Four months later, we check in on how he’s doing.No Easy Fix is a three-part series from Radio Atlantic about homelessness and addiction in San Francisco.The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Last year, we published a series called No Easy Fix. If you haven’t heard it, you should go back and listen. It’s about San Francisco’s attempts to address pockets of homelessness and addiction. It’s also a close and unusually humane portrait of one man—his name is Evan—living on the streets… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

President Donald Trump can hardly conceal his disgust for the word affordability, referring to its ascendance in America’s political lexicon as a “hoax,” a “con job,” and a “fake narrative” perpetuated by Democrats. But there’s one sign that he’s treating it like a very real political vulnerability: The former reality-television host is trying to give people cash.In recent weeks, Trump has been pitching half a dozen schemes to, in the words of White House officials, put money “straight into the pockets of the American people.” After a year in which Americans’ pocketbooks have been walloped by Trump’s tariffs, cuts to the social safety net, and apparent nonchalance in the face of spiking health-care costs, the president is turning to the allure of sweepstakes-style checks from the government to help coax voters out of their financial malaise ahead of next year’s midterm elections. It likely won’t work, economists from across the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.”But this week, the documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department—including flight logs and emails—told a different story. Federal prosecutors determined in January 2020 that Trump had been a passenger on the notorious private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein—who would later be charged with sex trafficking—far more often than they had realized.Many of the flights on what came to be known as the Lolita Express took place “during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” a federal prosecutor in… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Not so long ago, when the FBI raided Donald Trump’s 126-room Palm Beach mansion and found scores of classified documents, the notion that the disgraced former president would return to the Oval Office seemed far-fetched to just about anyone paying attention. Just over three years later, Trump is president, and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida is investigating the raid for being part of what the president’s allies have branded a “grand conspiracy” against Trump.From her quiet courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, Aileen Cannon is poised to reprise a role that gave the district-court judge an improbably influential say in national politics. Cannon is expected to preside next month over a special federal grand jury called by Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, that will probe aspects of the FBI’s raid—as well as broader allegations of a plot against Trump by… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.