THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

The most powerful members of Donald Trump’s government, security details in tow, filed into the Capitol Hill Club in February for a pep talk from the president’s top political adviser, James Blair. Weeks earlier, Trump had predicted midterm defeat because, he explained, “when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.” But in the green-awninged building just a couple of blocks from Congress, Blair wanted to share a more optimistic vision, urging everyone to focus on a particularly notable exception: In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt overcame economic headwinds to expand his party’s House and Senate majorities.Blair is brash and intense, a combination that has irked some administration officials and lawmakers who prefer their staff to behave more like staff. The 37-year-old keeps his head shorn shiny and his lips pressed together—half smirk, half quiet skepticism—not unlike a drill instructor. His goal that day was to apply data-driven discipline to the careening Tilt-A-Whirl of Trump’s governing style. The team had already decided that it would abandon the traditional midterm playbook of downplaying the president. Trump would command center stage no matter what. “The ground you have is the ground you have, and you have to fight on it,” one Trump strategist told us. Like others, the strategist spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategies.But that was just the start. Blair laid out a strikingly optimistic view of the coming eight months. The map was stronger than in 2018, with fewer swing seats and a real chance of Republicans holding both the House and the Senate, Blair told the assembled crowd, which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Blair emphasized that FDR was careful to calibrate his message in the 1934 campaign, arguing not that the problems had been solved but that things were getting better —and would continue to improve.No one had any illusions that Trump would be as disciplined as FDR. The president would be “doing his own thing,” and that would help Republicans by exciting his base of loyal but infrequent voters, Blair told the group. But everyone else needed to stick to a message shaped by polling, so they could speak to people beyond the MAGA bubble. There was little doubt—then or now—about the dominant issue. “I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide. But many stretch-run messages prove deeply ineffective and are quickly forgotten. Ahead of the 1998 midterms, Republicans went all in on investigations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton only to be rebuked by voters. President Obama’s insistence in 2010 that the country was coming out of the financial crisis led to his party enduring a “shellacking.” And during the 2018 midterms, Trump and his fellow Republicans tried to stoke fears about an alleged caravan of migrants headed toward the United States, only to have skeptical voters hand the House of Representatives to Democrats.This time around, Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” Bill Maher is a “loser,” and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique. That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps. Just for starters, he’s belittled the impact of his stalled war with Iran, sided with Russia as it continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, defended an attack ad from the GOP candidate for Ohio governor that repulsed other top Republicans, downplayed high energy prices while boasting that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making a freaking fortune,” embraced AI as the nation turns against it, obsessed over White House construction projects, and spent a lot of time talking about handsome men, Husted being just one.Many Republicans, and even some in Trump’s orbit, don’t quite get it. What has happened, they ask, to the instincts of the man who authored two of the most improbable victories in American political history? Trump’s superpower was his intuitive understanding of what motivated his supporters. Many Republicans privately tell me that he’s lost that feel. Trump now lives, they think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to—and, even worse, uncaring about—the problems facing so many voters. His approval rating has slipped to the low 30s. He’s become so toxic that some Republicans in tight races don’t… [TheTopNews] Read More.

As the Bernie Sanders road show traveled south through Maine earlier this month, the crowds grew bigger and louder with each stop. About 650 people showed up at a convention center in Bangor, then 700 packed a former church in Lewiston, and finally more than 1,000 filled a high-school gymnasium in Biddeford. Sanders was stumping for Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate, and the faithful were nodding along to the hits. He pitched Medicare for All and raising taxes on billionaires. He decried wealth disparities (“an obscenity”) and Donald Trump (“the most dangerous president” in American history) with equal fervor.What was surprising about Sanders’s appearance in the middle of one of the nation’s hardest-fought Senate races was less what he said and more that he was there at all. Mid-October in an election year is not usually Sanders’s busy season. The Vermont senator last had a tough race in his home state during President Bill Clinton’s first term. And although Sanders can draw a crowd like few other progressive politicians, Democratic candidates typically embrace him during primaries and then stick him on the sideline for the stretch run, when they’re rediscovering their love of capitalism and bipartisanship.This fall, however, Sanders is in far more demand than usual. He’s campaigning for Democrats in some of the most competitive battlegrounds, entrusted not only with juicing turnout on college campuses—his assigned role in earlier years—but with persuading voters in Republican-leaning areas as well. From Maine, Sanders headed to Florida and then on to Texas and Michigan.That Sanders finds himself, a decade after his first run for the presidency, arguably at the peak of his influence is all the more remarkable given that he recently turned 85 and that Democrats have spent the past two years wringing their hands over their party’s gerontocracy. According to YouGov, Sanders is the most popular current elected official in America—only the retirees Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger have higher ratings. Many of this year’s primary candidates whom Sanders backed defeated establishment opponents in states and districts that Trump had carried in 2024, and they now appear poised to help Democrats retake a majority in the House, and possibly the Senate. And when the party’s 2028 presidential free-for-all kicks off, Sanders’s endorsement could be among the campaign’s most sought-after prizes.“He will be seen as one of the most consequential political leaders of the 21st century,” Representative Ro Khanna of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

At 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in a corner booth at the Cheesecake Factory, emerging from the fog of war.Before me were a dozen half-empty plates, a cluster of dirty napkins, and several depleted beverages. The food had come in waves, unrelenting, like Normandy. There had been egg rolls, four ways; Roadside Sliders; a sheet tray of Factory Nachos; and something called Chicken Parmesan “Pizza Style.” Coke Zeros, I’d told the waitress at the beginning, and keep ’em coming. There had also been cake. Much cake.I checked in with myself. I was nauseous, for sure. But another feeling, too, was detectable within the churning volcano of my digestive tract: It was something like joy.Let’s back up. Over the weekend, Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s schlocky White House aesthetic by saying it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” My first reaction was to laugh. It’s true! The restaurant is over-the-top opulent—as if ancient Egypt and Tuscany had a baby in Las Vegas. Any true Cheesecake Factory fan would certainly appreciate the joke, especially if they remembered the Iraq War and Saddam’s own design sensibilities.What happened next, though, was disheartening. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory,” the conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Other Republicans, and even some Democrats, logged on to police the former president’s tone. This was classic elitist Obama, they argued, making fun of the working man and his primitive taste. It was why Trump won and why Democrats will never win back blue-collar America. My “For You” page filled with commentary about which political party could more confidently claim ideological custody over the Cheesecake Factory.Immediately, my head began to swirl like the raspberry drizzle in a Georgia Peach cocktail. My rage was congealing, like Cheddar Cheese Fondue on room-temperature Pretzel Bites. Enough! I wanted to scream. Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of your culture wars! Like any number of kitschy, charming American chain restaurants—Rainforest Cafe, Johnny Rockets, and even, God love them, Applebee’s—the Factory can obviously be mocked. But it must be mocked from a place of love. It should exist above partisan politics as a sacred third space, one of the few we Americans have left.Quickly enough, my frustration gave way to hunger, then introspection, and then to investigatory zeal. Which is how, an… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When Eloise, a veteran who lives in Michigan, first heard about Trump Accounts last year, her mind immediately turned to other projects that had borne the name of the businessman turned president: a university, an airline, steaks, casinos. All had gone bust, and several had left creditors or investors holding the bag. Pregnant at the time, she wondered whether opening a Donald Trump–branded investment account would put her first child’s financial future at risk.“Both my husband and I, our first reaction was like, Oh, this is a scam,” Eloise told me. Despite her initial skepticism, she did further research to determine whether to claim the $1,000 seed money the government was offering to most babies born during Trump’s second term. In the end, she decided not to accept it, opting instead to open a more traditional account to put money away for her child. She said she was skeptical that the Trump Account would work as promised and had a “moralistic” opposition to associating her newborn with the president. “Ultimately, it’s like, the man’s a con man,” said Eloise, who asked to be identified only by her middle name owing to fear of reprisals from the commander in chief.It is rare for people to turn down free money from the government. But that’s what happens when a polarizing president attaches his name to a taxpayer-supported program originally pitched as a vehicle to help America’s children achieve financial security. An investment idea once championed by Democrats as a pathway to stability for millions of minors is now at risk of becoming yet another casualty of the country’s partisan divide. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say the program has promise. But its greatest obstacle to achieving widespread acceptance may be its name.Tax advisers and economists told me that the president’s decision to brand the accounts in his image had become a major impediment for potential beneficiaries. “I have had personal experience where people have said, ‘I just can’t go along with something that has that man’s name on it,’” said Tom O’Saben, the director of tax content and government relations for the National Association of Tax Professionals.[Read: The Santa presidency]About 7 million children had been signed up for Trump Accounts by late September, before the shift to automatic enrollment. That amounted to about 10 percent of the eligible population. With the pace of enrollment lagging, the Treasury Department late last… [TheTopNews] Read More.