THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

President Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.Once the midterms are over, Trump could face his worst fear: irrelevance. He will be a lame duck, down to his final two years in office, and at some point will no longer be the nation’s top topic of conversation. As focus shifts to the presidential primaries, Trump risks disappearing from the headlines. Even some of his closest allies don’t know how he’ll react.Trump gathered a team of senior advisers at the White House on Friday to walk through the latest options in the war that he’d already declared won.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Lindsey Graham always had a deep appreciation for earpieces, motorcades, and heavily secured environments. He recognized heady Washington status symbols when he saw them—including posthumous ones, such as big memorial services held in big, important rooms containing big, important entourages.These were Graham’s kind of sanctums. And today was his kind of send-off.The South Carolina Republican, who died earlier this month at 71, was celebrated in back-to-back departure rites—a morning ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, followed by a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. Both gatherings were invitation-only, and heavily guarded. Graham would have liked that too; it underscored the potent lineup of dignitaries who’d come to pay respects to a senator who craved few things more than being part of top-level delegations, high-wire negotiations, and inner-circle golf foursomes. Power mourners included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vice President Vance, a good portion of the Trump Cabinet, and a bipartisan assemblage of the U.S. Senate.President Trump, whom Graham once despised—until Trump was elected and Graham managed to contort himself into an Oval Office confidant—served as the senator’s marquee eulogist. “A true American original,” Trump called Graham, which is one of those catchall descriptors for odd-duck characters who defy easy classification. Trump acknowledged that he and Graham “did not exactly get off to the best of starts.” Eventually, though, they would forge an important, if volatile, partnership. The president recounted an especially rough patch during the 2016 presidential campaign when Graham called Trump a “jackass” and Trump responded by sharing Graham’s private cellphone number at a rally in South Carolina.[Anne Applebaum: The quintessential politician of this era]For old times’ sake, Trump recited the number in his speech today: “202-228-0292, if anybody wants to give it a shot.” He added that Graham had the last laugh, “because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends, and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”Trump’s line drew laughs, but it also contained the key to Graham’s political durability: his ability to disarm opponents and to be dexterous in his alliances. “He understood that if people like you, then they’re more likely to work with you,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told me shortly after the Rotunda service had broken up. “He could endear himself to you,” Tillis said of Graham. “That’s who he was. But it was also smart politics.”Graham could… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Klaus GalianoIt was probably inevitable that the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, would become a battleground in the broader fight over President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The privately run jail reopened last year as the only sizable facility of its kind in the New York City metro area, with capacity for 1,000 ICE detainees. Trump officials have been threatening for months to intensify ICE enforcement in New York, making Delaney Hall essential to their plans. It’s also smack-dab in a blue sea of state and local governments dominated by Democrats whose constituents are furious at ICE.Protesters have rallied outside Delaney Hall since May to denounce poor conditions inside the facility, operated by the GEO Group on a $1 billion, 15-year contract. Trump officials say that complaints about the facility are overblown and that protesters’ true goal is to drive out ICE.New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and other prominent Democrats have joined calls for Delaney Hall to be shut down, and they’re suing the Trump administration to block ICE plans for a larger jail in another part of the state. In recent years, blocking or limiting ICE jails has generally been an effective tactic for immigration activists because it constrains the government’s ability to arrest and hold large numbers of immigrants. It also drives up costs by forcing ICE to relocate detainees. Squeezing ICE’s capacity has worked in tandem with so-called sanctuary policies adopted by state and local jurisdictions that try to limit or prohibit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The result is a geographic imbalance in ICE infrastructure: There are relatively few detention centers close to northern and coastal cities with large immigrant populations, while a disproportionate number of the agency’s jails are concentrated in Texas and Louisiana. But the keep-ICE-out approach has downsides that Democrats rarely acknowledge. And now that ICE is swimming in cash, a strategy that relies on starving ICE of resources might turn out to be not just futile, but counterproductive. Klaus GalianoA protest outside Delaney Hall on May 28Since Trump returned to office, Republicans have used the budget-reconciliation process to channel more than $100 billion in additional funding to ICE, 10 times the agency’s annual budget. ICE opponents can make it harder to open new immigration jails in blue cities and states, but the administration now has all the money it needs to ship detainees to southern states, where detention costs are generally… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president in the Oval Office for the signing of an executive order on psychedelic therapies. “It was literally that quick.”But it wasn’t that simple. After hearing from Rogan, the president told his team at the Department of Health and Human Services to change the policy, and the team sent a draft executive order to the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s when things got messy. In the days that followed, Rogan’s allies engaged in battle with a mid-level White House health adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton. As a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on health policy, Overton ran a process to revise the draft in coordination with other stakeholders, including the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs.Members of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement were furious, convinced that Overton, not for the first time, had undermined Trump’s own desires. The friction, which has not been previously reported, became so intense that Rogan and W. Bryan Hubbard, the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, a nonprofit that champions the drug’s therapeutic benefits, threatened to pull out of the signing ceremony if they did not have a say in Overton’s final edits, according to three people familiar with the events.Overton’s efforts on the Domestic Policy Council shrank the roughly 1,400-word HHS draft to about 900 words by the time Trump signed his name. Entire sections were removed, including those calling for a psychedelic-therapy czar and treatment-funding reforms, according to a draft we reviewed. A $250 million research fund became a $50 million partnership with states. In the end, the document accelerated review for some drugs and pushed the government to reschedule psychedelic substances that perform well in large clinical trials, enough to persuade Rogan and Hubbard to show for the signing.Overton is one of the most powerful public-health officials in Trump’s orbit who has little public profile. Her job, as a senior health-policy official on the White House Domestic Policy Council, is to convert the president’s priorities into the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were cruising the Mediterranean by yacht when they stopped for a swim off the Adriatic coast. They splashed over to an island and hiked, barefoot, across its hilly, rugged terrain. “Effectively that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled on, Robinson Crusoe–like, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base. Sazan is not undiscovered territory to Albanians; it’s their country’s largest island. Because it was uninhabited for many years, vegetation and wildlife flourished, making it a cherished nature preserve. Luckily for the Trump couple, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, was a guest on the same yacht one of the nights they were on board.Three years later—and about two months after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024—an investment committee led by Rama gave preliminary approval to the couple’s plans to develop the island into an opulent resort. The venture extends to nearby land next to a coastal lagoon, which serves as a crucial habitat for flamingos, sea turtles, and other species. The couple’s partners in the project include a pair of Qatari brothers who have financed ultra-luxury developments across the Middle East and South Asia and an Albanian conglomerate with holdings in energy, construction, infrastructure, insurance, and tourism. In a recent podcast interview, Ivanka Trump described the project as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live.”Many Albanians see matters differently. Hundreds of thousands have joined daily protests against the plans, in one of the country’s largest social mobilizations since the end of Communist rule 35 years ago. The uprising, called the Flamingo Revolution, takes its name from the wild birds that breed in the wetland habitat. Protesters have carried inflatable flamingos and placards with drawings.The unrest has it all: accusations of organized crime and drug trafficking, competing claims of foreign influence, a cameo by Kanye West. For the participants I spoke with, the demonstrations are about accumulated frustration with Albanian politicians who have failed to give the country a solid economic foundation. “You can interpret it as an anti-Trump demonstration in the sense that it’s opposed to a Trump-like system we see here,” Fatos Lubonja, a writer and dissident who… [TheTopNews] Read More.