THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

We don't know what Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, wrote in his sexually explicit texts with women other than his wife—six, according to his campaign; a dozen, according to an ex-aide—but do we need to? The glaring question that the texts pose to voters about the presumptive Democratic nominee at this point in a pivotal midterm race is: Are we really going to do this again?In 2016, voters were asked to choose between a populist candidate dogged by questions about his integrity, judgment, decency, civility, empathy, and respect for everyone from complete strangers to his own wife, and an overqualified, glass-ceiling-smashing woman. When voters opted for Donald Trump, Democrats were outraged. Now, faced with the choice between Platner and Governor Janet Mills, Maine Democrats have largely backed the populist themselves.Mills suspended her primary bid in April amid a cash shortfall and concerns that she’s too old and old-school to win. At age 78, she understandably gives pause to many Democrats still suffering from Joe Biden–related PTSD. But she’s also one of the few political leaders who have stood up to Trump. A former state attorney general and district attorney, she did it to defend the rule of law.[Mike Nelson: Condemning a Nazi tattoo shouldn’t be this hard]Mills, though, is an endangered species of American politician—one whose playbook the Democrats ought to be following, instead of the one they seem to have stolen from the GOP. In her first term as Maine’s first woman governor, she made a succession of unpopular decisions as she led the state through COVID. “It takes real guts to make decisions that have an overt negative political implication on the abstract proposition that it will save lives,” Angus King, Maine’s independent U.S. Senator and a former governor, told me in 2023. (I wrote a book that year about Mills and her COVID correspondence with a constituent, who sent her a weekly letter of support throughout the first year of the pandemic.) The governor’s tough choices paid off, and Maine emerged with some of the most successful health and economic metrics in the country. Mills won reelection by a historic margin.I was astonished that she allowed me to incorporate her unedited and candid journals from that time into my narrative. She is unusually at ease with herself in public and private, and has cultivated a relatable image, memorably wearing L.L. Bean duck… [TheTopNews] Read More.

You could be forgiven for ignoring the recent political goings-on in Iowa. The state, which was once a violet-hued hub of unpredictability, has lately elected and reelected Republicans.In last night’s primaries, though, Iowa Democrats nominated the kind of candidates the national party has struggled to find. Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist with a record of winning red areas, is the party’s nominee for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. And Rob Sand, the affably idiosyncratic state auditor who didn’t have a challenger, is officially up for governor. Which means that national Democrats and Republicans are now wrestling with a development that, until this week, had registered as little more than a quiet observation in the broadcast-standard English of farm country: Iowa is competitive again.Let’s start with Turek, whose primary, in the end, wasn’t even close: He beat Zach Wahls, a 34-year-old Democratic state legislator, by more than 25 points. This isn’t because Turek is better-known or more beloved. It’s because he was perceived by Iowa Democrats as more electable. And the perception of electability is everything to Iowa Democrats right now, as they sense victory like sharks smell blood in the water.Turek was the Senate candidate that Iowa Republicans did not want, which is, of course, exactly why Democrats had to have him. Turek describes himself as a “poor, disabled kid from Council Bluffs,” a reliably red part of the state. He has previously run against and beaten Republicans in a state House district that also supports Trump. He’s also got a compelling backstory: The 47-year-old was born with spina bifida, caused by his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and has said he underwent 21 surgeries as a child. Before entering politics, Turek was a wheelchair-basketball player, played in four Paralympic games, and worked at a mobility-technology company. During a visit to Iowa in March, I watched as he dragged his chair up hills and stairs to introduce himself to Iowans. “There’s something compelling about a man in a wheelchair making his way up a staircase,” Kurt Meyer, a state Democratic activist, told me. “It’s a visceral positive reaction when you see somebody that’s just that dog-determined.”The money helped: Even though Turek hasn’t served in the military, VoteVets, an organization that supports veterans, poured several million dollars into his campaign. Given the group’s alignment with Senate Democrats, Wahls attempted to frame Turek as a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Even in an age of unintended metaphors, few can compare to the scene that unfolded one winter morning five years ago on a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C.A group of men gathered in front of the seven-story building at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street Northwest, just a short walk from the Capitol, and prepared for an act of careful destruction. Their task was to do away with the colossal facade overhead. Slab by slab, they removed the Tennessee pink marble. The 45 words of the First Amendment had been there for years, giant letters carved in stone. Now that message was gone.Although the symbolism was impossible to ignore, the backstory bordered on mundane: The Newseum, a museum devoted to the history of journalism, had run out of money and closed. So down went the tribute to the First Amendment, sent in pieces to Philadelphia. The marble was reconfigured by the National Constitution Center, which is all well and good for those who want to pay $24.95 to bask in freedom’s most glorious words. But those words are no longer displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue, where anyone traversing the street that connects Congress to the White House would once have seen them.The facade was only ever a blip on the radar screen—installed in 2007, dismantled in 2021. And if you’re looking for razed history, there’s plenty more at that exact intersection. A century before the First Amendment (briefly) towered over passersby, two rival hotels stood at the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth. One had a tavern that held the distinction of being the first public place in Washington where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung, in 1814. The other, the National Hotel, was where John Wilkes Booth slept the night before he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in 1865.miralex / GettyFrom 2007 to 2021, the facade of the Newseum reminded passersby in downtown Washington of their First Amendment freedoms.My point is: America is in a constant state of change. Anything that persists for a time does so only through a combination of fortune and choice. Our core freedoms may be enshrined in our founding documents, but they are guaranteed to us only in principle. Advancing the cause of freedom in practice is another matter.Americans must try to better understand what freedom demands of them. One requirement of self-governance is the relentless pursuit of truth, which necessarily involves questioning people in positions of power in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.He couldn’t do it.As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows: One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia. Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor. Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C. Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform: We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts… [TheTopNews] Read More.