THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Stephen Miller spent his first weekend as White House chief of staff on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, huddling with President Trump and Natalie Harp, his executive assistant, about how to approach the next two years with the House and Senate under Democratic control. Katie Miller—the podcaster, political consultant, and wife of Stephen—spent the weekend in the Washington area, rearranging her own life. “I make every decision based on what’s best for my children and our family,” she wrote yesterday on X, before announcing that she had decided to wind down her podcast.But that was not all that was changing. For months, Stephen Miller has recused himself from matters of policy that involve Katie Miller’s other financial interests at the direction of the White House counsel. That meant that Stephen did not work on issues involving the media company Paramount, where his wife had been seeking a podcast deal, or anything to do with space policy or artificial intelligence, because his wife, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, also worked for SpaceX, the owner of the Grok artificial-intelligence assistant. All of that changed today.Katie Miller severed her employment with SpaceX, sold her stock in the company, and forfeited her right to future equity that had not yet vested under her contract, according to a person familiar with the moves. Over the weekend, she also ended a separate contract with Paramount for a planned podcast deal. As a result, a White House official told me this afternoon, “Stephen Miller is no longer subject to any recusals and may fully participate in all meetings and policy matters.” Katie declined to comment.White House lawyers had previously ruled that Katie Miller’s podcast advertising sponsorships from companies seeking official favor from her husband did not require recusals, because sponsorships carry a different ethical significance than consulting arrangements. Sugar-soda boosters at the American Beverage Association, the utility Southern Company, and the Merchants Payments Coalition, a group pushing for legislation to reduce credit-card swipe fees, had all purchased time on her show. But now even those potential conflicts will not be an issue, after a couple more already-recorded episodes from her podcast are released. “Nothing is more important than raising our four kids,” she wrote. “While I’ve loved the podcast, the time commitment is too great and now is the time to step away.”[Read: A chief of staff who ‘will crack skulls’]The Millers met during the first Trump… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it. Using data from the credit-reporting agency Experian, the state scrutinized its list of registered voters, searching for anyone who may have moved, left the state, or died. Tens of thousands of Mississippians had their active registrations shifted to inactive—a crucial step toward purging them from the rolls.On Tuesday, many of those inactive voters showed up at the polls, only to be told that they were not properly registered. Their best option was to fill out an affidavit ballot, a more involved process that increases the likelihood that a vote will not count. Now a Senate seat is on the line, and the Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, leads the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, by just about 2,500 ballots. And voting-rights advocates say that Mississippi, a state with a long history of voter suppression and discrimination, has once again undermined one of its citizens’ most sacred rights.Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way. Watson said in a social-media post that the inconvenience of having to fill out an affidavit ballot was “well worth the election integrity added by having cleaner voter rolls!” A postelection legal battle over the affidavit ballots is intensifying, as lawyers from the campaigns and voting-rights groups argue over how those ballots should be treated. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has called for affidavit ballots to be separated from regular ballots, suggesting that it may attempt to challenge their validity in the days ahead. Colom’s campaign has said there is no legal basis for treating affidavit ballots any differently once they are processed. The back-and-forth could be a precursor to a legal battle in which the courts could ultimately decide whether Colom or Hyde-Smith prevails.The situation is already drawing comparisons to Mississippi’s past efforts to systematically disenfranchise Black voters. In DeSoto County, inactivations surged in recent months, and the number of active voters declined by nearly 10,000 from September to October, according to state data. The county, just south of Memphis, is home to one of Mississippi’s largest concentrations of Black voters. A 2025 review of Experian’s voter-roll-maintenance data by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that supports election administration, found that zip codes… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Eight days after the 2024 election, I honored a presidential tradition by hosting a visit from the president-elect. Jill and I met President Trump and his entourage in the Diplomatic Reception Room, and then I escorted him into the Oval Office for our formal meeting, accompanied only by our chiefs of staff, Jeff Zients and Susie Wiles. He and I sat in chairs near a roaring fire; Jeff and Susie sat on sofas. Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on. It bordered on fawning.“You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.” I think I blinked, too stunned to respond. Then he kept going, as if intoxicated by the curious conversational path he had chosen. “Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together.” He said my performance on job creation had been “extraordinary.” He added that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me. I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand. I wanted to give him a wide-ranging overview of the issues that I thought would dominate his presidency. It was essentially a tour of the world, including Ukraine, NATO, Russia, Gaza and the Middle East, China, the Americas, and Africa. He nodded appreciatively. But I noticed a curious pattern: He focused on the personalities of the leaders, as if we were sharing gossip about people at a dinner party, not discussing issues of global significance. Still, I had a lot to share with him, and our conversation, scheduled for 30 minutes, ran for close to two hours.Despite that meeting, I was worried that the successful policies pursued by my administration would be on the chopping block. All presidents must confront a feeling that their legacy is vulnerable to the pendulum of politics and the whims of their successors. In my case, that feeling was magnified by the dismissive and destructive nature of Donald Trump, who seemed unable to tolerate the idea that someone else’s accomplishments might be worth building on rather than tearing down. This article has been adapted from Joe Biden’s forthcoming book, Promise Me, America. On day one, Trump reversed many of my decisions. I had rejoined the Paris climate accord on my… [TheTopNews] Read More.

During a swing through Detroit in the final days of the midterm campaign, former President Obama invoked the kind of gauzy pluralism that Democrats were so proud of during his presidency. He pointed out that Michigan had the opportunity to pull off an improbable feat: By electing Abdul El-Sayed to join Elissa Slotkin in the Senate, the state could turn its delegation into a walking symbol of buried enmities and transcendent harmony. “You’ve got a Muslim man, you’ve got a Jewish woman fighting for you in the United States Senate,” Obama said. “That’s something, Michigan, you can be proud of.” It took exactly a week for that optimism to run aground on the rougher shoals of modern Democratic politics. The following Sunday, Representative Haley Stevens withdrew her backing of El-Sayed and threw it to his opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers, citing, in part, El-Sayed’s stance on the issue that has divided Democrats more than any other this year: Israel. The abrupt reversal didn’t prevent El-Sayed from winning decisively. But that outcome masked the apprehensions that I heard again and again this week from Michigan Democrats about the potential for tensions over the Middle East to rupture the broad coalition that the party assembled to win in 2026. By the time I sat down with a group of Democratic activists at a red-sauce joint in Ann Arbor, on Election Night, the first bottle of wine was already empty. Nearly everyone at the table had voted for El-Sayed, who, hours later, would go on to make history as the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. But no one was gloating. If anything, the Jewish Democrats sharing bruschetta and pasta seemed a little shell-shocked, groggily emerging from a bitter Senate campaign and reckoning with what they described as one of the most difficult votes they had ever cast. Rubini Naidu for The AtlanticAnnie Wolock, Cindy Bank, and Beth Bashert gathered on Election Night in Ann Arbor, Michigan.Everyone at the table wanted the same thing: to see Democrats retake control of the Senate and repudiate President Trump. None of them, however, was particularly excited to elect a senator who seeks to make Israel a pariah, who speaks about Zionism in a way that they said makes Michigan Jews unsafe, and who campaigned with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer who has said that “America deserved 9/11.” In other words: They did not want to elect a senator… [TheTopNews] Read More.

“Deportations will continue,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote in a post on X the day after voters punished his party in the midterm election. The three-word statement appeared to be aimed at quieting an incipient debate among Republicans over whether President Trump should ease his ICE crackdown. Two years after he won back the White House promising the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history, Trump and his party suffered monumental losses in states such as Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, where voters—especially Hispanics—swung hard to Democrats. More moderate Republicans have urged the administration to adopt a quieter enforcement approach, focusing more narrowly on criminal offenders.Although the president has reportedly expressed concern to those close to him that some ICE tactics have gone too far, he has not ordered specific policy changes, according to three senior officials I spoke with at DHS. Those officials and others I’ve talked to told me they aren’t expecting a pullback, either. Trump’s decision to name Stephen Miller as his chief of staff yesterday places the chief architect and principal ideologue of the ICE campaign in charge of his administration. Miller’s promotion will give him even more power to mobilize other federal agencies to help ICE maximize deportations.Since Trump’s return to the White House, Republicans in Congress have given the administration nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars for the crackdown, aiming for 1 million deportations a year. ICE has obtained upwards of $110 billion, more than 11 times its annual budget, and the funding surge has created a powerful inertia. Absent a major policy reversal from Trump or a successful intervention by Democratic majorities in Congress—a longshot, experts say—Trump’s mass-deportation campaign will continue with its mandate to add more officers, more deportation flights, and more immigration jails. The campaign includes handing out wads of cash to local police and sheriff departments, which help the agency boost arrests. Prior to the midterms, ICE launched a hiring push to add 5,000 more employees—mosty deportation officers—by the end of the year.“Regardless of the political pressures that the White House may be feeling on immigration enforcement, the money creates a huge amount of momentum on its own,” Sarah Pierce, an immigration policy expert at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. ICE has so much money that it will have to double its rate of spending to use it all before its deadline at the… [TheTopNews] Read More.