THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Photographs by Caroline GutmanThe capital city is an absolute mess.The White House is an active construction site, with cement trucks going through the same gates typically used by the president’s armored limousine. There’s a gaping hole where half of the building once stood, a project held up by lawsuits. The South Lawn and the Ellipse, a 52-acre park between the White House and the Washington Monument, are completely torn up. The once-green grass where a temporary arena held a bloody UFC fight last month has turned brown. It looks like a demolition derby took place.The Reflecting Pool is a murky shade of green, despite a multimillion-dollar renovation to repaint it American-flag blue and mitigate its algae problem. It is now surrounded by fencing and ominous signs that read DANGER EXPLOSIVES and show a bomb being detonated. Ducks that died in the water are being tested.The National Mall seems to be wrapped in a variety of fencing, some of it in place for construction reasons, some of it to create a security gantlet for the July 4 celebration. At East Potomac Golf Links, at nearby Hains Point, is a massive pile of dirt that some golfers have dubbed “Mount Trump,” taken from the East Wing debris in preparation for a golf-course redo. The Federal Reserve is under construction, as are various roads and bridges, and the Kennedy Center is allegedly in disrepair—and now has an odd contraption of scaffolding and flame-retardant tarps covering its signage at the main entrance like a giant Band-Aid. There are construction cranes, National Guard troops, and portable restrooms everywhere.Throughout the city, there are government signs proclaiming, We are making DC safe and beautiful. D.C. may be relatively safe, but much of it certainly isn’t beautiful.Caroline Gutman for The AtlanticConstruction materials sit near the Lincoln Memorial on June 25.Donald Trump has often prided himself on being a builder of grand things. He laid out an expansive vision for Washington, including a gargantuan new triumphal arch in a traffic circle that leads to Arlington National Cemetery. He aggressively took over the 250th celebrations in Washington, redirecting tens of millions of dollars to glam up the tired capital. But so far, he has done more demolition and renovation than construction.“It’s as if there were a natural disaster, and we’re looking at the damage after a hurricane. Or think of Manhattan after the World Trade Center was hit by an… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Something is happening in the Democratic base.For a year and a half Democrats have been disgusted with President Trump. They’ve been similarly outraged by the fecklessness of their own party leaders. Now, after a handful of surprising primary elections last night in Colorado, a third observation is coming into focus: The Democratic base would like to shove the entire political establishment into a blade grinder.In Colorado’s deep-blue First Congressional District, a 29-year-old democratic socialist beat longtime Representative Diana DeGette; in the neighboring Eighth District, a young progressive trounced a more moderate Democrat and will go up against a Republican incumbent—who narrowly won his seat—in November. Statewide, one moderate officeholder won’t get the job he wants: Longtime Senator Michael Bennet lost his primary for governor to Colorado’s attorney general, who ran to his left.Two years after Joe Biden’s visible decline helped Trump return to the White House, these results are further evidence that the base is angry—at institutions, about Israel and ICE, and about its own leadership’s handling of Trump. But more than using any specific set of policies as a litmus test, Democratic voters appear drawn to the candidates who most radiate disdain for the status quo. Maine’s Graham Platner, with his sweatshirts and tattoos and the damning revelations about his past, was the first to demonstrate this desire, when he beat the establishment-backed Janet Mills. Last week, a pair of candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ousted incumbent Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman.[Read: New York’s warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer ]“If you look and sound like someone who should be in elected office,” one Democratic strategist told us, “voters want nothing to do with you.”  Like Espaillat in New York, the 68-year-old DeGette was slow to recognize the seriousness of the challenge she faced from Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who was born a few months after DeGette began serving her first term in Congress. This is partly because DeGette is not exactly a mushy moderate. First elected in 1996, she has been a progressive voice close to the party leadership for decades—and she ran with the endorsement of a former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal.But last night, both DeGette and 74-year-old John Hickenlooper, who was able to beat back a challenge to his Senate seat, seemed to have underappreciated the Democratic base’s desire for generational and political change. Kiros defeated DeGette… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Presidents have generally treated their pardon power like an embarrassing secret, closely held among only a few trusted aides and exercised quietly in the final days of an administration. Some have signed clemency warrants just hours before boarding Marine One for their final flight.But not Donald Trump.Since returning to the White House for his second term, Trump has wielded his authority to grant clemency with abandon. He issued pardons or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people associated with the January 6 Capitol riot on his first day back in office and has publicly mused since about preemptively pardoning aides and allies. Now the White House is discussing a possible announcement of presidential pardons as a centerpiece of the nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations over the Fourth of July weekend, according to 14 people familiar with the conversations. The idea has been described as “250 pardons for 250 years,” an initiative that would put one of the most politically fraught constitutional powers at the forefront of the country’s birthday festivities.The president had not been presented with the proposal as of Friday, and the idea may never rise to his level, a White House official told us. Trump’s advisers are still split on whether mass pardons for the anniversary of American independence would be a good idea. One adviser said there had been polling that suggested that a mass pardon could benefit the president, but any action was unlikely by Independence Day. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that 250 pardons were being considered.Advocates for the plan say that it would both underscore the president’s singular authority and reinforce an image he has long sought to cultivate: “Trump the merciful,” as a person close to the White House described it to us recently. Meanwhile, the prospect of a mass pardon has set off an international frenzy of lobbying and dealmaking, in which even slight proximity to the president can be monetized.Five current and former administration officials and nine private-sector lawyers, lobbyists, and other individuals with ties to Trump’s orbit told us that the jockeying among those seeking clemency for past crimes has been intense. One criminal-defense attorney called it “a three-ring circus,” and a former administration official said that it was “batshit crazy.” One lobbyist told us that he had started turning off his cellphone as the ”“aggressive” requests from clients intensified in recent weeks. All spoke with us on the condition… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from National Parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from National Parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. “I’m so proud of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said Wednesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary-general of NATO. “It’s become one of the hottest cities in the world.”But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include… [TheTopNews] Read More.

A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.And that was just yesterday.For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.[Read: Trump in defeat]This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies… [TheTopNews] Read More.