THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute majority in the state Parliament and one of its own installed as state premier, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, quickly begins implementing its agenda. The interior minister announces an emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation. The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits. European Union flags disappear from public buildings. The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology. The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.This hasn’t happened, but it’s not merely hypothetical either. The AfD is projected to win an election next month in Saxony-Anhalt, a central German state of some 2 million people. An anti-racism NGO in Berlin, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, created this scenario based on the far-right party’s own election manifesto and the statements of its representatives. For decades, right-wing politics have carried particular weight in Germany, where atonement for the Holocaust includes mandatory education about the rise of National Socialism. The far right was long relegated to the fringes, its most ardent members easily identified as skinheads decked out in leather. But the AfD, founded in 2013 as a mild euroskeptic party led mostly by conservative economists opposed to eurozone bailouts, is now Germany’s most important right-wing force since the Nazis.At the national level, the AfD is the most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of voters in recent polls. It leads both of the traditional broad-based parties, the center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats. Its base of support is in the formerly Communist east—generally poorer, older, and angrier than the rest of Germany. And that’s where it’s poised for a breakthrough later this summer. In past state elections, other parties have contorted themselves to keep the far-right faction out of governing coalitions, maintaining a so-called firewall even when the AfD has won the most votes. That may not be possible in Saxony-Anhalt, where ahead of a September 6 vote, the AfD is polling at more than 40 percent. If smaller… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections.Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy. One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”That decision has resulted in a Trump midterm-election ad blitz that is set to be rolled out soon from MAGA Inc., the main repository of Trump’s political fundraising, according to people familiar with the discussions, all of whom insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. Most of MAGA Inc.’s spending is still expected to go to targeted House and Senate races, for which the group has been establishing teams to review polling, voter modeling, and message testing. “We are going to unload the guns on both chambers real soon,” one of the people said. But another person told us that because Trump will inevitably be part… [TheTopNews] Read More.

ICE quietly enacted new rules this month that will keep officers involved in deadly-force incidents—such as firing a gun and using a choke hold—off the streets until the completion of an investigation. Previously, these officers were able to return to their regular job in as few as three days. Now they must remain on desk duty until they are cleared by investigators, according to two senior ICE officials with knowledge of the change, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss agency matters with reporters.Under the old rules, ICE supervisors could lengthen an officer’s period of leave, but such an extension was often viewed internally as signaling a lack of confidence in the officer and their version of events. At ICE and other law-enforcement agencies, officers are typically eager to return to full patrol duties as quickly as possible, and not remain in limbo as an investigation plays out. The change, which has not been publicly announced, means that officers who fire their guns, choke someone, or use some other form of deadly force—even if no one is killed—will potentially be limited to performing administrative duties for much longer periods. Acting ICE Director David Venturella and other senior ICE leaders ordered the change late last month, the two senior officials said.ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to my questions about why the policy change was made or how many such incidents have occurred since President Trump returned to office. ICE officers have shot at least 16 people since last January, four of them fatally, according to public records. Last month, there were two fatal shootings during traffic stops: On July 7, ICE officers in Texas killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old contractor from Mexico, and six days later, an officer in Maine fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant. DHS said the officers fired in self-defense, but the incidents are under federal investigation.Veteran ICE officials have worried for months about the competence of the thousands of new recruits who were added during a hiring binge last fall, many of whom were rushed onto the streets after taking a fast-track training course. The ICE officer in Maine, David Brouillette, was a new hire, and his relatives told reporters he had a history of mental-health issues and violent behavior that should have disqualified him from getting a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It’s something that happens so often in politics that there’s a name for it: widow’s succession. Dozens of times over the past century, women have filled a seat previously occupied by their late husband, and some have gone on to serve a long career.What has never happened in Congress before is what Darline Graham is doing: a sister’s succession.Less than 48 hours after Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly from heart issues last month, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s younger sister to complete the remaining six months of his term. Soon after that, Darline Graham announced that she would also run for a full six-year term, a bid that came at President Trump’s request. In the solidly red state, her biggest hurdle is likely to come in a primary runoff today. She is running in part on the legacy of her brother—but also in ways that bear no resemblance to the way he approached the job. Where he was chatty and seemed to love campaigning, she is reserved and describes the campaign as “brutal.” Where he was the ultimate Washington insider who served in Congress for more than 31 years, she is running as a populist outsider who previously worked with the disabled and visually impaired. And where he was one of his party’s most prominent and outspoken foreign-policy hawks until the day he died, she has conceded to having no experience and not much interest in such matters.“I’m not that informed on national security,” she said during a debate last week, a blunder that has become a focal point in the final days of an abbreviated campaign. The president came to her defense, praising her for being honest. He has invested significant time and political capital in attempting to give her a late boost in a closer-than-expected primary race.Her late brother comes up during almost every public event she holds—“I knew I could not sit on the sidelines. That’s not how Lindsey and I were raised,” she’s said—and campaign mailers tout that she is “Prepared to Carry on Lindsey’s Legacy.” She tells voters that “no one can ever fill his shoes” but that she will earn his seat. “I don’t just expect it to be handed to me,” she said earlier this month after casting her ballot in the special primary election.[Read: An unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future]Her Republican primary opponent is Ralph Norman, a congressman since… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte, was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back. “That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant. In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives. He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that eliminated the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial. Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me.[Read: Trump Has a Bill Pulte Problem]The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved. The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason. “Mostly it was operational. We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters. “With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team. It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as… [TheTopNews] Read More.