THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It sure feels like 1979 again. Iran is fighting the West. The price of gas has been rising for weeks. Moscow is aiming to take advantage of a distracted White House. The party in control of Washington is anxiously looking at the polls. Flared pants and jumpsuits are back! So are cigarettes. Steven Spielberg is riding high after doing a movie about humans encountering aliens. (Not to be outdone, actual space missions are back too.) U2 put out new music. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates are good.And if we do seem to have returned to that moment in time, then, well, Donald Trump would seem to be ready for whatever comes next, because the guy has lived his whole life like it’s the 1980s.He embraces the big-bigger-biggest ethos of the decade, with its gold-plated style and “greed is good” mantra. His views have been shaped by the brash era in which excess was the norm and ostentatious displays of wealth and power were celebrated in pop culture and in Trump’s Manhattan. (The pink-marbled lobby of his Trump Tower skyscraper looks just as it did when it opened in 1983.) It was also a moment when New York City was defined by extreme wealth stratification and racial unrest, a time of high crime and corruption. To this day, Trump’s touchstones almost seem preserved in amber from that decade: Sylvester Stallone, George Steinbrenner, Hulk Hogan, the musical Cats. This was an era of over-the-top displays of patriotism and even jingoism; the phrase Let’s make America great again was in. (It’s true—Ronald Reagan got there first.) This was when Trump became a celebrity, when he still had youth on his side. In his mind, at least, he hasn’t left.Smith Collection / Gado / GettyTrump’s favorite era may also be shaping his approach to the war with Iran. Back then was when Trump revealed himself to be an Iran hawk, one who believed that President Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to rescue hostages at the U.S. embassy broadcast a sign of American weakness to the globe. In a series of remarks over the decade when he became a public figure, Trump said he’d punish Iran, and he began to float his now-familiar refrain of take the oil. Indeed, those 1980s discussions of foreign policy and Iran were when the media began speculating that Trump might someday run for president. The lessons he learned decades ago have… [TheTopNews] Read More.

U.S. presidential campaigns usually get started at the Iowa State Fair or some other exalted arena of Americana. J. D. Vance chose Budapest. The vice president visited Hungary’s capital today to align himself in the most visible way possible with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is fighting to hold on to power in parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday.The U.S. government’s support for Orbán had already been clear. Donald Trump had issued a “Complete and Total Endorsement” on social media. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the most credible threat to Vance’s claim on the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, had traveled to Budapest in February and declared, “Your success is our success.” Vance, not to be outdone, didn’t cloak his endorsement in diplomatic rituals. “I’m here to help him in this campaign cycle,” the vice president said at Orbán’s side. For the prime minister, it was almost too good to be true. He raised his hand to his face as if to stop himself from blushing.Hungary is of relatively little material value to the United States. It’s a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people that accounts for about a quarter of 1 percent of U.S. trade. It contributes negligibly to NATO, ostensibly the measure that the Trump administration uses to determine the worth of its European partners. But Hungary matters to Vance because it matters to the MAGA intelligentsia—the think-tank bosses, Substack scribblers, and X influencers who help mold the agenda of the modern Republican Party. Many of the gatekeepers of GOP values view Hungary as a model. In their mind, Orbán shows how to cast aside conservative niceties and seize the institutions of the state to advance a particular vision of the good life, one that claims Christianity as its basis while punishing adversaries including leftists, immigrants, and sexual minorities. And so the Hungarian election has become the first stop of the 2028 presidential contest.[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]The trip, which took place five days before voting begins in Hungary, couldn’t have come at a better time for Vance, whose self-image as an anti-interventionist is at odds with Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran. In Budapest, he allowed himself some distance from the president’s threats to bomb Iranian civilization out of existence. He was squarely in his comfort zone, conjuring fears of “woke” indoctrination and leading Hungarians in a call-and-response chant opposing… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The empty warehouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City had a lot of potential but no buyers. Built in 2022, it was one of the largest warehouses in the area, with 833,000 square feet of space—14 football fields under one roof. The surrounding industrial zone had been promoted by the state as “Utah’s Inland Port,” a logistics hub smack-dab in the middle of a desert but only a few minutes to the freeway and the international airport.Demand for big warehouses had softened, however, and the property remained vacant, a white elephant by the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Then, suddenly, on March 11, the Department of Homeland Security snapped it up for $145.4 million—paying nearly 50 percent more than the property’s 2025 assessed value to a private investment fund controlled by a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Bank.The deal went through six days after President Trump announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as DHS secretary. Noem and her team had been racing to buy up industrial properties as part of a $38 billion overhaul of the ICE detention system in an effort to supercharge Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. DHS officials described the acquisitions as a crucial step to meeting the White House’s goal of 1 million deportations a year, after ICE carried out fewer than half that many during Trump’s first year back in office. The warehouses would be reconfigured and remodeled into megajails, with capacity for up to 10,000 detainees each.Noem’s replacement, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took control of the department on March 24 and ordered a pause on conversion plans for the warehouse in Salt Lake City as well as for 10 others scattered across the country, seeking to defuse backlash from local jurisdictions. Many local leaders say that they were blindsided by DHS’s acquisitions and don’t want giant immigration jails in their communities. Some have made clear that they are willing to fight the government’s plans. Lauren Bis, a spokesperson for DHS, characterized the pause as a logical part of Mullin’s transition process, which requires “reviewing agency policies and proposals” and making sure that the department works with community leaders. “We want to be good partners,” Bis told me.There are also legal challenges. The administration is facing lawsuits across its new portfolio of industrial properties, including in Michigan and New Jersey. In Maryland, a federal judge halted renovation work at a warehouse that ICE… [TheTopNews] Read More.

One evening last fall, J. D. Vance threw open the doors of his home, a Queen Anne–style mansion on the campus of the U.S. Naval Observatory, to Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. Over drinks in Vance’s study, the vice president asked Orbán for an update on life in Europe. Specifically, he wanted to know how quickly Christian faith was vanishing from the continent.The get-together, described to me by someone who was present, was informal. Only close aides were included, among them Orbán’s political director and Vance’s national security adviser. And then there was Gladden Pappin, a Harvard-trained, U.S.-born political theorist with round, dark-framed glasses and graying hair.Few people have ever heard of Pappin. Until I began examining the U.S.-Hungary relationship—trying to understand why President Trump and the people around him are backing Orbán’s reelection this month as if he were a swing-state Senate candidate—I hadn’t either. So what was he doing alongside Orbán at the vice president’s residence?The answer lies in the ties binding Orbán’s government to one of the most radical parts of Trump’s movement. Pappin belongs to a clutch of so-called post-liberal intellectuals who are small in number but whose power is magnified by their like-mindedness with Vance. Silicon Valley gave Vance the resources to run for the Senate in 2022; but this group gave him the relevance, and the ideas, to be Trump’s running mate in 2024 and his heir apparent in 2028.Pappin, like Vance, is Catholic, which infuses his critique of liberalism. In essays and other public comments, he has objected to limits on state power that enhance individual liberty and questioned the separation of Church and state. Privately, he has advanced fantastical ideas. He once predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, at which point the pope would anoint Melania Trump, who is Catholic, to rule the United States as queen.I heard this story from multiple people but dismissed it, at first, as implausible. Then I reached Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and previously a political-science professor. Polet told me that he was present when Pappin said this, over drinks one evening at a 2018 meeting of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which aims to nurture conservative ideas on college campuses. Although often puckish and provocative, Pappin, in Polet’s telling, became animated about this prediction, rebuffing the suggestion that it was merely something that he’d… [TheTopNews] Read More.