THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.A touch of annoyance flashes across Cory Booker’s face as we talk about fighting. “Why do people preemptively, continually, mistake kindness for weakness?” he asks. By “people,” he means, at this moment, me. I had just brought up the festering concern, expressed by fans and critics alike, that he is simply too nice to win the presidency. Booker has been trying to convince me that he’s tough enough for this uncivil American era—that a pathologically genial New Jersey Democrat who preached love in his (mostly unloved) 2020 campaign could, if called to, knock a guy on his ass.To make this case, Booker must reach back more than 30 years, to his days as a second-string tight end at Stanford. He told me how he almost started a fight with Junior Seau, the future NFL Hall of Famer, after the first snap in a game against the University of Southern California. (A teammate wisely pulled him away.) A coach once told Booker, “Between the whistles, when the play starts, you are ferocious. But when the whistle’s over, you help the guy up. And there’s something about that that’s even more scary to those who go against you.”Booker is telling stories like these to audiences around the country for a reason. Over his dozen years in Washington, his image has grown soft, and he needs Democrats to remember the brash up-and-comer who became mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (Declarations such as “I love Donald Trump” in response to an insult from the then–presidential candidate may have helped his reputation among Christian theologians, but not necessarily with voters.) Booker has criticized his party for not confronting the president aggressively enough during his second term; during a debate over police-funding legislation last summer, he angrily accused two Senate Democratic colleagues of complicity. Most memorably, Booker spoke out against the Trump administration for more than 25 hours, breaking Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech—and performing miracles of bladder control.Booker’s shift over the past year isn’t a complete transformation. He still gives out hugs and selfies, tells dad jokes, and occasionally sounds like a motivational speaker, sprinkling half a dozen inspirational quotes into any speech he delivers. But he wants the country to know that he’s got an edge to him, too. “You can be someone who believes in the values of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Philip CheungAt Coronado National Memorial in Arizona, the demolition crews blowing up national-park land tend to announce explosions at least a day in advance, as a warning for hikers to stay away. The crews have been working their way up the western slope of the park for the past couple of months, right along the international boundary with Mexico. President Trump’s border wall needs a smooth, straight path, and there are mountains in the way.Trump didn’t build along this stretch of the border during his first term, but his crews are now working at a furious pace. They have already completed about five miles of 30-foot-tall barrier, painted jet black at the president’s insistence because he thought it looked more intimidating and would be hotter to the touch.I watched them on a recent afternoon from an overlook, at a safe distance from the blast. To the west was the San Rafael Valley, a rolling yellow grassland that is one of the last wild open spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ringed by mountains, it has served as a setting for John Wayne Westerns and episodes of Little House on the Prairie. I saw no power lines, paved roads, or other signs of human presence, aside from the new camp where Trump’s workers were sleeping in trailers and crushing rocks to make concrete for the wall’s base. They had about 20 more miles to go to finish the whole valley, one of the last places in southeast Arizona that hasn’t been walled off.Trump spent about $11 billion to build 450 miles of border barrier in his first term, one of the most expensive federal-infrastructure projects in U.S. history. He faced a lot of pushback too. The federal government shut down in December 2018 for a then-record 35 days when Democrats refused to give Trump $5 billion for border-wall funding. But last summer, Trump got nearly 10 times that amount for the wall—$46.5 billion—when Republicans pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.The money has imbued the project with an aura of inevitability, wiping away the financial and topographical considerations that restrained Trump’s first-term ambitions. John F. Kelly, Trump’s first homeland-security secretary, used to say that building a wall “from sea to shining sea” made no sense over steep mountain ranges where few people enter illegally. Construction through those areas can be wildly expensive, costing more than $40 million a mile.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

By the time President Trump ousted Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month, her team had already embarked on a spending spree that included far more than the new luxury jet and the self-promotional ads that got her in trouble at the White House. Over the past several months, the department has purchased 11 large warehouses around the country that it plans to convert into megajails, some with space for up to 10,000 detainees. The acquisitions kicked off a $38 billion makeover of the detention system that has been overseen by Noem’s chief adviser and alleged lover, Corey Lewandowski.Trump set March 31 as Noem’s last day, and Lewandowski is expected to leave with her. (Both have denied an affair.) Their team has been racing to acquire properties and convert the warehouse sites, but two senior DHS officials with knowledge of the plan told me they now expect a slowdown—and that a “pause” wouldn’t be a bad thing. “They’ve had a ridiculous timeline to rush everything through,” said one of the officials, who, like others I spoke with, was not authorized to publicly discuss the warehouse plan with reporters. “Now everybody’s kind of going back to the drawing board and talking about resetting.”The administration’s “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative” was first pitched last spring but stalled for months while DHS focused on deportations and a recruitment drive to hire 10,000 ICE officers, the two officials told me. But as the White House demanded more detention space last fall, Noem’s team ordered ICE to expedite the warehouse plan. It calls for ICE to streamline its deportation process by purchasing detention centers from federal contractors it has long relied on and opening its own megajails in retrofitted warehouses.Some county governments and local lawmakers have adopted resolutions to try to keep ICE out of their communities or block conversion plans. DHS leaders had expected Republican-controlled jurisdictions to welcome the construction of warehouse jails in their communities and were surprised by what the two senior officials described as NIMBYism. Then came the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, further eroding public support for the mass-deportation campaign and raising questions about the administration’s tactics. Officials worry that backlash could make it more difficult to get permits for water and sewer connections and other modifications at warehouses designed to hold products, not people. “The timing of Minneapolis could not… [TheTopNews] Read More.

“I’ll share my lipid profile with anybody!” Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, pledged to me.These are the kinds of assurances that candidates make when everyone keeps harping on their age.Mills, who is 78, is trying to dislodge Susan Collins, a spring chicken at 73, in Maine’s Senate race this fall. Unlike her Democratic primary opponent, the gun-loving ex-Marine turned oyster farmer Graham Platner, Mills does not have a dicey Reddit history or a recently covered-over Nazi tattoo. She is well-known in the state and has a tested political organization. And yet, in several recent polls, she has been trailing Platner.One likely factor: If she is elected, Mills would be the oldest freshman senator in history. Platner, at 41, is a relative political infant.I spoke with Mills on a recent Friday afternoon in the coastal town of Rockland. We were sitting in a quiet café, and I kept steering the discussion to her least-favorite topic.“I feel bad asking all these questions,” I told Mills.“No, you don’t,” the governor shot back.Mills gives off the disarming sense of a secure soul undeterred by whippersnappers who toss around fancy words such as gerontocracy. “I’m too old to care,” she told a CNN reporter last month, which may or may not be a winning campaign message but struck me as sincere. She presents as younger than her years—still sharp of mind, a weathered workhorse whose energy showed no signs of flagging during a 13-hour day that included a speech to a craft-beer convention in Portland, visits to a food pantry and a chocolate factory in Rockland, a stop at a fishing expo in Rockport, and an evening house party in Waterville. At least judging by our day together, she seems to be personally acquainted with a large portion of Maine’s 1.4 million residents.[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]Still, Mills has to appreciate why Democrats are so sensitive to matters of age these days. The story begins and ends with the fresh trauma of how a certain geriatric presidency ended up for them not long ago. Joe Biden has made this race “far more difficult for her,” Jessica Taylor, the Senate editor for the Cook Political Report, told me. When I spoke with Mark Brewer, the chair of the political-science department at the University of Maine, he said that Democrats simply “do not want to get burned by that again.”Mills… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Washington’s hottest commodity is a 10-digit number that can swing financial markets, drive the news, and shift policy—but only if the timing is right.The White House has received reports in recent weeks that President Trump’s personal phone number has been offered for sale to deep-pocketed interests seeking influence, two administration officials told us. “It’s honestly just wild,” one of them said. “I’ve heard of CEOs offering money for his number. I’ve heard of crypto bros offering cryptocurrency for it.” Journalists have taken to horse-trading among themselves, offering the contact information of other world leaders—or sometimes even dozens of bold-faced names—just to get the most important one saved into their phones. “It’s out of control,” said the second official, who, like others we spoke with for this story, requested anonymity to talk frankly on the issue. “It’s like a wrecking ball.”No one foresaw this at the start of Trump’s second term, when the number was closely held by the president’s friends and a handful of journalists who used it sparingly. So many people now call Trump on his private iPhone that his advisers have stopped trying to keep track. Sometimes in meetings, he will leave his phone face up, allowing staff to gawk at the flashing notifications of incoming or missed calls that pile up on his screen. Only some of them are from numbers that have been saved in the device. “It is literally call after reporter call,” the first official said. “It is just boom, boom, boom.”The incoming calls get particularly intense after a journalist successfully catches the president and then publishes a mini-scoop on what he says. It’s like flashing a Bat-Signal: Trump may be idle and chatty. Assignment editors suddenly ask: If it is so easy for the competition to get a scoop, why can’t their reporters do the same, and stat? Network correspondents scramble to one-up each other. “Ten reporters will call in a matter of two hours,” the second official told us.The scrum for fleeting—and often conflicting—presidential utterances has made it difficult for the government to sell a clear story to the American people. Yet Trump’s advisers have no plans to intervene. “He enjoys it,” that official continued. “He knows how to handle the press.” When we asked the White House press office about the president’s phone, the spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in a statement: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president… [TheTopNews] Read More.