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- Why Trump Changed His Mind on Kristi Noem
Kristi Noem played “Hot Mama” as the walk-up song for her formal introduction at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in January 2025. President Trump had put her in charge of his signature campaign promise—the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history—and Noem took a fast, flashy approach to the job. She dressed as a Border Patrol agent and an ICE officer, and rode horseback at Mount Rushmore in ads. She flew to El Salvador and posed in front of a prison cell crammed with tattooed inmates. She made no apologies for aggressive enforcement tactics on American streets, even those that likely broke the law, or for the deaths of two U.S. citizens who opposed her approach.But it wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year that finally cost Noem her job today, making her the first ousted Cabinet secretary of Trump’s second term. Instead, it was her self-promotion.Noem’s standing was already shaky when she went to Capitol Hill to testify this week. On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican, asked whether Trump himself had approved Noem’s $220 million ad campaign that featured her urging migrants to self-deport. Noem said yes, and defended the ads as “effective.”The ads “were effective in your name recognition,” Kennedy told Noem, saying that she put Trump “in a terribly awkward spot.” He was implying the commission of a cardinal sin for a Trump Cabinet member: seeking to outshine the president. Kennedy told reporters today that he had spoken with Trump. “Her version of the truth and the president’s version of the truth are decidedly different,” Kennedy said.Noem had been saying for more than a year that the idea for the ads came from Trump himself. But with public opinion souring on Trump’s mass deportations, the messaging campaign that Noem touted as a success—and the no-bid contracts behind it—had come under suspicion from lawmakers. A person familiar with the decision to fire Noem told us that the president was upset about her attempt to pass the blame for the ad campaign onto him, and for her equivocation on the questions about her alleged romantic relationship with Corey Lewandowski, who has been working at DHS as her de facto chief of staff.“Replacing Kristi was based on the culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Things Are About to Get Ugly in TexasIn the end, it wasn’t particularly close. Democrats in last night’s Texas Senate primary decisively chose their fighter for November: James Talarico, a 36-year-old state lawmaker who looks—and sounds—like a youth pastor.At certain moments, the primary between Talarico and Representative Jasmine Crockett felt ugly. Online, supporters slung insults and accusations of racism. Crockett had harsh words for Talarico’s allies, and her campaign was hostile to the press, which it demonstrated by kicking me out of a rally.But all of that drama was just a small taste of what’s coming next. On the right, the primary between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is heading to a runoff, which likely promises nearly three months of nastiness. “The second wave is going to be a bitch,” Chris LaCivita, a top adviser to President Trump’s 2024 campaign who is working for an independent group supporting Cornyn, wrote on X, tagging Paxton.On the left, Talarico now faces the uphill climb toward winning statewide as a Democrat in Texas—a climb that, depending on which Republican emerges from the primary, will be somewhere between big and enormous. The real ugliness, in other words, starts now. It’s “open season,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican consultant in Texas who is not affiliated with either candidate, told me. “They’re going to release the hounds.”The two Democrats couldn’t have run more different campaigns. And last night, their strategies yielded very different results. Talarico, whose message is a careful blend of Christianity and economic populism, won the northern suburbs of Dallas, his hometown of Austin, and San Antonio. Crockett, who’d touted her opposition to Trump and promised to expand turnout among the party’s base, earned the support of more voters in Dallas and Houston—just not enough. Some voters in Dallas County were turned away from the polls because of a change in where people could cast ballots on Election Day, but not enough to have altered the outcome. Ultimately, Talarico won by more than six points.Given Crockett’s slightly Trumpian tendencies, including her low tolerance for critical coverage and her apparent willingness to deny reality, it seemed plausible, at least for a moment, that the congresswoman might refuse to concede. But this morning, she called Talarico to congratulate him. “Texas is primed to turn blue,” Crockett said in a statement, “and we must remain united because this is bigger than any one person.”Still, Crockett seems to hold some lingering… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Trump Is Expected to Endorse CornynPresident Trump’s political advisers expect him to endorse Senator John Cornyn in Texas’s May 26 Republican-primary runoff election following the incumbent’s better-than-expected finish against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the first round of voting yesterday, three people briefed on the deliberations told us.Trump declined to get involved in the race before the first round of voting, and Republican Senate strategists had been worried that he wouldn’t endorse Cornyn, who has been critical of the president in the past. Strategists have also warned that Paxton, a scandal-scarred favorite of Trump’s MAGA base, would need more money from top GOP donors than Cornyn would require to defeat the Democratic nominee, James Talarico. Estimates of the added cost of Paxton being the nominee in the general election range from about $80 million to more than $200 million, according to several top strategists, given the Democrats’ ability to raise massive sums of money in the state from individual donors if the race is perceived as winnable.Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Punchbowl News this morning that an early Trump endorsement “saves everybody a lot of money.” “If the president can weigh in, it would make it enormously helpful,” Thune told the outlet. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.Republicans have been working for months to rebuild the relationship between Cornyn and Trump, culminating in an invitation last week for the senator to ride on Air Force One with the president from Washington to a rally in Texas. The trip happened as Trump gave the green light for the U.S. attack on Iran. “It takes a lot of political courage, because, you know, these things are easier to start than to end,” Cornyn told CBS News Saturday about his conversations with the president about the strikes. “I told him I really respected the fact he would take the chance—the political risk, really—to strike Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.”The three people we spoke with noted that they have long expected Trump to endorse Cornyn in a runoff—a prospect made even more likely by Cornyn’s strong showing last night. Paxton consistently led Cornyn in polls leading up to the primary, but Cornyn eked out a top-place finish, albeit not a resounding-enough victory to avoid a runoff. The president has not yet made a final decision, however, and is prone to last-minute vacillation, they noted. Both the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Senate Leadership Fund,… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Pete Buttigieg in the Wilderness
Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.In May 2001, at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a 19-year-old freshman named Peter Buttigieg asked David Gergen, a Harvard professor and horse whisperer to five presidents, a question that he might have reserved for himself, a couple of decades later. Peter (he had not yet transformed into “Pete,” let alone “Mayor Pete”) said he loved The West Wing but could feel the idealism reflected in the show slipping away from politics in real life. “The presidency has now devolved into what’s called ‘the MBA White House,’ or ‘the corporate model,’” he said, with the plaintive tone of a child asking about the spirit of Christmas. “Is that magic really gone forever?”Last summer, by the shore of the Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan, I told Buttigieg that I remembered that kind of fresh-faced idealism from my own time as a Harvard student. It was earnest; it was ambitious; it kind of made me want to barf. Lust for power—that, I understood, and I recognized it in many of our classmates. (We overlapped briefly, but I didn’t know Buttigieg.) But the combination of naked ambition, absence of cynicism, and a sunny disposition seemed awfully suspicious. I always felt there was something odd about the undergraduates who haunted the IOP, Harvard’s convalescent home for politicians recently defeated in politics or retired from it. How could you trust students who, rather than getting laid or drunk with their peers, spent their free time at office hours with former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman? Buttigieg said he knew what I was talking about. “It could be a Puritan, self-effacing thing,” he told me, “where you’re not supposed to admit that you view yourself as the person who would want to do that.” (Even the phrasing—do that—made politics sound like an unnatural act.) The students with aspirations to high office knew that idealism and ambition put off a lot of people. The Harvard Crimson, he remembered, called all of the IOP kids and asked why they wanted to be president someday. “Almost all the IOPers were savvy enough not to respond,” he said. “You’re supposed to act as if you never even dimly suspected that you might run for office, until the moment you announce your campaign.” (Of the students who answered the reporter’s call, only one has held elected office—a term on the… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Leaving the United States Behind
Photographs by Natalie KeyssarThe Cruz family was exhausted. It was two days before Christmas 2024, and Rachel was coughing from bronchitis, her body once again crashing into the holiday break as she finished her 17th year teaching public high school in New York City. Irvi, her husband, was sleeping after his day shift at an upscale bistro on the Upper West Side, which had followed an overnight shift at a Latin dance club farther uptown, in Inwood. Between the two jobs, he’d dropped their daughters—Sara, 12, and Ana, 10—at their schools for gifted students, then rushed home to the Bronx to cook and do laundry.For years, Rachel and Irvi had been hustling to make this routine work, hoping that American immigration policy would evolve and allow Irvi, who had spent half his life in the United States, to become a citizen. Raising two children in New York City was expensive. Each day felt like a marathon they didn’t think they could finish. But the girls were thriving, and Rachel and Irvi were beloved at work. Every few years, they met with lawyers who urged them to hang on, so they did.I met the Cruz family in late 2016, when Donald Trump’s election, and his contempt for immigrants, first made them think of moving to Irvi’s hometown, in rural southern Mexico. But their daughters were just 2 and 4 then, and uprooting them was daunting. Four years later, Joe Biden’s win made the Trump years seem like an aberration, and Rachel and Irvi thought, once again, that a solution to their problem was within reach. Then came 2024, when 77.3 million Americans voted for Trump. His campaign signs had called for MASS DEPORTATION NOW! To the Cruzes, the message was clear: Irvi should give up and go home.The family had never been apart for long. The four of them linked arms or held hands when they walked down the street together, without seeming to notice they were doing it. Separation was not an option. So they would go, all of them.“We no longer have the faith that things will always be better here in the United States,” Rachel told me that night in December, sitting at their dining table, cupping a Zabar’s mug full of tea.[From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning story about the secret history of family separation]Drained from work, Irvi shuffled down the stairs in sweatpants.… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - The Impossible Predicament of the UninsuredThe day after Thanksgiving, I got a voicemail. A woman identified herself as a doctor at the University of Louisville hospital: “I believe I may have one of your family members here.”The message was hard to understand. Most of my family lives in Kentucky, so I didn’t know whom the doctor was referring to. I called the hospital, but kept getting put on hold. Then I tried my aunt—if someone was in trouble, she’d be the one to know. But she didn’t answer.A few hours later, her son got in touch with me. My aunt was the one in the hospital. She’d had an aneurysm on the right side of her brain, and it had burst. The drainage tube the doctors used to stop the bleeding kept slipping loose; after three tries, they finally got it to stick. Only then could they do surgery. My cousin FaceTimed me afterward, from the ICU. “Are you ready?” he asked. He angled the camera down to my aunt’s face, and I started sobbing like a sudden rainstorm.A few days later, I got on a plane from Washington, D.C., to Kentucky and went straight to join my family at the hospital. We had always called my aunt “The Glamourina.” She wore feathered hats with sparkly shirts and experimented with different hairstyles: a butterscotch-blond cropped cut, an afro, a bob streaked with highlights. She paid for my first real manicure, when I was in high school. We wore matching striped shirts to the salon, and used an eyeliner pencil to draw fake moles above our lips, like Marilyn Monroe.She is 58 now, and raised two kids as a single mother. She always treated me like one of her children, and I grew up to look more like her than like my own mom. When I’d talked with her the week before she ended up in the hospital, she’d asked me to play our favorite song, “I’m So Proud of You,” by Julie Anne Vargas. Now the top half of her head was shaved and staples ran in a ladder across it. IVs were taped to each arm, and a machine next to her bed was helping her breathe. She couldn’t speak. When she opened her eyes, they rolled.Her older son was especially alarmed by how quickly she’d declined. He wanted the doctors to come into her room so they could explain what had happened. But… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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