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- Another Pulte Purge
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.3 days ago - Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ MomentHow many words does it take to trigger MAGA world? Three, it turns out.When Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a rally on Sunday that President Trump wants to “travel with Natalie”—implying an untoward relationship between the 80-year-old grandfather and his 35-year-old special assistant, Natalie Harp—the outrage from Trump allies was as loud as it was predictable: Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, and Laura Ingraham, among others, accused Ossoff of misogyny, despite having previously defended Trump’s own sexist comments. (The word hypocrisy feels inadequate here.)But as this debate over propriety unfolds, a dedicated swath of the Democratic base is delighted. Since Trump’s reelection, these voters have been hankering to see their leaders show, well, a little more fight. So far, most of that fight seems to have come from midterm candidates on the far left, who often target the Democratic Party itself or the so-called establishment. To hear Ossoff, a more moderate Democrat in a reddish-purple state, direct a sharp—albeit petty—jab directly at the president thrilled such voters.Some, in fact, found it almost cathartic. “Someone finally said something,” a 52-year-old woman named Rebecca, who attended Ossoff’s Atlanta rally, told me, sounding delighted. Bring on the “smoke,” Aaron Whitely, the chair of the Democratic Party of Chatham County, in Georgia, told me. “The younger folks are looking for it. The older folks are loving it.”Ossoff appears to know this. It’s why viral clips of the senator, who is running for reelection, seem to pop up every few weeks like zinnias in summer. It’s also why you can’t have a conversation about the 2028 presidential race without mentioning his name. But just because the base loves the smoke doesn’t mean every other Georgia voter will.Throughout Ossoff’s reelection campaign, Democratic talking heads have credited the senator for succinctly calling out the Trump administration’s alleged self-dealing. His speech at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta, on Sunday afternoon contained his usual anti-corruption message: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile,” he told the crowd, “while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”But this time, about 10 minutes into the speech, Ossoff threw in the comment that lit up social media and group chats. “The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
- El-Sayed May Be Winning. But He Should Run Like He’s Losing
The Michigan “pollercoaster” continues. After a Democratic U.S. Senate primary in which polls wrongly projected a landslide win for Abdul El-Sayed, the start of the general election features wildly divergent poll data. In the days before the August 4 primary, none of the four general election trial heats released had El-Sayed—who did win the primary by a hair—leading Republican nominee Mike Rogers. And the first poll sampled after the primary, sponsored by Fox News, had Rogers up 4 points. The bipartisan duo used by Fox News, Beacon Research, and Shaw & Company Research, has been christened a “Select Pollster” by The New York Times poll aggregators. And since every other Fox News poll of competitive Senate races this year has shown a Democratic lead, its Michigan survey raised the question (for) of whether El-Sayed was in serious trouble. However, in the past week, four more post-primary polls dropped with El-Sayed’s leads. An internal poll for Senate Majority PAC, the Super PAC run by allies of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, which has fallen behind El-Sayed, has the Democrat up 6. Another is sponsored by League of American Workers, a one-man conservative operation, with El-Sayed leading by 3. AARP, using the bipartisan team of Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research, sees a 1-point race. The most recent sample, from August 11 to 17, shows El-Sayed’s biggest lead to date: 7 points. That one comes from Susquehanna Polling and Research, a Republican firm yet one that is also a Select Pollster in the eyes of The New York Times. The data can be interpreted in different ways. The average of the four trial heats surveyed in July is Rogers +3.5, and the five from August are El-Sayed +2.6, suggesting the end of a heated Democratic primary has reunited the party faithful, given El-Sayed fresh momentum, and brought along enough of the swing to win. However, 2.6 points is hardly a comfortable lead. If we toss out the internal poll (and we should), El-Sayed’s average lead dwindles to 1.4 points, well within margins of error. Furthermore, three of the August polls also sampled the Michigan gubernatorial race. In each, Democrat Joyce Benson runs stronger than El-Sayed, leading by 5 in the Fox News and AARP polls, and by 16 in the League of American Workers poll. At minimum, even if El-Sayed is slightly ahead, he could be doing better… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Dead Reckoning
The first thing I did after learning, three years ago, that my 97-year-old father had died was to write his obituary. I wanted the world to know who Robert Noah was, and I didn’t want to depend on the news judgment of the two publications likeliest to take note of his passing—the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Should these papers conclude his was a newsworthy death (which was far from certain), the likely reason would be that in the 1950s he’d got mixed up in a national scandal about rigged TV quiz shows. These shows, precursors to today’s game shows, scored huge prime-time ratings from an audience wholly unaware that the producers (at the prodding of sponsors) were feeding favored contestants the answers in advance. Dad had been executive producer of Twenty-One, the quiz show that made a national hero out of Charles Van Doren, assistant professor of English at Columbia and scion of a high-WASP literary family. Time magazine put Van Doren on its cover, and Robert Redford later made a movie about his rise and subsequent disgrace after it came out that the show was fixed. Explaining all that wasn’t a conversation I felt like having, so I didn’t notify either paper and wrote the obit myself. It mentioned the quiz scandals, of course—Dad had himself published an autobiographical novel about them in 1988—but not high up. Instead, I profiled the kind, witty, smart, generous, and (you’ll just have to take my word on this) highly principled person familiar to his family and others who knew him. Bob Noah had lived all but a smidgen of his life outside the news cycle. I saw no reason to return him to it. I bring up this personal history before delving into Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit, by the New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts, to demonstrate why, like a lot of dish about the Paper of Record and other leading news organizations, the trade secrets of the obituary pages don’t fascinate as much as they would have 30 or 40 years ago. These papers’ influence has dwindled, and even working journalists like me may choose other options. I posted my dad’s obit on Substack, and it reached pretty much all the people I wanted it to—his friends, my friends, and, eventually, more distant former colleagues who’d been out of touch and… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - The White House Freak-Out Over Natalie HarpYou are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration—often seen in public but rarely heard from—and her presence has turned into a curiosity. Although she got some mentions in the press as well as… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago
- James Fishback Is an Unsettling Glimpse Into the GOP’s FutureNormally, when a primary candidate finishes with 10.5 percent of the vote, it is a clear signal of their irrelevance.James Fishback finished third in Tuesday’s Florida Republican gubernatorial primary, and at no point in the race did it seem like he ever had a chance. In fact, at no point in his broader career has the 31-year-old, who is known for his racist slurs and unabashed bigotry, achieved anything of note. The high-school-debate nonprofit he founded was hit with allegations that he had sexually groomed a 17-year-old employee. A hedge fund where he’d once worked said that it had planned on firing him before he resigned, and accused him of claiming a job title that had never existed at the firm. He founded his own investment firm but left after the board decided to shut down the funds he managed. Fishback told me that he had left the firm to run for governor. He claims to have been an adviser to DOGE—but former senior DOGE officials have denied it.However, Fishback is defiantly proud of his showing, despite losing the primary to Representative Byron Donalds and also finishing well behind Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. “I would much rather have gotten 10 percent and done all of this and really moved the needle in political discourse,” he told me today, “than have gotten 24 percent like Jay Collins did and have nothing to show for it.”Despite his penchant for spectacular, serial failure, Fishback matters because he managed to figure out at least one thing: how to capture attention from the youthful right. Heading into Election Night, this was the one area where Fishback appeared to excel. A February poll from the University of North Florida found Fishback to be the leading candidate among GOP primary voters under 35, with 31 percent supporting him. By July, that number was up to 51 percent, according to a Change Research poll paid for by the conservative nonprofit Freedom Project USA. His candidacy was, in some respects, a test run for what might work with the next generation of Republican voters. What seems to be working is unrepentant bigotry.[Read: Young Republican activists are turning against Trump]Fishback’s appeal to younger voters can be explained by a few other things: He is relatively young. He ran a ragebait campaign that met young people where they are, maintaining a heavy digital presence with posts and appearances on the livestreams… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago
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