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- Trump: Help, the Iran War Is Going Great
Donald Trump painted his military campaign in Iran with the same gold shine as his plans for the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in remarks on Monday—but despite his assured posturing, he is asking for help. The president’s comments came at a press conference prior to a Monday vote among Kennedy Center board members on whether to close the institution temporarily for repairs. Trump previously insisted the building was in disrepair and that its programming was “woke,” pushing Congress to appropriate $257 million via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to fund renovations. In Iran, the president has created more serious problems. In the same Monday remarks, despite claiming that the US military had bombed Iran’s mine-laying ships to the extent that vessels could safely transit the Strait of Hormuz, an essential passageway in the Persian Gulf where roughly 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flows, Trump reiterated calls on allies to help reopen the shipping lane. “Every one of [the mine-laying ships] is gone, but it only takes one,” Trump stated. “It’s a little unfair [given] you win a war.” “You need people to watch and people to see,” he added. On Monday, Trump said that some nations were “enthusiastic” to help. But that appears to be an overstatement, as many NATO countries have refused Trump’s request for naval and other military support. And on receiving a tepid response, Trump warned allies on Sunday about a “very bad” future if they did not help, and complained at his Monday press conference that the US was not receiving reimbursement for providing protection. “This war has nothing to do with NATO,” Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said on Monday. “NATO is a defensive alliance, an alliance for the defense of its territory.” As Trump’s military campaign in Iran enters its third week, US and Israeli strikes have killed over one thousand people in the country and led to bombings across the region. The White House seems to have no set goal—let alone a plan—despite costs now well into the tens of billions of dollars. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - What Happens Now to Kristi Noem’s Warehouse Jails?
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.2 days ago - A 79-Year-Old Freshman Senator?“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.2 days ago
- What’s Trump’s Phone Number Worth?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.4 days ago
- High Stakes, and a Low Bar, For Markwayne Mullin at DHSDuring the 14 months of Kristi Noem’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, I regularly heard from staffers—career law-enforcement officers and political appointees alike—who were desperate for a return to institutional normalcy. Their concerns weren’t ideological. They felt, instead, that Noem was running the department and its law-enforcement agencies as an attention-grabbing spectacle, undermining their mission.Consider Noem’s appearance at a Salvadoran megaprison. Or the creepy white-nationalist messaging of her public-affairs team. Or the daily social-media clips of Greg Bovino’s masked border agents. Never mind the dubious media contracts, the luxury jet, and the presence of Corey Lewandowski, a shadow secretary rumored to be in a romance with Noem that both deny. These employees seemed to long for the steady hand of a veteran bureaucrat. Now Donald Trump has finally ousted Noem, but in her place, he is sending them Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Mullin is a former mixed-martial-arts fighter, a current fighter for Trump, and a guy who once tried to throw down against the president of the Teamsters union in the middle of a committee hearing, shouting, “Stand your butt up!” before Bernie Sanders had to rein him in. And whatever else he may be, he is not a veteran bureaucrat.Mullin is scheduled to appear before a Senate committee Wednesday for a confirmation hearing, and his approval appears all but certain. Republicans need a simple majority, and Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has indicated that he’ll vote for Mullin. “John already texted me,” Mullin told reporters on the U.S. Capitol steps after Trump nominated him. “You guys know John and I are friends.” Trump has said March 31 will be Noem’s last day.She leaves DHS, and its more than 260,000 employees across 23 agencies and subagencies, in a state of crisis. The department has been caught in a funding shutdown since February 14, and nearly half the DHS workforce is going without a paycheck. The TSA, one of its agencies, is unable to compensate its agents, so they’ve been quitting and calling out sick, creating havoc at airports. Democrats are dug in on their demand for changes to the hard-line immigration-enforcement tactics that Noem—and the White House—have implemented. Republicans are blocking Democrats’ proposals to separately fund the DHS agencies that aren’t leading Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.In some ways, Mullin doesn’t appear to offer much of a departure from the Noem era. He has been a staunch… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
- The Republican Party Continues Eating Its OwnIn a sea of congressional bloviators, Kevin Kiley has always stood out. The two-term California lawmaker, unlike most of his colleagues, does not reflexively defend the president and, at least recently, has been a frequent critic of his own party’s leadership. So it shouldn’t have been particularly shocking when, earlier this week, Kiley announced that he would run for reelection not as a Republican, but as an independent.Kiley will be the newest initiate of Congress’s tiny club of independents, which, until this week, consisted of just two senators: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. More important, though, the switch represents the latest example of the Republican Party eating its own.Politically, Kiley’s decision is something of a Hail Mary pass. The new House maps that California voters approved last fall as part of the Democrats’ retaliation for GOP gerrymandering in Texas carved up his district, which stretches from the Sacramento suburbs hundreds of miles south along the Nevada border. Kiley had to choose whether to challenge a conservative colleague, Representative Tom McClintock, in a safe Republican seat, or to run in a district that Democrats drew in their own favor. He chose to avoid a potentially nasty intraparty primary and seek the seat that includes his hometown (and that voted for Kamala Harris by about 10 points in 2024). In such a Democratic-leaning district, however, running as an independent might be Kiley’s only chance to win.[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’ ]Kiley’s move may have been prompted by short-term expediency, but it fits into a longer-running pattern of the Republican Party becoming less tolerant of free-thinking legislators and Congress as a whole becoming more polarized. Over the past two decades, the GOP’s moderate wing has shrunk to the point where most members avoid the term altogether. The Republicans who hold a dwindling number of swing seats are more conservative (and more loyal to party leadership) than were the most electorally endangered Republicans in the 1990s and early 2000s.In recent years, those GOP lawmakers who regularly criticize Trump or vote against the party don’t last very long. In the Senate, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis voted against the president’s signature tax-cut bill last year and then promptly announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska voices his displeasure with Trump regularly; he, too, is retiring after this year.Gerrymandering has only worsened this trend among… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago
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