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- Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?
Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel vowed before God, Fox Nation, and Donald Trump that he would punish the “deep state” for its manifold transgressions, especially the (actually nonexistent) conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.“I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this,” he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. We’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”That was five months ago. Patel has not yet delivered on his promise. But in interviews with more than 40 current and former administration officials, FBI employees, and members of Congress and their staffers, as well as others close to the White House, I’ve learned that it is not for lack of trying.The people I spoke with described Patel as desperate to help the Justice Department indict putative malefactors and stimulate headlines to please the president. Nearly all of the people I spoke with would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if their name appeared in the story. Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and me in response to my reporting earlier this year that he has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.In recent months, Patel has been briefed on the FBI’s “election integrity” investigations in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond. Officials told me their understanding is that many of the election-related investigation requests came directly from the White House, many times with the instruction that “this is a big deal for the president” or “this is a push from 47.” But all of that attention hasn’t yielded results. In meetings, Patel has expressed frustration that there have been no new findings, and instructed staff to “look harder” or “look again,” according to three people familiar with the conversations.The FBI’s preoccupation with the 2020 election represents a dramatic break with its past. Though the bureau—one of the world’s most famous and most powerful law-enforcement agencies—has experienced more than its share of controversies and episodes of overreach, it has also been dedicated to criminal investigation based in evidence, science, and reality. The commitment of personnel, resources, and time to investigate a conspiracy theory that was… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - The GOP’s Culture-War Hail MaryLast week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss the most pressing issue of the 2026 campaign: transgender athletes. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before. Two years ago, a series of ads about Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries proved to be some of Trump’s most persuasive. (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) In November, such ads could mean the difference between Republicans retaining and losing the Senate. “They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]But it’s not clear that Democrats have figured out how to thwart the Republicans’ transgender gambit without betraying their own coalition.The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals.… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago
- The Democratic Playbook for Investigating TrumpAs Democrats have grown more hopeful that they might win control of the U.S. Senate, congressional investigators have gathered regularly in a conference room in the office of Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who is on track to lead the body’s key oversight committee if they do. The team in recent months has assembled a list of people in President Trump’s orbit and administration whose actions are worthy of a probe, and they have brainstormed possible witnesses, drafted information requests, and gamed out how the administration might respond. Across the Hill, Representative Robert Garcia of California, a Democrat who could soon chair the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been preparing even longer. He told me he keeps a “running list of the most corrupt things that the Trump family has done” on a whiteboard in his home in Long Beach where senior staffers this week wrapped up several days of strategy meetings. “There’s a lot of ideas and possible investigations on there,” he said.With the midterms just weeks away, an army of committee staffers has been quietly preparing to launch numerous investigations in the new year. When the 120th congressional session begins in January, Trump and his administration could suddenly find themselves under the type of scrutiny they have thus far avoided. But there are significant risks and limits to Democrats’ congressional powers—and divisions could quickly emerge over the number and intensity of investigations, especially if their majority is a thin one.During Trump’s first term, Democrats heavily invested in trying to impeach the president on two occasions, animating their base but taking them away from work on issues of broader interest to more Americans. But the biggest hurdle is likely the president himself: Trump is widely expected to be more dismissive of congressional oversight than any president in history, ignoring requests, resisting subpoenas in ways that give Democrats little recourse, or issuing broad pardons to insulate those close to him. If Democrats attempted to hold someone in criminal contempt of Congress, the matter would be referred to a Department of Justice that Trump has controlled completely.All of these considerations leave Democrats certain that they are going to scrutinize Trump like never before, but deeply uncertain about how it will go. “I don’t think I’d call it retribution. I’d call it a reckoning,” Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon told me. “I don’t look at it like, We’re… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago
- Big, Ugly Changes to SNAP Are Hitting County Budgets
In Bladen County, North Carolina, an agricultural community in the state’s southeast known for its blueberry, tobacco, and hog farms, more than 6,000 people—one in five of the county’s 30,000 residents—rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To retain their food benefits, Bladen County must now come up with an additional $397,000 annually—money that could otherwise be put toward the staffing and infrastructure improvements that its school district requested, but which the county did not fund. Already this year, Bladen had to draw over $1 million in capital reserves to balance its budget. More than one in five Bladen residents, the same proportion that receive SNAP benefits, live below the poverty line. Historically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its partners in SNAP implementation—states and counties, which do the day-to-day work of processing applications, checking households’ eligibility, and recertifying families and individuals for the program—have split administrative costs 50–50. But on October 1, another of the numerous time bombs that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) strategically placed across America’s federal government detonated: States and counties are now on the hook for 75 percent of the cost to administer what is still, ostensibly, a federal program. In New York’s rural northeast Washington County, where more than one in ten residents are enrolled in SNAP, even a double-digit property tax levy increase was not enough to cover the county’s new cost-share—up $574,558 annually—without keeping unfilled Department of Social Services positions vacant. That leaves the additional paperwork created by the OBBBA’s expanded eligibility requirements in fewer hands. This change is but a small piece of the OBBBA’s broader shift of federal financial responsibilities for government services to the state and local level, where budgets are already buckling under concurrent weights: mounting pension liabilities as Baby Boomers retire, increased health care costs for employees, and inflation. The National Association of Counties (NACO) now estimates that the OBBBA’s cost shifts could lay an additional $1 trillion on states and counties by 2035. Along with hundreds of billions in lost services and benefits, and trillions added to the national debt, that was the price of the 2025 law’s tax cuts, the vast majority of which benefitted the richest Americans. By the simple law of ledgers, state and local governments running SNAP must either cut spending or raise additional revenues. “State-level tax policy is unlike the federal government; they can’t run… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - The Problem With Trump’s Crime ClaimsPresident Trump is deeply unpopular, and his party is on track to lose badly in the midterm elections. But at least one thing is going well on his watch: The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since at least 1900, and the number of violent crimes is falling across the country at the fastest pace ever recorded. Trump and senior administration officials, including the domestic-policy adviser Stephen Miller, are celebrating these trends as the effect of their immigration crackdown at the southern border and on U.S. streets.“Before I took office, we had the worst and most dangerous border on Earth,” Trump asserted to the United Nations General Assembly last week. Now, he said, no one is allowed into the United States unless they’re invited. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” The president had been even more explicit at an August rally in South Carolina. “If you wanna get the migrant criminals out of your communities, you have to vote Republican,” he said.ICE arrested about 50,000 immigrants a month this summer, the highest level ever, and deportations are on track for a record year. But Trump’s claim about ICE’s role in the falling crime rate is not backed up by his own administration’s data. Several of the cities and states that have seen the sharpest drops in the homicide rate, according to FBI and census data, are also the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the administration deplores as incubators of violent crime. (The Department of Justice defines sanctuary jurisdictions as places with “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Those jurisdictions have adopted policies that limit cooperation between their police departments and ICE.)Three of the five jurisdictions that recorded the largest change in the violent-crime rate, according to FBI and census data, were labeled sanctuaries: Connecticut, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. And of the 11 states where the homicide rate is falling fastest, six are considered sanctuary jurisdictions by the DOJ: Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Washington State and New York. Another—Massachusetts—has a sanctuary policy in its largest city.Similarly, the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests do not have the largest decreases in violent crime, either in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage change compared with last year. Georgia has been consistently among the top 10 states for monthly ICE arrests, according to… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- Taming the AI Monster
As much as the political world has been turned upside down by the Donald Trump administration’s callous cruelty, rampant corruption, and woeful incompetence, it is hard to shake the feeling that in a decade it will be a footnote compared to humanity’s collective failure to reckon with artificial intelligence. This summer has seen breathtaking breakouts, hacks, and escapes by frontier AI models. The most publicized was the Hugging Face attack, in which hundreds of OpenAI agents slipped out of a testing sandbox, coordinated with one another, spent more than four days inside another company’s systems, and tried to cover their tracks. Anthropic’s Claude models hacked three outside organizations after a testing error connected them to the open internet, and in September Google disclosed that Gemini had broken into three real companies during a security exercise aimed at a fictional one. Even before these escapes, the latest frontier models had shown the capacity to overwhelm many cybersecurity protections, forcing the world to adapt. These models’ ability to outwit security measures, combined with their willingness to deceive humans to achieve their goals and preserve themselves, caused an uproar. OpenAI slowed its training, and Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Both he and OpenAI chief Sam Altman even briefed the UN Security Council. The left has been suspicious of the AI companies’ motives, and for good reason. Silicon Valley has shifted sharply to the right in recent years, and the industry’s “move fast and break things” culture has done lasting harm to entire countries, children’s mental health, journalism, and the public square. AI behemoths, in particular, have not done themselves any favors by arguably stealing the work of human creators and almost gleefully threatening to put people out of work, with no coherent vision of what comes next. Until recently, the dominant critique of AI on the left has been that whatever its costs, the technology is mostly a gimmick: a plagiarism machine and stochastic parrot whose main uses are helping students cheat, giving upper management delusions of grandeur, and creating more work for office staff. Many of the complaints, from the environmental toll to a soon-to-pop financial bubble, are legitimate. The “gimmick” part is harder to sustain. Now that AI models have displayed a hivemind cleverness capable of humbling the world’s security infrastructure, the left has split into several camps. Some say… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
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