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- Trump Is Facing an Increasingly Defiant World
For months and months, President Donald Trump has bullied other countries on everything from trade to how they govern themselves. In just the last few days, however, a handful of global players have defied him, showing the limits of his influence. Iran’s Islamist leaders abandoned peace talks with the U.S., choosing to keep waging war instead. Hungary’s voters tossed out one of Trump’s closest European allies, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Then there’s Pope Leo, who presumably answers to a higher power, saying he has “no fear” of Trump after the president taunted him. Trump and his aides often appear to operate as if most other people on the planet are “non-player characters” in a video game. They believe, with few exceptions, that America can use threats, economic muscle and military action to bend other capitals to its will. But foreign policy has some basic laws. One of them, similar to physics, is that every action has a reaction. It may not be equal or opposite, but it also may not be what the Trump team wants. So far, the Trump administration does not appear to be adjusting well to the reality that more international players are willing to buck the American superpower. “If there were an appreciation that bullying was no longer a likely to succeed tactic you’d see a move away from it," but there’s no real sign that Trump is doing so, said Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. More than ever, I’m hearing concerns from foreign officials that critical information about geopolitical dynamics is simply not reaching the president because his aides won’t tell him hard truths. A New York Times rundown of his decision to go to war with Iran has fueled this worry. “He is surrounded by ‘yes’ people,” one senior European diplomat fumed to me. The Trump administration’s brash style came across in Vice President JD Vance’s comments after he held 21-hours worth of peace talks with Iranian officials over the weekend. Iran, Vance said, had “chosen not to accept our terms.” Such a statement, which Vance gave some version of twice, implied that the U.S. was dictating, not negotiating, despite Vance adding that the U.S. was “quite accommodating.” It did not go over well with supporters of the Islamist regime, while many in other countries saw the whole drama as a missed opportunity to deescalate tensions. “If you… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Orbán’s Defeat Shows What Trump’s Opponents Keep Doing WrongThe defeat of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, should deliver a sharp jolt to one of America’s two major political parties. Oddly, it’s not the Republicans, deeply invested though they were in Orbán as a fellow traveler. There is no question that Orbán’s downfall is a loss for MAGA-style politics and a reminder that even a developed system of so-called “illiberal democracy” has its limits. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance committed personal credibility and political capital to sustaining Orbán-ism, including by dispatching Vance to campaign for the premier in the final days of the election. The outcome is a setback for the White House and a humiliation for its best friend in Europe. But the sharpest message from Budapest should be for the Democrats, strange as that may sound. That is because Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete. Hungary's Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold. There is no equivalent figure among Trump's American opponents. This is not just the electoral flavor of the moment in Hungary, an ex-Communist country with a population roughly the size of New Jersey’s — hardly a bellwether for the American electorate. Instead, Magyar joins an eclectic club of successful insurgents scattered from Paris and Rome and Ottawa to Buenos Aires and Seoul and Washington. There is no ideological coherence to this group. It includes a technocratic former central banker, a conglomerate-bashing former labor lawyer, a chainsaw-wielding libertarian activist and a tariff-obsessed hotel developer-turned-reality TV star. Magyar, 45, was an obscure midlevel official in Orbán’s party before turning apostate in a spectacular defection, armed with a damning secret recording of his spouse who served in Orbán’s government. What these politicians have in common is a path to power. And it is one that Democrats have resisted for a decade since Trump became the dominant figure in American politics, killing off the traditional Republican Party along the way. Since then, Democrats have largely hewed to the command-and-control mindset that gave them Hillary Clinton’s coronation in 2016, the party’s abrupt flight to safety with Joe Biden in 2020 and the anointment of Kamala Harris in 2024 without even the pretense of a contested nomination. At least… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago
- The War With Iran Offers a Snapshot of Trump World. It’s Not a Pretty Picture.As the U.S. and Iran meet over the negotiating table in Pakistan this weekend, the outcome of Operation Epic Fury remains deeply uncertain. But one thing is clear: The war with Iran has offered a remarkably revealing snapshot of how the Trump administration really operates — inside the West Wing, across Washington and around the world. The picture that emerges is not a pretty one for President Donald Trump. The conflict has proved messier and more complex than Trump expected. The resulting energy shocks have damaged the domestic economy and alienated allies. The already-limited political support for the war at home has rapidly eroded, even among some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters. And the prospects for reaching a negotiated resolution that could satisfy both parties’ demands are far from certain. To help decipher this moment, we convened a roundtable of POLITICO reporters who have been closely covering the conflict: White House reporter Diana Nerozzi, senior Congress reporter Meredith Lee Hill, defense reporter Jack Detsch, national security reporter Daniella Cheslow, White House energy reporter Scott Waldman and senior politics reporter Liz Crampton. Here’s what our reporters have learned about Trump just over a month into the conflict — and what it suggests about where the conflict and the MAGA movement might go from here. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Let's start with some top-line takeaways from everyone: Briefly, what’s the most important thing that we’ve learned about President Donald Trump and/or MAGA from the war with Iran? Daniella Cheslow: TACO Tuesday lives on! We learned that while he has the stomach for short, targeted operations in Venezuela and last year, in Iran, he does not have the appetite for long-term intervention in Iran. That's certainly not something MAGA would be interested in — although I was surprised that some of his supporters were OK with him striking Iran alongside Israel in the first days and weeks of this operation. Diana Nerozzi: We've learned just how deep the fissures are in the MAGA movement on foreign conflicts. Some, like former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, quit the administration, while other previous loyalists like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens got into a fiery exchange with Trump, worse than we've ever seen before. This shows that a faction of the GOP is realigning itself, or at least is wavering, and that may have consequences for the future of the party. Jack… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago
- Fighting for health care claim approvals
Seventy-three percent of Americans say delays and denials of medical treatment by healthcare insurers are a major problem. Now, a company called Sheer Health says they will fight insurance battles on behalf of their clients. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - The Looming College-Enrollment Death Spiral
The “demographic cliff” is upon us. The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year. It will begin declining this spring and keep falling steadily through at least 2041. The trend is more of a downward slope than an abrupt falloff, but the gradient is steep and represents a crisis to colleges dependent on filling classroom seats and dorm beds. The United States currently has about 4,000 colleges. According to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 are closing on average each year; that number could double in any given year if the bottom falls out of enrollment.If the harm were only to the institutions forced to close because they’re running out of customers, that would be unfortunate but not tragic. But the causality runs in the other direction too, as students who otherwise would have gone to college find themselves with no viable option in the place where they live. American higher education has long consisted of two markets: one where high-achieving, typically affluent students compete for seats at national universities, and one where mostly middle- and lower-income students stay closer to home. Members of the first group will be fine even as college closures accelerate. The second group will suffer. After many decades of democratization, higher education could once again become a luxury good.Over the past half century, as more teenagers have enrolled in higher education, what was once mostly a local business has become national, especially for top students, whose sense of distance has gradually shifted. Campuses that once felt far away now seem closer, thanks first to interstate highways, then to discount airlines, and then to technology. Parents in the 1980s might have talked to their college kid on a dorm-floor pay phone once every few weeks, if they were lucky. Today’s parents can text and FaceTime their kids multiple times a day.Even so, roughly half of students at four-year colleges still attend one within 50 miles of home. The result is a market divided into two: one built on national brands that attract high-performing students from everywhere, and another that serves a local and regional population of place-bound students. Those two markets have hardened in recent years. Applications to the roughly five dozen campuses that accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants have skyrocketed, from nearly 800,000 two decades ago to more than 2.35 million today. This… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - Marjorie Taylor Greene Predicts a GOP Bloodbath in the MidtermsRepublicans are going to get “slaughtered” in the midterms — losing the House and maybe even the Senate. This prediction isn’t coming from Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer but from former Republican Congresswoman and MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene. For six years, Greene was one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies and became an influential and polarizing voice in the Republican Party. But the Greene-Trump relationship ruptured late last year over her push to release the so-called Epstein files, leading to her abrupt resignation from Congress. Now, she’s one of Trump’s loudest critics, calling his military action in Iran “evil and madness” and endorsing the use of the 25th Amendment to remove him for being unable to fulfill the duties of his office. “I was so shocked by his statement of taking out an entire civilization of people,” Greene said in an interview with The Conversation. “To me, that displayed a severe mental state.” Greene’s very public fallout with the president underscores a deeper fracture inside the MAGA movement and raises new questions about what “America First” actually means. In the short-term, however, the divide is likely to undermine the GOP in November. In the special election to replace Greene this past week, Democrats cut deep into Republican margins in the ruby-red seat. It was a sign, Greene said, that Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff — perhaps the most vulnerable Democratic senator — would be reelected. As for her own political identity, Greene said she didn’t know if she still considered herself a Republican. “I’m definitely leaning more [toward] calling myself an independent.” So, would she ever run as a third-party candidate? “I have no idea, honestly. I’m very much enjoying life out of politics,” she said. “I can’t even begin to answer that.” The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen here for the full conversation.There are people in the movement who say you’ve changed, that you're not quite the same. I know you said you haven't changed any of your positions, but the evolution of Marjorie Taylor Greene has taken a lot of folks by surprise. Well, I think everyone’s not used to someone that’s willing to criticize both parties. Everyone expected me to, when a Republican president came in and Republicans were in control, everyone expected me to continue my criticism of Democrats. However, I’ve always been critical of both sides. For me, it’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago
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