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Atlantic
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Tea Party Is Back (Maybe)
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Signs were all around, but the clinching evidence that the Tea Party is back came this week in New Hampshire, where the Republican Scott Brown announced that he'd be running for U.S. Senate. Fifteen years ago, in January 2010, Brown, a state senator in Massachusetts, defeated the Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late liberal icon Ted Kennedy. Brown's victory was a landmark for conservative opposition to Barack Obama's administration, and in particular to his attempt to overhaul health insurance. Protests in the streets and angry crowds at legislators' town-hall meetings had given a taste of the brewing voter anger, but Democratic leaders dismissed demonstrators as rabble-rousers or astroturfers. Brown's victory in deep-blue Massachusetts proved that the Tea Party was a real force in politics. Brown turned out to be somewhat moderate—he was, after all, representing the Bay State—and his time in the Senate was short because Elizabeth Warren defeated him in 2012. But in the midterm elections months after his win, a big group of fiscally conservative politicians were elected to Congress as anti-establishment critics of the go-along-to-get-along GOP, which they felt wasn't doing enough to stand up to Obama. Led by Tea Party activists and elected officials, Republicans managed to narrow but not stop the Affordable Care Act, which Obama signed in March 2010; they briefly but only fleetingly reduced federal spending and budget deficits. By 2016, the Tea Party was a spent force. Its anti-establishment energy became the basis for Donald Trump's political movement, with which it shared a strong element of racial backlash. Trump provided the pugilistic approach that many Republican voters had demanded, but without any of the commitment to fiscal discipline: He pledged to protect Medicare and Social Security, and in his first term hugely expanded the deficit. But now there's a revival of Tea Party ideas in Washington, driven by some of the same elected officials. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act follows the long-running Republican principle of reducing taxes, especially on the wealthy, but it doesn't even pretend to cut spending commensurate with the reductions in revenue those tax cuts would produce. This is standard for Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump all ran for office railing against deficits, and then increased them while in office. They were eager to lower taxes, but not to make the politically unpopular choices necessary to actually reduce federal spending. In theory, at least, the Tea Party represented a more purist approach that insisted on cutting budgets, even if that meant taking on politically dangerous tasks such as slashing entitlements. (Republicans could also produce a more balanced budget by increasing revenue through taxes, but they refuse to seriously consider that.) Some of the Tea Party OGs are striking the same tones today. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, elected in the 2010 wave, has emerged as the foremost Republican critic of the GOP bill. 'The math doesn't really add up,' he said on Face the Nation earlier this month. Trump called Paul's ideas 'crazy' and, according to Paul, briefly uninvited him from an annual congressional picnic at the White House. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, another member of the class of 2010, has also demanded more spending cuts and described the bill's approach as ' completely unsustainable.' 'I'm saying things that people know need to be said,' he told The Wall Street Journal. 'The kid who just exposed that the king is butt-naked may not be real popular, because he kind of made everybody else look like fools, but they all recognize he was right.' (The White House has lately been working to court Johnson.) Standing alongside these senators are representatives such as Andy Harris of Maryland, who was elected in 2010; Paul's fellow Kentuckian (and fellow Trump target) Thomas Massie, who arrived in the House in 2012; and Chip Roy, a Texan who first came to Washington in 2013 as chief of staff for Tea Party–aligned Senator Ted Cruz. Staring them down is Speaker Mike Johnson. Like Paul Ryan, who was a role model for many Tea Partiers but clashed with the hard right once he became speaker of the House, Johnson has frustrated former comrades by backing off his former fiscal conservatism in the name of passing legislation. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, this has led Johnson and his allies to brazenly lie about what the bill would do. The neo–Tea Partiers are not the only challenge for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. More mainstream and moderate GOP members are skittish about a bill that is deeply unpopular and will cut services that their constituents favor or depend on. Nor is fiscal conservatism the only revival of Tea Party rhetoric. Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has elicited a new burst of bigotry, sometimes from the same exact people. Meanwhile, Democrats are experiencing their own echoes of 2010, as voters demand more from elected officials, and anti-establishment candidates such as Mamdani win. The 2025 Tea Party wave faces difficulties the first wave didn't. Rather than being able to organize Republicans against a Democratic president, Paul, Johnson, and company are opposing a Republican president who is deeply popular with members of Congress and primary voters. Roy threatened to vote against the bill in the House but then backed down. Now he says he might vote against the Senate bill when the two are reconciled. 'Chip Roy says he means it this time,' snickered Politico this week, noting that he and his allies have 'drawn and re-drawn their fiscal red lines several times over now.' Then again, how better to honor their predecessors than to back down from a demand for real fiscal discipline? President Donald Trump said that he had cut off trade negotiations with Canada because of Canada's tax on tech companies that would also affect those based in America. The Supreme Court limited federal courts' ability to implement nationwide injunctions in a decision that left unclear the fate of Trump's executive order restricting birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled that parents can withdraw their children from public-school classes on days that storybooks with LGBTQ themes are discussed if they have religious objections. Dispatches Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres interviews Rose Horowitch about her latest story on why the computer-science bubble is bursting. The Books Briefing: As a writer and an editor, Toni Morrison put humanity plainly on the page, where it would outlast her and her critics alike, Boris Kachka writes. Evening Read The Three Marine Brothers Who Feel 'Betrayed' by America By Xochitl Gonzalez The four men in jeans and tactical vests labeled Police: U.S. Border Patrol had Narciso Barranco surrounded. Their masks and hats concealed their faces, so that only their eyes were visible. When they'd approached him, he was doing landscape work outside of an IHOP in Santa Ana, California. Frightened, Barranco attempted to run away. By the time a bystander started filming, the agents had caught him and pinned him, face down, on the road. One crouches and begins to pummel him, repeatedly, in the head. You can hear Barranco moaning in pain. Eventually, the masked men drag him to his feet and try to shove him into an SUV. When Barranco resists, one agent takes a rod and wedges it under his neck, attempting to steer him into the vehicle as if prodding livestock. Barranco is the father of three sons, all of them United States Marines. The eldest brother is a veteran, and the younger men are on active duty. At any moment, the same president who sent an emboldened ICE after their father could also command them into battle. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Coming soon. A new season of the Autocracy in America podcast, hosted by Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion and democracy activist. Watch (or skip). Squid Game 's final season (out now on Netflix) is a reminder of what the show did so well, in the wrong ways, Shirley Li writes. Play our daily crossword. P.S. Tuesday was a red-letter day for blue language in the Gray Lady. The New York Times is famously shy about four-letter words; the journalist Blake Eskin noted in 2022 that the paper had published three separate articles about the satirical children's book Go the Fuck to Sleep, all without ever printing the actual name of the book. An article about Emil Bove III, which I wrote about yesterday, was tricky for the Times: The notable thing about the story was the language allegedly used. In its second paragraph, the Times used one of its standard circumlocutions: 'In Mr. Reuveni's telling, Mr. Bove discussed disregarding court orders, adding an expletive for emphasis.' It printed the word itself in the 16th paragraph, perhaps because any children reading would have gotten bored and moved on by then. The same day, the Times reported, unexpurgated, on Trump's anger at Iran and Israel: 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing,' the president told reporters. I was curious about the discussions behind these choices. In a suitably Times -y email, the newspaper spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told me: 'Editors decided it was newsworthy that the president of the United States used a curse word to make a point on one of the biggest issues of the day, and did so in openly showing frustration with an ally as well as an adversary.' It's another Trumpian innovation: expanding the definition of news fit to print.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Tulsi Gabbard Chooses Loyalty to Trump
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Tulsi Gabbard believed she had found her people. The Trump White House would be a place where 'America First' isolationism ruled. No one would make the hurtful suggestion that her talking points sounded suspiciously like Kremlin talking points. And her decision to meet with Syria's now-deposed dictator as he bombed his own cities would not be unfairly judged. Her mission as director of national intelligence was straightforward, she told associates: to clean up America's spy agencies so they wouldn't be able to misuse intelligence in pursuit of war. But scarcely six months in the job, the onetime Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate is confronting the limits of her sway with Donald Trump as he celebrates his decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, muses about regime change in Tehran, and posts footage on social media of B-2 bombers to the tune of the parody song 'Bomb Iran,' which includes the lyrics 'Time to turn Iran into a parking lot.' This isn't what Gabbard had in mind. In her public remarks, she actually appeared to undermine the case for U.S. action while diplomatic efforts were progressing. At the end of March, Gabbard told Congress that the American intelligence community 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon' despite having stockpiles of enriched uranium that are 'unprecedented' for a state without nuclear arms. That assessment remains unchanged, a U.S. official told us. But Trump, asked about her conclusion that Tehran had not decided to restart the nuclear-weapons program it suspended in 2003, disparaged his own spy chief, telling reporters, 'I don't care what she said.' He later said, even more bluntly, 'She's wrong.' Gabbard has so alienated Trump that she may be endangering the existence of her office altogether, which the president has mused about scrapping. 'She touched the third rail—she testified that the intelligence community doesn't assess that Iran is sprinting toward a bomb,' a former U.S. official who worked closely with Gabbard told us. 'It's hard to overstate how many people she angered by doing that, and the amount of work required to get back into their good graces.' [Read: What everyone gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard] Gabbard, who declined our request for an interview, has sought to minimize any apparent distance with the president, writing on social media last week, 'America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.' A former intelligence official focused on the Middle East told us there are differences of opinion within Gabbard's office about how to interpret the intelligence. But career officers don't see her revised account as a reflection of new knowledge based on a second look, the former official said. Rather, the prevailing view is that she 'changed her stance to satisfy the president,' the former official said. 'And that's a big blow to her credibility within the building.' Her statements left some longtime associates and admirers marveling at how quickly she had fallen in line—a sign, they said, that voices of restraint within the administration had gone quiet and that Gabbard's peace-at-all-costs approach was a bad fit for the administration's more martial orientation. The perception that Gabbard is out of step with the president, and off message, had already eroded her influence by the time Trump confronted the most serious foreign-policy crisis of his second term so far. In an effort to prove her loyalty, Gabbard has sought to conform the analysis produced by her office with the president's policy aims, politicizing intelligence in the very way that she has promised to prevent. But even that may not be enough to return her to the president's circle of trust: The White House refused to send Gabbard to a classified Capitol Hill briefing on Iran today. After Trump announced a cease-fire on Monday, Gabbard praised him on social media for his 'herculean effort.' Yesterday, she declared that 'new intelligence' had emerged showing that Iran's nuclear facilities had been 'destroyed,' setting its program back by years. That conclusion appeared at odds with an initial assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, first reported by CNN and confirmed to us by two people familiar with its contents, that the bombing campaign did not dismantle key elements of Iran's nuclear program and likely set back the country's capabilities by only a matter of months. Although the finding was deemed low-confidence by the agency that produced it—and the CIA followed up by saying that Iran's program had been 'severely damaged'—the disclosure of a less-than-rosy assessment produced a furious reaction from the Trump administration, where officials have been under pressure to support Trump's insistence that the bombings he ordered had succeeded in every possible way. In fact, elements of the intelligence community had warned of an incomplete outcome ahead of the attack. It's not clear that anyone listened. By the time Trump ordered the Iranian strikes, Gabbard's influence with the president had eroded so significantly that she lacked a meaningful voice in his decision-making process. A Trump ally told us that the president appreciates Gabbard's political appeal to disaffected Democrats but doesn't look to her counsel on foreign policy or national security. 'She's a nonplayer,' the ally told us. 'When I want to call someone to influence Trump, I don't even think of her.' Earlier this month, Gabbard released a direct-to-camera testimonial after a trip to Hiroshima—a trip made for as-yet-undisclosed reasons—in which she argued that the world stands 'closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.' She said that 'political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions' because they have access to nuclear shelters that won't be available to 'regular people' in the event of disaster. [Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump] The macabre remarks angered the president, who confronted Gabbard during a meeting in the Oval Office, someone with knowledge of the interaction told us. Trump admonished his spy chief, saying he didn't like the video and didn't understand why she would make such a depressing pronouncement. She was subdued, responding simply, 'Yes, sir.' Trump's interest in curbing the work of her office, if not outright eliminating it, is in tension with Gabbard's political aspirations. 'She doesn't want to be like Linda McMahon, the last one to turn off the lights at her own office,' another former U.S. official told us, referring to the secretary of education, who is dismantling her own department. In fact, Gabbard's associates have said that she wants to be the most powerful and consequential DNI in the office's short history, according to the former official, and sees the role as a stepping stone to a second run for the presidency after her failed attempt as a Democrat in 2020. Given the limited influence that most DNIs have had, that path to power strikes many within the intelligence community as unusual. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created to improve coordination among U.S. spy agencies after the September 11 attacks. But many senior administration officials at the time resisted its creation, predicting that the new office would add another layer of bureaucracy without effectively corralling the loose federation of intelligence agencies. Today, the DNI is nominally the top intelligence officer in the government, but the CIA and the Defense Department maintain their own centers of power over operations and budgets. The creation of the office that Gabbard now oversees coincided with the intensification of the American-led war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, a period that Trump, despite having supported the invasion, now argues diminished America's international credibility. As president, he has portrayed himself as a victim of a career national-security bureaucracy that doesn't share his values and that he claims has used the powers of the intelligence community against him. It's fitting, then, that Trump would lock arms with Gabbard, whose service in Iraq and Kuwait is a touchstone of her criticism of American foreign policy. Renouncing her partisan loyalties in 2022, she reached for the kind of rhetoric that is common among online extremists on the left and the right, calling the Democratic Party an 'elitist cabal of warmongers.' When she endorsed Trump last year, she vowed that he would 'walk us back from the brink of war.' And when, in January, she came before the Senate for confirmation as Trump's spy chief, she presented herself as a bulwark against the distortion of intelligence to justify war. 'For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution,' she said. Before she became a Cabinet official, Gabbard found it easy to lob those kinds of critiques at the 'deep state.' Now she's the president's principal intelligence adviser, struggling to reconcile the conclusions of career experts with the aims of the president she serves. In meetings, Gabbard is prepared, follows a script or bullet points, and often asks pointed questions of her aides and advisers, people who have worked with her told us. She has dropped much of the critical rhetoric that characterized her time in Congress. But occasionally, she expresses ideas that some described to us as 'conspiratorial,' such as her persistent belief that the U.S. government routinely violates the privacy of its citizens through intrusive surveillance, said one person, who was surprised that her time as DNI had not convinced Gabbard that intelligence authorities are highly constrained by law and regulation. [Read: Isn't Trump supposed to be anti-war?] When they're together, CIA Director John Ratcliffe often defers to Gabbard, given that she at least nominally oversees his agency. This makes for an awkward dynamic, people who have observed them told us. Ratcliffe did Gabbard's job in Trump's first term and has more experience managing the intelligence process. When Mike Waltz was still the national security adviser, he brought Gabbard and Ratcliffe together in a regular Thursday conference that they called the 'secret-squirrel meeting,' a tongue-in-cheek reference to clandestine discussions. In White House meetings, Gabbard often relies on Joe Kent, a former CIA officer who has been acting as her No. 2 while he awaits confirmation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent, like Gabbard, is a fervent critic of military intervention. In a podcast interview last year, he criticized U.S. policy toward Israel's war in Gaza and left no doubt where he stood on the question of confrontation with Iran. 'This idea that we're going to escalate the war further by directly going to war with Iran, like Lindsey Graham and some of the other neocons are advocating, that's incredibly dangerous,' Kent said. Opposition to military confrontation with Iran is also the long-held stance of William Ruger, an Afghanistan veteran and a former vice president of the Charles Koch Institute whom Gabbard tapped to coordinate intelligence gathering and analysis across agencies. Ruger, who most recently led a libertarian think tank based in Massachusetts, told associates when he was named to his post that he worried about risking his credibility as a voice of military restraint if the administration went in a different direction. He also expressed doubt, a person who spoke with him told us, about how long Gabbard would last in the role. In response to questions for this story, a Gabbard spokesperson, Olivia Coleman, emailed us a statement saying, in part, that the U.S. spy chief is 'fearlessly implementing needed change across the intelligence community, rooting out weaponization, and challenging the darkest parts of the deep state in the process, which is why they are using their tired tactic of spewing flat-out lies through tabloid outlets like The Atlantic.' As a Cabinet official, Gabbard has not focused on some of the issues that preoccupied her in Congress, such as the fate of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. But one of the former U.S. officials we spoke with said that Gabbard has been outspoken on a number of foreign-policy dilemmas, including aid to Ukraine and U.S. policy toward Syria. She was among those who favored suspending assistance to Ukraine, including intelligence sharing, after Trump's dramatic Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. She argued that Zelensky had grown too confident about U.S. assistance and that Washington needed to demonstrate its leverage, according to the former official. In wrestling with a U.S. presence in Syria after the toppling in December of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator whom she'd met during a trip to the country in 2017, Gabbard was among those advocating for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. [Read: Trump's trouble with Tulsi] Ruger, the senior intelligence official installed by Gabbard, has been busy calling experts for input on how to manage the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a central hub for assessments of crucial policy issues. He has sought out advice about the composition of the council and its relationship with policy makers, two people who have spoken with him about the matter told us. The NIC has been battered by the perception of political interference. Last month, Gabbard removed two veteran intelligence officers leading the NIC after Kent sought to rewrite the council's assessment that the Venezuelan government wasn't directing the activities of the Tren de Aragua gang—a finding that contradicted Trump's justification for deporting Venezuelan immigrants. Kent wrote that the original assessment 'could be used against the DNI or POTUS.' The two veteran officers have been in limbo since, prevented from returning to their former roles at the CIA but required to update the agency regularly about their whereabouts, people familiar with the dynamic told us. Gabbard's associates maintain that the career officials were dismissed for legitimate reasons; her chief of staff went so far as to accuse the longtime analysts of politicizing intelligence, calling them 'Biden holdovers' on social media. The episode has cast a pall over the council, ordinarily a sought-after destination for analysts because of its relevance to high-profile policy decisions. 'My impression is one of great disorientation and anxiety in the workforce,' a former intelligence official told us. John McLaughlin, who was the deputy director of the CIA in the early 2000s, told us that Gabbard is now carrying out the 'weaponization of intelligence in the name of combatting weaponization—without a persuasive case that wrongdoing occurred in the first place.' 'This is Alice in Wonderland territory,' McLaughlin said. 'We're through the looking glass.' The perception that Gabbard's office is toeing a political line extends beyond the NIC. People being considered for senior positions within her office have been quizzed by White House personnel about how they voted in previous elections and rebuffed after revealing that their preference hadn't been for Trump. (A senior intelligence official told us, 'At ODNI, we do not ask about political preference when hiring.') Gabbard has declassified documents and falsely crowed on social media that they show that the Biden administration equated COVID skepticism with violent extremism. Gabbard has also sought to carry out DOGE's agenda internally; an ODNI official told us that Gabbard has 'identified efficiencies that will result in saving approximately $150 million annually in contracts,' including a purported $20 million in DEI-costs savings. Gabbard's performance is satisfying senior Republicans on the Hill. A spokesperson for Senator Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent us a statement from the Arkansas Republican saying, 'I appreciate the work that Director Gabbard has done to advance President Trump's agenda, depoliticize intelligence analysis, and eliminate duplication and burdensome bureaucracy at ODNI.' She also has some important allies around the president. Vice President J. D. Vance, sensing that Gabbard lacked some of the connections to the White House benefiting other Cabinet members, made a point of forging a relationship with the intelligence director, current and former officials told us. In a statement provided to us by Gabbard's office, the vice president stressed her MAGA bona fides, calling her 'a veteran, a patriot, a loyal supporter of President Trump, and a critical part of the coalition he built in 2024.' [Read: Trump changed. The intelligence didn't.] Democrats see her track record differently. 'If you just look at her social media, which is what most of America sees, she's working very hard to defend the United States from the threat of the Biden administration,' Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told us. 'You know, it's Epstein files, and it's mischaracterizing the risk of domestic violent extremists.' An outside White House adviser told us that Gabbard is resorting to theatrics because she lacks substantive priorities for her office. 'In the absence of something real, she's struggling to be relevant,' the ally said. A better approach, this person added, would be to 'strip her office down to the studs—to get rid of duplicative offices and fulfill the promise made at her confirmation hearing to really downsize the ODNI.' A senior intelligence official told us that announcements about additional reform will be 'coming soon.' Downsize too much, however, and she could be out of a job. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Deportation Goals Are Unrealistic
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In March, President Donald Trump was preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport noncitizens. This use of the law, which was passed in 1798 and previously used to intern Japanese Americans during World War II, was unprecedented, and Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official, was concerned that it was illegal. To be clear, Bove wasn't troubled that the administration might be breaking the law; rather, according to a new whistleblower complaint, he was concerned that the courts might try to block removals. In that case, 'DOJ would need to consider telling the courts 'fuck you' and ignore any such court order,' Bove said, according to the document. The complaint was made by Erez Reuveni, a fired DOJ lawyer, and first reported by The New York Times this week. The administration says that his allegations are falsehoods from a disgruntled former employee, but this is difficult to credit. A career lawyer, he was promoted by the Trump DOJ but says he was fired after he acknowledged in court that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was an administrative error and refused to accuse him of being a terrorist. The complaint details Reuveni's 'attempts over the course of three weeks and affecting three separate cases to secure the government's compliance with court orders, and his resistance to the internal efforts of DOJ and White House leadership to defy them.' It also suggests that Reuveni has emails and texts to back up many of his claims. A top Justice Department official allegedly conspiring to defy court orders would be very dangerous; what makes it darkly amusing, too, is that senators are this week considering Bove's nomination to the federal bench that, according to Reuveni, he wanted to ignore. This led to a sharp exchange in a committee hearing yesterday between Bove and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, two veteran federal prosecutors, in which Bove repeatedly insisted that he did not 'recall' making the comments that Reuveni alleged. 'Did you say anything of that kind in the meeting?' Schiff asked. 'Senator, I have no recollection of saying anything of that kind,' Bove said. 'Wouldn't you recall, Mr. Bove, if you said or suggested during a meeting with Justice Department lawyers maybe they should consider telling the court, 'Fuck you'?' Schiff replied. 'It seems to me that would be something you'd remember—unless that's the kind of thing you say frequently.' Because no Republicans have yet come out against Bove's nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he's likely to win confirmation. (By way of reminder, Bove got here by serving as one of Trump's personal lawyers in some of his many criminal cases.) This presents the grim parlor question of whether it's better to have Bove in a lifetime appointment on the bench, where his opinions can be appealed, or at the Justice Department, where he's reportedly been a one-man wrecking crew. The allegations against Bove are what my former colleague James Fallows took to describing during the first Trump administration as shocking but not surprising. Trump himself has said repeatedly that he will abide by court orders, but his deputies have been less circumspect, especially Vice President J. D. Vance, who is a lawyer, and the former DOGE leader and current Trump frenemy Elon Musk. Outside observers, including me, have fretted over what will happen if the White House actually crosses the rubicon of defiance. This is arguably beside the point. Even though the Trump administration continues to deny that it has refused to obey court orders, the reality is that it has already done so. Judge James Boasberg said in April that he'd concluded that probable cause existed to find the administration in contempt of court for removing certain Venezuelan immigrants. (An appeals court has temporarily stayed proceedings on the contempt charge.) In another instance, last month, the administration deported a Salvadoran man despite a court order forbidding it, then blamed 'a confluence of administrative errors.' (These errors seem to be a consistent issue for this presidency!) The administration also insisted in a court filing that Abrego Garcia simply could not be returned as ordered, because the United States 'does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.' The DOJ proved that false not long afterward, when it brought Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. to face charges. In a bizarre move this week, the administration sued every federal judge in Maryland—an attempt to evade an order that bans the government from immediately deporting migrants who are challenging their removal. The fights with courts are ironic, because although Trump has fared poorly in lower courts, the Supreme Court has been willing to let him expand his powers once cases reach it. As Reuters reported earlier this month, the justices, using what's known as the ' shadow docket,' have repeatedly granted emergency requests to proceed, pending full consideration. This week, the Court temporarily lifted an order preventing the executive branch from quickly deporting migrants to countries to which they have no ties. The White House has been seeking to send people—including Laotian, Vietnamese, and Filipino nationals—to extremely perilous countries such as Libya and South Sudan. This would be callous and morally abhorrent under any circumstances, but given the notable cases of the Trump administration deporting people who are legally protected, including Abrego Garcia, it is especially terrifying. The desperation to sidestep court restrictions on deportations is evidence of the shortcomings of the White House's plans. Trump aims to remove 1 million people this year, but as my colleague Nick Miroff reported yesterday, ICE statistics show that the agency has carried out only about 125,000 deportations since Trump took office, with roughly half the year gone. But as Reuveni's story suggests, in this administration, to be honest is to risk being fired. Attacking the courts is much easier than admitting that the president's signature promise is unrealistic. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News The Senate parliamentarian advised rejecting some Medicaid changes that would offset the costs of other key policies in President Donald Trump's tax bill. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran's strike on a U.S. base in Qatar was a 'slap to America's face'; he also warned against further U.S. attacks on Iran. A new Supreme Court decision allows states to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: Isabel Fattal on how sleeping less became an American value. Evening Read The Blockbuster That Captured a Growing American Rift By Tyler Austin Harper In a cramped, $50-a-month room above a New Jersey furnace-supply company, Peter Benchley set to work on what he once said, half-jokingly, might be 'a Ulysses for the 1970s.' A novel resulted from these efforts, one Benchley considered titling The Edge of Gloom or Infinite Evil before deciding on the less dramatic but more fitting Jaws. Its plot is exquisite in its simplicity. A shark menaces Amity, a fictional, gentrifying East Coast fishing village. Chaos ensues: People are eaten … In June 1975, 50 years ago this month, the movie version of Jaws was released in theaters and became the first-ever summer blockbuster. Though the film retains Benchley's basic storyline—shark eats people; shark dies a bloody death—it turns the book's politics upside down. Watch. Thank God for The Bear. Season 4 of the show (streaming on Hulu) is exactly what it—and we—needed, Sophie Gilbert writes. Lean on me. In everyday life, many people are reluctant to ask for and offer help. But milestones such as weddings lower the barriers to relying on other people, Julie Beck writes. Play our daily crossword.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
What the New York Mayoral Primary Means for Democrats
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. After its demoralizing defeat in November, the Democratic Party has undertaken an agonizing, months-long self-autopsy to determine how it lost some of its core voters and how to move past an entrenched, older generation of leaders. Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive winner of yesterday's New York City mayoral primary, might provide some of the answers—to a point. Mamdani, a 33-year-old, relatively unknown state assemblyman, ran an invigorated, modern campaign while embracing progressive—and in some cases, socialist—ideas to upset former Governor Andrew Cuomo. He is now on the precipice of leading the nation's largest city. According to some Democrats, Mamdani—charismatic, tireless, optimistic, a master of social media—could be a new leader in a party that is desperate to move on from overly familiar faces. Republicans hope they're right. The GOP is eager to make Mamdani a national figure and hold up some of his ideas (city-run grocery stores! free buses!) as evidence that the Democrats are far to the left of the average voter. [Michael Powell: The magical realism of Zohran Mamdani] There are, of course, risks to drawing national lessons from a local primary election, particularly one in a city where Democrats make up almost two-thirds of the electorate. Moreover, Cuomo had singular, deep flaws and ran a listless campaign. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, wasn't on the ballot, relegated to an independent run after facing allegations of corruption and allying himself with President Donald Trump. But for Democrats desperate to make sense of why their party is so unpopular, Mamdani's win could at least provide a burst of energy, and a few ideas about how to move forward. Democrats have been consumed with questions about what went wrong a year ago. Why didn't more in the party realize that President Joe Biden was too old to win again? How did Trump make inroads with young voters and with the Black and brown voters who have been Democrats' bedrock for generations? How did Trump make gains in some of the nation's biggest and traditionally bluest cities? Did the party move too far to the left, or not far enough? And why was a billionaire ex-president promising tax cuts for the rich seen as the better bet than his opponent to lower prices for working- and middle-class Americans? Since Trump's return to Washington, Democrats have managed to rally around their opposition to Trump's tariffs, DOGE cuts, and hard-line immigration policies. But they have struggled to put forth a coherent positive vision, and to find the right messenger. Few looked to New York City for hope. The mayor's race at first seemed destined to be defined by Adams's scandals. When Cuomo made his entry into the race, many expected that his name recognition and his support from wealthy backers would give him an easy win over a series of well-meaning but uninspiring challengers. Cuomo positioned himself as someone who would stand up to Trump and urged voters to look past his own scandals—he resigned in 2021 after a series of sexual-harassment allegations, which he denied—and to recall instead his level-headed COVID briefings. Of all the candidates, he argued, only he had the management skills to revive a city that has just seemed off since the pandemic. But Cuomo ran a desultory campaign, limiting his exposure to reporters and, more important, to voters. His long-held ambivalence toward the city was evident, as were the rumors that he viewed Gracie Mansion merely as a stepping stone to higher office. He couldn't shake his humiliating exit as governor. A late endorsement from former President Bill Clinton only reinforced the notion that Cuomo represented an aging, tarnished generation of Democrats. 'Cuomo relied on older establishment endorsements that no longer hold weight in the city,' Christina Greer, an associate political-science professor at Fordham University, told me. 'Cuomo also underestimated the extent to which New York voters are tired of disgraced politicians using public office as their contingency plan for life.' (Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor who has feuded with Cuomo for years, told me that he ran a 'grim, fear-based campaign with no authentic big ideas.') [David A. Graham: How voters lost their aversion to scandal] To categorize Mamdani at the beginning of the race as an afterthought would have been an insult to afterthoughts. He has served not even five years in the state assembly, and has little of the experience generally thought needed to manage a civic workforce of more than 280,000 people and a budget of $115 billion. (The New York Times' editorial board deemed him unqualified for the job.) But Mamdani did have energy and charm, and no shortage of ideas that were quickly turned into easy-to-digest slogans such as 'Free buses' and 'Freeze the rent.' He relentlessly focused on affordability and economic issues, a welcome message in a city with an extraordinarily high cost of living and stark income stratification. Mamdani revealed himself to be remarkably adept at communicating his message, mastering social-media memes and delivering powerful speeches that evoked far more of Barack Obama's loft than Biden's whisper. He said yes to seemingly every interview and every podcast, tossing aside the caution traditionally preached by the focus-group-wielding political-consultant class. He tapped into liberal New Yorkers' anger over Gaza. He resonated with young people, including young men, who not only turned out for him but also volunteered for his campaign, creating an enthusiastic army of believers that created a noticeable contrast with Cuomo's support from donors, unions, and establishment figures. In the race's final days, a cheerful Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a metaphor for the tirelessness he brought to the race. 'The Democrats nationally need to start doing what Zohran just did. When we metaphorically sit at the kitchen table and empathize and offer passionate solutions, we win,' de Blasio told me. 'We didn't do that in 2024, and that was a big reason we lost.' Mamdani did what so many Democrats failed to do last fall: He excited new voters, focused on economic issues, and communicated his story well. And most of all, he won, including in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. As of this writing, it appears that there will be no need to rely on multiple rounds in New York City's new ranked-choice voting system; although Mamdani did not crack the 50 percent threshold last night to win the nomination outright, he surpassed Cuomo by about eight points, and the former governor conceded. 'Mamdani created a movement around his candidacy, and the big lesson for Democrats is that young voters are looking for a larger social-political movement and not just an anti-Trump party,' Basil Smikle, a New York–based political strategist who has worked for Cuomo and Hillary Clinton, told me. 'His victory suggests there's a needed reformation of the Democratic coalition, and repudiation of incrementalism but also a more wholesale shift from establishment politics.' But the reverberations from Mamdani's candidacy aren't all reassuring ones for Democrats. Republicans have mocked his socialist ideas by evoking the barren supermarkets of the Soviet Union. They've seized on his previous calls to 'Defund the police' (Mamdani called for reducing the NYPD budget in 2020; he was the only candidate in the Democratic field this year to not pledge to hire more cops). A few Republicans have trotted out racist and Islamophobic stereotypes (Mamdani is of Ugandan-Indian descent and is Muslim). Some Democrats, too, are leery of Mamdani's call for new taxes on businesses and the rich, warning that such policies could lead to a wealth exodus from New York. Republicans have pointed to the sinking poll numbers of Chicago's progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, as evidence that liberals can't govern. Last night, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on social media, 'Congratulations to the new leader of the Democratic Party,' tagging Mamdani. Trump today went one step further, posting that Mamdani was a '100% Communist Lunatic.' Mamdani's depiction of Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide threatens to unnerve some members of the city's large and politically active Jewish population. Within hours of Mamdani's acceptance speech, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York sent a fundraising appeal calling him a 'Hamas Terrorist sympathizer.' Mamdani has defended the pro-Palestinian slogan 'Globalize the intifada' but has denied accusations that he is anti-Semitic. He has said that he supports an Israel that provides equal rights to all of its citizens, but he has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. [Jonathan Chait: Why won't Zohran Mamdani denounce a dangerous slogan?] 'Mamdani is a gift to Republicans. They will link every Democrat to his far-left policy proposals,' Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist who worked in Rudy Giuliani's mayoral administration, told me. 'As mayor of New York City, every single thing he does will be held under a microscope by Democrats and Republicans alike. And some of these things are really out there.' When the mayoral race began, the conventional wisdom was that the Democratic primary would be the de facto general election. That is no longer quite the case. Before last night, Cuomo had previously signaled that if he lost the primary, he might run in November on another ballot line, believing that the glow around Mamdani might wear off with more time and scrutiny. (Those close to Cuomo think that an independent run, though possible, might now be less likely given the margin of his defeat this week.) And while the Republican nominee, the anti-crime activist and radio-show host Curtis Sliwa, seems to have little chance, Mamdani's win might open the door again for Adams; in a remarkable plot twist, the mayor has told associates that he can now position himself as the steadier choice to keep the job. A person close to Trump told me that the president might enjoy wading into the race in his former hometown and would consider endorsing Adams, though he might opt against it out of concern that it would hurt Adams more than help him. Still, the Democratic nominee will be considered the favorite. If Mamdani wins, there will be only so much that his fellow Democrats can learn from the specifics of the race, given New York's liberal tilt. But maybe there will be some lessons that are less about ideology and more about tactics—having energy, communicating clearly and frequently, and focusing on personal economic issues. 'I've already heard from some Democrats who worry that this guy is going to get us all labeled as socialists,' the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil-rights leader and Democratic stalwart, told me. 'But he hit on something; he connected with something. Mamdani kept showing up. Democrats need to keep showing up.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
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What America Can Learn From Iran's Failure
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The latest round of the Israel-Iran war is over, and the immediate outcome appears decisive. In just 12 days, Israel eliminated the leadership of Iran's military, air force, and intelligence agency; bombed the country's nuclear sites; and took out dozens of missiles and launchers on the ground before they could be used. Iran, by contrast, was unable to take down a single Israeli jet, and was reduced to firing decreasing volleys of ballistic missiles at Israel's population centers, killing 27 civilians and one 18-year-old soldier at home with his family. All active-duty military deaths were on the Iranian side. Israel's achievements were made possible by their stunning intelligence penetration of the Iranian regime's highest ranks. In the first hours of the conflict, Mossad agents reportedly launched drones from inside Iranian territory to neutralize air defenses, and lured much of Iran's top brass to a supposedly secret bunker that was then pummeled by Israeli forces. These early coups enabled Israel to achieve air dominance over Iran, a country some 1,500 miles away. To understand how the regime's leaders could have failed so utterly to suss out Israeli spooks, one needs to understand another time when Israel was alleged to have taken control of Tehran's skies. In the summer of 2018, Iran was experiencing a drought. This is not an uncommon occurrence in the Middle East and would not have made international news if not for the response of a regime functionary, who blamed the weather on Israel. 'The changing climate in Iran is suspect,' Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali said at a press conference. 'Israel and another country in the region have joint teams which work to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain.' He went on to accuse the Jewish state of 'cloud and snow theft.' This story seems like a silly bit of trivia until one realizes that Jalali was also the head of Iran's Civil Defense Organization, tasked with combating sabotage. In other words, a key person in charge of thwarting Israeli spies in Iran was an incompetent conspiracy theorist obsessed with Jewish climate control. About a week after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Jalali celebrated the massacre and boasted in state-run media that Israel's 'military and intelligence dominance has collapsed and will not be repaired anymore.' Unsurprisingly, it was on his watch that Israel executed an escalating campaign of physical and cybersabotage against Iran's nuclear program, culminating in the war this month. Jalali is but one of many high-level Iranian functionaries who seemingly believe their own propaganda about their enemies. Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani once told Fox News that Israel supported the Islamic State, despite ISIS executing attacks against Israelis. His predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suggested at the United Nations that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the U.S. government. It would be easy to dismiss Iran's wartime failures as unique to the country's dysfunctional authoritarian system. But that would be a mistake. Jalali and other top Iranian officials were unable to defeat Israel not just because their own intelligence capabilities didn't match up, but because their adherence to regime-sanctioned fantasies made grasping Israel's actual abilities impossible for them. As a result, once Israel decided, after October 7, that it could no longer tolerate the risks of constant aggression from Iran and its proxies, the regime's defenses quickly folded. In this way, Iran's predicament is a cautionary tale about what happens when loyalty to a ruling ideology—rather than capability—determines who runs a society, and when conspiracies, rather than reality, shape decision making. Although the Iranian theocracy presents an acute case of this phenomenon, the early symptoms are beginning to manifest in democratic societies, including our own. Consider: Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has cast doubt on decades of scientific research on the effectiveness of vaccines. He recently fired the entire membership of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and appointed several vaccine skeptics to the panel, which is now planning to review childhood vaccination standards. Kennedy attained his position as a reward for endorsing Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has suggested that the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons against his own people in 2017 and 2018, despite extensive documentation of the attacks, including by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the previous Trump administration. A former Democrat, she also attained her position after endorsing Trump. Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who worked on Trump's 2024 campaign, is now the interim director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, despite having no apparent experience in counterterrorism. And that's to say nothing of Congress, where people such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a conspiracy theorist who once speculated that the Rothschild banking dynasty was setting wildfires with a space laser, now sit on the powerful House Oversight Committee. Politicians have long rewarded their allies with plum positions. But when allegiance replaces proficiency as the primary qualification for advancement, and conspiracism replaces competency, disaster looms. Flunkies guided by regime ideology lack the capacity to understand and solve national crises. Just look at Iran. When Jalali blamed his country's drought on Israel, Iran's chief forecaster pushed back, but tentatively, seemingly afraid to upset those in charge. The general 'probably has documents of which I am not aware,' Ahad Vazifeh, the director of forecasting at Iran's Meteorological Organization, said. 'But on the basis of meteorological knowledge, it is not possible for a country to steal snow or clouds.' He then offered a warning that is as applicable to America today as it was then to Iran: 'Raising such questions not only does not solve any of our problems, but will deter us from finding the right solutions.' The self-deportation psyop The David Frum Show: Why do billionaires go crazy? The worst sandwich is back. Today's News President Donald Trump said that U.S. and Iranian officials will speak next week, but Iran has not confirmed whether such talks are scheduled. Zohran Mamdani is the presumptive Democratic candidate for the New York City mayoral race; Andrew Cuomo conceded last night. Members of the CDC's vaccine-advisory panel, who were recently appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared inclined to overhaul longstanding vaccine recommendations during a meeting today. More From The Atlantic Evening Read Brace Yourself for Watery Mayo and Spiky Ice Cream By Yasmin Tayag In the kitchen, an ingredient's taste is sometimes less important than its function. Cornstarch has rescued many a watery gravy; gelatin turns juice to Jell-O. Yet the substances that make bread fluffy, hold mayonnaise together, and keep the cream in ice cream have, according to the new stance of the United States government, 'no culinary use.' These natural and synthetic substances, called emulsifiers, are added to processed foods to give them the textures that Americans have come to love. They've also become targets in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s push to remove many food additives from the American diet. Watch. Our film critic David Sims has a summertime assignment for you: watching these movies. Read. At night, Toni Morrison worked on her novels. By day, as an editor at Random House, she championed a new generation of writers, Clint Smith writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
