Category: Politics

The White House’s MAHA Gatekeeper

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Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term. The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president…

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The Wingman

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Photographs by Philip Cheung “My wife, Gabby, was shot in the head.” Obviously, I knew this. Senator Mark Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and grievously wounded in a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway in 2011. It was one of the most notorious acts of political violence in America.  In several recent conversations with Kelly, however, I was struck by how often and how bluntly he repeated these exact words. Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut, seems to appreciate the…

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Inside Trump’s Reversal on ICE

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President Trump woke up this morning with an urgent message for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deployed on U.S. streets: They were to pay no mind to the internal memo, issued barely a day earlier, telling them to suspend vehicle stops amid a public outcry over two fatal shootings by ICE officers in less than a week. Trump was issuing his own orders. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!,” the president wrote on his Truth Social network. “Once we…

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What Lindsey Graham Wanted

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Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One. What could be more fitting, then, for Graham—unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning—to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived. Graham was a complex character—his private life, sudden…

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Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue

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The Senate race in Maine looks significantly different than it did 48 hours ago. Yesterday, Politico reported a credible allegation of sexual assault against the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. In a video posted after the story broke, Platner denied the accusation but said that his campaign would explore the best way forward, opening the door to what seems like an inevitable withdrawal from the race. Now the voices that had most vehemently defended Platner during previous scandals or vouched for the necessity of his folksy progressivism have withdrawn their endorsements,…

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Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

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Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms. It was a heady time for…

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