John Heilemann
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Articles by John Heilemann
Is Adam Hamilton “Too Woke For Kansas?”
With the midterm elections now almost precisely two months away, it’s fair to say that virtually every salient headline and data point flowing over the transom compounds the direness of the circumstances facing Republican candidates across the country. Gasoline at $4 a gallon and diesel at $5.60. Renewed hostilities in the Iran war, with no end in sight.
Chuck Schumer’s Red Scare
As anyone even dimly tuned in to national politics knows, the biggest story of the past week was the historic but way-narrower-than-expected victory of left-wing outsider Abdul El-Sayed over moderate Beltway insider Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary.
Ben Wikler on the Rise of the DSA, Michigan’s Pricey Primary
As anyone even dimly tuned in to national politics knows, the biggest story of the past week was the historic but way-narrower-than-expected victory of left-wing outsider Abdul El-Sayed over moderate Beltway insider Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary.
Will El-Sayed Hand the Senate to Trump?
In the run-up to tomorrow’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, the fight between former public health administrator Abdul El-Sayed and fourth-term congresswoman Haley Stevens has grown more negative, personal, and exorbitantly pricey by the day.
Will Abdul El-Sayed Hand the Senate to Trump?
In the run-up to tomorrow's Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, the fight between former public health administrator Abdul El-Sayed and fourth-term congresswoman Haley Stevens has grown more negative, personal, and exorbitantly pricey by the day.
Chris Van Hollen’s Opus
About a month ago, something unusual happened. A federal elected official published an op-ed in The New York Times that didn’t induce immediate narcolepsy. Instead, it stuck with me for weeks. Titled The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face, the piece argued that Donald Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had plainly failed, but it also conceded that the Democrats’ strategy had been equally ineffective—and possibly more insidious.
The Department of Just Trump
Maya Wiley has spent her adult life in and around the fight for civil rights, and these days she has the title to match: president and C.E.O. of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the coalition of more than 240 national organizations founded in 1950 as a partnership coming out of the Black liberation struggle. Among the groups in that coalition is the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Andrew Weissmann on the Real Prize in Trump’s DOJ Settlement
This week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former personal attorney, finally got his heart’s desire: an official nomination for the job. Blanche had worked hard for it, after all.
Andrew Weissmann on the Real Prize in Trump’s DOJ Settlement
John Heilemann Updated Wed, June 10, 2026 at 7:02 PM UTC 9 min read Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Andrew Weissmann on the Real Prize in Trump’s DOJ Settlement Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former personal attorney, has been officially nominated for the job after being a central figure in promoting and defending Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund, which now appears to be dead according to D.O.J. court filings.
The Optimist’s Case for A.I.
In just the past three weeks, three of the men who would be king of the A.I. revolution—Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk—have moved to take their companies public at valuations so stratospheric that they’re less likely to make Croesus blush than to suffer a myocardial infarction.
Chris Murphy’s Case Against Trump’s Correction
Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, has made no secret of the fact that he’s mulling a presidential bid in 2028—and in traditional fashion, he’s got a new book out as a possible prelude. But whereas most tomes in this genre tend toward the soporific and self-serving, Murphy’s Crisis of the Common Good defies the rules of senatorial publishing in that it’s actually pretty damn good.
The “Most Damaging” Thing Trump Has Ever Said?
Even if the Democratic Party faithful weren’t afflicted by a chronic case of collective bipolar disorder, their wild-eyed oscillation between mania and depression is easy to understand given the welter of recent headlines.
The “Most Damaging” Thing Trump Has Ever Said?
The Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act has opened the door for last-minute Republican redistricting efforts across the South. Despite Trump's historically low approval ratings and Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot, recent redistricting changes have shifted the Democratic outlook for November to a significantly smaller margin of victory in the House.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Trump, ICE, and What’s Next
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vaulted onto the national stage on January 7, in the chaotic, mournful hours after Renee Good was killed by ICE agents in his city. Standing at the podium, he delivered a blunt, unsparing directive to federal authorities: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” For many Americans, it was their first encounter with Frey.
The Secret Iran Intel That Terrified Dems
Richard Blumenthal, the senior U.S. senator from Connecticut, turned 80 last month, but his workload would exhaust a person half his age.
The Secret Iran Intel That Terrified Dems
Senator Richard Blumenthal, who turned 80 last month, is heavily involved in debates on Capitol Hill regarding the war in Iran, D.H.S. funding, and the Department of Justice under Donald Trump. Blumenthal, a Harvard and Yale Law School graduate, has held various political positions in Connecticut before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010.
“It’s Amateur Hour”: Mark Kelly Rips Trump & Hegseth on Iran
At the dawn of the second week of the most deadly and perilous military adventure yet undertaken by Donald Trump, the picture of where the war with Iran might be headed is as cloudy, confusing, and contradictory as the rationales that Trump and his team have put forward for starting it in the first place.
Mark Kelly Rips Trump & Hegseth on Iran: “It’s Amateur Hour”
The war with Iran under Trump's administration is escalating rapidly, with a rising casualty count, spiking oil prices, and strategic incoherence. Senator Mark Kelly criticizes the administration's lack of strategic goal and operational competence in the war with Iran, attributing it to Trump's ego and lack of advice.
Ezra Klein on Trump’s Fading Power and Democratic Revival
Back in February of this year, New York Times columnist and podcast juggernaut Ezra Klein posted a video evaluating the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term. Observing that Trump was following Steve Bannon’s “muzzle velocity” strategy with his deluge of executive orders and DOGE rampage, Ezra noted that the cumulative intended effect was to convince Americans that Trump could do anything he wanted. “Don’t believe him,” Klein urged, in a video that’s racked up 2 million views.
How Trump’s Military Purge Enabled Caribbean Boat Strikes
Shortly after his return to the White House, Donald Trump and his new secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, fired the top military lawyers of the Army, Air Force, and Navy. Hegseth had long made clear his contempt for judge advocates general—the military professionals who advise troops and commanders on the laws of war—referring to them as “jagoffs” in his book. At the time of the firings, Hegseth said he wanted lawyers who wouldn’t be “roadblocks” to troops carrying out orders.
How Trump’s Military Purge Enabled Caribbean Boat Strikes
Shortly after his return to the White House, Donald Trump and his new secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, fired the top military lawyers of the Army, Air Force, and Navy. Hegseth had long made clear his contempt for judge advocates general—the military professionals who advise troops and commanders on the laws of war—referring to them as “jagoffs” in his book. At the time of the firings, Hegseth said he wanted lawyers who wouldn’t be “roadblocks” to troops carrying out orders.
How Trump’s Military Purge Enabled Caribbean Boat Strikes
Shortly after his return to the White House, Donald Trump and his new secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, fired the top military lawyers of the Army, Air Force, and Navy. Hegseth had long made clear his contempt for judge advocates general—the military professionals who advise troops and commanders on the laws of war—referring to them as “jagoffs” in his book. At the time of the firings, Hegseth said he wanted lawyers who wouldn’t be “roadblocks” to troops carrying out orders.
Pat Ryan’s Blueprint for Democrats After Trump’s Losses
"Democrats need to keep it in the context that the number one, two, and three issues for people are housing, food, and healthcare costs. But [the Epstein files] get to the heart of a fundamental breach of trust. I hear from Trump voters in my district that they are very personally twisted in knots about this. And I think that’s an important point for us to keep driving the issue," says congressman Pat Ryan.
J. Michael Luttig on Trump’s Third-Term Strategy
Donald Trump has never been inclined to hit the campaign trail on behalf of candidates he thinks are doomed. That helps explain his behavior in this year’s governor’s races in New Jersey, where his efforts on behalf of Jack Ciattarelli were limited to three tele-rallies, and Virginia, where he refused not only to endorse Winsome Earle-Sears but even to say her name in public.
Ro Khanna’s Populist Pivot
At a glance, Ro Khanna’s political profile seems rife with ideological tensions, if not outright contradictions.
The Epstein Half-Life & Schumer’s Second Chance
Lawmakers have returned from August recess to a Washington littered with crises, controversies, and what can only be described as audacious administrative theater. Last Wednesday, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, seven survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s abuse network made a rare and powerful public appearance, serving as a reminder that trauma and accountability have a long half-life in American politics.
James Talarico on Next Steps in the Texas Map Wars
The precise moment that James Talarico emerged as a figure of fascination among the national political cognoscenti can be pinpointed to July 18, when an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience featuring Talarico dropped on YouTube and throughout the podcast universe.
Pod Save’s Dan Pfeiffer on Newsom ’28 and Pritzkermania
It wasn’t until Dan Pfeiffer and I sat down last Friday afternoon to tape the latest installment of my Impolitic podcast that I realized we hadn’t had a good long gab since Donald Trump reoccupied the White House in January—an unusually long gap in a running conversation that’s been going on for, yeesh, nearly 20 years now.
Robert Garcia on Gerrymandering, Epstein, and Dem Strategy
Donald Trump’s second term was just three weeks old, and Elon Musk was riding high—to the point that some wags, myself included, had been referring to him as co-president of the United States—when Robert Garcia, the second-term Democratic congressman and former mayor of Long Beach, California, offered a different description of the world’s richest man: Musk, Garcia declared in a House committee hearing and later on CNN, was simply “a dick.” In something like a heartbeat, both of those moments...
Inside the Quiet Democratic Revival in State Legislatures
For all the trouble Donald Trump has been in lately, from the Jeffrey Epstein brouhaha to economic numbers that suggest stagflation around the corner, little of it has accrued to the benefit of the Democratic Party, which remains deeply in the doldrums: chronically unpopular, still litigating whether Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is more to blame for what happened in November, engaged in factional squabbling about where the party needs to go from here, and in control of zero national power...
Maggie Haberman on Trump’s Epstein Ailment
We are now two days into the fourth straight week in which the Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio has consumed Donald Trump’s Washington—enraging the president, engulfing his administration, inflaming MAGA Republicans in Congress, and emboldening Democrats from Capitol Hill to the Capital Grille.
A Crisis Comms Expert Dissects the Trump Epstein Mess
Democratic communications wizard Lis Smith has seen more than her share of crises—and from every conceivable angle. Best known as the fast-talking, wisecracking, supremely media-savvy senior advisor who helped elevate Pete Buttigieg to their party’s upper echelon in the 2020 presidential race, Smith cut her teeth in national politics fending off incoming and putting out fires as director of rapid response on Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on MAGA’s Epstein Freak-Out
Nicolle Wallace is one of the few remaining shining stars in the ever-dimming cable news solar system: a former advisor to George W. Bush whose understanding of the practice of politics in the trenches and at the highest levels in Washington, combined with her skills behind the anchor desk and deep grasp of her audience’s appetites, have turned her two-hour stint each afternoon as host of MSNBC’s Deadline: White House into a bigger draw than many of the network’s primetime shows.
Angus King Has Got a Lot of Problems With You BBB People
Senator Angus King of Maine is that rarest of creatures in our politics today: neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but an actual, factual independent who lives and breathes and votes in accord with that affiliation. Still going strong at 81, King moved to Maine in the 1970s—where he’s since won election as the state’s governor twice and its junior senator three times.
Jeh Johnson on Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans
Created by George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security consolidated all or part of 22 federal agencies, including two—U.S. Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—that reach deeply into the lives of America’s ever-vulnerable and oft-vilified immigrant population.
Karen Hao on Her New Book About OpenAI
The other day, my pal John Ellis, the insatiably curious and perspicacious polymath behind the indispensable News Items, published a post under the headline I’m Sorry, Dave; You Can’t Do That—a slightly revised version of a famous piece of dialogue spoken by HAL 9000, the sentient supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Banker Robert Wolf on the TACO Trade
For the duration of Barack Obama’s two terms in office, Robert Wolf was perhaps the only Wall Street mover and shaker in the White House orbit whom Obama actually liked. In the run-up to the 2008 presidential primaries, Wolf, then serving as chairman and C.E.O. of UBS Americas, had been at the forefront of a generational shift in the allegiances of Democratic megadonors, enabling Obama to build the fundraising juggernaut that helped beat Hillary Clinton.
The Story Behind the ‘Original Sin’ Book about the Biden Family
Every so often a book comes along that manages to become the incessant, inescapable talk of the town in Washington, while tapping into the highly polarized, beyond-the-Beltway political zeitgeist: a book that manages, in other words, to be applauded and pilloried in roughly equal measure but also proves impossible to ignore. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, is just such a tome.
Former Rep. David Jolly on Making Florida Purple Again
David Jolly’s political transformation is almost a mirror image of his native Florida. Born in Dunedin, just west of Tampa, and raised in Dade City about an hour north, Jolly won a special election in 2014 to represent Florida’s 13th congressional district—replacing his moderate Republican mentor and former House Appropriations Committee chairman, Bill Young.
Confessions of a Never-Trump Florida Man
David Jolly’s political transformation is almost a mirror image of his native Florida. Born in Dunedin, just west of Tampa, and raised in Dade City about an hour north, Jolly won a special election in 2014 to represent Florida’s 13th congressional district—replacing his moderate Republican mentor and former House Appropriations Committee chairman, Bill Young.
Obama “Car Czar” Steve Rattner on the Affects of Trump’s Tariffs
Thanks to Donald Trump and his ChatGPT-enabled tariff jihad, last week was one of the most tumultuous, tempestuous periods for stocks and bonds and currencies that we’ve ever seen. What happened across those five days, and more importantly, what happens next, is a story that sits at the intersection of Wall Street and Washington, of financial mechanics and political mojo, of conventional plutocratic maneuvering and MAGA-fueled disregard for history, precedent, and institutional coherence.
Don't Waste a Constitutional Crisis
Donald Trump's second presidential term, while different from his first in many ways, has remained perfectly consistent in one glaring respect: His behavior during his first three weeks back has once again served as a full-employment act for legal analysts-from law school heavyweights and white shoe partners to former federal prosecutors and public defenders-who have been called back into 24/7 service to guide the rest of us through the thicket of obscure, arcane, and often unprecedented...
Tropic Thunder
In the face of Donald Trump 's blizzard of executive actions in his first two weeks back in the big chair-some of it purely performative, some legally dubious (at best), all plainly designed to disrupt established norms and long-standing precedents with respect to the division of power between the presidency and Congress-the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have shown little appetite for pushback. In fact, many seem to welcome the usurpation of their traditional prerogatives.
The Dems' Wilderness Map
Almost immediately after Joe Biden left the presidential race last summer, my longtime pal and former Circus co-host Jennifer Palmieri, then doing a podcast for MSNBC with former senator Claire McCaskill and appearing regularly on the network, took a leave of absence from the commentariat to become the short-term, sprint-to-the-finish-line chief of staff to second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Joe Versus the Volcano
Inaugurations are, by definition, historic. But I can't think of one more eventful, newsy, or just plain weird than Donald Trump's sequel to the "American carnage" goat rodeo of 2017. Look no further than the fact that 45/47 delivered, in effect, two separate inaugural addresses: the scripted (and decidedly low-energy) official rendition in the Capitol Rotunda, followed by the grievance-laden, backward-looking screed he uncorked a few minutes later to supporters in the Capitol Visitor Center.
Reps. Seth Moulton and Richie Torres on Fixing What’s Broken
What a year the past two weeks have been. In the head-spinning days since Trump’s history-making reelection and amid his wildly unpredictable cabinet-selection process, Americans could at least count on an old standby: Democrats are once again in disarray. Various factions and personalities within the party have been reprising comforting old classics such as finger-pointing, second-guessing, blame-casting, backstabbing, and shit-talking.
The Post-Harris Blamescape & Democrat Reckoning Tea Leaves
That Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday was more thorough and sweeping than almost anyone in the political class had expected was already clear by the time we went live at 6:00 a.m. Wednesday on Morning Joe—a broadcast that began with Mika announcing that NBC News had just called Wisconsin for Trump, pushing him past 270 electoral votes by the network’s count.
Wes Moore’s Worst Nightmare
Any list of Americans under age 50 with a serious and readily foreseeable path to being president one day would have to include Wes Moore, who, at 46, is currently the second-youngest governor in the country and only the third Black person ever elected to that office.
Harris Advisor David Plouffe on Kamala’s Higher Ceiling
Last week in this space, as the tremors of Democratic electoral trepidation became so palpable that you could practically measure them on the Richter scale, I attempted to get ahead of the eruption of panic that has become as reliable a quadrennial ritual as the Al Smith dinner—only sweatier, more cacophonous, less easily ignored.
Will Election Day Mark the End of the G.O.P. As We Know It?
There’s a little less than three weeks until Election Day, which means that Democratic bedwetting is well underway. To parse the latest talking points (or lack thereof) consuming the political class, I dragooned one of the great power couples working in political journalism—Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker—to join me on a recent episode of Impolitic With John Heilemann.
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