11 stories credited to TPM – Talking Points Memo
Latest story Sep 22, 2026 · on ChamberLight since Apr 2026
A story can appear as several articles (copies of the same piece), so counts of stories and of articles differ.
Scores for TPM – Talking Points Memo
Originality
11 stories · updated Sep 24, 2026
Writing quality not enough rated stories yet: 5 of 10. How it is measured
Scores last checked Sep 25, 2026.
Stories ChamberLight collected, by month
Stories credited to TPM – Talking Points Memo, by publication date. ChamberLight collects articles that mention the officials it tracks, so this shows its own coverage of this source, not how much the source publishes.
- Stories from TPM – Talking Points Memo
- Shaded: ChamberLight collected no stories, or almost none, from any outlet (a gap in its collection, not in the outlet’s publishing)
Show as a table
| Month | Stories | All outlets |
|---|---|---|
| March 2026 | 5 | 850 |
| April 2026 | 3 | 4,537 |
| May 2026 | 0 | none collected |
| June 2026 | 0 | none collected |
| July 2026 | 0 | none collected |
| August 2026 | 0 | 1 (collection gap) |
| September 2026 | 2 | 598 |
Top topics
Share of this source’s stories tagged with each topic. A story can carry several topics, so the shares do not add up to 100%.
- Ethics/Corruption6
55% of 11 stories · 57% across all outlets
- Budget/Spending4
36% of 11 stories · 31% across all outlets
- Foreign Policy4
36% of 11 stories · 28% across all outlets
- Economy3
27% of 11 stories · 24% across all outlets
- Immigration3
27% of 11 stories · 12% across all outlets
- Voting Rights2
18% of 11 stories · 18% across all outlets
- Criminal Justice1
9% of 11 stories · 19% across all outlets
- Defense/Military1
9% of 11 stories · 24% across all outlets
The thin mark on each bar is the topic’s share across all outlets.
Who they cover
Party of the officials these stories are mainly about, across all 17 officials named. A story counts once for each official it is mainly about, so the split is over 25 story–official pairs, from 11 stories.
- Republican68% · 17 pairs
- Democrat16% · 4 pairs
- Party not recorded16% · 4 pairs
Most covered
Stories mainly about each official, and their share of the source’s 11 stories.
- 1Donald TrumpR8 stories · 73%
- 2John CornynR2 stories · 18%
- 3Angela Nixon–1 story · 9%
- 4Ashley MoodyR1 story · 9%
- 5Bobby Lyons–1 story · 9%
- 6Charles SchumerD1 story · 9%
- 7Eric SwalwellD1 story · 9%
- 8James Talarico–1 story · 9%
- 9John CurtisR1 story · 9%
- 10John ThuneR1 story · 9%
+ 7 other officials (7 story–official pairs)
Article tone
ChamberLight’s article analysis assigns each story a tone toward the official it covers. It describes the coverage of that official, not TPM – Talking Points Memo’s stance, and reader votes do not change it. 11 stories.
- Good Look
- 1 (9%)
- Mixed
- 1 (9%)
- Informational
- 1 (9%)
- Bad Look
- 8 (73%)
Challenges to these scores
No one has challenged a score on this page yet. Anyone can; editors publish every outcome here.
Articles served from talkingpointsmemo.com
27
Durbin Responds to GOP Sen’s Request for Don Jr Probe: ‘Corruption Must Never be Tolerated’
‘A Toaster Is a Wedding Gift’ A Republican member of the Senate broke party ranks on Monday in a letter...
Durbin Responds to GOP Sen’s Request for Don Jr Probe: ‘Corruption Must Never be Tolerated’
‘A Toaster Is a Wedding Gift’ A Republican member of the Senate broke party ranks on Monday in a letter...
Notes on the Florida Senate Race
I want to flag this poll for you. It’s a poll of the Florida Senate race by St. Pete Polls,...
Notes on the Florida Senate Race
I want to flag this poll for you. It’s a poll of the Florida Senate race by St. Pete Polls,...
Johnson Sends House Members Home Until After the Midterms, Avoiding Massie's Vote to Impeach Hegseth
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is being accused of running away from a bipartisan effort to hold an impeachment vote on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the Republican driver of that effort, accused House GOP leadership of sending lawmakers back to their districts ea
Johnson Sends House Members Home Until After the Midterms, Avoiding Massie's Vote to Impeach Hegseth
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is being accused of running away from a bipartisan effort to hold an impeachment vote on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the Republican driver of that effort, accused House GOP leadership of sending lawmakers back to their districts ea
Trump’s Corruption Is What’s Tanking the Economy
It’s the Corruption, Stupid In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections. The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.” That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control. In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base. Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away. The AP sums up the Trump family kleptocracy succinctly: The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid. Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return. The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father. It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom. Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about. The Economic Warning Signs The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook. The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession. Latest on the Middle East Conflict … Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon. Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports. House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran. Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170 The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports. Must Read TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory. Thread of the Day Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has drastically cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend. www.cato.org/blog/trump-h… — David J. Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T19:05:32.235Z IMPORTANT Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment. Quote of the Day Cheryl Kelley in The Hill: American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent. Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House. Two Big Wins In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again. The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.” Good Read Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb The senior senator from Ohio: Bernie Moreno on Trump’s comments about the Pope: “I was incensed to watch the Pope's comments. I think what the Pope is doing is a disgrace.”“It's a shame that the Pope has made the Catholic Church political. Thank God my mom’s not alive to watch that.” — Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T21:35:06.715Z Unintentional Edginess From CSPAN i feel bad for our country but this is tremendous content — derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) 2026-04-14T01:35:43.012Z Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump’s Corruption Is What’s Tanking the Economy
It’s the Corruption, Stupid In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections. The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.” That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control. In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base. Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away. The AP sums up the Trump family kleptocracy succinctly: The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid. Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return. The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father. It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom. Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about. The Economic Warning Signs The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook. The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession. Latest on the Middle East Conflict … Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon. Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports. House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran. Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170 The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports. Must Read TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory. Thread of the Day Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has drastically cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend. www.cato.org/blog/trump-h… — David J. Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T19:05:32.235Z IMPORTANT Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment. Quote of the Day Cheryl Kelley in The Hill: American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent. Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House. Two Big Wins In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again. The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.” Good Read Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb The senior senator from Ohio: Bernie Moreno on Trump’s comments about the Pope: “I was incensed to watch the Pope's comments. I think what the Pope is doing is a disgrace.”“It's a shame that the Pope has made the Catholic Church political. Thank God my mom’s not alive to watch that.” — Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T21:35:06.715Z Unintentional Edginess From CSPAN i feel bad for our country but this is tremendous content — derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) 2026-04-14T01:35:43.012Z Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump’s Corruption Is What’s Tanking the Economy
It’s the Corruption, Stupid In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections. The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.” That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control. In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base. Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away. The AP sums up the Trump family kleptocracy succinctly: The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid. Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return. The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father. It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom. Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about. The Economic Warning Signs The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook. The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession. Latest on the Middle East Conflict … Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon. Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports. House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran. Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170 The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports. Must Read TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory. Thread of the Day Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has drastically cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend. www.cato.org/blog/trump-h… — David J. Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T19:05:32.235Z IMPORTANT Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment. Quote of the Day Cheryl Kelley in The Hill: American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent. Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House. Two Big Wins In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again. The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.” Good Read Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb The senior senator from Ohio: Bernie Moreno on Trump’s comments about the Pope: “I was incensed to watch the Pope's comments. I think what the Pope is doing is a disgrace.”“It's a shame that the Pope has made the Catholic Church political. Thank God my mom’s not alive to watch that.” — Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T21:35:06.715Z Unintentional Edginess From CSPAN i feel bad for our country but this is tremendous content — derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) 2026-04-14T01:35:43.012Z Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
New Labor Department Rule is Trump’s Latest Favor to the Crypto Industry
The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a rule designed to make it harder to sue retirement plan fiduciaries that invest in risky, more volatile assets. The rule is also President Donald Trump’s administration’s latest giveaway to the Trump family’s favorite industry: Cryptocurrency. Drawing on Trump’s August 2025 executive order titled, in part, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets,” the Labor Department rule highlights a non-exhaustive list of six such investments, including private credit, real estate, and cryptocurrency. To protect retirement plan agents and managers who choose to include these riskier products in their 401(k) offerings, the proposed rule outlines six factors over 164 pages designed to define a legally required “prudent process” fiduciaries should take to vet an asset. It lists several hypothetical situations and thoroughly explains how to do the right thing in each as defined by this administration. The rule signals to fiduciaries: If you follow these step-by-step processes, our rule offers you safe harbor from litigation. “When a plan fiduciary [follows] the described process…,” the rule reads, “its judgment regarding the factor or factors is presumed to be reasonable and is entitled to significant deference.” The DOL’s proposal “gives fiduciaries (not opportunistic trial lawyers) the discretion and flexibility.” Trump’s DOL rule is the latest element of the president’s oft-stated goal to grow the crypto industry, signaling the administration’s desire to allow huge sums of money to flow from retirement accounts into the largely unregulated, new financial realm, experts told TPM. Looming over all crypto policy decisions, these experts warned, was the fact that they could stand to further enrich a president with unprecedented conflicts of interest related to his family’s own business ventures. “The White House is now directly meddling in every policy, especially with regard to financial regulation like this,” Corey Frayer, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told TPM. “And rather than making a fact-based analysis of the facts and coming to some neutral conclusion, the policies are all bent towards either serving industry or, worse, benefiting companies that Trump and his family have enormous financial interest in.” In the first several months of his second term, Trump’s family enterprise World Liberty Financial netted more than $800 million crypto sales, according to a Reuters tally — largely through sales made to foreign countries and entities. But as with many of the administration’s pro-crypto policies, the impact is not purely personal — crypto’s administration-supported expansion throughout the U.S. economy could come at a cost to average Americans at a time when the Trump administration is dismantling consumer protection agencies and departments like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Trump’s August executive order frames more volatile alternative investments as aspirational. His pitch hinges on the idea that wealthy individuals are already reaping the rewards of the sophisticated investments ordinary retail investors have been locked out of, a sentiment that has been echoed by big wigs on Wall Street whose firms are invested in private credit and digital asset industries. The rule change also garnered support from professional advocacy groups like the American Retirement Association. “Put simply: this rule is not about expanding access to any particular investment,” ARA CEO Brian Graff wrote in a letter explaining the group’s support of the rule. “Rather, it reinforces the protective standards that govern how plan fiduciaries make decisions by providing a roadmap for investment selection, not a mandate.” Experts who spoke to TPM, though, said the rule removes legal protections from retirees in the event employer-sponsored retirement plan managers don’t live up to their fiduciary duties. The rule risks protecting fiduciaries who operate in their own interests rather than that of their clients, and gives a green light to investments that offer less stability, less transparency, and less protection from adverse investment results. “The reason fiduciaries were not taking these risks with employees’ retirement savings is because the potential rewards aren’t commensurate with those risks and under the current standard they are incentivized by the threat of litigation not to make investments that aren’t in the employee’s interest,” said Frayer, who served as a senior advisor on crypto markets at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration. “The ability of the investor to hold that fiduciary accountable has been made harder.” To make money there’s gotta be this kind of perpetual motion machine where you’re constantly finding new people to bring into the ecosystem to offload the investments onto. Graham Steele, academic fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and former Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Treasury Department Just before the Labor Department’s announcement, the health of the private credit industry, which has historically offered higher yields in exchange for higher fees and less immediate liquidity, was beginning to come under scrutiny. Investors who were already tapped into the market initiated, over the last few months, record high withdrawals and hit withdrawal caps, prompting concerns about access to investments and limited investor pools. Cryptocurrency has long been considered a volatile, less regulated instrument susceptible to financial crimes, though some digital assets try to offer more stability and are pegged to traditional assets. In response to questions from TPM, a Labor Department spokesperson said the department’s rule affirms a process outlined in retirement investment law and affords “maximum discretion” to fiduciaries who follow the department’s outlined process. Trump’s August executive order used almost the exact same language employed by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink last year in his influential annual letter to investors. With one section titled “The democratization of investing,” Fink spends much of the letter arguing that capitalistic wealth creation can reach more people by diversifying retirement plan investments to include private credit and digital assets. “The beauty of investing in private markets isn’t about owning a particular bridge, tunnel, or mid-sized company,” Fink wrote. “It’s how these assets complement your stocks and bonds — diversification.” But Trump and Wall Street don’t actually care about expanding access to wealth, Graham Steele, former Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Treasury Department, told TPM. Instead, it’s about broadening the investor pool to inject more wealth into the pockets of sophisticated investors. “To make money there’s gotta be this kind of perpetual motion machine where you’re constantly finding new people to bring into the ecosystem to offload the investments onto,” said Steele, who is now an academic fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. “The administration uses language about quote unquote democratization, but it’s really a way to prop up asset prices to benefit crypto, venture capital, and private equity in particular.” A DOL spokesperson told TPM the rule is to provide “regulatory clarity and guidance,” not to show support for a specific industry or asset class. “The proposed rule is asset neutral,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “DOL provided regulatory clarity and guidance so that plan fiduciaries can evaluate all potential assets (sic) classes that may or may not be appropriate for a 401(k) plan, and provided additional factors like liquidity and valuation guidance for the diligent evaluation of more complex or potentially volatile investments.” Steele and Frayer said the language in the DOL rule could, in fact, result in propping up certain asset classes by sending a wink and a nod from the administration to fiduciaries. Another result of that signaling, said Steele, could be to connect more exclusive assets to the mainstream market and to help protect those more volatile products from a possible future, industry-wide downturn. “People are less sympathetic to the idea of bailing out crypto if it’s just going to make a bunch of crypto companies whole,” Steele said. “But if there’s actually working people standing behind that, there’s a more compelling case there.” A study from JPMorganChase found fewer new investors are entering the crypto market. Retail investors who participate in the market are confident in it, a 2025 study from PriceWaterhouseCooper showed. As of 2021, only about 14% of adults in the U.S. had traded crypto as of 2021, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, but the incorporation of crypto assets into 401(k)s presented growth opportunities for the volatile asset class. The rate of U.S. crypto ownership remained virtually unchanged through 2024, the Pew Research Center found. Democrats in Congress have initiated several investigations and inquiries into the president’s ties to the crypto industry and his other business interests, which they have said present exceptional conflicts of interest. “Changing the rules to allow such risky investments into retirement accounts is deeply alarming, but it is hardly surprising,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who on March 30 sent a letter to the SEC about the Trump family’s crypto ties, said in a statement to TPM. “Americans’ savings will be in danger, but President Trump will be making millions from this risk.” World Liberty Financial in January applied with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter under the name World Liberty Trust Company. In the application, the firm said it had attached a request “to have full fiduciary powers” in a “Confidential Business Plan” exhibit, though it’s unclear exactly what the request contained or what the implication of those powers would be. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TPM. World Liberty Financial spokesperson David Wachsman told TPM the company’s banking charter application “is not for” the purpose of being a retirement plan fiduciary and that the charter is “unrelated” to becoming a 401(k) management or advisory company. Still, Steele and Frayer envisioned a future where companies seeking to curry favor with the president could pump up their retirement offerings with crypto offered by World Liberty Financial. “We already see foreign countries doing this,” said Frayer.
A Case Study in How Trump Treats His Friends
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender☕️ Learning from her predecessors, ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi was the ultimate yes man. Perhaps unflagging sycophancy could protect her from the fate of Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s first Attorney General back in 2017, who provoked his rage by recusing himself from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump forced him out, then put a coda on his political career by endorsing Tommy Tuberville in the 2020 Alabama Senate primary.
Trump’s Iran War Objectives Have Collapsed. Now What?
Faulty Assumptions and Hubris The only thing more dangerous than an unbound strongman launching elective wars is when those wars begin to go badly. There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped. This is old-style mission creep on steroids. As Yonatan Touval eloquently writes in a NYT op-ed, the presumptions that undergirded Trump’s lurch into the Iran war have already proven to be incorrect: The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive. Now what? When a mission’s presumptions collapse under the weight of their own overoptimism and the original strategic objectives are no longer attainable, a different kind of self-delusion sets in: that the only way forward is to keep going forward. To listen to Trump’s increasingly shrill threats, you’d think he was about to go Curtis LeMay on Iran. And he may. But threats like this are also a transparent negotiating tactic, which is to say it’s both announcing a planned war crime and issuing a cry for help. A back-to-the-Stone-Age bombing campaign is but one example of what is likely to come next: an inexorable slide towards replacing already-abandoned strategic objectives with feel-good tactical wins. What’s always a danger for a bogged-down empire is a heightened risk for a superpower led by a man with a short attention span who is enthralled by military spectacle. Without re-setting strategic objectives in light of the reality that the old ones are lost, Trump has left Iran holding the better hand, as TPM’s Josh Marshall observes: The problem is that … the U.S. is escalating with nothing it can call a “win” that isn’t 100% at the discretion of Iran. … Military planners and heads of state who are smart really want goals they can at least realistically try to achieve entirely on their own terms. … But if your goal is entirely at the other guy’s discretion, you’ve got a big problem. And that really seems like what the U.S. is getting into now. Whatever Trump lurches towards next, his stupidity, racism, hubris, and provincialism will — as it has for past U.S. administrations far less burdened by those weaknesses than he is — prevent him from seeing his avowed enemy clearly or on its own terms. “[W]ar is never merely a technical contest,” Touval reminds us. “It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.” Playing Word Games Out Loud Trump: "We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It's for legal reasons. Because as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that. So I call it a military operation." — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-27T22:48:36.250Z The Latest From the Middle East … NYT: Strike on U.S. Base in Saudi Arabia Injures 12 American Troops, 2 Seriously Reuters: Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis launched their first attacks on Israel on Saturday, raising the prospect that they could bottleneck a second key shipping route: the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. WaPo: Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations in Iran NYT: U.S. Special Operations Forces Sent to Mideast WSJ: Trump Weighs Military Operation to Extract Iran’s Uranium Pete Hegseth Watch Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s intervention to block the promotion of two Black men and two women to be one-star Army generals was “not only outrageous, it would be illegal.” In addition to his interference with Army promotions, Hegseth also intervened to remove a Black colonel and a female colonel from the promotions list in another unspecific branch of the armed services, NPR reports. Greg Sargent on the Christian Reconstructionist roots of Hegseth’s bloodlust, featuring some of TPM’s own reporting. The Retribution: Anthropic Edition Benjamin Wittes aptly describes the real point of the Pentagon’s attack on the AI company Anthropic: The underlying issue is simply the lack of submission. And the point is not to win. The point is to emphasize to the next recalcitrant entity, person, company, or institution that it will have to defend itself if it asserts its rights—because the government will relentlessly come at those who don’t submit. … And if you’re a frontier AI company with the temerity not to submit, they will use the opportunity of destroying you to create opportunities for businesses associated with friendlier billionaires who know to stay on side. Mass Deportation Watch A new “facilitate” case: U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of Houston has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a man deported to Mexico and at risk of being sent on to Guatemala, where he fears persecution. Stressed the fuck out: Acting ICE chief Todd Lyons has been hospitalized twice for stress-related issues during Trump’s mass deportation push, Politico reports. Great read: In the first installment of a series about how brazenly DHS lies about its conduct, Radley Balko examines the January raid on the St. Paul home of 57-year-old Laotian immigrant ChongLy Scott Thao. House GOP Revolts Over Senate DHS Bill The House rejected the bipartisan Senate bill to partially fund DHS and put an end to the TSA nightmare at the nation’s airports, instead passing its own funding bill late Friday before recessing for Easter. The Senate had already left town for its two-week recess. In a new executive order, President Trump purported to have the authority to pay TSA workers, and the government appeared to be taking steps to issue paychecks even without congressional authorization. The Corruption: DHS Edition The DHS inspector general has searched and seized records and a computer in the office of Kara Voorhies, a FEMA contractor, as part of an investigation into a network of aides to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and adviser Corey Lewandowski, the WSJ reports: Another prong of the probe into Voorhies: her compensation. FEMA officials have been unable to locate her contract and investigators are still seeking it, according to people familiar with the matter. Senior FEMA officials were told that Voorhies was getting paid as much as $19,000 a week, some of the people said, which would amount to roughly $1 million a year. Voorhies was brought into DHS by Lewandowski, who has told people close to him that “he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case stemming from the inspector general’s probe,” according to the WSJ. Patel Phished FBI Director Kash Patel personal Gmail account was hacked by a group linked to Iranian intelligence, Reuters reports. Patel emails from across a dozen years were posted on a website hosted by a computer server in Russia, the NYT reports. The Retribution: Eric Swalwell Edition The congressionally mandated release of the DOJ’s Jeffrey Epstein files has created a dangerous precedent that FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to use as a political weapon against President Trump’s political foes. Patel recently directed FBI agents in the San Francisco office to redact for potential public release the decade-old investigative files involving Trump nemesis Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and suspected Chinese intelligence operative Christine Fang (a.k.a. Fang Fang), even though the investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, the WaPo reports. Swalwell is currently running for governor of California. In a followup report, the NYT adds that the FBI is moving swiftly and that law enforcement officials fear the files full of personal and classified information could be released: “In recent days, scores of F.B.I. agents and other personnel in California were instructed to gather the documents on Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Fang, with the goal of working through the weekend to finish a review by early next week, the people said. Supervisors advised the agents to lightly redact the records to obscure some sensitive information and told them the files would be shared with senior administration officials in Washington.” Jan. 6 Never Ends A federal judge in Georgia heard arguments and testimony Friday in Fulton County’s challenge of the FBI’s recent seizure of ballots and other materials from the 2020 election. Jan. 6 defendants have filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government in the Middle District of Florida for “indiscriminately” using force against a “peaceful crowd.” Quote of the Day “President Trump took on the fake news media and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”—FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, bragging at CPAC about Republicans doing to corporate media what they have long falsely accused Democrats of doing What a Personalist Regime Looks Like A rundown of everything that Trump has slapped his name on so far in his second term. Graphic of the day: President Trump’s ballroom design has rushed toward construction, with little time for public review of this major addition to the White House. Architects say it shows. — The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2026-03-30T00:10:06.011999Z No Kings WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 28: Protesters hold a “No Kings” flag as they rally and march on March 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. This is the third nationwide “No Kings” protest held against the Trump administration. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) MINNEAPOLIS, MN. – MARCH 2026: Bruce Springsteen performs during a “No Kings” protest at the Minnesota State Capitol Saturday, March 28, 2026, in St. Paul. (Photo by Jerry Holt/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images) MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA – MARCH 28: Marchers carry banners during the “No Kings” Rally Concert at the Minnesota State Capitol on March 28, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images) Los Angeles, CA – March 28: Protestors throw projectiles after police fire tear gas into the street outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, March 28, 2026. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images) CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – MARCH 28: Demonstrators gather in Grant Park to protest policies of the Trump administration by participating in a No Kings rally and march on March 28, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. This is the third nationwide “No Kings” protest held against the Trump administration. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) People holding signs march downtown during the “No Kings” national day of protest in Houston on March 28, 2026. Nationwide protests against US President Donald Trump are expected Saturday as millions of people vent fury over what they see as his authoritarian bent and other forms of cruel, law-trampling governance. It is the third time in less than a year that Americans will take to the streets as part of a grassroots movement called “No Kings,” the most vocal and visual conduit for opposition to Trump since he began his second term in January 2025. (Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP via Getty Images) Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump’s Iran War Objectives Have Collapsed. Now What?
Faulty Assumptions and Hubris The only thing more dangerous than an unbound strongman launching elective wars is when those wars begin to go badly. There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped. This is old-style mission creep on steroids. As Yonatan Touval eloquently writes in a NYT op-ed, the presumptions that undergirded Trump’s lurch into the Iran war have already proven to be incorrect: The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive. Now what? When a mission’s presumptions collapse under the weight of their own overoptimism and the original strategic objectives are no longer attainable, a different kind of self-delusion sets in: that the only way forward is to keep going forward. To listen to Trump’s increasingly shrill threats, you’d think he was about to go Curtis LeMay on Iran. And he may. But threats like this are also a transparent negotiating tactic, which is to say it’s both announcing a planned war crime and issuing a cry for help. A back-to-the-Stone-Age bombing campaign is but one example of what is likely to come next: an inexorable slide towards replacing already-abandoned strategic objectives with feel-good tactical wins. What’s always a danger for a bogged-down empire is a heightened risk for a superpower led by a man with a short attention span who is enthralled by military spectacle. Without re-setting strategic objectives in light of the reality that the old ones are lost, Trump has left Iran holding the better hand, as TPM’s Josh Marshall observes: The problem is that … the U.S. is escalating with nothing it can call a “win” that isn’t 100% at the discretion of Iran. … Military planners and heads of state who are smart really want goals they can at least realistically try to achieve entirely on their own terms. … But if your goal is entirely at the other guy’s discretion, you’ve got a big problem. And that really seems like what the U.S. is getting into now. Whatever Trump lurches towards next, his stupidity, racism, hubris, and provincialism will — as it has for past U.S. administrations far less burdened by those weaknesses than he is — prevent him from seeing his avowed enemy clearly or on its own terms. “[W]ar is never merely a technical contest,” Touval reminds us. “It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.” Playing Word Games Out Loud Trump: "We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It's for legal reasons. Because as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that. So I call it a military operation." — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-27T22:48:36.250Z The Latest From the Middle East … NYT: Strike on U.S. Base in Saudi Arabia Injures 12 American Troops, 2 Seriously Reuters: Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis launched their first attacks on Israel on Saturday, raising the prospect that they could bottleneck a second key shipping route: the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. WaPo: Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations in Iran NYT: U.S. Special Operations Forces Sent to Mideast WSJ: Trump Weighs Military Operation to Extract Iran’s Uranium Pete Hegseth Watch Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s intervention to block the promotion of two Black men and two women to be one-star Army generals was “not only outrageous, it would be illegal.” In addition to his interference with Army promotions, Hegseth also intervened to remove a Black colonel and a female colonel from the promotions list in another unspecific branch of the armed services, NPR reports. Greg Sargent on the Christian Reconstructionist roots of Hegseth’s bloodlust, featuring some of TPM’s own reporting. The Retribution: Anthropic Edition Benjamin Wittes aptly describes the real point of the Pentagon’s attack on the AI company Anthropic: The underlying issue is simply the lack of submission. And the point is not to win. The point is to emphasize to the next recalcitrant entity, person, company, or institution that it will have to defend itself if it asserts its rights—because the government will relentlessly come at those who don’t submit. … And if you’re a frontier AI company with the temerity not to submit, they will use the opportunity of destroying you to create opportunities for businesses associated with friendlier billionaires who know to stay on side. Mass Deportation Watch A new “facilitate” case: U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of Houston has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a man deported to Mexico and at risk of being sent on to Guatemala, where he fears persecution. Stressed the fuck out: Acting ICE chief Todd Lyons has been hospitalized twice for stress-related issues during Trump’s mass deportation push, Politico reports. Great read: In the first installment of a series about how brazenly DHS lies about its conduct, Radley Balko examines the January raid on the St. Paul home of 57-year-old Laotian immigrant ChongLy Scott Thao. House GOP Revolts Over Senate DHS Bill The House rejected the bipartisan Senate bill to partially fund DHS and put an end to the TSA nightmare at the nation’s airports, instead passing its own funding bill late Friday before recessing for Easter. The Senate had already left town for its two-week recess. In a new executive order, President Trump purported to have the authority to pay TSA workers, and the government appeared to be taking steps to issue paychecks even without congressional authorization. The Corruption: DHS Edition The DHS inspector general has searched and seized records and a computer in the office of Kara Voorhies, a FEMA contractor, as part of an investigation into a network of aides to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and adviser Corey Lewandowski, the WSJ reports: Another prong of the probe into Voorhies: her compensation. FEMA officials have been unable to locate her contract and investigators are still seeking it, according to people familiar with the matter. Senior FEMA officials were told that Voorhies was getting paid as much as $19,000 a week, some of the people said, which would amount to roughly $1 million a year. Voorhies was brought into DHS by Lewandowski, who has told people close to him that “he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case stemming from the inspector general’s probe,” according to the WSJ. Patel Phished FBI Director Kash Patel personal Gmail account was hacked by a group linked to Iranian intelligence, Reuters reports. Patel emails from across a dozen years were posted on a website hosted by a computer server in Russia, the NYT reports. The Retribution: Eric Swalwell Edition The congressionally mandated release of the DOJ’s Jeffrey Epstein files has created a dangerous precedent that FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to use as a political weapon against President Trump’s political foes. Patel recently directed FBI agents in the San Francisco office to redact for potential public release the decade-old investigative files involving Trump nemesis Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and suspected Chinese intelligence operative Christine Fang (a.k.a. Fang Fang), even though the investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, the WaPo reports. Swalwell is currently running for governor of California. In a followup report, the NYT adds that the FBI is moving swiftly and that law enforcement officials fear the files full of personal and classified information could be released: “In recent days, scores of F.B.I. agents and other personnel in California were instructed to gather the documents on Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Fang, with the goal of working through the weekend to finish a review by early next week, the people said. Supervisors advised the agents to lightly redact the records to obscure some sensitive information and told them the files would be shared with senior administration officials in Washington.” Jan. 6 Never Ends A federal judge in Georgia heard arguments and testimony Friday in Fulton County’s challenge of the FBI’s recent seizure of ballots and other materials from the 2020 election. Jan. 6 defendants have filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government in the Middle District of Florida for “indiscriminately” using force against a “peaceful crowd.” Quote of the Day “President Trump took on the fake news media and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”—FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, bragging at CPAC about Republicans doing to corporate media what they have long falsely accused Democrats of doing What a Personalist Regime Looks Like A rundown of everything that Trump has slapped his name on so far in his second term. Graphic of the day: President Trump’s ballroom design has rushed toward construction, with little time for public review of this major addition to the White House. Architects say it shows. — The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2026-03-30T00:10:06.011999Z No Kings WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 28: Protesters hold a “No Kings” flag as they rally and march on March 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. This is the third nationwide “No Kings” protest held against the Trump administration. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) MINNEAPOLIS, MN. – MARCH 2026: Bruce Springsteen performs during a “No Kings” protest at the Minnesota State Capitol Saturday, March 28, 2026, in St. Paul. (Photo by Jerry Holt/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images) MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA – MARCH 28: Marchers carry banners during the “No Kings” Rally Concert at the Minnesota State Capitol on March 28, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images) Los Angeles, CA – March 28: Protestors throw projectiles after police fire tear gas into the street outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, March 28, 2026. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images) CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – MARCH 28: Demonstrators gather in Grant Park to protest policies of the Trump administration by participating in a No Kings rally and march on March 28, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. This is the third nationwide “No Kings” protest held against the Trump administration. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) People holding signs march downtown during the “No Kings” national day of protest in Houston on March 28, 2026. Nationwide protests against US President Donald Trump are expected Saturday as millions of people vent fury over what they see as his authoritarian bent and other forms of cruel, law-trampling governance. It is the third time in less than a year that Americans will take to the streets as part of a grassroots movement called “No Kings,” the most vocal and visual conduit for opposition to Trump since he began his second term in January 2025. (Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP via Getty Images) Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump DOJ Keeps Charging First and Investigating Later
Giant Oopsy in Protestor Prosecution A new twist in the prosecution of anti-ICE protesters who entered a church in St. Paul, Minnesota in January: The Trump DOJ has dropped all charges against a woman who was mistakenly identified as a protestor but apparently wasn’t involved with the protest at all. The charges were dropped with prejudice — meaning they cannot be refiled — Friday evening, which set off a vigorous reaction from attorney Abbe Lowell, who represents three journalists who were charged in the same case for covering the protest, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon. In a new filing, Lowell accused the Trump DOJ of misleading the court by asking for an extension of discovery deadlines in the case, which the court partly granted, before revealing the charging goof to the judge, even though it already knew of its mistake. In granting the extension earlier in the day, still unaware of the mistaken identity of one of the 39 defendants, the judge had chided the Trump DOJ for discovery delays in what has become a broader pattern of charging first and investigating later: “So, here we are, months into a case that the government had an intense appetite to initiate, but cannot seem to keep up the pace when it comes to discovery obligations. This is unacceptable.” More Brutalization of Abrego Garcia In another cruel development in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, the Trump administration swears that’s it for real this time in planning to deport the El Salvadoran national to Liberia. It is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to reopen Abrego Garcia’s habeas case, which the judge has shut down repeatedly after evidence presented in court over multiple hearings showed the government had no real plan to deport him to a third country but was using the threat of removal as a pretext to keep him detained. The wrongfully-deported-then-vindictively-indicted Abrego Garcia has said for months that he will agree to be deported to Costa Rica, but acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a March 2 memo filed Friday in court formally rejected that option and declared Liberia (again) to be the only option. In a weekend response to the new filing, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked the judge to pause the contempt of court and related proceedings in the original “facilitate” case while they fight the government’s latest move in the second case. Back in Court Today I’m back in federal court in Baltimore today for what will be Day 3 of what was supposed to be a one-day hearing in the wrongful deportation case of J.O.P. v. Department of Homeland Security. As I exclusively reported Thursday, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services witness testified that there were more than 100 previously unknown wrongful deportations in violation of the court-approve class action settlement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. In another exclusive report on Friday, I reported that the judge gave the Trump DOJ until today to get to the bottom of things, and for the first time raised concerns that either DOJ attorneys or agency attorneys (or both) had not been candid with the court. In response, DOJ trial attorneys told the judge the surprise testimony was news to them, too. Stay tuned … Mass Deportation Watch NYT: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child Politico: “In dozens of cases over the past several weeks, Justice Department lawyers have declined to push back on detainees’ claims that they’re owed a chance to make a case for their release. In those cases, the administration has simply agreed to provide a bond hearing, or even outright release, telling judges that officials “do not have an opposition argument to present” or saying they couldn’t cobble together enough information to mount a defense.” NYT: How Corey Lewandowski Wielded Power Inside D.H.S. WSJ: Trump Administration Scrambles to Deploy ICE Agents at Airports as Lines Mount 46th Lawless Boat Strike The death toll in the lawless U.S. campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats rose to at least 159 on Thursday after a strike in the eastern Pacific killed two people and left one survivor, who was turned over to the Costa Rican Coast Guard, according to the Pentagon. It was the 46th such strike on the high seas. Latest From the Middle East … You can select from the individual bullet points below, or down a straight shot of absurdism, no chaser, over at Gold and Geopolitics: President Trump’s sole military objective in Iran now appears to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which is to say, returning to the status quo that existed before he launched his elective war. That is easier said than done. If the U.S. were to succeed in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the region’s oil and gas infrastructure remains seriously, though not irreparably, damaged by three weeks of air strikes. Iran’s first ever use of intermediate ballistic missiles Friday to target the U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base, some 2,500 miles away, puts much of Europe within range of Iranian missile strikes. Judge Blocks Pentagon Press Limits In a lawsuit brought by the NYT, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman of D.C. struck down the Trump Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists as unconstitutional, ruling: “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.” Robert Mueller, 1944-2026 Garrett Graff memorializes the man who will be most remembered for his stint as special counsel in Trump I, while Marcy Wheeler takes the occasion of his death to refresh already-stale memories of his Russia investigation. Trump DOJ Watch The WSJ examines the threats and bare-knuckle tactics of Mike Davis, who had no prior antitrust experience, but has positioned himself as MAGA’s antitrust fixer, threatening the top DOJ antitrust official Gail Slater — “If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ” — according to deposition testimony by her deputy, a claim Davis denies. Neither Slater nor her deputy are any longer at the Justice Department. A new hire in the decimated Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hire resigned from his Alabama law firm over a Facebook post following George Floyd’s murder, Chris Geidner reports. The Corruption: Colorado Edition In a corrupt bargain, President Trump has lured a GOP challenger out of the GOP primary for the CO-03 district by offering her and her husband roles in his administration, CNN reports. The move to sideline Hope Scheppelman was a triple flip-flop-flip by Trump, who had originally backed Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO), but pulled his support last month and threw his endorsement to Scheppelman before Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) convinced him there’s no playing around with such tight margins in the House. Putting the White in White Nationalism Elon Musk gave a 💯 to a tweet on his X platform that concluded: “White solidarity is the only way to survive.” President Trump had installed on the White House grounds early Sunday morning a replica of a statue of Christopher Columbus that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020, the NYT reports. According to the WaPo, a panel affixed to the base of the sculpture reads: “Destroyed July 4, 2020. Resurrected 2022.” The Absurdism: Hungary Edition Fearing that next month’s election won’t go Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s way, Russian intel considered a plan to boost his prospects by staging an assassination attempt, according to an internal Russian intel report obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by the WaPo. Russia denied the allegation. Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump DOJ Keeps Charging First and Investigating Later
Giant Oopsy in Protestor Prosecution A new twist in the prosecution of anti-ICE protesters who entered a church in St. Paul, Minnesota in January: The Trump DOJ has dropped all charges against a woman who was mistakenly identified as a protestor but apparently wasn’t involved with the protest at all. The charges were dropped with prejudice — meaning they cannot be refiled — Friday evening, which set off a vigorous reaction from attorney Abbe Lowell, who represents three journalists who were charged in the same case for covering the protest, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon. In a new filing, Lowell accused the Trump DOJ of misleading the court by asking for an extension of discovery deadlines in the case, which the court partly granted, before revealing the charging goof to the judge, even though it already knew of its mistake. In granting the extension earlier in the day, still unaware of the mistaken identity of one of the 39 defendants, the judge had chided the Trump DOJ for discovery delays in what has become a broader pattern of charging first and investigating later: “So, here we are, months into a case that the government had an intense appetite to initiate, but cannot seem to keep up the pace when it comes to discovery obligations. This is unacceptable.” More Brutalization of Abrego Garcia In another cruel development in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, the Trump administration swears that’s it for real this time in planning to deport the El Salvadoran national to Liberia. It is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to reopen Abrego Garcia’s habeas case, which the judge has shut down repeatedly after evidence presented in court over multiple hearings showed the government had no real plan to deport him to a third country but was using the threat of removal as a pretext to keep him detained. The wrongfully-deported-then-vindictively-indicted Abrego Garcia has said for months that he will agree to be deported to Costa Rica, but acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a March 2 memo filed Friday in court formally rejected that option and declared Liberia (again) to be the only option. In a weekend response to the new filing, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked the judge to pause the contempt of court and related proceedings in the original “facilitate” case while they fight the government’s latest move in the second case. Back in Court Today I’m back in federal court in Baltimore today for what will be Day 3 of what was supposed to be a one-day hearing in the wrongful deportation case of J.O.P. v. Department of Homeland Security. As I exclusively reported Thursday, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services witness testified that there were more than 100 previously unknown wrongful deportations in violation of the court-approve class action settlement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. In another exclusive report on Friday, I reported that the judge gave the Trump DOJ until today to get to the bottom of things, and for the first time raised concerns that either DOJ attorneys or agency attorneys (or both) had not been candid with the court. In response, DOJ trial attorneys told the judge the surprise testimony was news to them, too. Stay tuned … Mass Deportation Watch NYT: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child Politico: “In dozens of cases over the past several weeks, Justice Department lawyers have declined to push back on detainees’ claims that they’re owed a chance to make a case for their release. In those cases, the administration has simply agreed to provide a bond hearing, or even outright release, telling judges that officials “do not have an opposition argument to present” or saying they couldn’t cobble together enough information to mount a defense.” NYT: How Corey Lewandowski Wielded Power Inside D.H.S. WSJ: Trump Administration Scrambles to Deploy ICE Agents at Airports as Lines Mount 46th Lawless Boat Strike The death toll in the lawless U.S. campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats rose to at least 159 on Thursday after a strike in the eastern Pacific killed two people and left one survivor, who was turned over to the Costa Rican Coast Guard, according to the Pentagon. It was the 46th such strike on the high seas. Latest From the Middle East … You can select from the individual bullet points below, or down a straight shot of absurdism, no chaser, over at Gold and Geopolitics: President Trump’s sole military objective in Iran now appears to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which is to say, returning to the status quo that existed before he launched his elective war. That is easier said than done. If the U.S. were to succeed in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the region’s oil and gas infrastructure remains seriously, though not irreparably, damaged by three weeks of air strikes. Iran’s first ever use of intermediate ballistic missiles Friday to target the U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base, some 2,500 miles away, puts much of Europe within range of Iranian missile strikes. Judge Blocks Pentagon Press Limits In a lawsuit brought by the NYT, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman of D.C. struck down the Trump Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists as unconstitutional, ruling: “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.” Robert Mueller, 1944-2026 Garrett Graff memorializes the man who will be most remembered for his stint as special counsel in Trump I, while Marcy Wheeler takes the occasion of his death to refresh already-stale memories of his Russia investigation. Trump DOJ Watch The WSJ examines the threats and bare-knuckle tactics of Mike Davis, who had no prior antitrust experience, but has positioned himself as MAGA’s antitrust fixer, threatening the top DOJ antitrust official Gail Slater — “If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ” — according to deposition testimony by her deputy, a claim Davis denies. Neither Slater nor her deputy are any longer at the Justice Department. A new hire in the decimated Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hire resigned from his Alabama law firm over a Facebook post following George Floyd’s murder, Chris Geidner reports. The Corruption: Colorado Edition In a corrupt bargain, President Trump has lured a GOP challenger out of the GOP primary for the CO-03 district by offering her and her husband roles in his administration, CNN reports. The move to sideline Hope Scheppelman was a triple flip-flop-flip by Trump, who had originally backed Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO), but pulled his support last month and threw his endorsement to Scheppelman before Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) convinced him there’s no playing around with such tight margins in the House. Putting the White in White Nationalism Elon Musk gave a 💯 to a tweet on his X platform that concluded: “White solidarity is the only way to survive.” President Trump had installed on the White House grounds early Sunday morning a replica of a statue of Christopher Columbus that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020, the NYT reports. According to the WaPo, a panel affixed to the base of the sculpture reads: “Destroyed July 4, 2020. Resurrected 2022.” The Absurdism: Hungary Edition Fearing that next month’s election won’t go Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s way, Russian intel considered a plan to boost his prospects by staging an assassination attempt, according to an internal Russian intel report obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by the WaPo. Russia denied the allegation. Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump DOJ Keeps Charging First and Investigating Later
Giant Oopsy in Protestor Prosecution A new twist in the prosecution of anti-ICE protesters who entered a church in St. Paul, Minnesota in January: The Trump DOJ has dropped all charges against a woman who was mistakenly identified as a protestor but apparently wasn’t involved with the protest at all. The charges were dropped with prejudice — meaning they cannot be refiled — Friday evening, which set off a vigorous reaction from attorney Abbe Lowell, who represents three journalists who were charged in the same case for covering the protest, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon. In a new filing, Lowell accused the Trump DOJ of misleading the court by asking for an extension of discovery deadlines in the case, which the court partly granted, before revealing the charging goof to the judge, even though it already knew of its mistake. In granting the extension earlier in the day, still unaware of the mistaken identity of one of the 39 defendants, the judge had chided the Trump DOJ for discovery delays in what has become a broader pattern of charging first and investigating later: “So, here we are, months into a case that the government had an intense appetite to initiate, but cannot seem to keep up the pace when it comes to discovery obligations. This is unacceptable.” More Brutalization of Abrego Garcia In another cruel development in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, the Trump administration swears that’s it for real this time in planning to deport the El Salvadoran national to Liberia. It is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to reopen Abrego Garcia’s habeas case, which the judge has shut down repeatedly after evidence presented in court over multiple hearings showed the government had no real plan to deport him to a third country but was using the threat of removal as a pretext to keep him detained. The wrongfully-deported-then-vindictively-indicted Abrego Garcia has said for months that he will agree to be deported to Costa Rica, but acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a March 2 memo filed Friday in court formally rejected that option and declared Liberia (again) to be the only option. In a weekend response to the new filing, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked the judge to pause the contempt of court and related proceedings in the original “facilitate” case while they fight the government’s latest move in the second case. Back in Court Today I’m back in federal court in Baltimore today for what will be Day 3 of what was supposed to be a one-day hearing in the wrongful deportation case of J.O.P. v. Department of Homeland Security. As I exclusively reported Thursday, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services witness testified that there were more than 100 previously unknown wrongful deportations in violation of the court-approve class action settlement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. In another exclusive report on Friday, I reported that the judge gave the Trump DOJ until today to get to the bottom of things, and for the first time raised concerns that either DOJ attorneys or agency attorneys (or both) had not been candid with the court. In response, DOJ trial attorneys told the judge the surprise testimony was news to them, too. Stay tuned … Mass Deportation Watch NYT: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child Politico: “In dozens of cases over the past several weeks, Justice Department lawyers have declined to push back on detainees’ claims that they’re owed a chance to make a case for their release. In those cases, the administration has simply agreed to provide a bond hearing, or even outright release, telling judges that officials “do not have an opposition argument to present” or saying they couldn’t cobble together enough information to mount a defense.” NYT: How Corey Lewandowski Wielded Power Inside D.H.S. WSJ: Trump Administration Scrambles to Deploy ICE Agents at Airports as Lines Mount 46th Lawless Boat Strike The death toll in the lawless U.S. campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats rose to at least 159 on Thursday after a strike in the eastern Pacific killed two people and left one survivor, who was turned over to the Costa Rican Coast Guard, according to the Pentagon. It was the 46th such strike on the high seas. Latest From the Middle East … You can select from the individual bullet points below, or down a straight shot of absurdism, no chaser, over at Gold and Geopolitics: President Trump’s sole military objective in Iran now appears to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which is to say, returning to the status quo that existed before he launched his elective war. That is easier said than done. If the U.S. were to succeed in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the region’s oil and gas infrastructure remains seriously, though not irreparably, damaged by three weeks of air strikes. Iran’s first ever use of intermediate ballistic missiles Friday to target the U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base, some 2,500 miles away, puts much of Europe within range of Iranian missile strikes. Judge Blocks Pentagon Press Limits In a lawsuit brought by the NYT, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman of D.C. struck down the Trump Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists as unconstitutional, ruling: “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.” Robert Mueller, 1944-2026 Garrett Graff memorializes the man who will be most remembered for his stint as special counsel in Trump I, while Marcy Wheeler takes the occasion of his death to refresh already-stale memories of his Russia investigation. Trump DOJ Watch The WSJ examines the threats and bare-knuckle tactics of Mike Davis, who had no prior antitrust experience, but has positioned himself as MAGA’s antitrust fixer, threatening the top DOJ antitrust official Gail Slater — “If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ” — according to deposition testimony by her deputy, a claim Davis denies. Neither Slater nor her deputy are any longer at the Justice Department. A new hire in the decimated Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hire resigned from his Alabama law firm over a Facebook post following George Floyd’s murder, Chris Geidner reports. The Corruption: Colorado Edition In a corrupt bargain, President Trump has lured a GOP challenger out of the GOP primary for the CO-03 district by offering her and her husband roles in his administration, CNN reports. The move to sideline Hope Scheppelman was a triple flip-flop-flip by Trump, who had originally backed Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO), but pulled his support last month and threw his endorsement to Scheppelman before Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) convinced him there’s no playing around with such tight margins in the House. Putting the White in White Nationalism Elon Musk gave a 💯 to a tweet on his X platform that concluded: “White solidarity is the only way to survive.” President Trump had installed on the White House grounds early Sunday morning a replica of a statue of Christopher Columbus that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020, the NYT reports. According to the WaPo, a panel affixed to the base of the sculpture reads: “Destroyed July 4, 2020. Resurrected 2022.” The Absurdism: Hungary Edition Fearing that next month’s election won’t go Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s way, Russian intel considered a plan to boost his prospects by staging an assassination attempt, according to an internal Russian intel report obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by the WaPo. Russia denied the allegation. Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump Slinks Away From His Promise of a Texas Senate Endorsement
Trump Unable to Save Republicans from Self-Imposed Damage in Texas Senate Runoff President Donald Trump crows over the power of his endorsement — dangles it, sword of Damocles-like, over Republican candidates who perform adulation for his approval. But its weakness is apparent in his hesitant deployment. His favorite endorsees are those certain to win. In a Trumpian perversion of the purpose of an endorsement, it’s less useful to him as a way to influence close races and more a reassurance of his own power. In Texas, he postured like he was actually going to put his political capital on the line. Facing three more months of bloody, bare-knuckle brawling between two candidates who detest each other, Republicans prodded the president to get behind Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and push Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton out of the runoff. Cornyn has been considered the stronger candidate for a general election matchup with Democratic nominee James Talarico, though polling has not clearly borne that out. Paxton, though, having survived impeachment, indictment and recorded pen thievery, refused to go quietly into this good night. Making clear that he would stay in the race regardless, he redirected focus to Republicans’ voter suppression bill and Cornyn’s longtime support for the filibuster. The conversation got muddied because Trump let it be — better to talk about the un-passable SAVE America Act than to contemplate possible insubordination from an ambitious Republican underling. And he’d become less certain that Cornyn — always too mannerly for Trump’s liking — was a sure bet. “I’ve heard that,” Trump told NBC when asked about the theory that Cornyn would perform better than Paxton against Talarico. “I don’t know. I don’t know that to be a fact.” Paxton might have ignored Trump’s order to drop out; Texas’ Republican voters might have ignored Trump’s preference. Weak, weak, weak. The king has no clothes. Better to retreat, to tell himself that he could have changed the race if he felt like it. Meanwhile, the March dropout deadline has passed; both Cornyn and Paxton’s names will appear on the May ballot. And Talarico has three months to consolidate the base and gain momentum while the Republicans spend millions to weaken his ultimate opponent. — Kate Riga By the Way, DHS Is Still Shut Down We’re more than a month into the Department of Homeland Security-specific government shutdown. The public outrage over the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE officers has left the headlines, but congressional Democrats have been holding the line. Dems’ are continuing their unwavering push to enact meaningful reforms for ICE and CBP officers, refusing to fund all of DHS without changes to officers’ practices and conduct. Though they’ve held the line on funding ICE and CBP, congressional Democrats have been trying to get Republicans on board with a bill that would fund all other agencies under the DHS umbrella — including TSA, the Secret Service, FEMA and the Coast Guard — while negotiations continue. Democrats in both chambers tried to pass that bill several times over the past couple of weeks. Each time it was blocked by Republicans. Hoping, once again, to put Senate Republicans on record, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is reportedly planning to force a cloture vote Saturday (as the upper chamber continues to debate the SAVE Act) on a bill to pay TSA agents through the end of the fiscal year. The bill would be subjected to the filibuster and would likely fail. Senate Democrats and the Trump White House have been exchanging proposals on ICE reforms for weeks without much progress. Taking the negotiations one step further, White House border czar Tom Homan was on Capitol Hill for an in-person meeting with a bipartisan group of senators on Thursday. Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), who has been representing Senate Republicans in the ongoing negotiations, described the meeting as “helpful.” “First step is dialogue, and this is the very first time that we have had that,” Britt said. “I hope that we will see more of that in the days to come.” Meanwhile Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who also attended the meeting, indicated a deal is far from around the corner. “I’m glad that the White House was here, but we are a long ways apart,” Murray told reporters following the meeting. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) recently warned that the planned two week Easter recess — a time senators often use to connect with their families and constituents, and in an election year, to campaign — could be cancelled if there is no progress in ending the ongoing shutdown. “It needs to get resolved by the end of next week. I can’t see us taking a break if the government is still shut down,” Thune told reporters on Thursday. — Emine Yücel Secretaries of State Rail Against SAVE America Act Secretaries of State are speaking out against the Trump administration’s restrictive election bill known as the SAVE America Act. The sweeping bill, among other things, mandates documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. It’s expected to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters who do not have proof of citizenship readily available. According to data from the Brennan Center, that amounts to some 21.3 million eligible U.S. voters. “This would be changing the rules very close to an election in a very substantial way,” Democratic Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told the MinnPost this week. Simon also said that the issue of non-citizen voting, which is a myth that the SAVE America Act further perpetuates, is “microscopic.” As TPM has reported, there is no evidence of any kind to suggest that non-citizen voting is a problem. Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas similarly emphasized to Democracy Docket that the bill will disenfranchise eligible voters. “This bill assumes that every voter can navigate these requirements and navigate them quickly, and that is just not reality,” she said. “Imagine a woman, divorced, she’s moved, changed her name and needs to update her voter registration. Under this bill, that is no longer a simple matter. It means tracking down multiple documents.” And Democratic Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, during a press briefing on Thursday, said the legislation “suppresses Americans’ ability to access the ballot box.” Senate Republicans began a marathon debate this week ahead of an eventual Senate vote on the SAVE America Act. For several weeks now, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), has been facing pressure from President Trump to change filibuster rules in order to pass the bill. Thune has repeatedly said there is not enough support in the Senate to do so. The legislation is not expected to move forward because it requires a supermajority to pass. — Khaya Himmelman
Trump Slinks Away From His Promise of a Texas Senate Endorsement
Trump Unable to Save Republicans from Self-Imposed Damage in Texas Senate Runoff President Donald Trump crows over the power of his endorsement — dangles it, sword of Damocles-like, over Republican candidates who perform adulation for his approval. But its weakness is apparent in his hesitant deployment. His favorite endorsees are those certain to win. In a Trumpian perversion of the purpose of an endorsement, it’s less useful to him as a way to influence close races and more a reassurance of his own power. In Texas, he postured like he was actually going to put his political capital on the line. Facing three more months of bloody, bare-knuckle brawling between two candidates who detest each other, Republicans prodded the president to get behind Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and push Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton out of the runoff. Cornyn has been considered the stronger candidate for a general election matchup with Democratic nominee James Talarico, though polling has not clearly borne that out. Paxton, though, having survived impeachment, indictment and recorded pen thievery, refused to go quietly into this good night. Making clear that he would stay in the race regardless, he redirected focus to Republicans’ voter suppression bill and Cornyn’s longtime support for the filibuster. The conversation got muddied because Trump let it be — better to talk about the un-passable SAVE America Act than to contemplate possible insubordination from an ambitious Republican underling. And he’d become less certain that Cornyn — always too mannerly for Trump’s liking — was a sure bet. “I’ve heard that,” Trump told NBC when asked about the theory that Cornyn would perform better than Paxton against Talarico. “I don’t know. I don’t know that to be a fact.” Paxton might have ignored Trump’s order to drop out; Texas’ Republican voters might have ignored Trump’s preference. Weak, weak, weak. The king has no clothes. Better to retreat, to tell himself that he could have changed the race if he felt like it. Meanwhile, the March dropout deadline has passed; both Cornyn and Paxton’s names will appear on the May ballot. And Talarico has three months to consolidate the base and gain momentum while the Republicans spend millions to weaken his ultimate opponent. — Kate Riga By the Way, DHS Is Still Shut Down We’re more than a month into the Department of Homeland Security-specific government shutdown. The public outrage over the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE officers has left the headlines, but congressional Democrats have been holding the line. Dems’ are continuing their unwavering push to enact meaningful reforms for ICE and CBP officers, refusing to fund all of DHS without changes to officers’ practices and conduct. Though they’ve held the line on funding ICE and CBP, congressional Democrats have been trying to get Republicans on board with a bill that would fund all other agencies under the DHS umbrella — including TSA, the Secret Service, FEMA and the Coast Guard — while negotiations continue. Democrats in both chambers tried to pass that bill several times over the past couple of weeks. Each time it was blocked by Republicans. Hoping, once again, to put Senate Republicans on record, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is reportedly planning to force a cloture vote Saturday (as the upper chamber continues to debate the SAVE Act) on a bill to pay TSA agents through the end of the fiscal year. The bill would be subjected to the filibuster and would likely fail. Senate Democrats and the Trump White House have been exchanging proposals on ICE reforms for weeks without much progress. Taking the negotiations one step further, White House border czar Tom Homan was on Capitol Hill for an in-person meeting with a bipartisan group of senators on Thursday. Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), who has been representing Senate Republicans in the ongoing negotiations, described the meeting as “helpful.” “First step is dialogue, and this is the very first time that we have had that,” Britt said. “I hope that we will see more of that in the days to come.” Meanwhile Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who also attended the meeting, indicated a deal is far from around the corner. “I’m glad that the White House was here, but we are a long ways apart,” Murray told reporters following the meeting. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) recently warned that the planned two week Easter recess — a time senators often use to connect with their families and constituents, and in an election year, to campaign — could be cancelled if there is no progress in ending the ongoing shutdown. “It needs to get resolved by the end of next week. I can’t see us taking a break if the government is still shut down,” Thune told reporters on Thursday. — Emine Yücel Secretaries of State Rail Against SAVE America Act Secretaries of State are speaking out against the Trump administration’s restrictive election bill known as the SAVE America Act. The sweeping bill, among other things, mandates documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. It’s expected to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters who do not have proof of citizenship readily available. According to data from the Brennan Center, that amounts to some 21.3 million eligible U.S. voters. “This would be changing the rules very close to an election in a very substantial way,” Democratic Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told the MinnPost this week. Simon also said that the issue of non-citizen voting, which is a myth that the SAVE America Act further perpetuates, is “microscopic.” As TPM has reported, there is no evidence of any kind to suggest that non-citizen voting is a problem. Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas similarly emphasized to Democracy Docket that the bill will disenfranchise eligible voters. “This bill assumes that every voter can navigate these requirements and navigate them quickly, and that is just not reality,” she said. “Imagine a woman, divorced, she’s moved, changed her name and needs to update her voter registration. Under this bill, that is no longer a simple matter. It means tracking down multiple documents.” And Democratic Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, during a press briefing on Thursday, said the legislation “suppresses Americans’ ability to access the ballot box.” Senate Republicans began a marathon debate this week ahead of an eventual Senate vote on the SAVE America Act. For several weeks now, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), has been facing pressure from President Trump to change filibuster rules in order to pass the bill. Thune has repeatedly said there is not enough support in the Senate to do so. The legislation is not expected to move forward because it requires a supermajority to pass. — Khaya Himmelman