During a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday, President Donald Trump touted growing “investment” into the U.S. since he took office.

“There’s never been anything like it from the standpoint of investment into our country,” Trump told reporters and members of his administration. “It’s five to six times higher than anybody has ever seen, than any other country, not just us, has ever had.”

Part of a diatribe about the economy which included a segment about his tariffs, the president was likely referring at least in part to the several trillions of dollars in foreign investment commitments his White House announced beginning last year after Trump leveraged threats of historically high tariffs as a bargaining chip with various countries. (The president employed equally aggressive tactics to elicit financial commitments and expensive gifts from U.S. companies including tech giants Apple and Nvidia.) There’s even a whole page on the White House website titled, simply, “Investments,” touting $10.7 billion in U.S. and foreign investment commitments beneath pulsating text that reads “The Trump Effect.”

The webpage frames the numbers as if they’re dollars already spent. But in many cases, they aren’t. 

“The Trump approach remains to be seen,” Ryan Mulholland, a senior international economic policy fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, told TPM. 

A year ago, international trade experts and economists told TPM that many foreign governments were playing Trump. Today, some investment agreements are already underway, while others have virtually no mechanism to be executed at all. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s stick approach to foreign economic relations will send real dollars flowing to U.S. companies and workers — or whether it’s just one more way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and companies allied with the president.

‘Where do these deals leave us?’

New money coming from foreign governments to the U.S. is up compared to last year, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And commitments for 2026 made in 2025 are much higher than those made in 2024. But they’re not the highest in history. New foreign investment commitments were nearly $20 billion higher under former President Joe Biden in 2022. And their impact on U.S. prosperity is much more of a mixed bag.

There’s no indication that new foreign investment in the U.S. stems from Trump’s trade deals, according to available federal data. And most deal-related boosts won’t show up in the most recent figures from the BEA. What is apparent in the data, though, are high-tech investments into the AI industry — new investments that are separate from Trump’s trade policy agreements, a late June research paper from the Federal Reserve showed.

The economic hallmark of Trump’s second presidential term are his tariffs, which his administration has said are aimed at correcting long-running imbalances between the U.S. and its trading partners. One of his attempts at correction — to levy blanket tariffs using a 1970s era law — was struck down by the Supreme Court. A second tariff scheme using a different provision was blocked by a lower court, too. Small businesses are suing Trump right now to overturn his administration’s third attempt at reordering global trade through tariffs, which SCOTUS ruled were a tax on the American people. All the while, Trump and his officials are hammering home the idea that the president’s savvy salesmanship has saved a failing American economy.

“I think other countries have largely figured out that they can give Trump a sort of headline that he likes, and in exchange win all of the details of a trade deal,” Mulholland said. 

“Where do these deals leave us? Are we in a better position to create prosperity for everyday people?
Are we in a position to work with our partners and allies around the world to solve the challenges that impact people’s lives? I think on both of those scores,” Mulholland continued, “Trump’s very sort of short-term, zero sum kind of view of trade relationships has hurt us.”

Trump is prepared to act if foreign governments fail to uphold their agreement terms, White House spokesman Kush Desai told TPM in an email.

“President Trump means what he says, and he has never hesitated to leverage the might of the American economy to hold trading partners accountable to their agreed-upon commitments,” Desai said.

Meeting Trade Commitments Will Prove ‘Very Difficult’ for Most Countries

Japan agreed to invest $550 billion in U.S. manufacturing sectors including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and the shipbuilding industry with special financing provisions that mean Japan will pay for the projects at little cost to America. That deal, along with commitments on U.S. tech and manufacturing investments from Taiwan and shipbuilding from South Korea, has progressed the most.

“I guess the only place where we’ve seen some action is really on Japan’s commitments. “The conditions are [once] the project is approved, the Japanese government is obligated to provide financing for it,” Greg Auclair, a statistician and researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told TPM. “That’s a very small list right now.”

Already, Japan and Taiwan have poured about $75 billion into the U.S., Auclair said,  though he noted that opaque commitment terms and novel financing mechanisms make it harder to know whether those investments are one-to-one correlations with the trade deals.

Auclair co-published a report suggesting foreign governments will have a hard time financing their commitments to the U.S. Auclair showed that even if some countries with commitments to Trump tap significant portions of their investment capacities and turn them toward the U.S., those nations would still struggle to fulfill their pledges over a 10-year timeline.

“I don’t think they will all be fulfilled,” Auclair’s co-author Adnan Mazarei told Politico in January.

Countries would essentially have to rob Peter to pay Paul — reallocating import schema to benefit the U.S. at the expense of other trading partners, selling foreign assets to purchase more American ones, and bumping up against their own debt capacities.  

“Putting everything together,” Auclair told TPM, “it would be possible for them to meet the pledges but very difficult.”

An update to Auclair’s January report will show that the first year of Trump’s presidency saw foreign investment in the U.S. align with the long-run average, he said, pushing back on Trump’s narrative of historic inflows of foreign cash.

In some cases, Trump’s overbearing tactics have pushed countries to take the opposite tack, reducing exposure to the U.S. economy while creating historic trade agreements with other countries. 

The European Union in January closed a deal with several South American countries that’d been more than two decades in the making. The bloc of 27 European countries also closed a “landmark” free trade deal with India in January to protect against growing U.S. trade volatility. A bloc of South American countries are now in talks with Japan, and Canada is diversifying its economy away from the U.S. as evidenced by a recent electric vehicle deal with China.

“So there are a lot of instances where governments are seeking to reduce their exposure to the United States, and that is a direct result of Trump’s belligerence on the world stage,” Mulholland said. 

Future U.S. presidential administrations, he added, will be limited as a result.

“[Other countries’] ability to negotiate kind of new things with the United States,” Mulholland said, “is going to be hamstrung by commitments that they’ve already made to each other in the deals they did to reduce their exposure to the Trump administration.”

This article has been updated to include a statement from the White House.

This article has been updated to correct the amount of new and planned investment from Japan and Taiwan. It is $75 billion. TPM regrets the error. 

ICE’s Round-the-Clock Digital Dragnet

About a month ago, it emerged from upstate New York that the Department of Homeland Security was targeting online critics of ICE by trying to force them to sign a heretofore unheard of “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that those cases are just the tip of the iceberg of a larger DHS surveillance program targeting social media users nationwide. As with the previously reported cases, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility is taking the lead — a dramatic departure from its previous role as internal affairs bureau investigating wrongdoing by ICE agents.

DHS has used, with varying degrees of success, administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media posters, according to the new report.

There are, of course, some actually concerning threats online — and some subsequent convictions — but the scope of DHS surveillance program seems to go well beyond true threats. The WSJ attempts to put some numbers to it (emphases added):

• “To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE ‘may’ be a crime.”
• “The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a ‘threat originator.'”
• “OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration …”
• “DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted ‘content critical of federal actions.’ … Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.”
• “The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.”

Funding is another tell.

A WSJ analysis found that ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants surged by 57% year over year to $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in office.

Lawyers told the newspaper that the spike in subpoenas for information on online critics began to spike in September, which coincided with when a new $8 million contract took effect between OPR and a software development firm called Amivero, which subcontracted the work to the global consulting firm Guidehouse.

Both of the previously reported upstate New York cases are apparently products of OPR’s new surveillance program. As Morning Memo noted last month, one of the targets in those two cases, David Streever, filed a lawsuit in D.C. with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home in June and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” for a non-threatening but critical email opposing Operation Metro Surge that he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.

Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Ohio: With their Temporary Protected Status withdrawn, Haitians immigrants are being outfitted with ankle monitors by DHS, the WaPo reports.
• New York: U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino of Albany struck down the state’s law banning federal officers from wearing masks as a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
• D.C.: Democratic officials from 24 states and D.C. sued to block DHS from viewing personal details about millions of people receiving anti-poverty aid, Politico reports.

Senate Judiciary to Vote on Blanche

After a few days of delay, Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general looks likely to make it through the Senate Judiciary Committee today, which will stand for all time as a ratification by Senate Republicans of President Trump’s evisceration of the Justice Department and of Blanche’s lawless award of IRS immunity to Trump personally.

One more footnote on the IRS immunity, via the NYT: While the retroactive immunity is limited to the parties to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — the lawsuit defines the Trump Organization as the Trump Organization, LLC, and 418 other entities that are not specifically identified. Let that sink in.

More Reflecting Pool Cases Dropped

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose job is in jeopardy for dismissing the highest profile of the bogus Reflecting Pool “vandalism” cases, has also moved to dismiss three other similar cases related to the peeling liner from what she now admits was a  “hasty and botched” renovation job.

MAGA’s Crony Capitalism Comes With A Socialist Twist

The Trump administration has now taken ownership stakes in at least 30 corporations, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, which is closely tracking the new practice:

What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute. 

Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.

As CATO notes, the Biden administration awarded funds to private companies under the same CHIPS and Science Act provisions that the Trump administration is using but without taking equity interests in the companies.

Just $85,000 To Go

We are entering the stretch run of our drive to raise $500,000 for the TPM Journalism Fund. As of this morning, we have about $85,000 to go to hit the mark. Thank you for your generosity to get us to this point!

If you haven’t contributed yet — and you value independent journalism, Morning Memo, the TPM sensibility, or some combination thereof! — please take a moment now to pitch in. We would love to sprint through the finish line on this and turn 100% of our focus back to the work we do. Thanks again!

Ethereal Phenomenon

I‘ll stop posting timelapses of the aurora from the @Space_Station when I’m tired of looking at them . . . so basically never! Another unforgettable display of this ethereal phenomenon as it danced beneath us last night, this one even more special as it was shared with… pic.twitter.com/zwVRUHAYzq

— Jessica Meir (@Astro_Jessica) August 3, 2026

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

President Trump is now demanding that Iran reach a deal with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz as soon as today or face devastating attacks from the United States. On its face, you can put this in the same bucket of Trump’s last six months: threats about ending Iranian civilization or committing various war crimes or whatever. But this is actually an example of how deep a hole the U.S. is now in, and how rapidly it’s sliding into conceding a system of post-war Iranian tolls on the Strait as a given.

What Iran and Oman are negotiating is an interim agreement in which they will jointly manage a system of tolls (calling them “service fees”) over what is an international waterway. The White House would certainly point out that this is a temporary rather than a permanent deal. But something so fundamental conceded in a provisional or temporary agreement is seldom withdrawn in a final accord. The mix of control and revenue this provides to Iran amounts to a massive strategic gain from the war Trump began back in February. But it seems well on the way to becoming a given in U.S. post-war plans.

In response to last week’s post about AI data centers, I got this fascinating response from TPM Reader RK. Very interesting details and nuanced. But mostly I find it fascinating because it complicates the storyline by placing the data center rebellion in a line of continuity with earlier opposition, in the same or similar communities, to efforts to build wind turbines or solar arrays — stuff liberals obviously think is great.

Intrigued by this post, as I’ve spent the past 2+ years lurking at township halls in Michigan, working on a book about the rising backlash against big companies with big plans to transform how land is used in rural communities. 

It didn’t start with data centers. I was originally interested in how rural communities are pushing back hard against solar and wind farms. In Michigan, you have Gov Whitmer pushing a clean energy agenda, which requires vast swaths of open land. It takes a lot of real estate to replace an oil or gas plant with a solar or wind farm, and that much open space is not available in cities or suburbs. So you wind up in rural areas where voters lean conservative, are skeptical about climate change, and would prefer to see their pleasant landscape left alone. Lots of yelling, recall elections, angry rhetoric as formerly sleepy town halls turn into sights of intense conflict.

Two Elections to Watch Tonight

One critique of Democrats that has stuck with me — lodged by fellow Democrats against their colleagues and themselves — is that they vote in primaries not for who they want to elect, but for who they think their neighbors will elect.

In the face of crushing increases in the cost of living and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, left-of-center voters’ desire to engage in such mental gymnastics has stated to fray in recent years. Today is the key one for the biggest such experiment this year.

As you’re no doubt aware, public health official Abdul El-Sayed will face Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate. Stevens has many of the party’s endorsements, but, as Josh Marshall noted last night, the energy in the primary appears to be with El-Sayed. Polls show he may well trounce Stevens this evening.

The outcome then sets up a test for the general election, the result of which, Kate Riga wrote last week, we’re going to be hearing about for years. Mike Rodgers, the Republican candidate, is a fairly run-of-the-mill figure in Trump’s Republican Party, and he’s lost this race before, in 2024. (He of course baselessly claims it was stolen from him.) If El-Sayed wins tonight, and Rodgers wins in November, cable news pundits will harangue Michigan’s Democratic primary voters about their choice until the next such test emerges. If Stevens pulls off an unlikely upset tonight only to lose to Rodgers, the left’s ascendancy in the Democratic Party will, no doubt prematurely, be declared all but assured.

At the end of the day, the voters pick who they pick. It’s then the campaign’s and the party’s job to consolidate the electorate and win.

Tuesday will also see primaries in Virginia, Missouri, Kansas, and Washington State.

We’ll have our eye on a Republican-backed ballot referendum to switch Kansas to judicial elections, the first of what both supporters and opponents see as a growing conservative push nationwide to remake courts so that they are more likely to support Republican policies. Its the latest effort by right-wing operatives in the state to undo a 2019 decision by the state Supreme Court protecting abortion — a wall they’ve been banging their heads against in various ways ever since.

Time Is Running Out For Republicans to Swap Out Max Miller

Trump on Tuesday declined to publicly call for his staffer-turned-member of Congress Max Miller (R-OH) to resign in the face of multiple allegations of abuse and violence, including domestic violence against his wife and two-year-old daughter. But on Monday night, according to an Axios report, Trump called him to share the insight that things “aren’t looking good.”

• Miller would need to drop out by tomorrow in order for Republicans to be able to replace him on the ballot. If he does, a special election would be held to pick a new candidate.
• Miller has insisted he is not dropping out.
• The situation invites comparisons to Democrats’ imbroglio with Graham Platner in Maine, though Platner was never accused of domestic violence. A difference, of course, is that Democrats, including most of Platner’s high-profile allies, spoke in a nearly unified voice to pressure the candidate off the ballot in the face of a sexual assault allegation.
• By contrast, the task of muscling Miller off the ballot has largely fallen to Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), the father of Miller’s ex-wife. The handful of Republicans who have also called on Miller to quit have framed their perspective as support for Moreno, not a policy of zero tolerance for the kind of allegations repeatedly made against Miller.

Tabs

• TPM’s Emine Yücel looks at a new attempt by the Trump administration to tighten its control over grants distributed by the executive branch, and a nascent attempt by the Senate to (at least temporarily) stop it.
• A second man in less than one year has died at Delaney Hall, a federal detention center in Newark, New Jersey, the New York Times reports.
• NPR looks at the Trump administration’s use of a charge that was most recently widely used to prosecute January 6 insurrectionists to go after the left: conspiracy to impede or injure an officer.

Man of the Hour

It’s Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), who, in a Congress full of men accused of doing awful things, has become the first in years for whom the House Ethics Committee has recommended censure. That’s in part due to the extensive evidence of sexual harassment mustered against him, including odd gifts and reams and reams of corny messages documenting what appear to be attempts at romance with his subordinates. Kate sifts through it here.

Are We at War?

Trump called off strikes this weekend claiming their will be new negotiations, but both sides now say none are planned.

Tomorrow is primary day in a number of states. Michigan is the state that will get the most attention. There are several big primaries but the Senate one on the Democratic side will get by far the most attention. It pits Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. Unless the polls are wildly far off the mark (not impossible in a primary election), El-Sayed will win handily. About a half dozen polls conducted over the last two weeks show El-Sayed winning by 10 points or more, many in the mid to high teens. Meanwhile the balance of general election polls show Stevens very narrowly beating former Rep. Mike Rogers while El-Sayed very narrowly loses to him.

President Trump spent the weekend raging on Truth Social against Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, after the Justice Department wrote in a motion to dismiss the case that issues with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the result of bad refurbishing work — and not the product of vandalism, as it had previously alleged. Trump still insists vandalism is to blame.

In the Friday court filing, the DOJ acknowledged that Trump’s $14 million Reflecting Pool renovation was “hasty and botched.” In the filing, the DOJ said it was dropping its case against former Olympian David Hearn, whom the Justice Department accused of vandalism around the time that the renovation was getting bad press, including reports that the new lining was coming off in floating chunks. Hearn pleaded not guilty to the felony vandalism charges in D.C.’s Superior Court before the case was dismissed last week.

Trump has, aggressively, not reached the same conclusions as his DOJ and brought his online anger with Pirro to the airwaves on Monday during an unrelated Oval Office meeting, during which he suggested Pirro “choked” in building a proper case against Trump’s perceived enemies for the supposed sabotage.

“Frankly, I think she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” Trump said.

Shortly after Trump’s Oval Office outburst against Pirro, CNN published a report this afternoon that Trump is considering removing Pirro over the filing, citing two people familiar with Trump’s thinking. Per CNN:

The president is “furious” with Pirro, one of the sources said, telling CNN that he fumed about her all weekend. They added that based on his criticisms of her, they find it “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”

The other source, a senior administration official, said Trump was “blindsided” by Pirro’s court filing: “The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that.”

Trump reportedly spoke to Pirro on Saturday and she blamed career officials in her office for the Friday filing (though her name is on the bottom of it). It was the around the same time that Trump was publicly unleashing on her via Truth Social.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote.

Up until this point, Trump has had no reason to question Pirro’s work. As TPM reported earlier this year, Pirro was one of a group of U.S. attorneys who met with Trump earlier this year and received a verbal lashing from the president for not acting fast enough to carry out his personal retribution crusade. Shortly after that meeting, the Federal Reserve received grand jury subpoenas from Pirro’s office, related to testimony that then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — one of Trump’s favorite perceived enemies — gave Congress last summer about a Fed building renovation.

Shortly after, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told the New York Times that she received requests for an interview with Pirro’s office; the FBI and others within the DOJ were at the time looking into Slotkin and other Democratic lawmakers who participated in a social media video aimed at reminding military service members that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. Trump suggested that the Dems should be arrested and charged with “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

Seems like the retribution-inspired honeymoon between the two might be over.

MAGA Melts Down Because Mullin Admits America Needs Farm Labor

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has attracted ire from Trump’s base of supporters because he more or less conceded that the American farming industry needs migrant workers in order to survive. It’s a fact that played a political role in Trump’s decision early in his second term to flood blue cities with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out his mass deportation clampdown in urban areas — largely avoiding, at least initially, rural parts of the country where immigrant labor is often what keeps farms running.

During a bipartisan National Governors Association meeting in Oklahoma on Saturday, Mullin spoke about changes that need to be made to seasonal work visas to accommodate the year-round farm work demands of the agriculture industry.

“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, reportedly adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries.”

“It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes,” he said.

Mistake on his end, per The New Republic:

These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”

Crowdsourcing His War

Per new reporting from CNN today:

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

More to Read From TPM Today

Hunter Walker unpacks Trump’s bombastic remarks from the Oval Office today, during which he publicly let slide his disgust for blue cities: Trump Launches Into Extraordinary Rant About ‘Disgusting’ Blue Cities: ‘Their Trees Are All Gross’

The House Ethics Committee put out a report recommending the censure of Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) over his treatment of and behavior towards two young women on his staff. Kate Riga digs in here: Bizarre Texts, Gifted Guns, 30 Types of Ice Cream: Rep. Faces Censure Following Sexual Harassment Allegations

New from Sarah Posner: How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him

Yesterday’s Top Story

The Low-Energy Response to the GOP’s ‘High-T’ Politics 

What I’m Reading

She protested ICE raids. Then agents showed up at her door 

Trump still really wants a slush fund 

The right-wing bubble seals in the GOP with Max Miller 

President Donald Trump went off on a long, strange tangent where repeatedly expressed revulsion at the state of “blue cities” during an event in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

“What do they have in common? They’re all dirty. They’re filthy, dirty,” Trump said, adding, “Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty.”

Trump went on to specify that he didn’t “want to mention any specific city.”

“It’s really all of them,” he said. 

Trump’s attack on the homes of a large segment of the American populace came at an event that was ostensibly about a commission for military spouses. After signing an executive order establishing the group, Trump took questions from reporters. His tirade about “blue cities” came when he was asked about the ever-shifting state of talks to end the Iran War. Trump said he is “under no time constraints” to conclude the conflict that he initially predicted would end months ago. He contrasted this with his Republican colleagues who are currently facing elections and said they are running against a “sick ideology.” He rattled off various leftist proposals including Supreme Court reform and abolishing the Senate that he predicted would “destroy the country.” From there, Trump totally went off. 

“These are sick people,” he said. “When a country goes bad, like, look at the blue cities. What do they have in common aside from massive crime? Much more crime. The Republicans have very little crime. But what do the blue cities have? … And also you can see this with nations when they go bad — the blue cities have something in common — crime, high crime, vicious, violent crime.”

Earlier on in the event, a reporter from one of the right-wing outlets that the Trump administration has added to the press corps praised the president’s redecorating efforts in Washington, D.C., which have included the controversial White House ballroom and the algae-plagued Reflecting Pool renovation. 

A reporter also asked Trump if he would consider trying to “federalize” the capital city. Trump mused about the idea while praising his own work in the district. 

“Would I federalize basically, you’re saying federalize D.C.? Well, I’m allowed to do that. Would I do that? If they wanted,” Trump said before trailing off and turning to the changes he has made in the city. 

“We took something that was in deep trouble. It was a graffiti-filled, crime-filled mess.We turned it into Shangri-La. We turned it into a great place,” he said, adding, “Look at the grass in front of the White House being all replaced with the top stuff. … Scott’s Miracle Gro. They’re doing it. … Got to give them a plug because they did the White House for free.”

Trump returned to D.C. later on when he reiterated his disagreement with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s conclusion that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy contracting work rather than vandalism. The president repeated his highly questionable claim the pool was targeted and argued Pirro had “choked” by dropping the Justice Department’s case against a former Olympian for allegedly damaging it. He also brought up the capital city during his rant about the “blue cities.” 

“They’re like Washington, D.C. was a year and a half ago with graffiti all over the place, with crime all over the place, with people afraid to be here. You had to be ashamed of your capital,” said Trump. “Some of the most beautiful buildings built in the real time. Like, you look at the Supreme Court building, and they put graffiti on it. The most beautiful columns I’ve ever seen. … You look at those columns, how magnificent and then you see graffiti on the side of the building.”

Data actually shows red states have higher crime than blue states on average. Large cities in red states, many of which have Democratic local governments, have the highest murder rates. However, it’s not as though Trump was doing any kind of detailed analysis. He concluded his screed by declaring the blue city ideology is “not going to happen in our country.”

“The one thing they all have in common: crime. Two things, crime, but they’re disgusting. They’re filthy, dirty,” Trump said, adding, “The streets are dirty. They have people lying all over the street doing you know what.”

The bipartisan House Ethics Committee on Monday recommended that Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) be censured for his behavior towards two young women on his staff.

This is not a large point but it’s one worth articulating explicitly.

Politics, like life, isn’t fair. One of the surest examples of this is that presidencies rise and fall with gas prices. Those presidents usually didn’t really do anything to make them rise or fall. And it’s quite difficult for a president to pull them lower, except on the margins. Donald Trump’s recent, ongoing slide tracks closely with gas prices, repeating a decades old pattern — even down to this later (?) part of the Iran War in which faux ceasefires and collapses drive short term ups and downs. But Trump is close to unique in being more or less 100% to blame for them. Current gas prices are almost entirely because of the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump started that war. And, as I argued last week, he started it more or less out of the blue.

We’re now over 80% of the way toward this year’s goal in our Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We need your help to get to the final goal, at least $500,000. Right now we’re at $423,276. If you’ve been meaning to contribute but haven’t found the right moment yet, now is definitely that moment. Please take just about 90 seconds this moment and join us. Click right here. You’ll truly be glad you did and will have our undying appreciation.

With the prospect of another government shutdown looming, the Senate Appropriations Committee released the text of a continuing resolution (CR) on Sunday that would keep the federal government funded until Dec. 11 and punt the government funding negotiations until after the midterms. 

In that stopgap bill, Democrats and a couple of Republicans included a significant provision that would ban, for now, the Trump White House and its Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from finalizing a grantmaking rule change it proposed in May. 

Wet Noodle Award: Cornyn and Tillis

Trump is Lucy. GOP senators are the football. D.C. political reporters are Charlie Brown.

For a decade now, the illusion that Republican senators in whole or in part would rise up against the outrages of the Trump presidencies has animated political reporting even as the Senate GOP conference has chronically failed to rise to the occasion.

The farcical effort required to sustain the illusion has required a willing disbelief and feigned innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So while the urge to pile on Senate Republicans like John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina for not driving a hard bargain with Trump over the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general is warranted, it must also be acknowledged, as painful as it is, that their pretend resistance actually works at yielding the headlines and reputational burnishing they’re looking for.

Most of this morning’s coverage of the overnight development bears this out.

After weeks of resistance, Blanche finally put in writing, in documents he posted to X, that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund is dead and that the IRS immunity for Trump is retroactive only. It was a limited concession, but it was enough for the two Senate holdouts, Tillis just confirmed on X.

The news coverage hailed this as a “formal” act by Blanche of rescinding the “anti-weaponization” fund. Some managed to cover the development without reference to Blanche’s disastrous anti-democratic run at a DOJ used as tool of retribution for the Trump White House.

This came after President Trump over the weekend continued to escalate his insistence that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund should still move forward. We’re supposed to belief Trump’s former personal lawyer and underling, not the president himself.

Just look at what Blanche did and did not do because it reinforces what a parody of a negotiation with the two senators this has been.

• Cornyn has rightly insisted that by the terms of the “settlement agreement” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, only the parties to it, including Trump, can amend it. Only Blanche signed his “order” on the “anti-weaponization” fund. No amendment to the settlement agreement, if one exists, has been released.
• Blanche’s “order” purports to be the final word on the “anti-weaponization” fund but it’s not at all clear what, if any, legal authority it carries. Remember that Blanche has refused in one of the what he calls “frivolous” lawsuits challenging the slush fund to declare it dead under penalty of perjury. Nothing filed in court so far suggests a change in that position.
• Blanche’s “order” makes no mention of the IRS immunity for Trump. Instead, a separate statement from his office — unsigned and under no one’s name — stipulates that the IRS deal is only retroactive. This statement appears to be a sop to Cornyn who wanted Blanche to put his Senate testimony to this effect in writing; the statement reaffirms Blanche’s testimony. How this bald statement is legally binding on anyone is a mystery.

These vague assurances with no legal obligation are consistent with the weak demands Cornyn was making for his vote. For his part, Tillis gave away the game Saturday before Blanche’s written assurances, lamenting that Trump’s doubling down on the slush fund was hobbling Blanche’s confirmation (emphasis added): “It’s unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal.”

Trump Appeals Sanctions in IRS Case

In related news, Trump and his lawyers are appealing U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ finding last month that he engaged in a collusive lawsuit against the IRS. They’re also asking for Williams to pause the sanctions while their appeal plays out.

Rather than immediately ruling on that request, Williams has asked the outside lawyers she previously appointed as friends of the court — since there were no adverse parties in the case by the president against his own administration — to brief her on the request.

In what would normally be a dry procedural order, Williams got in one more jab at the lack of adverseness between the Trump plaintiffs and the Trump administration defendants, noting that the outside lawyers were needed “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response to the Motion.”

Pass the Popcorn for Trump v. Pirro

The Reflecting Pool liner prosecution spectacularly imploded Friday with an embarrassing motion to dismiss by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro that deserves a hallowed spot in the annals of the depredations of the Trump DOJ

The two most notable aspects of the implosion:

• Despite her “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to prosecutions like this one, Pirro publicly pointed fingers at the Interior Department for failing to provide at the outset crucial information that undermined the prosecution: “It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.” That she didn’t seek that and other information before bringing charges is one of the glaring problems here.
• Pirro’s finger-pointing provoked a backlash from President Trump himself, who lashed out at her in a social media post Saturday: “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM …”

For his part, erstwhile defendant David Hearn was just a pawn in this sordid affair, first when Pirro rushed to placate the president over the embarrassment caused by his crappy pool liner and now as she tries to extricate herself and her prosecutors from of the mess she created without getting hit with heavy sanctions or a civil lawsuit for the baseless prosecution.

As Chris Geidner notes, there’s a lot more to come in this case: “Friday’s motion to dismiss the David Hearn case is more likely an opening — rather than the closing — salvo in this matter.”

MN Church Protesters Offered Plea Deals

In another in a series of crumbling cases against ICE protesters, the Trump DOJ has offered plea deals to 29 of the 38 people charged in the January anti-ICE demonstration in a St. Paul, Minnesota, church that would reduce their charges from felonies to misdemeanors. Apparently, none of them has accepted the offer.

2026 Midterms Ephemera

• Ohio: In a social media post Sunday, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R) said his former son-in-law, Rep. Max Miller (R), lacks the “basic standards of character” to serve in Congress. Moreno’s daughter Emily has accused Miller of abuse towards her and their young daughter; Miller has denied her accusations in the bitter custody battle.
• Virginia: Reversing the actions of former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger announced Friday that she is restoring voting rights for some 66,000 people in the state with past felony convictions.
• Nationwide: FiftyPlusOne has a new midterms forecast out this morning that gives Democrats an 85% chance of winning the House and 55% chance of winning Senate control.

Previous NYT Subpoena Disclosed

A previously undisclosed grand jury subpoena was served on a NYT freelancer way back in February over a story he co-wrote for the newspaper last fall about a failed 2019 Seal Team 6 operation in North Korea, the NYT revealed over the weekend:

The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.

Freelance reporter Matthew Cole has been quietly fighting the subpoena from a grand jury in Newport News, Va., using the same attorney as the NYT, which separately fought subpoenas of its reporters over their Air Force One reporting. Cole’s co-author of the piece, NYT staff reporter Dave Philipps, was reportedly not subpoenaed.

Santos Fined for Alleged SOTU Scheme

Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has settled a claim — without admitting wrongdoing — by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that he manipulated prediction market Kalshi over whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address.

His alleged manipulation included instances like this one, via the NYT:

For example, on Feb. 22, Mr. Santos posted on X asking his followers whether he should “wear a muted serious suit to the SOTU or a bedazzled one?”

That query caused the value of betting on Mr. Santos’s attendance to shoot up. The next day, regulators said, Mr. Santos exited his position and made about $3,400 in profits.

Under the terms of the settlement, Santos will return $17,570 in ill-gotten gains and pay a $17,500 penalty.

Meanwhile, in the Real World …

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850. pic.twitter.com/uU5EYVXfZ2

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 2, 2026

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, voting for legislation to boost immigration enforcement could have seemed like a safe choice to some Democrats, who tied Donald Trump’s second presidential victory to a rejection of their party’s handling of immigration. 

Forty-six Democrats broke with their party to support legislation named after the murdered Georgia college student Laken Riley. Now, for some, that vote is a potential liability, as primary opponents say the votes cosigned Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Following his attendance at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a meeting with President Trump about the Iran War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders at the historic Blair House in Washington last Wednesday. Among the participants were Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans; Larry Huch, a televangelist deeply embedded in the Christian Zionist world; MAGA evangelical influencer Lance Wallnau; and broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck, whose dispatches from the Middle East can be seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and YouTube. Evangelicals and Jews, Netanyahu told the assembled group, are part of the same “Judeo-Christian heritage” that is “under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism.” Our enemies, his message was, are the same. “It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack,” Netanyahu said, “because we are one.”

They are one, Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters believe, in a war not against the far-right antisemites and anti-Zionists who have both defined and rocked Trump’s coalition, the ones who admire Hitler and engage in Holocaust denial. The true enemy, they contend, are Israel’s critics on the left. Similarly, critics of Christian nationalism are, in evangelical thinking, solely from the left. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and criticism of an American theocracy with anti-Christian bigotry.

The ‘Depraved Essence of Insider Trading’

An API built by Truth Social, offering financial institutions faster access to the most influential posts on the platform — Trump’s — for $100,000, has gone live. The company has struggled for years to find a business model that works. Now it proposes to distribute early access to the thoughts of the president, which move markets and which he makes exclusively available on the platform, which his family also has a stake in.

In a letter to Truth Media and Technology Group, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MA) called the program the “depraved essence of insider trading.” “A public official with access to the ultimate insider information — his own next actions and policies as the Chief Executive of the United States — is selling advance access to that market-moving information to the high bidders,” he wrote.

This story has captured our attention because it compounds the corruption that has become endemic throughout the executive branch with a new, ridiculous feature of our economy — Trump manipulating the markets through his bespoke social media platform, prompting sell-offs and rallies with his statements about the status of such things as tariffs or the Iran war, regardless of those statements’ grounding in fact.

The problem, however, is not limited to big global issues. The Truth API also compounds Trump’s ability to manipulate the market as it relates to specific companies he favors or disfavors, prone as he is to attack firms and individuals via social media with little notice.

The program appears targeted at the world of computerized, high-frequency trading, where firms take new positions rapidly in response to emerging information, aiming to do so before other actors in the market can catch on that something has changed. Even milliseconds can make a difference.

The Truth API has attracted attention from both the House and Senate. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have urged the SEC to investigate. But under the Trump administration, that prospect seems unlikely.

“When you don’t have enforcement of the rules and regulations, when there are different legal outcomes for the president than there would be for any other market actor that acted this egregiously,” Corey Frayer, former senior advisor at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, told TPM’s Layla A. Jones, “it becomes hard to hold anyone accountable.”

Trump’s Reflecting Pool Prosecution Implodes Gradually, Then Suddenly

The Trump administration dramatically dropped its troubled case against Olympian David Hearn amid a flood of finger pointing.

• In a Friday filing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. said the Interior Department had provided new documents that showed the damage to the pool to not be the result of vandalism, but instead the product of a botched installation by the contractor. (Kudos to former TPMer Ryan Reilly, who wrote for NBC that the DOJ concluded the allegations did not “hold water.”)
• The remarkable filing also blamed “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
• This left Trump raging throughout the weekend at D.C. U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote, comparing it to a large “86 47” that was etched into the National Mall.

Tabs

• The Tate Brothers, and Trump world’s connections to them, should be a second, more reality-based Epstein scandal, Brian Beutler writes.
• Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), who is Republicans’ nominee to run against Jon Ossoff (D-GA) for Senate, is avoiding questions about his white supremacist son in law.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who finally has his off-ramp! He’s ready to greenlight Todd Blanche for attorney general after receiving “assurances.” A vote on the nomination will be scheduled for Tuesday after a weekend of angst. David Kurtz will have more on what to make of this deal in Morning Memo.

Are We at War?

A question with an evolving answer. After Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with Trump this weekend, urging him not to attack Iranian infrastructure out of concern that the country would retaliate against Gulf States, Trump suddenly claimed a deal with Iran to be at hand, and later said talks would begin Monday. Iran said there are no talks. Regardless, whether we are at war or not at war, we are never at war, per Trump.

Trump: "This is the golden age of America. And we have a war that's going on. I call it a military operation."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-07-31T15:47:46.892Z

A new report from Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) details shocking allegations about the conditions inside an ICE detention facility in Texas. The report, which was published on Friday, was based on interviews Senate staff conducted with “approximately 20 family units and approximately 40 women detained in the adult detention unit” at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, it said. In a statement released along with the report, Durbin described the findings as part of “an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care” in immigration detention facilities. He also called for the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is the ranking member, to hold a hearing on the issue. 

 “Children and their parents described a top-down culture of cruelty among Dilley staff, including guards deliberately disrupting children’s sleep at night, purposely entering rooms without knocking, and taunting children who are often provided with inedible food by eating candy and pizza in front of them,” Durbin said.  

Steven Owen, the vice president of communications at CoreCivic, a private prison company that operates the Dilley facility, disputed the claims made in the report in an email to TPM.

“The critical characterizations of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center (DIPC) do not reflect the operations, standards or care provided at the facility. DIPC was purpose-built to meet the needs of families, and families are housed together in accommodations designed to support family unity, safety and children’s well-being,” Owen said, adding, “Claims that children are denied care or experience delayed medical assessment are false. DIPC maintains on-site pediatric expertise, and emergency services are activated when a child’s clinical presentation requires off-site care.” The children and their families at DIPC receive health care that is clinically rigorous, federally overseen and delivered with dignity. Residents receive:”

Owen also provided links to material CoreCivic prepared including a primer created response to prior critical reporting on conditions at the Dilley facility.

When reached by TPM, the White House referred all questions about the report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE did not respond to a request for comment, but an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, provided a statement. The DHS spokesperson stated “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities is FALSE.” They also claimed “Dilley does meet federal detention standards and actually undergoes regular audits and inspections.”

“Another day and another hoax about the South Texas Family Residential Center. Nearly every single day, this office responds to media questions on FALSE allegations about illegal alien detention centers,” the DHS spokesperson said. “The media is clearly desperate for these allegations of inhumane conditions at this facility to be true.”

Along with the other disturbing claims, Durbin’s report alleges there is “substandard medical care” at Dilley. 

“Poor medical care was the most urgent concern raised by both families and adult women. They described a range of unaddressed health issues and voiced that, because they were not receiving adequate care, those medical conditions are worsening,” the report said. 

Specific issues detailed in the report include a mother and child who were ill yet allegedly “were repeatedly refused blankets to address the extremely cold temperatures in their unit.” The report also described multiple instances where detainees said they were not given care despite “extreme” pain and others who said chronic or troubling conditions were not addressed. 

Along with the allegedly inadequate medical care, the report also claimed facility staff failed to provide detainees with proper meals. 

“One family reported finding worms and a fingernail in their food. Several families said their children refused to eat facility meals entirely,” it said.

A lack of required educational programs is another issue detailed in the report, which said Judiciary Committee staffers found “no evidence that the facility was meeting … basic education standards.”

“One 16-year-old described the education offered at Dilley as ‘drawing in coloring books,’ which was not appropriate for students his age,” the report said.

The lack of school programs was described in the report as part of a pattern of “psychological harm to children” that included “demeaning, dismissive, and abusive behavior by Dilley staff.”

“One parent reported that guards who are perceived as ‘too nice’ are scolded by supervisors and told to be harsher. A guard told the parent: ‘You only have three rights here: drink, sleep, eat.’” the report said.

The report also said Dilley detainees face a lack of access to family members and attorneys.

“Many of them stated they have committed no crimes, have pending immigration cases, have minor children at home, and have lived in the United States for years. They stated repeatedly that they have followed the rules, and they are not criminals—and do not understand why they are being treated as if they are. They are desperate to be reunited with their families and spoke about their efforts to seek release through habeas petitions,” the report explained. 

Dilley has been a hotbed for protests and activism that have taken place around the country in response to ICE and President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Durbin claimed the Judiciary Committee staff had issues speaking to detainees as part of what the report described as “DHS obstruction.”

“My staff visited Dilley as part of an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care, solitary confinement, and access to counsel in immigration detention. During that visit, in an attempt to curtail oversight, DHS imposed an arbitrary two-hour time limit on visiting the facility,” Durbin said in his statement.

Other members of Congress have similarly accused DHS and ICE of attempting to thwart lawmakers’ right to conduct oversight in what they have called a violation of legislation. The practice led to a successful lawsuit in federal district court. In his statement, Durbin also suggested some of the things Judiciary Committee staff observed at Dilley violate the Flores Settlement Agreement, a court ruling that sets standards for immigration detention. 

Durbin has previously released reports on conditions at ICE detention facilities in Florida and Louisiana. Overall, his latest report blamed the issues in detention centers on Trump administration policies. 

“The Trump Administration is intentionally subjecting longtime law-abiding residents of our communities and children who have grown up in our communities to neglectful and dangerous detention conditions,” the report said, adding, “In a desperate attempt to meet Stephen Miller’s quotas in furtherance of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign, immigration officials now target law-abiding families attending immigration

court hearings and ICE check-ins.”

Durbin’s report also predicted the issues observed at Dilley will have devastating consequences and that “more people will die in detention without necessary medical care.” 

“Medical care in immigration detention is dangerously inadequate. Immigration detention facility staff routinely deny or defer necessary medical treatment, providing only minimal care until emergency care is required. Without better policies for quickly addressing urgent medical needs, including facilitating release, more individuals, including children, will die in Detention,” the report said. “Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in more  than two decades. Twenty-two people have already died in ICE custody thus far in 2026.”

This story was updated at 9:31 pm with a response from CoreCivic. It was also updated at 4:38 pm on August 1, 2026 with the statement from a DHS spokesperson.

Talk About Losing the Thread

In a social media post this morning, President Trump threw all of toys in the air and declared that he still thinks the “anti-weaponization” slush fund was the way to go after all.

While ostensibly calling for Todd Blanche to be confirmed as attorney general, Trump lost the thread and resumed defending his $1.776 billion slush fund, which would siphon money to Jan. 6 rioters and other supposed victims of the Deep State:

They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them. …

I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!

The only arguable nod to the legal cases challenging the slush fund, which remain pending, is that Trump described how he “felt” and “will always feel” — not what he will do to revive the fund over which he would exert control and for which there would be no guardrails. The official Trump administration position before Congress and in court has been that the slush fund is “dead” and that no amount of public pining for it by the president should make anyone think that it’s coming back once public attention drifts elsewhere.

With Blanche’s nomination stalled not over the slush fund but over a separate provision in the same bogus “settlement agreement” that gives Trump immunity from the IRS — a giveaway potentially worth as much as $100 million from Trump in his official capacity to himself in his personal capacity — it was comical for the president to come to Blanche’s supposed rescue by reasserting the righteousness of the slush fund.

The real target of Trump’s scorn in the social media blast was Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is the main hold up on the Blanche nomination even though the Senate Judiciary Committee Republican only asking for the barest fig leaf to camouflage the corrupt IRS immunity provision (see below). Trump’s impulsive reaction to Cornyn’s opposition is to mock him for having his political career ruined by Trump, which is amusing in its own right.

All of this came the day after Trump improbably threatened in another social media post to pull the Blanche nomination until Cornyn and fellow holdout Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) are out of office next year — a weak-handed threat that miscalculates the chances of the Senate being more friendly to Blanche after the midterms. No one is fooled.

The NYT Gets It! Cornyn’s Thin Red Line

The NYT has some real talk that ratifies yesterday’s Morning Memo on how Sen. Cornyn is actually seeking to entrench — not eliminate — the immunity President Trump got in his “settlement” with the IRS:

The red line that Mr. Cornyn has drawn is fairly thin. He and Mr. Tillis are not seeking to kill the deal that Mr. Blanche negotiated with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, which gave the president, his family and his businesses broad immunity, potentially saving them at least $100 million in penalties and drawing accusations from Democrats of self-dealing. They are merely demanding modifications — in writing. …

Mr. Cornyn’s request is fairly modest. He wants the Justice Department to guarantee what Mr. Blanche said under oath at his confirmation hearing: that the I.R.S. immunity would apply only to Mr. Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization, and that it would be limited only to audits of past tax returns.

“All we’re doing is asking them to put that in writing,” Mr. Cornyn said.

It’s telling, I suppose, that the White House refuses to make even this minor accommodation and instead attacks Cornyn.

“The fact that they’re balking at putting that in writing tells me that they were hoping to get by with this settlement agreement and his testimony, and then revitalize those provisions at a later date,” Cornyn told ABC News. “And that’s, I don’t think, good faith negotiations.” 

Still, the news coverage of this collective hoodwinking has been abysmal and has allowed Cornyn to strut around like a dragon-slayer while actually giving away $100 million in potential tax liability forgiveness to Trump.

First at TPM: Judge Finds Trump Admin in Contempt

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Baltimore this week held the Trump administration in contempt of court for violating two of her orders enforcing a settlement agreement in a long-running class action case over the rights of unaccompanied minors to seek asylum in the United States.

As TPM first reported, the administration has deported nearly 100 asylum seekers in violation of the court-approved settlement agreement in the case.

But Gallagher’s order gives the administration a chance to “purge” its contempt by refraining from any further unlawful deportations in violation of the agreement:

To do so, the administration will have to comply with a series of new requirements that Gallagher imposed in the same order intended to prevent more unlawful deportations of members of the settlement class, when numbers north of 70,000 people.

Mass Deportation Watch

• The 7th and 9th circuits became the latest U.S. Courts of Appeal to reject the Trump administration’s re-interpretation of a 30-year-old law and turn it into a tool of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond. The circuit courts are now split 6-2 against the Trump policy, and the Supreme Court is likely to take up the issue in its next term, Politico reports.
• A Cameroonian national with an expired visa who is a former Fulbright scholar and is now a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University was detained by ICE this week while boarding a domestic flight as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement efforts at airports, The Banner reports.

Judge Declines to Recuse in USA Case

A quick update on the most significant legal challenge to Trump’s corrupt U.S. attorney scheme: The outside judge assigned to hear the lawsuit against the administration by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle has denied the Trump DOJ’s motion to recuse himself.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee, is the chief judge of the Eastern District of Washington, based in Spokane, and is a frequent visiting judge in Seattle. The Trump DOJ took issue with (i) how Bastian was assigned the case, arguing that the chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals should appoint an outside judge rather than the case being assigned to the usual visiting judge; and (ii) Bastian’s impartiality given his frequent work in the district.

Bastian found no legal basis for his recusal.

Morning Memo Playlists

On a random Friday in March 2024, I first dropped into Morning Memo a musical segue into the weekend that began a semi-regular feature. It’s ebbed and flowed a bit, but your response has been remarkably gratifying, especially because am I very much a musical neophyte. In response to reader requests, I’ve put together a playlist of the songs that have appeared here. I’ll keep adding to it as we go along:

I did a parallel playlist on YouTube that’s nearly the same as the Spotify playlist above, but a few tracks are available only on one or the other of the two platforms, not both.

See you back here Monday.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.