Good Riddance

It takes a lot to be among the most odious Republican members of this Congress. Let me reacquaint you with Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN).

What makes Ogles special is that he managed to be a virulent Islamophobe, Christian nationalist, and fabulist — really the trifecta of qualifications for current House GOPers — and still alienate his fellow Republicans.

Ogles went down to a stinging defeat in the GOP primary in Tennessee last night, losing 53%-47% to former state agriculture commish Charlie Hatcher.

While Ogles maintained an endorsement from President Trump, many state Republicans were done with him. Gov. Bill Lee (R) and former Gov. Bill Haslam (R) had endorsed Hatcher.

Ogles was a piece of work in so many ways.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” he tweeted in March.

“America and Islam are incompatible. Time for a muslim (sic) ban,” he posted in another tweet around the same time.

He posted AI-generated images of himself and senior Trump administration officials in front of the Capitol dressed as Crusaders.

He had campaign finance issues and resume-inflation issues.

Ogles’ nemesis back home was the relentless investigative reporter Phil Williams, of Nashville, who unearthed much of what we’ve come to know about Ogles and to whom I defer on cataloging Ogles’ sins:

• Ogles had claimed to be an economist; he was not.
• He had boasted about being trained in investigating international sex crimes; he had not.
• He had claimed to have done graduate work at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth; that was a lie.
• His resume showed he had served on the board of directors for the city of Franklin, Tennessee; Franklin does not have a board of directors.
• He claimed to have personally loaned his campaign $320,000 in his first run for Congress in 2022; he did not have that kind of money to lend.
• The FBI opened a criminal investigation into those fraudulent campaign disclosures, but that investigation was canned by the Trump administration.

In a fitting end to his losing campaign, Ogles banned Williams and select other news outlets from an Election Day event — and Williams got ahold of the blacklist.

What gives Ogles’ primary defeat a little extra boost of schadenfreude is that he was running in a pretty dramatically re-drawn district thanks to state Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting. Call it a small (but inadequate) consolation prize for the elimination of the state’s only majority-Black district in Memphis.

BREAKING … Court Halts Trump Ballroom

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals halted Trump’s vanity ballroom project in a ruling just out:

We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.

The ruling was 2-1, with Judges Patricia Millett (Obama) and Bradley Garcia (Biden) in the majority and Neomi Rao (Trump) in dissent.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Blanche nomination: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced early this morning that she’s a “No” on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general: “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.” I want to very careful not to pump this up into a suspense-filled drama because the GOP conference is usually very strategic about parceling out the “No” votes to vulnerable or marginal members without jeopardizing the final vote — but Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is thought to be the only remaining holdout and the final vote Blanche needs to win confirmation. Late Update: Cassidy just announced his support for Blanche’s nomination on the Senate floor.
• IRS immunity: A revised legal challenge to the unprecedentedly corrupt “settlement” of Trump’s IRS lawsuit — which is what’s nearly sunk the Blanche nomination — is now also targeting the gift of IRS immunity that Blanche gave Trump. The case in the Eastern District of Virginia spearheaded by the Democracy Forward Foundation had already succeeded in winning a preliminary injunction in June blocking the “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Yesterday, DFF filed an amended complaint seeking to block Blanche’s order granting Trump immunity from the IRS.
• Reflecting Pool: The bogus vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn was officially dismissed by the judge yesterday, but he punted on the question of whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice until he receives additional briefing from the parties and holds a hearing. He also held off ruling on Hearn’s alternative request for access to the grand jury materials that could potentially make D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro squirm even more than she already is. Stay tuned on this one.

Headline of the Day

Politico: Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote

Paul Threatens Nom Over ICE Shootings

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is threatening to hold up the confirmation of Lance Schroyer to lead ICE unless he gets more information about the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Worth noting that Paul has multiple interests here. Schroyer, an Oklahoman who led the security detail of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin when he was a senator, is Mullin’s pick for the job. Mullin is a well-known Paul nemesis.

Trump Orders New Leak Probe

Embarrassed by news reports of U.S. munitions shortages, President Trump has ordered another leak investigation, the WSJ reports. His previous reactive leak probes have immediately focused on journalists and pushed the bounds of the law and the First Amendment. Stay tuned …

Trump Avoids Giving Financial Info to BBC

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Miami granted the president’s emergency motion to delay having to turn over his financial information to the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. To avoid implicating his own finances, Trump wants to amend his lawsuit, and the judge found it to be a “compelling argument” that the new lawsuit may moot the BBC’s need for the financial information.

New Lawless Birthright Citizenship EOs

Despite losing on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court less than six weeks ago, President Trump rolled out two new executive orders that, taken together, run afoul of the high court’s recent decision.

U.S. Intel: Putin Could Provoke NATO

The steady drumbeat of warnings like this from Europe and from here at home continues, according the WSJ:

The U.S. had previously assessed that Putin wouldn’t provoke a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country while he is still fighting in Ukraine. But that assessment changed earlier this year, the U.S. officials said, as Putin is squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home to secure a victory.

If Putin is going to do this, I don’t see why the optimum timing for him would not be between now and the end of Trump’s term, when official U.S. resistance will be at its lowest ebb since NATO was formed — and that’s roughly the same period U.S. intel is most concerned about: “The time frame for any move by Russia is estimated to happen between this fall and 2029, according to the U.S. intelligence assessments.”

Help Us Wrap Up the Journo Fund Drive!

With a big final push, we can hit the $500,000 mark in our annual drive for the TPM Journalism Fund — and I won’t have to keep pitching you into next week. Let’s get ‘er done!

See Ya Monday

Before Elvis … before Willie … before the Pet Shop Boys … Gwen McCrae was the first to release “Always on My Mind“:

In case you missed it last week, I created a couple of Morning Memo playlists of the music I’ve shared: Spotify and Youtube.

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

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said he will support Todd Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General in a Senate floor speech Friday morning, effectively guaranteeing Blanche’s confirmation. 

“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this,” Cassidy said. “But the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche. It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump and who indeed may not be as good as Mr. Blanche. This puts at risk the progress made fighting violent crime, human and drug trafficking and fraud, and this does not serve the American people well.”

I mentioned this in my morning post today, but one of the weirdest, Trumpiest, vehemently anti-immigrant and scandal-plagued members of Congress lost a primary yesterday. Goodbye Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN). Those seeking to pass legislation denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani or giving Trump a third term will have to find another congressional champion.

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

With a potential midterm wipeout just three months away, Republicans have been recycling past conspiracy theories to an epic extent, mining the greatest hits of a decade of paranoid plots both to please the president and to invoke memories of the “good old days.” 

From the Senate’s contentious hearings that saw Dr. Anthony Fauci grilled with lockdown-era conspiracy theories to President Trump’s continued evocation that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are both replaying the past and actively rewriting it, trying to distract their voters from current crises and rally them around Trump’s brand one last time.

It’s impossible to look at the run-up to the 2026 midterms without examining the repackaging and reuse of the conspiracy theories that got us here. The midterms might be the last chance we see some of them used with any real efficacy, and nobody is missing their shot.

Russ Vought’s Power Play Sows Legal Chaos for Administration

Last month, the New York Times reported that the administration confessed, in federal court, to having blocked grants in October 2025 for clean energy projects in blue states simply because they voted against president Trump.

TPM discovered that the administration has in fact conceded this point in court multiple times.

Our story, by Emine Yücel and Josh Kovensky, does a few things. First, it notes that a negotiations tactic deployed by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought during the government shutdown last year — declaring that he was withholding grant funding to blue states in an effort to exert leverage over Democrats in Congress — has backfired, with the administration’s lawyers forced to make damaging admissions before judges and, in two cases, ultimately losing their case and being ordered to restore the grants.

Second, we know that the Trump administration regularly withholds funds to blue states, sometimes mustering an excuse about why it’s doing so — vague claims of “fraud,” perhaps. But while talk is cheap, our story shows that in court, DOJ lawyers were not able to muster a fig leaf for these October 2025 grant denials. They were, simply, political.

Third, our story shows that these concessions were made as part of an effort by administration lawyers to avoid discovery, which raises the question of why the administration was willing to go to these lengths to avoid discovery. What emails were sent, and what discussions were had, within the White House as these grants were withheld that lawyers hoped to keep out of the record?

There are big elements of this story still to come.

• First, the Trump administration has proposed a new rule to make it so that political appointees have final review over grants, and that grants can be more easily terminated, making standard the kind of control the administration has exercised over federal funding since the days of DOGE — and continuing through the example of the October 2025 grants that formed the core of Emine and Josh’s story. This assault on the separation of powers and federalism has led to urgent warnings, particularly from the scientific community, where researchers say it could decimate the U.S.’s advantage.
• As Emine wrote earlier this week, the Senate has for now proposed a temporary halt to this rule, which Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the appropriations committee and in a tight reelection fight in Maine, is touting as her work. Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the committee, said Republicans would not support a more fulsome ban on the rule. A fight over this legislation, which is part of a Senate effort to fund the government through December, will ensue when members return in September.
• We may also get some insight into what the administration was hiding as it sought to avoid discovery. This could come from the continuing, ongoing lawsuits in this space, from other litigation, from congressional oversight by a future Democrat-controlled legislature, or another avenue.
• In the meantime, there is a nascent effort in the House to impeach Vought over his October 2025 decision to withhold these grants.

Trump Comes for Birthright Citizenship Again

Trump is taking another run at restricting birthright citizenship through executive order.

• He signed EOs Thursday specifically targeting the children of parents deemed to be an “alien enemy” — a concept that has become a favorite of this administration — and purporting to end “birth tourism.”
• Targeting alien enemies plays on an idea that the administration has sought to get great mileage out of: that immigrants within the U.S. are actually representatives of an invading army.
• This justification was core to early administration efforts to render Venezuelan men to a Salvadoran prison camp, and to its attempts to send the National Guard and the military into American cities. Both encountered skepticism at the Supreme Court.
• The “birth tourism” thing loomed large during Supreme Court oral arguments for Trump’s last executive order on birthright citizenship. Justice Samuel Alito in particular latched onto it. Despite the insistence of right-wing media that there is a booming industry of foreigners coming to the U.S. to have their kids, the Washington Post notes data showing that “in 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”

Tabs

• Trump has ordered a leak probe into reports that munitions were running low amid the Iran War, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Will Sommer has a fascinating look in the Bulwark at a group of right-wingers who feel burned by the Trump administration and who are mulling establishing a third party. They include Tucker Carlson, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie, and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. Carlson seems perhaps the most invested in the project, and recently gave a long speech describing the ideas such a party should push.

Man of the Hour

Anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, scandal-plagued and performative pro-Trump representative Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) lost his primary fight last night to former state agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher. Hatcher won roughly 53% of the vote.

Are We at War?

Yes. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who gets it, accused Trump in a speech yesterday of “gaslighting” Americans on this topic. “The essential gaslight,” he said, “is that the war is about to end. Don’t worry. Yet it appears that there is no end.”

Census Bureau officials last Sunday conceded that a new rule banning certain privacy protection methods will make it impossible for the agency to publish data that it has historically released, a development that could especially harm minority groups. Representatives of the bureau, however, denied that the policy change had political objectives, though experts and advocacy groups believe it does.

President Trump and other Republicans have been struggling to land on any sort of uniform messaging as they seek, ahead of the midterms, to spin their recent legislative effort as making life more affordable for working class Americans when it has, in fact, largely done the opposite. This is, in part, because Trump has forced congressional Republicans to spend time tending to his election fraud delusions rather than using their trifecta to move legislation: he refused to sign a bipartisan bill aimed at increasing housing supply as he tried to force Republicans to pass the impassable-in-the-Senate SAVE Act, for example.

I just finished recording an episode of The TPM Social Club with Josh Kovensky. We had an awesome conversation with Jake Bittle about the state of the Colorado River, which unfortunately is vanishing. That episode will drop tomorrow and we hope you’ll check it out.

While we were recording, I noticed a notification from Slack: We had just published a major investigation showing how the Trump administration had repeatedly admitted in court to withholding grant money from blue states simply because they voted blue — a shocking thing to put in writing in a legal dispute. The authors of that story were Emine Yücel and my trusty co-host, Josh — although that doesn’t mean I knew it was imminent. 

The New York Times has a piece today with the title “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Specifically it’s about the centrist pressure group Third Way and a plan with a budget of $15 million to, as the group’s president Jonathan Cowan puts it, “prepar[e] for the next war that is coming.” I’ll note that during the first two years of the Biden administration Third Way was notably and consistently supportive of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. It was a sign of the remarkable party unity that allowed Biden to push through a remarkably progressive agenda with a tied senate. I’ll also note that you place an article like this because you want to show the people who gave you the $15 million that you mean business. So talk of “going to war” is sort of what you want to show them.

That said, this is remarkably ill-conceived and a misunderstanding of the current moment.

Michigan election officials oversaw primary elections this week and also dealt with the Trump administration sending federal elections monitors to oversee polling sites in three blue municipalities — one of which Trump has repeatedly targeted with his election conspiracy theories. 

While the Justice Department, under Democratic and Republican administrations, does regularly send election monitors to observe voting in Michigan and other states, the decision to send DOJ monitors to key polling sites in Michigan was suspect given this DOJ’s focus on investigating Trump’s election conspiracy theories. And, although, as election officials have noted, the presence of federal monitors in Detroit, Lansing, East Lansing, and Hamtramck was uneventful — their presence did still stir up fear and unease, election officials said. 

“The fact that the DOJ felt it was necessary in the first place, it served to cast doubt,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Votebeat. “Now, tomorrow, they can speak with authority having been here — is that going to lend credit to future claims, even when they’re nonsense?”

It is, of course, no coincidence that the administration sent federal monitors to oversee elections in parts of Michigan where voters typically elect Democrats in an important battleground state that has previously been ground zero for 2020 election conspiracy theories. It’s just one of many ways that the Trump administration has tried to exert control over election administration and sow seeds of doubt in the election system. 

Back in June, as my colleague Josh Kovensky reported, DOJ Voting Section Deputy Chief Timothy Mellett wrote in a letter to Detroit officials that voting monitors that were present in 2024 identified voting concerns related to allegedly long voting lines caused by a lack of provisional ballots. This is something that Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey disputes.

Mellet sent similar letters to officials in Lansing and East Lansing as well.

In response to the letter sent to Detroit, Winfrey said that the DOJ had drawn a “baseless conclusion that then becomes the pretext for additional monitoring of Detroit elections,” and that Mellet’s claims “are not a valid pretext for increasing monitoring in Detroit.”

“Michigan law provides not only a variety of ways to vote, but also plenty of opportunities to get involved in the election process,” Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel wrote in response to the DOJ’s letter last month. 

“The law even provides parameters for federal and congressional poll monitors. We encourage everyone to participate and see for themselves how secure and fair our elections are – but make no mistake, my office stands ready to hold accountable those who attempt to unlawfully interfere with or intimidate Michigan election workers,” she added. 

Nevertheless, the monitors were present at several polling places during Tuesday’s primary election and no issues have been reported by the DOJ thus far. But that did not stop President Trump from immediately promoting conspiracy theories about how the vote was counted in Detroit in the wake of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory. 

“Wayne County (Detroit) in Michigan is one of the most corrupt voting areas in the United States, if not the World. It is strictly Third World! Miracles happen in Wayne County, including more votes being cast than there are voters, by a lot,” he wrote in a Truth Social post Wednesday. 

As always, there’s lots more to unpack this week. Let’s dig in.

Two More Losses for the DOJ’s Campaign to Seize Voter Data

Yes, the DOJ has been handed two more losses in its failing campaign to seize sensitive voter data from the states. Last week, the DOJ earned its 19th loss to date (with zero wins) after a federal judge dismissed a case against Illinois with prejudice. Days later, it was handed its 20th loss after a federal judge similarly dismissed a case against Colorado. 

Like the many other judges in the cases before him have concluded, U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless ruled that the federal government is simply not entitled to the state’s sensitive voter data, which includes Social Security and driver’s license numbers. 

For many many months now, the DOJ has been demanding that at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. hand over sensitive voter roll data. The DOJ has been relying on provisions in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) to make its (very weak) case. 

Lawless pointed out in his ruling that the CRA does not entitle the federal government to this type of information. 

“…,the Court finds Title III does not provide the Attorney General with the authority to compel production of the unredacted voter registration list, and the written demand was deficient as a matter of law,” he wrote. 

“Dismissal is additionally warranted because the Attorney General’s written demand did not include both a sufficient basis and legitimate purpose for requesting the unredacted voter registration list,” he added.  

Then, early this week, U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer, also ruled that the state’s unredacted voter rolls are not something the federal government is entitled to and also pointed out the administration never provided a “basis” for its request. 

Voters Incorrectly Flagged As Potential Noncitizens in Texas

Over 2,000 voters were recently incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens in Texas. The Secretary of State’s office is now directing election officials to reinstate the voters that it had incorrectly flagged as ineligible, Votebeat reported. 

Per Votebeat, the state elections director, Christina Adkins, confirmed the citizenship status of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential being noncitizens. Adkins, however, did not confirm how many of the 2,724 voters flagged provided proof of citizenship to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Yikes. So, how does such a mistake happen?

The voters were flagged after the state put its voter rolls through the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which has recently been used by the Trump administration to purge supposed noncitizens from the voter rolls. The system, however, which was originally developed as an immigration tool to verify immigration status of people applying for certain governmental benefits, is known to be unreliable. 

So, it’s no surprise that a mistake like this happened and the whole episode helps bolster the case for why the database that the Department of Homeland Security is trying to force states to run their voter rolls through is not effective. 

Votebeat reported that we don’t know exactly how many voter registrations have been canceled in total. Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Official, made the following statement to Votebeat: “Counties are following appropriate list maintenance procedures under Texas law, and will ensure eligible voters whose registrations were cancelled are reinstated, and that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls.” 

In Other Election News:

TPM: Missouri Republicans Count on Foot Dragging to Help Jam Through Gerrymander

NBC News: Democrats put redistricting amendment on Maryland’s midterm ballot

The New York Times: For Trump, the Year Is Always 2020

Late last year, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials agreed to make a surprisingly damaging but until-recently little-noticed admission in court: the Trump administration had cancelled several grants worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars largely because the money was slated to be sent to states that did not support the president in the last election. 

“A primary reason” for withholding the funds in question was that “the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State,’” the DOJ wrote in a December 2025 court filing called a stipulation, an agreement entered into by the parties involved in a lawsuit agreeing to certain facts. 

A review by TPM identified multiple other instances of the administration making the same concession in court. One, from July, was recently covered by the New York Times; TPM found other examples of the same concession, documenting that the administration’s lawyers have been open for several months now about having withheld money in part or entirely to punish the president’s perceived political enemies.

The Trump Retribution Feedback Loop

The targeting of Anthony Fauci stands as a textbook case of retribution by the Trump administration using, in tandem with Republicans on Capitol Hill, what has become a well-worn and ruthless feedback loop that has ensnared other former officials and targets of the president’s ire.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted this morning to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for having invoked his 5th Amendment rights not to testify at last week’s witch hunt of a hearing.

At least two Senate committees are actively going after Fauci.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed last night that he had obtained Fauci’s COVID-era phone from the Department of Health and Human Services, Fauci’s former government employer, which left Republicans salivating that they had another motherlode of fodder to stoke the fires against Fauci.

HHS has previously released Fauci’s diary to Congress, without having notified him. If you needed reminding, HHS is led by chronic Fauci critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote the 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”

But all of that is clearly not enough piling on Fauci in the current environment.

Attorneys general in Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia seized on the Fauci diary as a pretext to launch their own investigations of him. The three red-state AGs announced yesterday that they had subpoenaed Fauci for a wide range of records tied to grant money, awards and book deals, and other evidence of what they alleged was potential self-dealing by Fauci. It was primarily an opportunity to further smear Fauci by press release and jump on the bandwagon with Republicans in Washington.

This particular pattern of retribution is chillingly familiar: The Trump administration releases government documents (and diaries and phones) to Republican allies on the Hill who in turn often leak the information to the right-wing media apparatus. The resulting MAGA firestorm leads to GOP-run hearings on the Hill, which serve as opportunities to entrap witnesses and prompt criminal referrals to the Trump DOJ.

It was puzzling to see otherwise smart and respected people dumping on Fauci last week for taking the 5th when this pattern had just played out in the House with former Special Counsel Jack Smith less than a week before. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan dragged Smith in to testify about his two historic investigations of Trump and then ginned up a bogus claim of perjury that he referred to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. James Comey and John Brennan have had their turns in the grinder, too, under similar though not identical circumstances.

Fauci has the advantage of a preemptive pardon from President Biden, which should in theory at least shield him from Trump DOJ persecution for alleged acts that predate the pardon. But testifying in a perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who chairs HSGAC, would have been post-pardon conduct and left him potentially exposed in the same way Smith is. Still, his refusal to testify sets him up for a potential contempt of Congress prosecution. No way out. Tails I win, heads you lose.

If you don’t see the broad pattern of persecution and the mechanics of the retribution feedback loop — and deeply cynical bad faith fueling it all — you can fall into precious arguments over the limits of 5th Amendment rights or the bounds of congressional power or other curiosities while entirely missing the forest for the trees.

We are witnessing a stunning abuse of power by the executive branch and a pliant legislative branch that they have together refined and systematized into a grinder that chews up and spits out Trump foes as a means of retribution and for the sheer spectacle of it. That is the real story here. Not the Wuhan lab or COVID policy or whatever other ostensible underlying issue is the pretext for feeding Trump foes into his vengeance machine.

Neutering the Watchdogs at DOJ

Within the Trump DOJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General have lost significant percentages of their staffs and seen investigations plummet under Trump II, Reuters reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE has threatened to seek criminal witness tampering charges against the elected county sheriffs in Minneapolis and Chicago for refusing to hand over inmates.
• Airlines are pushing back against ICE enforcement operations on airplanes and jet bridges.
• DOJ cites the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision to shield DOJ official Aakash Singh from scrutiny in the Broadview 6 case.

The Destruction: EPA Edition

Remember the $20 billion in grants that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze and tried to claw back in the early days of Trump II — with help from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who tried to turn it into a criminal case, prompting the resignation of a senior career prosecutor?

I know. It was a long time ago, and these things are hard to keep track of. Which is partly the point. The grant recipients have been in limbo ever since, forced in some cases to lay off workers because the EPA funds were not available, which is also part of the point.

After winning a preliminary injunction at the district court level in April 2025, the grant recipients have finally won on appeal to the full D.C. Circuit and will now be able to access the funds. The appeals court divided 6-4 in a convoluted per curiam decision that upheld the preliminary injunction.

The Corruption: WTF? Edition

Jennifer Mascott, a Trump appointee to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, continued to run the D.C. public relations firm she inherited from her late husband for at least six months after she was confirmed as a judge in October 2025, Politico reports.

Hoisted on His Own Petard

The BBC seems only too happy to use President Trump’s defamation suit against it to explore his finances — and Trump is now scrambling to avoid a court-ordered deadline of today to turn over details on his business empire to the broadcaster.

In a related move, Trump is seeking to amend his lawsuit — over how the broadcaster spliced together portions of his Jan. 6 speech on The Ellipse — to remove the language that put his finances in play in discovery in the first place.

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

Jon Cohn has a good piece in The Bulwark on the challenges ahead for Abdul El-Sayed. The “brutal path ahead,” Jon calls it. I’ll note here that Jon is based in Michigan, despite beginning his journalism career in the East Coast cities where most political journalists are based. (In other words, his report isn’t based on parachuting into the state for a few weeks.) He notes the two, equally accurate narratives coming out of this primary battle. El-Sayed built a potent and victorious movement. Sanders-style progressive Democrats seldom win these contests in purple states. El-Sayed did. And he did it in the face of concerted opposition from the state’s Democratic establishment, the national establishment and an ocean of outside money, mostly from AIPAC.

It’s also true that Republicans will now run a viciously Islamophobic campaign against him, which will get extra traction from his association with the willfully inflammatory Hasan Piker. There’s another dynamic we’ve seen across numerous establishment-progressive battles. The Platner campaign pitched itself as appealing to working class or at least culturally working class voters who are usually unreachable by Democrats. But the polling showed that the demographic profile of Platner’s supporters looked pretty similar to what most Democrats have gotten over the last couple decades, and especially since Trump — the educated and affluent. The loose outlines of El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan look similar. Both make a pitch about young voters but they tend to appeal most to educated and downwardly mobile voters — so again, another version of standard early 21st century Democratic coalition.

Introducing America to ‘Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed’

It’s not at all surprising, but it was nonetheless quick: With the Michigan Democratic primary over, Republicans are trying to reap whatever they can from drawing an opponent in a crucial state for Senate control who has a foreign-sounding name.

“I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” said his opponent, Mike Rogers, in a statement. “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”

It’s unclear where exactly Rogers hunted terrorists — though he served in the military in the ’80s, he was in Congress in the years after 9/11. Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, not El-Sayed, said America “deserved 9/11” before apologizing.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee made a point of calling him by his full name, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” and put out a statement by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) claiming El-Sayed supports “terrorist organizations.” “An alliance of communists and Islamists is taking control of the Democrat party,” the Senate Republican Conference posted on social media.

In an interview last night with MS Now, El-Sayed was asked directly about the attacks and offered an optimistic take on the electorate. “Of course, he’s going to do the same thing that MAGA always does, which is try to divide us,” he said of Rogers.

“I know that Michiganders are open-minded,” he continued. “They’re big-hearted. They’re less interested in how you pray than what you pray for. And we all pray for the same things. We want what’s good for our kids and our families. We want clean air, clean water, healthcare we can afford.

“So they’re going to use Islamophobia because their ideas are tired, their economy sucks. They’re taking us to a war we shouldn’t fight. And we have an opportunity to actually focus on bringing us together.”

As Nicole LaFond noted last night and Khaya Himmelman will have more on today, another predictable aspect of the GOP’s response to Tuesday’s election has been to undermine its validity. As much as the election denial-tinged freakout around California seemed half-baked — did reality star turned Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt ever really have a path? — the Michigan discourse on the right is transparently aimed not at any particular outcome (it’s a primary contest between Democrats, after all) but more broadly at sowing distrust. “Anyone want to bet that when the mail in ballots come in in Michigan there will be a HUGE surge for Haley Stevens?” Sean Spicer said in one representative social media post echoing the president. It was an assertion that Democrats somehow manipulate elections to reach their preferred outcomes, a necessary conspiracy theory to breathe life into ahead of whatever Trump may try in November.

One of the Weirdest, Loudest Members of Congress Faces a Primary Challenge

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) — who you may know for his legislation seeking to denaturalize and deport New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or for his lies about a six-figure personal loan to his campaign that drew comparisons with George Santos, or as the man seeking to amend the Constitution so Trump (but not Barack Obama) can run for a third term — is facing a primary challenge today.

• Former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher (R) has raised more money than Ogles and has the endorsement of Governor Bill Lee (R), The Downballot reports. Ogles has Trump’s endorsement.
• There is scant polling of the race, but Ogles seems to have a small lead.
• Trump’s subservient Department of Justice did Ogles a favor, too: Immediately before a new gerrymander of the state — primarily seeking to deny Black voters the ability to pick their own candidate, but also drawing Ogles a largely new district with a different electorate — it said it would drop an investigation into whether he committed campaign finance fraud and return or destroy the evidence it had collected.

Tabs

• Perhaps surprisingly, the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are projected to fall — not, of course, because of anything the federal government is doing, but due to increased reliance on cleaner (if not always entirely clean) fuels.
• Trump speaks often with his new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, the Wall Street Journal reports — an encroachment on the Fed’s independence.

Man of the Hour

It’s Tom Smith, who won his primary race in Michigan despite having suspended his campaign in July; Trump’s preferred candidate, Amir Hassan, came in second. The candidate Smith endorsed, Al Lemmo, came in third. Lemmo speculated to the New York Times that Smith won because of his “plain-Jane American name.”

Are We at War?

Yes, and Trump is mad that we’re running out of munitions. And mad that we know he’s mad that we’re running out of munitions.

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

For most of human history, trying to identify an oligarchy has been difficult. Part of that has to do with the definition of the term “oligarchy” in the first place. Aristotle first popularized the word thousands of years ago, pointing out that an oligarchy — which literally means “rule of the few” — is indeed all about a small number of individuals steering a given country, nation, or empire. But even then, Aristotle added, it wasn’t just about the number of individuals that mattered, but also about how much wealth they controlled. In order to have an oligarchy, a state had to be run not just by the few, but by the wealthiest few. 

The other part that’s made “oligarchy” such a tricky thing to define is that, for centuries, oligarchic figures tended to operate out of sight, or by playing down their impact on politics. Not always, necessarily; the so-called “robber barons” of the Gilded Age — oligarchs by another name — were front and center in American society in the late 19th and early 20th century. But by and large, oligarchs tended to downplay their influence, and even their wealth. Since they could operate as the powers behind the throne, they tended to keep themselves (and their wealth) out of the spotlight, making it even trickier to nail down who an oligarch actually is, or what oligarchy looks like when it’s taken over a democracy. 

Those two factors — the difficulties in defining “oligarchy,” and the struggles in identifying oligarchs themselves — made analyzing the topic, let alone writing a book about it, an uphill battle. 

And then, in January 2025, all of that changed. Because there, in the U.S. Capitol, as President Donald Trump once more swore the oath of office for the presidency, stood a suite of men, just off to the side, all standing in a row. They looked out over the audience, smiling in their suits. In that moment, those figures — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a small number of others — made oligarchy impossible to miss. Looking out at a man they’d propelled back to office — at a man who would usher in not only the most corrupt administration in American history, but who is himself oligarchy made flesh — they forced Americans to an inescapable realization. We’d once, as a country, had a Gilded Age. But now, with more wealth inequality than ever prior, and with more power concentrated in the hands of a small number of select men, we have something else: the Age of Oligarchy. 

In the wake of now-Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory over the Democratic establishment-backed candidate Rep. Haley Stevens in Tuesday’s primary, President Trump is back to his old ways, giving a platform to MAGA conspiracy theories about how Detroit runs its elections.

Missouri Republicans have been transparent about their strategy to drag out the response to a challenge to their new 7-1 congressional map, with state Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) saying publicly during a radio interview earlier this year that “delay works in our favor.” 

Saga Not Over Yet

While most of the reflecting pool coverage focuses on the reality TV-style palace intrigue among the ridiculous personas of Donald Trump, Jeanine Pirro, and Doug Burgum, pay attention to how hard the former criminal defendants in the now-dismissed “vandalism” cases push for court-ordered consequences for the misbegotten prosecutions.

As a first step, attorneys for David Hearn are asking a judge to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would keep Pirro from recharging him later. Pirro has sought to dismiss the charges without prejudice and keep her options open.

They take particular exception to Pirro’s claims that prosecutors were not aware of the fatal flaws in their case until shortly before they moved to dismiss the case. They provide a timeline of what prosecutors learned as the case unfolded that challenges the sequence of events Pirro provided the court in her motion to dismiss.

As Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler notes, Hearn’s counsel also suggested to the judge in the latest filing that the court could still revisit their pending request for the grand jury materials — or review them in chambers.

There are also three other similar cases Pirro is trying to dismiss, as she tries to point the finger at Burgum and the Interior Department, save her job, and avoid court-ordered sanctions or ethics reviews.

And yet … I realize the palace intrigue has some appeal, so here you go:

• NYT: Inside the Oval Office Showdown Between Trump and Jeanine Pirro
• Politico: Jeanine Pirro struggles to give Trump the wins he craves the most
• WSJ: Pirro’s About-Face in Pool Case Followed Prosecutors’ Private Concerns

The Toll on the Federal Judiciary

U.S. District Judge John McConnell, the chief judge in Rhode Island, goes on the record about the numerous threats he’s faced after issuing several important rulings adverse to the Trump administration.

McConnell was among the judges to have received unrequested pizza deliveries, as a way a warning “We know where you live.” In his case, the name on the pizza order was Daniel Anderl, the slain son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, who was killed by a disgruntled lawyer in an attack at the judge’s New Jersey home.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, reluctantly granting the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy indictment against eight members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, including Stewart Rhodes, all of whom were convicted but later had their sentences commuted by President Trump:

This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed. Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle. The court cannot write a different ending.

Profile in Courage Ducking for Cover

Facing a tough re-election in a key Senate race, Maine Sen. Susan Collins is being given cover by Senate Republicans to vote against the nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general. She didn’t announce her opposition until after Blanche cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. With two senators still officially undecided, there remains some faux drama around the confirmation, but Collins getting a get-out-of-jail-free card confirms where this is headed.

2026 Midterms Watch

• Michigan-Senate: In a nail-biter that pre-election polling did a poor job of picking up on, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed eked past Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary. The race was too close to call for much of the night, but the AP has now declared the race for El-Sayed, who hold a 49-48 lead with 99% of the votes counted.
• Missouri-01: In a rematch of the 2024 Democratic primary, Rep. Wesley Bell defeated former Rep. Cori Bush.
• Virginia-05: Former Rep. Tom Perriello (D) won the Democratic primary to challenge incumbent Rep. John McGuire (R).

House GOP Scandal Update

• Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) has dropped his re-election bid in the aftermath of a cringey-as-hell House Ethics Committee report with excruciating details about his awkward and uncomfortable behavior toward two young women staffers in his office.

• Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), who has been accused of abusive behavior by multiple women, including his ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), went on CNN to defend himself in an extended interview with Jake Tapper and, oh boy:

The Antisemitism Is Ubiquitous

TPM’s Hunter Walker: Colorado Republicans Attack Jewish Gov Candidate With AI ‘Cartoon Devil Horns’ Graphic 

Make America Wipe Again

From a NYT Mag profile of Dr. Sean O’Mara, whose dietary recommendations have been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:

“When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

I just can’t with this.

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Three Republicans were running in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary. Trump in June endorsed Amir Hassan, a Navy Veteran, former Guantánamo guard, and Department of Homeland Security official. Hassan was up against Thomas Smith, a retired engineer, and Al Lemmo, an anti-abortion activist. In July, Smith suspended his campaign and endorsed Lemmo, who had decried Hassan as a “possible Trojan Horse candidate and lifelong Democrat.”

On Tuesday, Smith, who was no longer running, won a pretty clean victory over his Trump-endorsed former opponent.

Progressive Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), the pick of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).