This probably won’t get the attention or, frankly, outrage that it deserves because it’s kind of technical. But it’s stunning and a ‘Caligula making his horse a senator’ kind of craziness, as revealed in a new report from The Washington Post.
The US is in the process of transitioning from the Nimitz class to Ford class aircraft carriers. The USS Ford is already in service. I think one other Ford class ship is in the testing phase. (For clarity, the class of ship takes its name from the first shape in production. So there’s a USS Ford and then a Ford ‘class’ of ships which follow the same design.) The tower on the Ford class ships is swept toward the back of the ship. That has some safety advantages but it also creates a much longer launch and storage area. President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult operator who told him the old kind was better.
Political labels are increasingly meaningless. As Josh Marshall has been writing, fewer people these days are inclined to identify as “centrist” or “moderate.” So-called independent voters often espouse wildly incoherent views (see: those insane-making New York Times voter surveys). Donald Trump even accused Joe Biden of being a socialist.
As we’ve seen in this year’s primary contests, there’s also a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States. Commenting on a Wisconsin gubernatorial field that included DSA-backed state lawmaker Francesca Hong and the election-denying congressman Tom Tiffany, University of Wisconsin professor Mark Copelovitch noted, “The @nytimes hasn’t written a single article asking if ‘voters will think Tom Tiffany is too radical’ because he is an election-denying, pro-ICE, authoritarian extremist. Somehow, his position on the political spectrum has disappeared completely from the National and State Conversations.” After Hong lost her bid by just 3,000 votes, the New York Times ran a piece headlined “A Stunning Loss in Wisconsin Shows the Limits of the Left” and declaring it a possibility that “the democratic socialist wave cannot reach beyond urban centers.” (The Wall Street Journal, Politico and Axios were similarly quick to diagnose Hong’s loss as a terminal failure of the “far left,” with CNN even declaring, “Democratic establishment roars back.” Tiffany, meanwhile, won his race. The Times headline: Tom Tiffany Wins Wisconsin’s Republican Primary for Governor.)
Below, we take a look at some of the policies proposed by 2026 primary candidates in the “far right” camp versus those coming from candidates who’ve been labeled “far left.” Some of these things are not like the others.
On immigration
Candidate: Darializa Avila Chevalier, Democratic nominee to represent New York’s 13th Congressional District
The immigration proposals on Avila Chevalier’s campaign website include calls to mandate free legal representation for immigrants — an issue that several states are currently working to address, as TPM has reported. She also promises to fight to ”abolish ICE and the deportation machine,” which some 48% of Americans want to do, according to a July YouGov poll.
Candidate: Mike Collins, Republican Senate nominee in Georgia
Collins sponsored the first piece of legislation that Trump signed in his second term: the Laken Riley Act, which targets undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation. He also sponsored a bill to end birthright citizenship.
On reproductive rights
Candidate: Francesca Hong, Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin
Among a lengthy list of policy priorities, Hong, who lost her bid on Aug. 11, advocated for enshrining reproductive rights into Wisconsin’s constitution and for providing universal childcare and paid leave programs to allow people to access reproductive care.
Candidate: James Fishback, Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida
Fishback’s campaign website credits him for recognizing “what too few establishment Republicans are willing to say: life begins at conception and abortion is murder.” The candidate pledges to shut down Florida’s remaining 53 abortion clinics (legality of that TBD!) and replace them with crisis pregnancy centers because “abortion is never the answer.” He’ll also establish paid maternity leave, since “welcoming a child into the world is one of the most important things a family can do.” Generous.
On taxes
Candidate: Donovan McKinney, Democratic nominee to represent Michigan’s 13th congressional district
The Michigan lawmaker and DSA member’s campaign site is a bit thin on details, but he proposes raising taxes on billionaires and corporations in order to “fund crucial investments our community needs for housing, education, clean air & water, fair paying jobs and healthcare.” He also endorses a universal basic income.
Candidate: Mike Lindell, Republican gubernatorial nominee in Minnesota
Better known as “the MyPillow Guy,” Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Lindell proposes eliminating Minnesota’s in-person retail sales tax “so working families, small businesses, farmers, and retirees can keep more of what they earn.” Lindell lost his bid on Aug. 11.
On national security
Candidate: Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan
El-Sayed’s support for Palestine and opposition to funding Israel’s military was one of the defining issues of the Michigan Senate primary. On his campaign website, he calls for a “sensible foreign policy,” which includes ending the war in Iran; ending the “warlike pathway that the foreign policy establishment has pursued with China”; imposing an arms embargo on Israel; reinvesting in foreign aid; reengaging with international bodies like the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement; and “spending our taxpayer dollars here at home” rather than on funding foreign militaries.
Candidate: Bo French, Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner
The man tapped by the GOP to help oversee the state’s largest industry (it earned $27 billion last year) has his Day 1 priority set: prohibiting the sale of Texas land to people from Muslim-majority countries because of their purported threat to state security. “America has been at war with Islam since the time of our Independence, and stopping the subversive influence of Islam in Texas by banning all Muslim countries from acquiring land and interfering in Texas Oil and Gas will be my top legislative priority,” French says.
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By Allegra Kirkland
[Report]
Trump Is Trashing the GOP’s Economic Edge
Are voters finally starting to realize they can’t entrust the nation’s economy to a piss-poor businessman whose companies are still failing? Maybe that’s too hopeful a view. But ahead of a 2026 midterm election that will decide not only which party controls the legislative branch of government but the future course of American democracy, several surveys show President Donald Trump’s tanking approval rating comes amid record low sentiment about his handling of the U.S. economy.
For the first time since Trump began to dominate American politics about a decade ago, voters trust Democrats with the economy more than Republicans, per a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken between the end of July and beginning of August. It’s crucial now, as voter dissatisfaction with affordability has catapulted progressive and Democratic Socialist candidates to mayorships and nominations for higher office nationwide. For his part, Trump refuses to acknowledge affordability as an actual problem.
Let’s take a quick look at how this not-actually-sentient being called the economy has been behaving as of late.
The U.S. lost 23,000 jobs in July according to the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the statistical agency also revised its positive jobs numbers from the two months prior down by a cumulative 103,000 positions.
Wednesday’s release of inflation data by the BLS showed a modest 0.1% bump in the consumer price index and might’ve been welcome news for the administration if not for a tandem BLS report finding real wages fell by the same amount price inflation rose. Overall, standing basically stagnant at around 3.4%, the annual inflation rate is stuck above the Fed’s 2% target, and people’s paychecks aren’t keeping pace. Data published at the end of July saw the U.S. GDP grow at 1.5%, representing a soft second quarter and lower-than-expected economic growth.
Trump’s marquee policies of tariffs by any means necessary and a violent mass deportation scheme hurt all of these metrics, economists have repeatedly said.
This is not to say all has been abysmal. The U.S. financial market remains resilient. In spite of Trump’s spasmodic policymaking, the stock market continues to reflect investors’ cautious optimism in AI and whatever else.
The barrage of recent bad financial news started weeks before Trump Media & Technology Group — a large stake of which is held by Trump’s revocable trust — posted $238 million in losses. That’s 1,090% higher than the $20 million in losses the company took last year and contrasts ridiculously with the more than $2 billion Trump and his family earned in the first year of his presidency. Ironically, or perhaps by design, the lionshare of Trump’s 2025 gains came from crypto, as TMTG’s latest deep losses reflect a pivot away from the controversial industry. The data may sound conflicting — alarming economic indicators and unaffordable cost of living versus strong financial markets; an obviously failing business model versus a business owner who just keeps getting richer — but it’s of a piece with Trump’s entire modus operandi.
The efficiency experts at Axios, whom writer Matt Pearce excellently identified as the minds behind the gamified paragraph, claim to have discovered an even better way to read. Advancing the idea that reading any kind of book is hard these days, but reading difficult books is especially hard, one vacationing Axios writer had a breakthrough. While struggling to read the dense prose of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” presumably while rolling about on a beach blanket, the writer decided to ask his chatbot for help. This way after each challenging chapter, he could refer to a “spoiler free” cheat sheet that, and we’re just guessing here, broke the chapter into bullet points and answered the all-important question: “why it matters.”
While Cooper is certainly a choice for vacation reading, it can hardly be a coincidence that the very first paragraph of “The Last of the Mohicans” speaks to the importance of struggle in preparing to handle adversity. If you’re thinking that this message seems to have gone over the head of the Axios writer (and his AI assistant), the writer does document the struggle of getting the AI to provide accurate information about the actual text, the AI having been trained primarily on ancillary data like book and movie reviews. To overcome this adversity, he suggests that those who wish to copy his methods ask their AI to seek out online versions of the book so that they can get more accurate answers about what they are “reading.”
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[Words of Wisdom]
Color Me Reassured
“Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing.” -President Trump on his executive order dictating changes to the childhood vaccine schedule that run counter to guidance from major medical organizations.
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[TPM Trivia]
How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?
Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, advanced to the Republican runoff in South Carolina’s Senate race. Which other candidate advanced along with her?
Donald Trump reportedly plans to spend how much on his White House vanity construction projects: a) $500 million, b) 750 million c) $900 million
Which public-facing member of the Trump administration announced this week that she’d be leaving her role?
Answers below
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[Programming Note]
Help Us Wrap Up the Journalism Fund Drive!
We’re in the final stretch of the annual journalism fund drive, with less than $15,000 of our $500,000 goal to go. You’ve no doubt seen our many pitches for the fund by now, but as a quick recap, your contributions go towards:
Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi drew attention to Emine Yücel and Josh Kovensky’s recent report documenting how the Trump admin is withholding grant money from blue states to punish them. “Federal funding should serve Americans, not Trump’s grudges,” the Illinois Democrat wrote on Bluesky.
The Trump Administration admitted that it canceled federal grants simply because they went to Democratic states. Federal funding should serve Americans, not Trump's grudgeshttps://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-administration-has-repeatedly-confessed-in-court-to-withholding-money-from-blue-states
What If We Kept the Reflecting Pool Saga Going Forever?
You might think the Trump administration would be sick of seeing negative headlines about the botched Reflecting Pool renovations. But the president doesn’t seem willing to let the whole drama go.
Trump was, of course, super mad when U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeannine Pirro dropped the felony case against former Olympian David Hearn, admitting that damage to the pool’s surface was caused by a botched contracting job rather than vandalism. Pirro even hauled boxes of evidence over to the White House to try to explain her decision to Trump in person. Trump himself this week admitted to “some contractor error.”
But now White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider a new misdemeanor prosecution of Hearn, according to a Wall Street Journal report. So strap in for another round of unflattering media coverage of the president’s weaponization of the DOJ and absurd pursuit of expensive vanity projects in the nation’s capital. A real “I’m not owned! I’m not owned!!” moment.
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Trivia answers: 1) Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) 2) $900 million 3) Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
Correction: This story originally noted the incorrect state for which Mike Lindell was the GOP nominee. We apologize for the mistake.
I had a couple conversations today which turned on the role of private equity in today’s economy and the importance of business models that align with a company’s purpose. Both of them were relevant to our soon to be completed drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. In the new episode of the TPM Social Club podcast Joe Ragazzo and TPM head of product Derick Dirmaier talk about the impact of private equity on sports. This involves caricatures of course but I think of Venture Capital and Private Equity as sort of twin players, often with perverse and deleterious effects on the lives of companies, the first on the ascent of the rocket, the second on the descent. Both have had deeply negative impacts on the news and journalism industry. In both cases that’s because scale and market dominance don’t play the same role in the news business as they do for social media or the production of widgets and many other kinds of business. Most require being rooted in the lives of particular communities, often geographical communities, or having a more than transactional relationship with an audience.
It’s 1920, Republicans feel their government trifecta melting away. They’ve decided forcing a constitutional crisis is the only way to maintain that stronghold.
It took chipping away at it by the The Guardian, the New York Times, and others before the Washington Post blew the story wide open yesterday: “The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program.”
According to the WaPo, citing a source with knowledge, “the strikes were part of a ‘covert action’ program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged.”
With the Pentagon denying any knowledge of or involvement with the strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats — one of which remains missing, with its crew presumed lost at sea — suspicion had focused on covert ops, private military contractors, or other Latin American governments as the likely culprits. The WaPo notes that the CIA involvement doesn’t rule out the other potential culprits: “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.”
The crews of the two boats that survived the mystery attacks ended up in El Salvador before being repatriated to Ecuador, the WaPo reports. Both crews reported being “rescued” by a blue boat that may have been involved in the attacks. Most of the men aboard the blue boat spoke English, and wore uniforms with American flag patches, the NYT previously reported.
The program of covert strikes is separate and apart from the Pentagon’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats: “It is unclear why, as the Trump administration touts its military attacks against alleged drug boats, it would engage in a separate clandestine effort targeting vessels, said former U.S. officials who previously worked in the region.”
The WaPo covers similar ground as the NYT piece earlier this week, but adds additional details about the strikes on the Ecuadorian fishing boats and about a mystery aircraft flying out of El Salvador that it identifies as a Cessna Citation Longitude using the call sign “FENIX 701.” (Given its sordid history, the CIA’s use of “Phoenix” in a covert op today is either tone deaf or a deliberate middle finger.)
The plane flew from Tennessee to El Salvador in November, was photographed from the ground and via satellite at El Salvador’s Ilopango International Airport, was tracked in the vicinity of the Ecuadorian fishing boat strikes, and was last detected landing in San Antonio, Texas, in April.
We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
The revelation that the CIA is behind the mystery boat strikes reminds of the conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his podcast The Daily Blast:
I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on [alleged] drug smuggling boats. … I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. … I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.
COINTELPRO II?
It’s going to take some time to expose the full scope and scale of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation into protesters of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. But we got the first glimpse yesterday in a court filing that included internal DHS documents among some of the discovery provided by the government to a group of protesters facing criminal charges.
As TPM’s Josh Kovensky details, the invasiveness of the investigation is striking. In addition to making extensive use of undercover informants, it targeted labor unions and left-leaning groups, including using administrative summons and/or subpoenas to access records of financial transactions by labor unions, in some instances stretching back years before the protests.
As the NYT put it: “As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.”
Mass Deportation Watch
Houston: U.S. attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed that FBI tests didn’t find meth in the van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was fatally shot by ICE last month. The Trump DOJ made public its suspicion that the substance was meth before running any tests in what appeared to be a smear job to come up with an ex post facto political justification for the wrongful shooting.
Tacoma: U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright awarded $5,498 in compensatory sanctions and $11,455 in attorney’s fees to an undocumented immigrant who was wrongfully transferred by ICE outside of her jurisdiction without notice twice, in what she found to be two willful violations of her court orders.
Alien Enemies Act: The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the leading challenge to President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act after the administration deported the three Venezuelan men who originally filed the lawsuit using a different law. That left the case without plaintiffs, and the appeals court refused the request to substitute new plaintiffs who had been targeted under the AEA.
Good Read
TPM’s Emine Yücel: The new OLC memo purporting to expand executive privilege to private advisers to the president is a “devious tactic” to cover up Trump administration corruption ahead of a potential midterm victory for congressional Democrats.
What Happened in the Wisconsin Gov Race?
G. Elliott Morris goes under the hood on a poll that missed big on the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor and concludes that it was the largely result of (i) assuming the electorate would be younger and more progressive than it turned out to be; and (ii) a late move by David Crowley that continued after the last polls were in the field.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
A state judge in Nevada threw out criminal charges over the 2020 fake electors scheme, ruling that Attorney General Aaron Ford “failed to present sufficient evidence from which a reasonable grand jury could infer the requisite intent to defraud.” Ford vowed to appeal.
The New Cold War
WSJ: An Italian fighter jet under NATO auspices shot down a foreign drone that entered Latvian airspace early Friday. Latvia hadn’t determined the drone’s origin but suggested it may have been a Ukrainian drone deflected off course by Russian counter-drone measures.
WaPo: Poland says it thwarted a Russian assassination attempt in Warsaw on an unidentified U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin.
NYT: Inside Russia’s big push to destabilize the Western-leaning government of Moldova.
Just the Pettiest Shit Imaginable
The Trump-appointed board of the beleaguered Kennedy Center voted yesterday to sidestep a federal court order blocking it from renaming the performing arts institution for Donald Trump by:
closing the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations and carving this inscription into the building’s white marble facade, just beneath the marquee with JFK Jr’s name: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump”;
adding another line if an endowment fund named for Trump reaches $100 million: “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
renaming the physical site on which the center stands to “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
See Ya Monday
This is the last weekend of summer for a lot of folks. Make it memorable.
News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.
This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.
This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when Indiana Jones is asked how he intends to single-handedly stop a Nazi caravan he mutters, “I’m making this up as I go.” That improvisational approach by a signature Paramount hero appears to mirror that of the company’s current CEO David Ellison, as he stumbles through a conservative media takeover that feels more like the product of expediency than ideology.
The latest odd wrinkle in Ellison’s serialized pursuit of becoming one of media’s most influential figures — acquiring Paramount through Skydance Media, then engineering a pending $111 billion merger with a much larger studio, Warner Bros. Discovery — emerged this week. Frustrated by the thus-far effective efforts of state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, to delay or even derail the deal, Paramount officials privately floated the prospect of abandoning California if Ellison doesn’t get his way, administering a blow to the state’s economy.
Bonta quickly labeled the not-so-subtle threat “blackmail,” but like many of Ellison’s actions, there’s a sense nobody fully thought the logistics through in terms of relocating and how that would practically work. Since the Skydance deal closed a year ago, Paramount has been defined by chaos, potentially destroying traditional media outlets while cozying up to the Trump administration to secure its regulatory blessing.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) put out a new opinion earlier this week arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.
Experts tell TPM that the legal opinion is likely an effort from the Trump administration and his DOJ to preemptively interfere with congressional investigations that Democrats plan to launch if they manage to take control of one or both chambers after the 2026 midterms.
Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways, what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this doesn’t sound like Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.
I’ve been operating under the assumption that the Trump administration’s interest in cracking down on “fraud” in how states spend federal funding that is dispersed for programs like Medicaid, Medicare and the federal nutrition program SNAP was just another excuse to punish President Trump’s critics and perceived political foes.
Gambling on Some Light Election Denialism In Pennsylvania
Happy Thursday!
The Republican nominee in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race is engaged in a delicate balancing act as she attempts to appeal to President Trump and his base of supporters while also trying to win over undecided voters or those who elected the state’s Democratic incumbent. For a Republican in a swing state in 2026, that means finding your election denialism equilibrium.
Please contribute today to get us over the finish line. Out of $500,000 we needed to raise this year for the TPM Journalism Fund, we have only $27,789 to go. Just 5% more to go. Amazing. We thank you so much. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to contribute this is it. Just click here. Thank you.
Federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents to observe a climate group and into churches, and obtained financial records for labor unions, as they sought to crack down on mass protests in Minneapolis following the Trump administration’s surge of federal officers into the city, attorneys alleged in a new filing.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Earlier this week, Todd Blanche was sworn in as the newest attorney general of the United States. Administering the oath of office to Blanche, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, was another former member of Trump’s legal team: Judge Emil Bove, whom Trump nominated in 2025 to a life-tenured seat on the Third Circuit.
For both Blanche and Bove, the reunion must have been a real treat. Three years ago, they were unknown New York City-area law firm partners taking a long-shot bet on a disgraced ex-president who stood accused of, among other things, sexually assaulting a magazine writer, storing classified government documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, making illegal hush money payments to kill an unflattering news story about his philandering, and trying to fraudulently overturn his loss in the 2020 election in Georgia. (That last list item should not be confused with separate federal charges stemming from Trump’s involvement in efforts to foment a violent insurrection and overthrow the government on January 6.)
Thanks in part to the work of Blanche and Bove, though, none of those cases resulted in meaningful consequences for Trump. And now that he is president again, their respective appointments are best understood as hard-earned rewards for their troubles. After Bove finished conducting Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, the two former colleagues got to hug it out in the Oval Office as their bored-looking benefactor clapped politely.
I noted a few days ago how many of the news stories of the day are knock-on effects of earlier episodes of Trump’s cupidity or grandiosity. Airport Food Truck-Gate goes back to the wildly corrupt and unconstitutional personal gift of a plane; the Reflecting Pool prosecutions go back to his whim and rushed decision to make the bottom of the Reflecting Pool blue and then the way in which he was embarrassed when his no-bid contractors messed it up. I want to return to one aspect of the plane story.
Yes, it’s corrupt, silly, stupid, etc. But Trump got the gift from the royal family of Qatar. Qatar isn’t any gulf state. It’s not UAE or Saudi or Kuwait. Qatar’s regional brand, their niche in the complex geopolitics of the Gulf, is that they’re close to both sides. They host a U.S. military base. They have decent relations with the U.S. They also have close relations with Iran. They were until recently the host of Hamas.
All of a sudden the Justice Department wants to be involved in President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — and it’s gunning to get the judge who imposed sanctions on Trump’s attorneys removed from the case.
After sitting out the IRS case in any official way at the trial court, the Trump DOJ overnight jumped into the appeal of the case by Trump and his co-plaintiffs that challenges the sanctions imposed by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams as punishment for the collusive lawsuit.
The Trump DOJ’s failure to defend the lawsuit — unlike it had in other similar lawsuits for illegal IRS leaks of taxpayer information — was the centerpiece of Judge Williams’ concerns that there was no true adversity between the parties. It’s why she appointed distinguished outside counsel to serve as friends of the court so that she would be able to hear something approximating “the other side” in the case. It was a major factor in her ultimate conclusion that the Trump plaintiffs and Trump administration defendants were all on the same side.
The new DOJ filing at the 11th Circuit was signed only by Trent McCotter, a political appointee only just installed as acting deputy attorney general this week after Todd Blanche was confirmed as attorney general. It was McCotter who earlier this week was upbraided by a federal judge in Brooklyn for his conduct in dropping a criminal fraud prosecution of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.
While it’s been perfectly clear all along whose side the Trump DOJ has been on in the IRS lawsuit, the Justice Department was careful to keep some distance from the case in court. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case. No responsive pleading to the Trump complaint was ever filed. No defense to the Trump lawsuit was ever mounted.
Judge Williams noted all of these irregularities in her order finding that the lawsuit was collusive and imposing sanctions on Trump’s personal lawyers, while referring top DOJ officials Blanche and Stanley Woodward for potential attorney discipline at the state level. It was one of her critical findings in her conclusion that the Trump lawsuit and the resulting “settlement” that created the “anti-weaponization” slush fund and unlawfully granted IRS immunity to the Trumps was bogus:
For the 109 days that this case was pending, no attorney representing the United States filed a notice of appearance or any document indicating the government’s position, interest, or awareness of this matter.
As recently as Aug. 1, Judge Williams threw another dart at the Trump DOJ for failing to defend the case. When Trump and his lawyers asked her to pause her sanctions order while they appealed, Williams asked the court-appointed amici to weigh in on the motion “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response.”
Now the Trump DOJ is actively colluding with Trump at the appeals court, but doing so even more openly and brazenly that it did in Judge Williams’ court.
McCotter has leaped in on the side of the Trump plaintiffs’ side in supporting their motion to pause the sanctions while their appeal proceeds. McCotter urges the appeals court to stay Judge Williams’ sanction order, argues that the Trump plaintiffs are “exceedingly likely” to win their appeal, and then rehashes many of the Trump team’s arguments for why Williams overreached.
But McCotter doesn’t stop there. He mounts a more aggressive attack on Judge Williams that the Trump plaintiffs did by seeking to have the appeals court reassign the case from Williams to a new judge, accusing her of “improper political motivation”; suggesting she timed her sanctions order to derail Blanche’s nomination as attorney general; and improbably accusing her of intentionally keeping Blanche and the DOJ from participating in the case (even though they had gone out of their way to avoid appearing in the case).
In arguing for Williams’ removal from the case, McCotter writes:
This Court need not conclude that the District Court’s actions were improperly motivated, but rather only that reasonable members of the public would view them that way. That standard has certainly been satisfied. This Court should order reassignment. To be sure, no remaining proceedings are needed or appropriate in the District Court: the Order should be stayed and ultimately vacated, and the District Court lost jurisdiction months ago. The District Court is the only one insistent on trying to keep the lower-court proceedings going, on the flimsiest of bases. But for precisely that reason, this Court should order reassignment.
Because of the way this case has proceeded, it’s not even clear that the government is a party to the appeal since it never participated in the case. The appeals court has styled the case as Donald Trump, et al v. Thirty-Five Former Federal Judges, with no mention of the original federal government defendants (the IRS and the Treasury Department). Reinforcing the weirdness, McCotter’s unusual filing is styled as “Defendants’ Response to Appellant’s Time-Sensitive Motion for a Stay,” but it’s docketed as an “Amicus Brief as of right or by consent of the parties filed by R. Trent McCotter for Internal Revenue Service and Department of Treasury.”
But the precise legal permutations aren’t the point here. It’s the No. 2 political appointee at DOJ, with no backing from career attorneys, aggressively jumping to President Trump’s defense in a case whose central dispute is the finding of collusion between the Justice Department and the president — and doing so after carefully sitting out the early rounds of the case at the trial court to make the travesty look slightly less obviously bad. Now the Trump DOJ has dropped any pretense.
Mass Deportation Watch
Illinois: An ICE agent pleaded guilty to a state misdemeanor battery charge for throwing a protestor to the ground while off duty during Operation Midway Blitz. He was sentenced to a year of court supervision.
Worldwide: Trump’s detention archipelago spans 35 countries, including far-flung places like Eswatini, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova
Ukraine Beats US in Military Exercise
Having mastered modern drone warfare, Ukraine has run circles around the U.S., U.K., and Sweden in recent military training exercises in Europe, the WSJ reports.
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The Brief will be off tomorrow and early next week for a family vacation. I’ll see you Thursday Aug. 20!
Trump Administration Tries to Set the Terms of Post-Midterms Congressional Oversight
With the prospect of a possible Democratic-controlled House and/or Senate drawing near, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has provided the White House with an opinion declaring that a “private adviser” — defined as “anyone the President consults outside the Executive Branch” — may be covered by executive privilege if they play a role in “official presidential decisionmaking.” This, among other things, gives the White House the green light to attempt to flout congressional subpoenas for such individuals.
Asked about the OLC opinion by TPM yesterday, Democrats in Congress scorned it, and insisted it would not hamper their efforts. “This Mafia State Code of Silence has nothing to do with the American Constitution and it won’t stop Judiciary Dems from investigating this Administration’s rank corruption,” the Democrats on that committee said in a joint statement.
The OLC opinion is non-binding and is, merely, the administration’s position. Judges may, and likely will, disagree if executive privilege fights make contact with courts. Still, it may slow down accountability for a historically corrupt administration: Democrats had been planning to get individuals outside the administration to engage swiftly with their investigations, given Trump’s tendency to assert privilege over everything and anything involving White House aides in his first term.
The opinion is not solely aimed at blunting congressional oversight, however. As Lisa Rubin notes at MS NOW, the American Bar Association is seeking documents from Trumpworld figure Boris Epshtehyn to find out more about his role in the early Trump II effort to pressure law firms into cutting deals with the administration; ABA has challenged that pressure campaign, arguing it impinged on law firms’ First Amendment rights. The DOJ has argued those communications are covered by executive privilege. If reports about Epshtehyn’s role in the deals are correct, he fits the DOJ’s extremely broad description of a “private adviser,” as does anyone else who speaks with the president.
The OLC has laid the groundwork for various administration attacks on the law throughout this second term. In April, it released an opinion finding that the White House did not need to comply with a law requiring it to turn certain records over to the National Archives. (A judge said the opposite, and ordered the administration to do so.)
“OLC has lost all credibility and should be abolished,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told us.
Hard-core Election Denialists Want an ‘Emergency’ Ahead of 2026
US President Donald Trump speaks with reporters after landing at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, upon his return from Ohio where he attended the Patriot Games finals, on August 11, 2026. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)
With right-wing activists beginning to abandon hope and acknowledge the SAVE Act’s poor chances of passing the Senate, various influencers have begun to consolidate around another big idea: Trump should declare a national emergency, allowing him to do … something.
This possibility surfaced this week when radio host Wayne Allyn Root urged Trump to do so, and Trump, in classic form, declined to rule anything out. “Stranger things have happened,” he said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Trump’s dud of a speech in July about supposed issues with the 2020 election also stoked these fears, with his former lawyer Ty Cobb telling PBS that all Trump’s claims were intended as the “predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections.”
A draft executive order claiming to do just that surfaced earlier this year, obtained by TPM and other outlets.
As with all schemes by Trump and his allies to use the executive branch to screw with elections, this one runs up against the reality that the executive branch has no authority over elections. Various emergency orders could allow Trump to stoke a lot of chaos. But they do not empower him to seize election administration from the states.
Those who are rattled by this talk are not off base, however. Trump often says in public what he intends to do, the villain at the end of a spy thriller unnecessarily explaining his entire evil plan. Even if this specific scheme is half-baked, that Trump is entertaining it — and that he has entertained similar schemes before — should have us all ready for something.
“The nearer danger was never the proclamation,” writes James Sample, a professor of law at Hofstra University, as he picks apart Root’s understanding of the law. “It is counting and certifying, in a handful of counties, if control of a chamber comes down to a margin thin enough to litigate.”
Natalie Harp, aide to President Donald Trump, boards Air Force One before departing from Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey, on August 9, 2026. (Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)
Alabama federal prosecutors on Wednesday unveiled charges against Heidi Beirich, a prominent critic of violent far-right extremist groups like the KKK, Proud Boys, and others.
You may have seen the news by now that the Trump White House has asked the Justice Department to consider bringing a new prosecution against the same man that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. just moved to dismiss felony charges against over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool saga.
Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made the same argument a number of times — most recently with TPM Reader AB whose email dispatch you can read below. I wanted to share it with you because it informs my way of understanding these things.
After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last year, there were so many powerful people eager to take him down and so many ways it would be easy to do it. It’s very, very challenging to navigation the transition from a lefty/social democratic/identity politics milieu to a broader society-wide electorate. Obviously New York City is a very blue city. It’s not Wisconsin or Michigan, let alone Texas or Ohio. But the same general point remains. It’s an incredibly challenging needle to thread, one that requires immense, innate political skill. Mamdani fielded all the standard attacks, some fair, some very unfair, and again and again he was able to finesse them. This, to me, was the biggest signal. He’s an immense political talent. Some have it; most don’t; he does.
Of course I have my own issues with him on Israel/Palestine. But even on that issue, perhaps especially on that issue, I saw how he was able to navigate a super challenging electoral thicket. Again and again.
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