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With the prospect of another government shutdown looming, the Senate Appropriations Committee released the text of a continuing resolution (CR) on Sunday that would keep the federal government funded until Dec. 11 and punt the government funding negotiations until after the midterms.
In that stopgap bill, Democrats and a couple of Republicans included a significant provision that would ban, for now, the Trump White House and its Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from finalizing a grantmaking rule change it proposed in May.
Trump is Lucy. GOP senators are the football. D.C. political reporters are Charlie Brown.
For a decade now, the illusion that Republican senators in whole or in part would rise up against the outrages of the Trump presidencies has animated political reporting even as the Senate GOP conference has chronically failed to rise to the occasion.
The farcical effort required to sustain the illusion has required a willing disbelief and feigned innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
So while the urge to pile on Senate Republicans like John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina for not driving a hard bargain with Trump over the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general is warranted, it must also be acknowledged, as painful as it is, that their pretend resistance actually works at yielding the headlines and reputational burnishing they’re looking for.
Most of this morning’s coverage of the overnight development bears this out.
After weeks of resistance, Blanche finally put in writing, in documents he posted to X, that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund is dead and that the IRS immunity for Trump is retroactive only. It was a limited concession, but it was enough for the two Senate holdouts, Tillis just confirmed on X.
The news coverage hailed this as a “formal” act by Blanche of rescinding the “anti-weaponization” fund. Some managed to cover the development without reference to Blanche’s disastrous anti-democratic run at a DOJ used as tool of retribution for the Trump White House.
This came after President Trump over the weekend continued to escalate his insistence that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund should still move forward. We’re supposed to belief Trump’s former personal lawyer and underling, not the president himself.
Just look at what Blanche did and did not do because it reinforces what a parody of a negotiation with the two senators this has been.
These vague assurances with no legal obligation are consistent with the weak demands Cornyn was making for his vote. For his part, Tillis gave away the game Saturday before Blanche’s written assurances, lamenting that Trump’s doubling down on the slush fund was hobbling Blanche’s confirmation (emphasis added): “It’s unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal.”
In related news, Trump and his lawyers are appealing U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ finding last month that he engaged in a collusive lawsuit against the IRS. They’re also asking for Williams to pause the sanctions while their appeal plays out.
Rather than immediately ruling on that request, Williams has asked the outside lawyers she previously appointed as friends of the court — since there were no adverse parties in the case by the president against his own administration — to brief her on the request.
In what would normally be a dry procedural order, Williams got in one more jab at the lack of adverseness between the Trump plaintiffs and the Trump administration defendants, noting that the outside lawyers were needed “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response to the Motion.”
The Reflecting Pool liner prosecution spectacularly imploded Friday with an embarrassing motion to dismiss by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro that deserves a hallowed spot in the annals of the depredations of the Trump DOJ
The two most notable aspects of the implosion:
For his part, erstwhile defendant David Hearn was just a pawn in this sordid affair, first when Pirro rushed to placate the president over the embarrassment caused by his crappy pool liner and now as she tries to extricate herself and her prosecutors from of the mess she created without getting hit with heavy sanctions or a civil lawsuit for the baseless prosecution.
As Chris Geidner notes, there’s a lot more to come in this case: “Friday’s motion to dismiss the David Hearn case is more likely an opening — rather than the closing — salvo in this matter.”
In another in a series of crumbling cases against ICE protesters, the Trump DOJ has offered plea deals to 29 of the 38 people charged in the January anti-ICE demonstration in a St. Paul, Minnesota, church that would reduce their charges from felonies to misdemeanors. Apparently, none of them has accepted the offer.
A previously undisclosed grand jury subpoena was served on a NYT freelancer way back in February over a story he co-wrote for the newspaper last fall about a failed 2019 Seal Team 6 operation in North Korea, the NYT revealed over the weekend:
The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.
Freelance reporter Matthew Cole has been quietly fighting the subpoena from a grand jury in Newport News, Va., using the same attorney as the NYT, which separately fought subpoenas of its reporters over their Air Force One reporting. Cole’s co-author of the piece, NYT staff reporter Dave Philipps, was reportedly not subpoenaed.
Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has settled a claim — without admitting wrongdoing — by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that he manipulated prediction market Kalshi over whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address.
His alleged manipulation included instances like this one, via the NYT:
For example, on Feb. 22, Mr. Santos posted on X asking his followers whether he should “wear a muted serious suit to the SOTU or a bedazzled one?”
That query caused the value of betting on Mr. Santos’s attendance to shoot up. The next day, regulators said, Mr. Santos exited his position and made about $3,400 in profits.
Under the terms of the settlement, Santos will return $17,570 in ill-gotten gains and pay a $17,500 penalty.
I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850. pic.twitter.com/uU5EYVXfZ2
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 2, 2026
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This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, voting for legislation to boost immigration enforcement could have seemed like a safe choice to some Democrats, who tied Donald Trump’s second presidential victory to a rejection of their party’s handling of immigration.
Forty-six Democrats broke with their party to support legislation named after the murdered Georgia college student Laken Riley. Now, for some, that vote is a potential liability, as primary opponents say the votes cosigned Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Following his attendance at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a meeting with President Trump about the Iran War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with evangelical leaders at the historic Blair House in Washington last Wednesday. Among the participants were Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans; Larry Huch, a televangelist deeply embedded in the Christian Zionist world; MAGA evangelical influencer Lance Wallnau; and broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck, whose dispatches from the Middle East can be seen on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and YouTube. Evangelicals and Jews, Netanyahu told the assembled group, are part of the same “Judeo-Christian heritage” that is “under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism.” Our enemies, his message was, are the same. “It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack,” Netanyahu said, “because we are one.”
They are one, Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters believe, in a war not against the far-right antisemites and anti-Zionists who have both defined and rocked Trump’s coalition, the ones who admire Hitler and engage in Holocaust denial. The true enemy, they contend, are Israel’s critics on the left. Similarly, critics of Christian nationalism are, in evangelical thinking, solely from the left. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and criticism of an American theocracy with anti-Christian bigotry.
An API built by Truth Social, offering financial institutions faster access to the most influential posts on the platform — Trump’s — for $100,000, has gone live. The company has struggled for years to find a business model that works. Now it proposes to distribute early access to the thoughts of the president, which move markets and which he makes exclusively available on the platform, which his family also has a stake in.
In a letter to Truth Media and Technology Group, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MA) called the program the “depraved essence of insider trading.” “A public official with access to the ultimate insider information — his own next actions and policies as the Chief Executive of the United States — is selling advance access to that market-moving information to the high bidders,” he wrote.
This story has captured our attention because it compounds the corruption that has become endemic throughout the executive branch with a new, ridiculous feature of our economy — Trump manipulating the markets through his bespoke social media platform, prompting sell-offs and rallies with his statements about the status of such things as tariffs or the Iran war, regardless of those statements’ grounding in fact.
The problem, however, is not limited to big global issues. The Truth API also compounds Trump’s ability to manipulate the market as it relates to specific companies he favors or disfavors, prone as he is to attack firms and individuals via social media with little notice.
The program appears targeted at the world of computerized, high-frequency trading, where firms take new positions rapidly in response to emerging information, aiming to do so before other actors in the market can catch on that something has changed. Even milliseconds can make a difference.
The Truth API has attracted attention from both the House and Senate. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have urged the SEC to investigate. But under the Trump administration, that prospect seems unlikely.
“When you don’t have enforcement of the rules and regulations, when there are different legal outcomes for the president than there would be for any other market actor that acted this egregiously,” Corey Frayer, former senior advisor at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, told TPM’s Layla A. Jones, “it becomes hard to hold anyone accountable.”
The Trump administration dramatically dropped its troubled case against Olympian David Hearn amid a flood of finger pointing.
It’s Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who finally has his off-ramp! He’s ready to greenlight Todd Blanche for attorney general after receiving “assurances.” A vote on the nomination will be scheduled for Tuesday after a weekend of angst. David Kurtz will have more on what to make of this deal in Morning Memo.
A question with an evolving answer. After Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with Trump this weekend, urging him not to attack Iranian infrastructure out of concern that the country would retaliate against Gulf States, Trump suddenly claimed a deal with Iran to be at hand, and later said talks would begin Monday. Iran said there are no talks. Regardless, whether we are at war or not at war, we are never at war, per Trump.
Trump: "This is the golden age of America. And we have a war that's going on. I call it a military operation."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-07-31T15:47:46.892Z
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