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.