The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress. 

It’s sitting right there in front of us. But it’s still worth noting. The political stories of the moment are heavily geared to the long-tail effects of Donald Trump’s antic and ego-driven escapades: the decision to make the Reflecting Pool “American flag blue”; the eagerness to get a plane as a present (which he could take home with him after his presidency) from the royal family of Qatar. There are countless examples. In each case, the initial driver is the president’s personal cupidity and grandiosity, things which have no relation to any aspect of public policy or really any public support. They begin unknown and pretty quickly end up unpopular. He does them because he can, with the Supreme Court having removed basically all of the immediate brakes on a president’s power. But those initials gambits — the hunger for gifts and cash prizes — lead to bad news stories, legal impediments, or often technological snafus. Those in turn lead to embarrassment, anger, outbursts which repeat the process of bad news stories, legal impediments or technological snafus.

Air Force None

By now, you’ve likely ingested many of the details from the bombshell Washinton Post report on the elaborate security operation and public misinformation campaign to spirit President Trump out of Ankara, Turkey, following last month’s NATO summit in order to avoid a credible threat to his life from Iran.

The entire ruse is remarkable by the historic standards of security theater and continuity of government protocols that have hovered over our political consciousness since the peak tensions of the Cold War nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

Especially striking is that White House staff and the press pool who remained on the older model Air Force One that everyone thought Trump was aboard ended up serving as decoys — sitting ducks for whatever scheme Iran had conjured up but ultimately failed in or decided not to execute.

The image we conjure in our minds of Trump boarding Air Force One on one side of the plane before secretly exiting the other side into a waiting catering truck is indelible. But I’m just as taken by what happened after Trump’s secret flight landed in the U.K.

Once on the ground, Trump had to be secretly returned to the older Air Force One, then make a show of disembarking from it before boarding the new Qatari Force One that he took across the Atlantic to Joint Base Andrews. As you may know, the Air Force One call sign only applies when the president is aboard the aircraft, but I’m taking some liberties with the term here for the sake of clarity.

“It’s not clear how Trump moved from the C-32A to the legacy Air Force One after landing,” the WaPo noted.

The NYT has a more robust account of this part of the operation: “Before that, unbeknown to reporters, Mr. Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to the U.S. official.”

Here is he pretending to have just flown in on the older Air Force One:

Here he is walking between the old and new Air Force One aircraft:

This entire episode would be notable in its own right, but the NYT’s subsequent reporting on the ostensible version of what happened — the old Air Force One was used because the new Qatari-gifted one lacked sufficient defense capabilities given the Iranian threat — gave rise to a leak investigation and highly controversial subpoenas to NYT reporters.

Those subpoenas have since been withdrawn, but it’s a bit of a mindfuck to try to piece together that related saga in light of this new information. Was the administration, for instance, agitated not just that the new Air Force One was being denigrated by the NYT’s reporting but that the NYT was onto the secret mission to extricate Trump from Turkey? We don’t know if the NYT had additional information on the ruse that it didn’t publish, though its followup to yesterday’s WaPo exclusive didn’t betray any previous unpublished knowledge of the operation.

The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sharply criticized principal associate deputy attorney general Trent McCotter in dropping criminal fraud charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and several of his co-defendants.

Judge Garaufis largely (but not entirely) granted the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, but, in a withering 47-page order, he shellacked political appointee McCotter for pushing the dismissal through without consultation with investigators:

On the current record, McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment. The fact that McCotter came to this decision largely in collaboration with defense counsel, and seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney’s Office who brought the case, appears to be highly unusual.

Garaufis also flamed McCotter for claiming the indictment was the handiwork of a politicized Biden DOJ:

McCotter appears to be accusing officials across four different government offices of bringing a detailed 54-page, 5-count indictment out of spite. However, he has not provided a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the timing of the unsealing of the indictment, or the charging decisions, in this case was politically motivated. McCotter’s baseless assertion is unbecoming of his office.

The dismissal of the case against Adani, essentially a foreign bribery case of the kind that the Trump DOJ has de-emphasized pursuing, came after Adani retained Bob Giuffra and Jamie McDonald (who Trump later nominated as Manhattan U.S. attorney) of Sullivan & Cromwell (which is representing Trump personally in other matters). In a presentation to McCotter at the Justice Department, Giuffra reportedly said that Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy if the charges were dropped, according to CBS News.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ICYMI: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s motion for vindictive prosecution was denied Friday by the trial judge, who declined to look past federal prosecutors in Alabama to Main Justice or to the White House in assessing improper motives for bringing the politicized case.
• Reflecting Pool: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will make an effort to extract information from the Trump DOJ about the charging decision in the since-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn, Greg Sargent reports.
• OLC Dramatically Expands Claimed Scope of Executive Privilege: The president can assert executive privilege over communications with “private advisers … so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the Office of Legal Counsel asserts in a new memo flagged by Punchbowl.

Photo of the Day

Former Trump lawyer Emil Bove swears in former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general in front of President Trump in the Oval Office, Aug. 10, 2026:

🇺🇸 @AGToddBlanche has officially been sworn in as the United States Attorney General today in the Oval Office. pic.twitter.com/0PfeWYLDqT

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 10, 2026

Painful Flashback Alert

NYT: How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed by Rod Rosenstein’s Appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel

Mass Deportation Watch

• Politico: Families, lawyers and judges describe a year of frantic emergency cases after a Trump administration memo reversed decades of interpretation of federal law and allowed ICE to begin detaining without bond hearings people who have lived in the U.S. for years. Federal judges have since ruled against the Trump detention policy more than 16,000 times.
• Arizona Daily Star: “Conditions are deteriorating to dangerous levels at a decommissioned hotel in Equatorial Guinea, where dozens of immigrants have been imprisoned since the U.S. deported them to the African nation, without warning or due process, the immigrants and their attorneys say.”
• The American Prospect: An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned in 2023 after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a $244 million no-bid federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.
• NYT: New Evidence Shows Agents Using Slurs, Bolstering Profiling Claims

Quote of the Day

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, writing about President Trump’s new birthright citizenship executive orders:

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it extended the promise to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall all future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment. 

The Pyrocene Keeps Pyrocening

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, nudging past July 2012 and July 1936. The average temperature of 76.9F was more than three degrees above the 20th century average.

In completely unrelated news, the Swiss Re Institute warned today that wildfire risk is the fastest-growing weather peril globally. 

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

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Mike Lindell’s Big Moment

Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s personal evolution or possible lack thereof on the topic of Thanksgiving, you may have missed that the Republican Party is on the cusp of picking two quite extreme gubernatorial nominees on the same evening.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) faces little opposition and will become Republicans’ nominee for governor in his home state tonight. As Khaya Himmelman writes for TPM, he is an election denier who has put in the work, not just objecting in Congress against certifying the results of the 2020 election and signing onto Ken Paxton’s lawsuit that year to throw out the results, but continuing to insist that the 2020 election saw “improprieties.” (If you’re curious where he stands on such “Woke I” issues as “Thanksgiving,” he was also one of only 14 Republicans in Congress to vote against making Juneteenth a federal holiday.) This is, to be fair, why Democrats in the state are so concerned about the fate of their own ticket.

I am really here, however, to talk about Minnesota, where Mike Lindell, the man who visited Trump with a proposal for martial law in the days after Jan. 6 and who continues to boost the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the year in which our politics has become forever trapped. Tonight, Lindell has a real shot at becoming Republicans’ Minnesota gubernatorial candidate.

This is in part the result of the field splitting three ways. Minnesota state House Speaker Lisa DeMuth has the money behind her, but the state GOP endorsed another candidate, businessman Kendall Qualls.

Trump, however, endorsed Lindell, and primary voters’ hearts appear to be with the pillow salesman and conspiracy theorist. Poll after poll has shown him ahead, though it is unclear how reliable each of these surveys is. Lindell has faced a series of bizarre and sometimes dumb scandals given that he is, after all, Mike Lindell. The latest is an accusation that he violated campaign finance law by handing out MyPillows on the campaign trail. More seriously, the state GOP continues to question whether Lindell, who previously lived in Texas, even meets the residency requirements for the ballot.

“We’ve never had a party challenge the residency of one of its serious candidates,” Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College, summed it up for the local ABC affiliate. “And then you add the fact that this candidate has been endorsed by the president of that party. It’s really an extraordinary situation.”

Whoever wins this race will face Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) after current governor Tim Walz (D) decided not to run again. The Minnesota primaries so far have seen record-breaking turnout, the secretary of state said yesterday.

Darline Graham Gets a Challenger

South Carolina will hold a special election today to replace Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), whose sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has filled his seat after his death and is running to fill it for a full term. She faces a crowded field of other candidates. Two — presumably the Trump-endorsed Graham and one other — will advance to a runoff. The field contains some familiar names.

• Ralph Norman, who — TPM broke the news — privately urged the White House to invoke “Marshall Law” following the 2020 election, is one. He was crushed in his bid to become the state’s governor earlier this year.
• Former state governor, congressman, and hiker Mark Sanford is also running.
• As is Rep. Russell Fry, who in 2022 unseated Rep. Tom Rice, a Republican critic of Trump who was among the 10 to vote to impeach him.
• Whoever wins will run in November against Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who has previously run against Rep. Nancy Mace (R).

Tabs

• Donald Trump was smuggled out of a UK-bound plane and onto another in a catering crate, leaving Turkey in a military jet last month amid an attempt on his life from Iran.
• After supporting some industry priorities last year, a handful of pro-crypto Senate Democrats have balked at its latest demand.
• The DOJ’s bid to get states’ voter roles has lost in court 21 times in a row, Reuters reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Max Miller, who we’ve covered a lot here, and who, in the face of abuse and domestic violence accusations is now running in a seat that the Cook Political Report has shifted all the way from “likely Republican” to “toss up.” Democrats are now spending seriously on his opponent, Brian Poindexter. The White House urged Republicans not to criticize Miller after it became clear he wasn’t going to quit, Politico reported yesterday.

Are We at War?

Yes, with Trump attempting to one-up Iran by demanding it pay damages to the U.S.