Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Tuesday, asking both Defense Department officials to confirm that the Pentagon will not send troops to polling places during the upcoming midterms.
Newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche made headlines over the weekend for other, arguably, more alarming remarks and actions than what I am about to unpack. During an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Blanche refused to say that the Justice Department would act independently from the White House. On Friday, he and FBI Director Kash Patel openly campaigned for a Republican midterms candidate alongside President Trump.
But during his sprint of weekend public appearances, Blanche also acknowledged that he might take the Justice Department’s obviously-failing effort to seize election administration rights from states all the way to the Supreme Court. During an interview with Kristin Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Welker asked whether Blanche would be willing to take his campaign to seize voter roll data from states to the Supreme Court. The DOJ’s efforts to sue for states’ voter roll data has been hit with 22 district court losses thus far, most recently in Nevada.
“We’ll see what happens,” Blanche said when asked about involving the high court in the floundering campaign that began under fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Absolutely, it’s a possibility.”
As TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has been tracking for months now, the Justice Department is trying to force states to hand over unredacted voter roll data ostensibly to purge states’ voters rolls of supposed noncitizens, whom President Trump has claimed are illegally voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections. This is a widely debunked myth that Republicans and Trump tend to elevate when it is politically convenient for them, but the truth is, noncitizens voting in federal elections is vanishingly rare, in part because it is illegal and the consequences for doing so are already incredibly harsh.
That said, the Justice Department has sued 30 states overall to try to exert authority over state’s constitutional right to administer elections. It wants this data so it can run it through a faulty database — known to mistakenly identify eligible voters as ineligible — and purge supposed noncitizens from the rolls, which states already do on a regular basis to clean up voter rolls ahead of elections.
When NBC’s Welker asked Blanche if it’d suffered enough legal defeats to give up the crusade, Blanche said, “we’re not going to stop.”
“We’re relying on a statute passed by Congress that allows us, in the right circumstances, to review and get those voter rolls,” said Blanche. “So, no, we’re not going to stop doing what I think every American should expect us to do.”
So far, not one single federal judge has sided with the Trump Justice Department’s argument for why it should have access to the data — and we’re talking about judges who have been appointed by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. As Khaya has reported for TPM:
The data the DOJ is after includes sensitive information like drivers licenses and Social Security numbers — personal identifying information that the federal government is not entitled to.
To make its case, 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 argue it is allowed to seize the information. But, as the courts have found time and time again, none of these statutes give the federal government the authority to demand state’s voter rolls.
From: Judges Across the Nation Agree: The DOJ’s Legal Argument for Seizing Voter Rolls Does Not Hold Up
By Khaya Himmelman | 07.02.26 | 2:00 pm
Amid reports of both a lack of supplies and food, and a deteriorating mental health situation onboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln where multiple service members have tried to jump overboard, a Fox News host and former Marine made fun of the sailors, saying, “how weak are you?” The ship is stationed in the Arabian Sea, supporting the U.S.’s military operations in Iran and has not made a port call for over 200 days.
“I just do not understand the mentality,” Fox host Joey Jones said. “If this is a representation of who our military is now… we’re just Rome sitting here waiting to burn. We’ve got nothing left.”
Joey Jones on concerns of service members on the USS Lincoln: pic.twitter.com/Va2npYmA9x
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 15, 2026
After directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” the U.S. military’s ongoing drills with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un,” Trump defended the decision in the Oval Office today. Trump argued that the U.S. should not be engaging in joint military exercises with South Korea if they’re not willing to help aid the U.S. in Trump’s ongoing, unpopular war with Iran.
“He said, ‘No, thanks,’” Trump said. “And I said … we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? … I see. Well, why are we involved in helping you?”
“We’re guarding them from a country … that’s costing us billions and billions of dollars to protect not only them, but other countries,” he continued. “Look at NATO. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars protecting Europe from Russia, hundreds of billions, mostly from Russia, but from other things, too. And then they say, well, they don’t want to get involved with guarding the strait where they get most of their oil.”
Sarah Posner reports on the evangelical community as it looks for the Christian right’s next political leader when Trump’s term is up in 2028. They’ve somehow set their sights on … Mike Huckabee: Evangelicals Think They’ve Found Their Post-Trump Era Leader in … Mike Huckabee?
Let’s Take a Look-See at What ‘Far Left’ vs. ‘Far Right’ Candidates Actually Want
Planned Parenthood to spend more than $600,000 against Susan Collins in Maine
Burnham exchanged messages with impersonator of top Trump aide
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
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.
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.
In today’s edition of Where Things Stand, I want to unpack a few examples of the Republican midterms messaging strategy that we’re tracking as the party grasps at increasingly dangerous and racist threads to campaign on in lieu of any cohesive policy platform.
There hasn’t been a ton of new reporting on a suspiciously-timed and blatantly Trump-linked project unfolding in a remote area of Greenland, so I wanted to use Where Things Stand today to help pull some of these threads together. It’s a convoluted story, of which we don’t have the entire picture, but it involves a Texas oil company with close ties to Trump’s imperialist visions in Greenland and, somehow, Dr. Phil.
President Trump and other Republicans have been struggling to land on any sort of uniform messaging as they seek, ahead of the midterms, to spin their recent legislative effort as making life more affordable for working class Americans when it has, in fact, largely done the opposite. This is, in part, because Trump has forced congressional Republicans to spend time tending to his election fraud delusions rather than using their trifecta to move legislation: he refused to sign a bipartisan bill aimed at increasing housing supply as he tried to force Republicans to pass the impassable-in-the-Senate SAVE Act, for example.
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.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and a handful of women’s rights and reproductive freedom groups are sounding the alarm over recent reporting that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has vowed to use the Justice Department to roll back abortion access nationwide — a break with both President Trump’s own campaign promises that places him much further out on a limb on abortion than other Trump admin officials have been willing to go.
President Trump spent the weekend raging on Truth Social against Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, after the Justice Department wrote in a motion to dismiss the case that issues with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the result of bad refurbishing work — and not the product of vandalism, as it had previously alleged. Trump still insists vandalism is to blame.
In the Friday court filing, the DOJ acknowledged that Trump’s $14 million Reflecting Pool renovation was “hasty and botched.” In the filing, the DOJ said it was dropping its case against former Olympian David Hearn, whom the Justice Department accused of vandalism around the time that the renovation was getting bad press, including reports that the new lining was coming off in floating chunks. Hearn pleaded not guilty to the felony vandalism charges in D.C.’s Superior Court before the case was dismissed last week.
Trump has, aggressively, not reached the same conclusions as his DOJ and brought his online anger with Pirro to the airwaves on Monday during an unrelated Oval Office meeting, during which he suggested Pirro “choked” in building a proper case against Trump’s perceived enemies for the supposed sabotage.
“Frankly, I think she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” Trump said.
Shortly after Trump’s Oval Office outburst against Pirro, CNN published a report this afternoon that Trump is considering removing Pirro over the filing, citing two people familiar with Trump’s thinking. Per CNN:
The president is “furious” with Pirro, one of the sources said, telling CNN that he fumed about her all weekend. They added that based on his criticisms of her, they find it “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”
The other source, a senior administration official, said Trump was “blindsided” by Pirro’s court filing: “The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that.”
Trump reportedly spoke to Pirro on Saturday and she blamed career officials in her office for the Friday filing (though her name is on the bottom of it). It was the around the same time that Trump was publicly unleashing on her via Truth Social.
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote.
Up until this point, Trump has had no reason to question Pirro’s work. As TPM reported earlier this year, Pirro was one of a group of U.S. attorneys who met with Trump earlier this year and received a verbal lashing from the president for not acting fast enough to carry out his personal retribution crusade. Shortly after that meeting, the Federal Reserve received grand jury subpoenas from Pirro’s office, related to testimony that then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — one of Trump’s favorite perceived enemies — gave Congress last summer about a Fed building renovation.
Shortly after, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told the New York Times that she received requests for an interview with Pirro’s office; the FBI and others within the DOJ were at the time looking into Slotkin and other Democratic lawmakers who participated in a social media video aimed at reminding military service members that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. Trump suggested that the Dems should be arrested and charged with “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”
Seems like the retribution-inspired honeymoon between the two might be over.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has attracted ire from Trump’s base of supporters because he more or less conceded that the American farming industry needs migrant workers in order to survive. It’s a fact that played a political role in Trump’s decision early in his second term to flood blue cities with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out his mass deportation clampdown in urban areas — largely avoiding, at least initially, rural parts of the country where immigrant labor is often what keeps farms running.
During a bipartisan National Governors Association meeting in Oklahoma on Saturday, Mullin spoke about changes that need to be made to seasonal work visas to accommodate the year-round farm work demands of the agriculture industry.
“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, reportedly adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries.”
“It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes,” he said.
Mistake on his end, per The New Republic:
These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”
Per new reporting from CNN today:
“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.
Hunter Walker unpacks Trump’s bombastic remarks from the Oval Office today, during which he publicly let slide his disgust for blue cities: Trump Launches Into Extraordinary Rant About ‘Disgusting’ Blue Cities: ‘Their Trees Are All Gross’
The House Ethics Committee put out a report recommending the censure of Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) over his treatment of and behavior towards two young women on his staff. Kate Riga digs in here: Bizarre Texts, Gifted Guns, 30 Types of Ice Cream: Rep. Faces Censure Following Sexual Harassment Allegations
New from Sarah Posner: How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him
The Low-Energy Response to the GOP’s ‘High-T’ Politics
She protested ICE raids. Then agents showed up at her door
In a scathingly-written regulatory filing posted on the Federal Communications Commission’s website on Thursday, ABC’s lawyers tore into Trump administration FCC head Brendan Carr for “attempted censorship” and accused Carr of helping President Trump in his retribution campaign against media that criticizes him.
By now, you may have seen the headlines about Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) dragging former Trump and Biden administration health official Dr. Anthony Fauci before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — during which he berated him for pleading the fifth and kicked Fauci’s attorney out of the hearing.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told reporters on Tuesday that there’s a chance the confirmation vote to move Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination out of committee may be postponed — or it may not.
It appears as though New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) will not comply with the Justice Department’s demands for the identities of the 6,600 noncitizens who were, through no fault of their own, placed on the voter rolls in 2023 and 2024.
The Trump administration has been salivating for something — anything! — that could help feed President Trump’s belief in the myth that noncitizens are illegally voting en masse for Democrats. The unfortunate situation in New Jersey this week, involving a software error at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission during Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, sadly gives them at least one datapoint rooted in reality to point to to justify Trump’s singular fixation with the otherwise widespread conspiracy theory. And perhaps also offers a new rationale for his attempts to try to jam a voter suppression/documentary proof of citizenship bill through Congress to throw the midterms — and hope of Dems taking back power — into chaos.
His Justice Department was never not going to seize on the moment, especially as the DOJ faces loss after loss after loss in its crusade to try to force states to give their voter rolls to the federal government, supposedly for the purpose of purging noncitizens from the rolls, something that states already do themselves and an occurrence that is vanishingly rare, even in light of the news from New Jersey this week.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced Tuesday that her administration had found that a software glitch at the MVC had allowed 6,600 noncitizens to be added to the New Jersey voter rolls. About 400 of them have voted in at least one election since 2023. Sherrill said the people had disclosed they were noncitizens while trying to get a license or ID and were mistakenly registered to vote. The people were removed from the voter rolls, likely had no impact on overall election results in the state, and the state is cutting ties with the software company behind the error. Sherrill placed blame for the issue on her predecessor and said her administration was “working very hard to protect” the people who were placed on the rolls through no fault of their own.
Nonetheless, and of course, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, and Trump’s former personal lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Sherrill on Tuesday demanding that she hand over the identities of the 6,600 noncitizens who were placed on the voter rolls within five business days. She requested the names, nationalities and residential addresses for each of them, Politico reported.
Dhillon reportedly said that she was interested in the information as part of a DOJ investigation into whether New Jersey was following federal law, but she has since hinted publicly that the DOJ might want to make a big show of deporting or bringing criminal charges against the noncitizens on the rolls.
“The consequences of voting when you’re not allowed to in a federal election can mean removal to your home country and worse — it’s a crime,” Dhillon said during a conversation with far-right influencer Benny Johnson Wednesday. “And you know people need to just stop cold in their tracks and not enable it. And shame on New Jersey for its sloppy and incompetent handling of this issue, or worse.”
Additionally, the DOJ is trying to use the incident to bolster its genuinely unbelievably disastrous campaign to seize voter records from states ahead of the midterms. The DOJ has lost every single case that has made its way through court thus far after suing 44 states and Washington, D.C. to try to obtain these records. In fact, in dismissing the lawsuits, every judge has shot down the DOJ’s legal theory, as TPM has reported. Per Politico:
Separately, the DOJ is also using the disclosure of noncitizen voters to bolster its case in court to obtain New Jersey’s unredacted voter registration files. The Trump administration is suing New Jersey, seeking access to the state’s full voter file which includes nonpublic information like the drivers license ID numbers and partial Social Security numbers of New Jersey voters.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) got testy when presented with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s recent remarks — that President Trump’s “patience is running out” with Senate Republicans, who both don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE Act or the interest in nuking the filibuster in order to jam through Trump’s voter suppression bill ahead of the midterms.
“Maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes. Right? It’s 50 around here,” Thune said, when reporters asked him about Leavitt’s remarks.
“Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats,” he continued. “And if there are Republicans they think are gettable, get on the phone.”
Obviously, Thune is one of the few roadblocks standing in the way of Trump having his delusions fulfilled by fall, but it’s not just Thune and Senate GOP leadership’s disinterest in changing filibuster rules for the sake of disenfranchisement. There are several other Senate Republicans who are not on board with the legislation, one of whom has been very vocal about the fact that it would be impossible to implement Trump’s documentary proof of citizenship and voter ID laws just months out from a major federal election.
New stats from a new Fox News poll conducted between July 17-20:
Several findings in the latest Fox News Poll show voters are unhappy and want major change, which bodes well for Democrats in November: President Donald Trump’s job approval remains near a record low, more Democrats are motivated to vote, Republicans join Democrats and independents in rating the economy negatively, and 4 in 10 voters want “dramatic” or “revolutionary” change. Plus, more view the GOP as tied to elites than the Democratic Party.
Kate Riga covers the latest fallout from Callais: A panel of judges blocked Black Tennesseans’ attempt to challenge Republicans’ racial gerrymander in Tennessee where, after the Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, state Republicans moved to carve up the state’s one Democratic district: Tennessee Gerrymandering Challenge Fails, Just as Supreme Court Intended
In this week’s edition of The Franchise, Khaya Himmelman digs in on election denier wins in Arizona’s Republican primaries this week and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin escalating the admin’s threats against state election officials: Election Deniers’ Grip on the Republican Party Strengthens in Arizona
“A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters,” David Kurtz writes in today’s Morning Memo: What’s Really Behind Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme
New Attack Launched Against Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme
Sex work or starve: Aid workers in Nepal left jobless by USAID cuts turn to sex work to survive
Government withdraws subpoenas of 3 reporters for The New York Times after admitting legal errors
Trump Badly Screws Susan Collins as Maine ICE Death Takes Darker Turn
Freshly sworn-in Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) made her loyalty to President Trump and the rest of the MAGA movement known with a simple post on X this week when she announced the SAVE America Act would be “the first bill I am cosponsoring in the Senate.”
The White House is being forced to court a Republican senator who President Trump has labeled a “loser” and another whose political career Trump ended to advance acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s AG nomination to the Senate floor.
Ahead of the World Cup’s Round of 16, President Donald Trump literally interfered with the U.S. team’s run as he called FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and argued for a controversial red card to be reviewed. And, on Sunday, as the quadrennial tournament came to its conclusion, Trump crashed the stage during the final celebration.
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