Kate and Josh discuss the latest Epstein file dump, along with headlines from the Lone Star State.
Editors’ Blog
TPM is resurrecting The Franchise, a weekly newsletter that we used to send out back in the day, starting before and continuing while President Trump began spreading deranged conspiracy theories about his loss in the 2020 election. (You can sign up here!)
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election and MAGA’s various attempts to sow doubt in states’ election administration processes and spread conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud (conveniently, in locales where Democrats won or typically win elections), former TPM reporter Matt Shuham used The Franchise to meticulously track the Big Lie and all its tentacles and permutations.
With Trump’s undying fixation with the 2020 election back in the news this week — and everything else his Justice Department and White House is attempting to do to act on his fever dream to “nationalize” elections, seize voter data from states, force mid-cycle gerrymandering and, potentially, intimidate voters at the polls this fall — we figured it was an apt time to bring The Franchise back to TPM readers’ inboxes.
TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman has taken on this task. Since we first hired Khaya at TPM she has covered elections, voting rights, the conspiracy theories that festered post-2020 (and the people who perpetuated the disinfo), the ways in which election administration had to change in the wake of Trump’s attempt to subvert the vote, attacks on poll workers, the DOJ’s overreach into states’ rights to administer elections, Trump’s gerrymandering pressure campaign and more.
You can read the first issue of our relaunched Franchise on TPM here or sign up here to get it sent directly to your inbox every Thursday. Thanks for reading!
I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.
That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.
The Trump administration used Charlie Kirk’s September assassination as an opportunity to declare war on the left, pledging to use the full force of the law to go after their ideological opponents.
That’s exactly what is now happening. As Josh Kovensky and John Light discussed on Substack Live Wednesday morning, Trump’s DOJ is making novel use of “material support for terrorism” charges against Black Lives Matter and anti-ICE protesters.
Josh Kovensky and I will be discussing NSPM-7, the Trump administration’s crackdown on its ideological enemies, and its novel use of “material support for terrorism” charges on Substack Live at 10:30 a.m. Join us here.
Last Friday, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a GOP campaign consultant named Brad Todd. He says he’s the one who coined that phrase about taking Trump “literally but not seriously.” The big argument of the piece I think actually makes no sense or represents a kind of denial. But there are building blocks to it that capture key insights about immigration policy in the United States. The gist of Todd’s argument is that Trump’s immigration agenda was a big political winner in 2024 and has actually been very successful in practice — dramatically reducing the number of entries via the southern border. The problem is that it’s being overshadowed and the support for it is being wrecked by Trump sending ICE on these wilding sprees into blue cities.
My view is a bit different. I don’t know if Todd is in denial or willfully obtuse or maybe less than fully leveling with readers. But I don’t think this is actually what’s happening. Nobody foisted Stephen Miller or the whole “mass deportation” policy on Trump. Other than perhaps the concept of tariffs it’s the most organic and natural thing to him. It’s more accurate to say that the energy of MAGA is all about mass deportation and perhaps even more than mass deportation the assaultive cleansing of American society, of both those who are “illegal” and/or brown, but also white people whom through various forms of sexual license, gayness, uppity womenhood and non-traditionalism, are collectively standing in the way of Making America Great Again. “Closing the border” or “securing the border” is just the packaging the gets you electorally to 50%. Because that’s something quite a lot of Americans for a variety of reasons want to do. In other words, wilding sprees aren’t inadvertently driving down support for Trump immigration policies. The actual MAGA policy is “mass deportation” and ICE wilding sprees and it’s unpopular. The border rhetoric is popular but that’s neither here nor there.
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Kate and Josh discuss the latest Epstein file dump, along with headlines from the Lone Star State.
Correction: An earlier version of this podcast misstated a detail about the Epstein files. TPM regrets the error.
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