Iowa Didn’t Quite Work Out the Way Trump Wanted

Posted on by Kate Riga

It Turns Out Trump Endorsed a Loser in Iowa 

President Trump’s eleventh-hour endorsement not only didn’t propel Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-IA) to a win in the primary for Iowa governor, it didn’t even push him into a runoff.  

Zach Lahn, a MAHA-aligned businessman who entered the race as a complete unknown, beat Feenstra outright with 38% of the vote. 

To be fair to Trump, that endorsement had to carry a lot of dead weight; Feenstra skipped all of the debates and barely even bothered to hold in-person events. 

Lahn will face Rob Sand, the popular, Democratic state auditor, in the general election. Following last night’s results, The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia shifted the governors’ race from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.” Cook Political Report, another major election prognosticator, already ranked that race as a toss up. 

— Kate Riga

Not Out of the Woods in the Jungle Primary 

California’s jungle primary, where the top two vote-getters in either party advance to the general, has caused significant Democratic angst this cycle as it’s threatened to lock the party out of major races, leaving voters in the very blue state to choose between Republicans in November.

While the risk in the governor’s race seems averted now (it has yet to be officially called), there was a time when two Republicans were polling first and second in the California governor’s race. Trump’s strategically idiotic endorsement of Steve Hilton helped put an end to that, and at least one Democrat is all but certain to advance. 

The same dynamic has added tension to a couple of House races, one of which — the race for Rep. Kevin Kiley’s seat (I-CA) — is still playing out. 

While there are certainly benefits to the system — a think tank that studies polarization suggests that it lessens extremism and boosts primary turnout — these races underscore its weaknesses. Voters in such a Democratic state shouldn’t have to choose one of two Republican candidates simply because there were more candidates running on the left and splitting the vote. 

But on that note — Democrats, get it together! We don’t need 8 trillion people running if it means risking a Democratic lockout.

— Kate Riga

The Emptiness of the Administration’s Pro-Natalist Propaganda 

Crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs — which are truly religious anti-abortion organizations, poorly disguised as healthcare clinics — target the most vulnerable.

Now, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is helping to funnel people towards them. 

On Mother’s Day, the HHS launched Moms.gov, describing the website as “groundbreaking.” To be clear, the website does not offer any new resources for expectant parents. It’s a glorified Linktree for information that any chump with an internet connection could find. 

Featuring images like a headless, pregnant belly in a golden field of wheat, pink and blue baby footprints, and simple illustrations of only the wholest of foods, the messaging is clear: Make America Barefoot Again. 

Dr. Oz underlined this theme when Moms.gov was announced, explaining that “one in three Americans are under-babied,” which was not a term I learned in public health school. 

The first resource Moms.gov shares is a link to Option Line, an online directory of pregnancy crisis centers funded by the religious right. The CPC Map has identified over 2,600 CPCs in the U.S. Their use of manipulative tactics and medically inaccurate disinformation has been well-documented by journalists, late-night news satire talk shows, and even The L Word. 

One study of hundreds of CPCs found that only 5% offered prenatal care, only 40% provided referrals for prenatal care, and only 26% and 16% of CPCs have a registered nurse or doctor, respectively — all the while using language and imagery that implies visitors can receive medical care onsite. 

Moms.gov doesn’t stop with CPCs, also pointing visitors towards Trump Accounts for their unborn children, and TrumpRx for fertility medication. You can find links to a Focus on the Family page about adoption, tons of breastfeeding resources, and the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 

To be clear, these are real concerns many people deal with. And, to be fair, Moms.gov was launched alongside the bipartisan Health Moms Health Babies America campaign, which addresses critical issues like reducing maternal mortality and expanding paid family leave. But it is hard to square these initiatives with the influx of federal and state dollars to CPCs, which may actually serve to increase the risk of maternal mortality and morbidity by causing visitors to delay critical prenatal screening and care. At the same time, funding for Title X — the Nixon-era family planning program for low-income families — has remained flat, and its services are being chipped away along with its administrative staff. 

In reality, the administration’s pro-natalist propaganda and its actual policies are a web of contradictions. Abortion bans are associated with increased likelihood of sepsis, infant death, and pregnancy-related death, because those bans create legal uncertainty that leads to inconsistent care for high-risk pregnancies. But the biggest hit of all to pregnancy-related health may have been the 2025 budget reconciliation, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed the single largest payer of births in the U.S.: Medicaid. By 2034, 14 million more people are expected to become uninsured, a status which is associated with poorer outcomes during pregnancy. 

Pregnancy is encouraged, but only for those who can afford it and its associated risks. The rest of us are on our own. 

— Farrell Brenner

In Case You Missed It

The latest in Supreme Court corruption: SCOTUS Cobbles Together Excuse to Let Alabama Discriminate Against Black Voters in New Order

The Backchannel: The Great Untethering—MAGA/GOP Edition

Also from the Editor’s Blog:

Morning Memo: The Mounting Toll and Absurdity of Trumpism

More on California: Democrats on Track to Avoid Being Locked out of Power in California Governor’s Race

More on Iowa: Running on ‘Prairie Populism,’ Turek Wins Primary as Iowa Dems Reach for US Senate Seat

A little scoop from Emine Yücel: Dems to Warn Trump He Has Run Afoul of War Powers Act With Absurd Claim That Iran War Has Been ‘Terminated’

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

Will We NEVER Learn the Lessons of Trump? — David Kurtz

What We Are Reading

Trump 2020 election denier Kurt Olsen joins Justice Department — Erin Banco and Andrew Goudsward, Reuters

Why young men are killing their sperm: The most ironic side effect of looksmaxxing. — Anna North, Vox

Who Is Nick Bilton? — Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs

Democrats on Track to Avoid Being Locked out of Power in California Governor’s Race

Posted on by Kate Riga

Democrats seem to have avoided the nightmare scenario in California: with just under 60 percent of the vote in, only one Republican is currently poised to make it to the general election. 

Continue reading “Democrats on Track to Avoid Being Locked out of Power in California Governor’s Race” →

Grand Jury Corruption Watch

Posted on by Josh Marshall

A few more nuggets to report out of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office. Yesterday the DOJ released what it referred to, rather grandiosely, as a “rare special report” about grand jury appearances. It was basically a statement and and defense by U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros himself to charges that he was himself involved with the tainted grand jury which brought charges against the so-called Broadview Six. It’s a bit convoluted, even for someone like me who’s followed the case pretty closely. The “report” starts by arguing that one transcript reference that appears to refer to the “USA”, i.e., the US Attorney, was actually a transcription error. So, as the “report” puts it, a classic case of mistaken identity. It seems like that may be right, though it’s not clear to me that anyone was actually referring to that bit of transcript. In any case, the “report” leads with that, making it seem like any claims that Boutros has dirty hands is just wrong and there’s no there there.

I read an account of this “report” and then shortly after the pretty aggressive/smackdowny statement from Broadview Six defense attorney Chris Parente, Boutros’ current main antagonist.

Continue reading “Grand Jury Corruption Watch” →

The Great Untethering—MAGA/GOP Edition

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Republicans will never turn on Trump. He’s gobbled up too much power in the architecture of the Republican Party. Even as his national approval numbers have continued to tumble, Trump has upped his ritual slayings of Republican incumbents, some for lack of total loyalty and then some, like John Cornyn, just for — well, let’s just say it — for the fuck of it. So it’s not just that he has too much power. The party’s elected officials are now overwhelming his people. When you see a breakdown between the White House and Republican majorities on Capitol Hill, it doesn’t come with any fingerprints. It’s almost like a black hole. Things that were going to happen just suddenly don’t happen. Or things disappear without a really obvious explanation.

The White House’s maybe-backaway from the Trump Thug Fund is an example of that. Todd Blanche says the Trump family’s immunity stays. They might try bring the fund back at any moment. But for now they’ve shelved it or are claiming they have. And the court ruling against it isn’t a sufficient explanation. They get those all the time. They’re abandoning it because it’s simply too unpopular on Capitol Hill.

Continue reading “The Great Untethering—MAGA/GOP Edition” →

The Proposed Trump NDA Is Following John Roberts’s Bad Example

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Last week, President Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management published a draft of a sweeping nondisclosure agreement that the administration hopes to impose on millions of federal workers. The proposed NDA would bar employees at federal agencies from revealing any “sensitive” information that is “not currently publicly available” and “should not be disclosed” under any applicable law or “government-wide policy.” Employees would remain obligated to keep quiet for five years after they leave federal service, unless they get “written permission” to do otherwise from an authorized agency official.

The proposal’s demand for secrecy is inherently in tension with democracy’s demand for transparency. And Congress has already passed several laws that aim to strike the right balance between the government’s responsibility to safeguard some private information, and federal employees’ First Amendment right to speak out about matters of public concern. As a result, confidentiality agreements have historically played a limited role in government, primarily impacting people with access to classified national security information.

In short, the Trump administration’s proposed government-wide blanket ban on speech is a dramatic departure from democratic norms—the latest in a series of many. In OPM’s draft notice, however, the administration contends that its gag rule does have precedent: The Supreme Court has a gag rule, too. 

Continue reading “The Proposed Trump NDA Is Following John Roberts’s Bad Example” →

The Mounting Toll and Absurdity of Trumpism

Posted on by David Kurtz

Mourning All We Have Lost

Laying awake last night processing the Supreme Court’s latest galling decision, I reflected on how many evenings over the past decade have been consumed by late breaking bad news of another historic setback.

My professional reactions to such news have slowly changed over time, from rushing to alert readers because it felt like an alarm needed to be sounded to waiting until I could provide better context to a growing sense that I have unwillingly become an obituary writer, chronicling the losses here each day.

This isn’t a lament. It is not self-excoriation that my hair isn’t sufficiently on fire 10 years into the Trump era. It’s not resignation. It’s an observation that over the course of a decade, the response to repeated losses, the next more serious than the last, takes on certain patterns.

The initial gut punch. The disbelief. The shock, but not really anymore, of another setback. The immediate urge to do something in response and finding few good options. Casting about for someone or something that explains what is happening better than I can. Coming to grips with where the new battle line must now be drawn, but with less confidence each time that it will hold any better than the last one did. Not feeling enervated exactly, but finding it harder over time to direct my energy productively.

Each setback brings its own constellation of losses, often deeply layered and spreading outward until they get entangled with all the others you haven’t yet fully processed.

Last night’s losses are staggering, even when seen through the prism of history, which usually mellows the perspective: a constitutional amendment born of the carnage of a civil war; a century of enduring Jim Crow’s base indignities; a grand mid-century civil rights movement; another half century of painstaking work to try to hold on to those gains.

Seen through a personal prism, the losses are of a small scale but no less difficult to fathom, a jumble of disparate anecdotes and the flickers of fading memories. That interview with David Duke in the mid-90s when Pat Buchanan was foreshadowing the GOP’s 21st century agenda. Discreetly pointing out John Lewis to my wide-eyed kids at a Capitol Hill diner while showing them a photo of him with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The losses on any given day come so fast and across such a wide spectrum of civic life that it overwhelms our capacity to mourn. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Rest in peace, 60 Minutes and the military’s merit-based promotion system, but also the deep-ocean observation system that you probably hadn’t heard of before now but which you’re glad existed independently of naked partisanship and the raw urge for power.

Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.

Bill Pulte as acting DNI. A Jan. 6 rioter hired in a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations. Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), his prison sentence commuted by President Trump, now under investigation for allegedly manipulating prediction markets by front-running on whether he would show up for Trump’s State of the Union address. Elon Musk’s coming IPO for SpaceX potentially catapulting his net worth past the unfathomable $1 trillion mark.

In looking for historical parallels to the current moment, I’ve often fallen back on 1942, America’s first year in World War II, when Imperial Japan was marauding across the Pacific. We know it as the darkness before the dawn of an Allied counterattack that eventually swung the war, but they didn’t know then when the tide would turn or if it ever would. A lesson for us, perhaps, in enduring setbacks and uncertainty.

In an astute analysis this week, Ned Resnikoff posits that Trumpism is hyperfascism, by which he doesn’t mean turbocharged or souped-up fascism, but “hyper” in the sense of over the top.

“It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found,” Resnikoff writes. “[I]t is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else.”

Hyperfascism eschews the hard work of sustaining itself, preferring the next spectacle to the grind of consolidating and entrenching its power through bureaucracy and structural advantages, at least as compared to other long-running authoritarian regimes.

“The good news is that this means hyperfascism can’t survive long as a governing ideology, because it has no program for long-term institution-building,” Resnikoff argues. “The bad news is that there may be no limits to the damage it can cause if left unchecked.”

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Coalescing Positions

Posted on by Josh Marshall

In very different language, and coming from his own vantage point, Jamelle Bouie has a piece up in the New York Times today which points in the same direction as I’ve been arguing here in various posts. The gist version is this. The current Project 2029 efforts are a mix of messaging/positioning efforts and policy proposals. Those may be solid or promising on their own terms. But they are inadequate. Trump broke the old system, which has existed in an evolving form since the 1930s and 1940s. You need to build a new system, a new vision and mechanism of public power in its place. As Bouie puts it, “A Project 2029 that has nothing to say about either the Senate filibuster, or an ideologically captured Supreme Court, or extreme partisan gerrymandering — among other concerns — is not a Project 2029 worth the time or effort.”

I’m flagging this because Bouie is one of the best and I want to highlight this article. But this is a position that is clearly enough distinct — structural reformers, reconstructionists — that it really needs to be seen as such in the world of Democratic politics, at least through 2029. When that happens, public arguments become more coherent. It provides clarity to voters.

People Died for the Voting Rights Act

Posted on by John Light

We are now well into the post-Voting Rights Act period, with ruthless attempts at racial gerrymandering unfolding across the South. The latest development came yesterday evening, when the Supreme Court deployed a twisted logic to effectively halt an Alabama election already in progress so state officials can hold it under a map that dilutes the Black vote.

Against that backdrop, we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this TPM story, from about two weeks ago now, in which the families of civil rights activists who died in the months before and immediately after the passage of the Voting Rights Act talked to us about what the Supreme Court’s April ruling eviscerating it means to them. This kind of work is not always the splashiest political reporting, but we think it’s important. It’s the kind of thing your memberships make possible. So thank you.

Continue reading “People Died for the Voting Rights Act” →

What’s Happening With the California Governor’s Race

Posted on by John Light

While the AP has not yet called the race, it now appears clear that Democrats have avoided a nightmare scenario they contemplated in the days after Eric Swalwell’s campaign for governor dramatically imploded: That some two dozen Democratic gubernatorial candidates might split the vote, creating room for two Trump-aligned Republicans to advance to the general election in the state’s top-two primary system. The state is notoriously slow to count votes, but, this morning, Trump-endorsed Fox commentator Steve Hilton (R) and former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D) currently have the top two spots. The other major Republican in the race, Sheriff Chad Bianco, trails as a distant fourth.

SCOTUS Cobbles Together Excuse to Let Alabama Discriminate Against Black Voters in New Order

Posted on by Kate Riga

The Supreme Court showed beyond a doubt Tuesday that it will never again put a stop to Republican states snuffing out the Black vote. 

Continue reading “SCOTUS Cobbles Together Excuse to Let Alabama Discriminate Against Black Voters in New Order” →