It was pretty obvious that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ admission to Vanity Fair that President Trump was engaged in “score settling” was going to make it into a legal filing sooner or later. Now it has.

In a filing overnight, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s attorneys cited the Wiles interview as part of their bid to dismiss the indictment against him on vindictive prosecution grounds:

I’ve been under the weather. That partly explains missing two days of posts. But another reason is a feeling of repetition. Everything I see in our politics right now — or at least at the pinnacle where Donald Trump dominates all the visuals and attention — has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it — crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him. That was, I believe, Wednesday, though the days run together. Then there’s his new hall of presidents, a sick-burn tweet storm embedded on a wall of what remains of the White House. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.

As the year winds down, we have a fun little project I want to pitch you on. It’s a key, incremental part of keeping TPM strong, vital and moving forward into the new year and beyond. Right now, we are 279 subscriptions short of a net increase of 3,000 subscribers for the year. True, this is not a bumper-sticker ready declaration. But it’s an important one. We want and need to keep growing like that as we move forward and the 3,000 net new members is a big milestone. So if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, please consider doing it before the new year.

And here’s the incentive. We have a supply of high-end TPM t-shirts and baseball caps from TPM’s 25th anniversary. These isn’t your standard made-on-demand online merch stuff. This is high end, plush, well made. I’m not saying it’s quite Louis Vuitton. But if you went to the campus bookstore at your alma mater and thought of getting a sweatshirt or something, it’d be that level of quality. If you are a non-member and you sign up for a TPM AF (ad free) annual membership we will give you a choice of either a T-shirt or a cap. This is while supplies last. We’ll update each day to tell you what we have left. If you are currently a TPM Prime member and you upgrade to ad free, we will make the same offer. Just to be super clear, we cannot do this for a regular TPM Prime membership. This does not mean that we don’t want you to sign up or that we’re not super grateful but these are pricey and we are trying to offer these as an additional incentive. (I’ll note how to claim your merch below.) Mainly, the reason to do this is to join our community and support our team’s work. People are often amazed that this little organization remains when so many other bigger ones, richer ones, hotter ones, have fallen by the wayside. This is why. We have this community who wants to be part of what we do and support what we do for the relatively small cost of a subscription. Click here to join right now.

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INSTRUCTIONS: If you sign up for a new TPM PRIME AF (ad free) annual membership, here’s what you do to claim your merch. Sign up or upgrade to the new membership. You’ll get a receipt by email. Someone at TPM will then follow up later (that day or the next) by email to get the details about your merch preferences and where to send it. That’s it. As I said, we will do this while supplies last and we are making the offer through this week. We will update on the Editor’s Blog if we run out of merch by the end of the week.

Our bespoke piñata of the day is the Susie Wiles piece in Vanity Fair (they must be excited to move on from Olivia …) We’re seeing the standard incantations of “fake news” from none other than Wiles herself. Trump’s Cabinet secretaries have all lined up to post tweets repeating the claim, intoning the Trump-Wiles catechism as though they’d just emerged from a fast-forward struggle session with a pack of feral MAGA toughs. I’ve started making my way through the morselly excerpts, as perhaps you have or are too. What struck me here was perhaps not even so much the quotes as the venue.

Few American publications are more at the heart of the cosmopolitan world of America than Vanity Fair. That is not liberal. Small-c cosmopolitan is different but overlapping. But it is perhaps even more than “liberal” what MAGA is talking about when it denounces the “coastal elite.” Certainly they’re talking more about that than, like, People for the American Way or Americans for Democratic Action or Heather Cox Richardson. Susie Wiles is no fool. And while she may — as in a very low de minimis chance — have gotten a touch injudicious in a few quotes, she certainly knew with perfect clarity what Vanity Fair is.

Today, I want to share some additional thoughts with you on this ranging topic of tech lords and predators, the conquistadors and pirates in our midst. It’s a point that is perhaps the most visible part of the current moment, but because of that, paradoxically, hardest to see clearly. It’s been more than a century since the men at the highest pinnacles of the American economy so visibly and directly intervened in the country’s politics. An element of that is the highly personalist nature of the big tech monopolies. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a CEO or plurality owner. He is Facebook. He’s the founder, the driving mind since the beginning. I believe that voting rights are structured in such a way at Meta that in terms of control as opposed to equity stakes he is in total control. Meta cannot be taken away from him. Whether or not voting rights are precisely the same, a similar story prevails at Amazon, Google, certainly X and all of Musk’s companies. We haven’t seen anything like that since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons, when big names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rockefeller similarly owned, drove and personified the great corporate behemoths and monopolies of the day.

For many decades, certainly since the Second World War, even the more politically- and ideologically-minded corporations kept their political spending and their exertions in the background. Perhaps they gave most of their money to Republicans but they’d give to Democrats too just to keep them mostly on side.

What we began to see in the late Biden administration and then to an almost mind-boggling degree through 2025 is not just the big tech titans cozying up to Trump and doing so visibly, but making themselves what we might call main characters in the American Political Cinematic Universe. There’s really nothing like it in our history. I know many friends who are into MMA and the UFC. My sons are into it. Not my thing. But great if it’s yours. But if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you take ringside seats at a UFC match with Trump friend and UFC CEO Dana White, you’re sending a very clear and specific message and you’re sending it far outside the channels where most traditional political messaging takes place. Even more if you put White on your board. And the same applies to going on Joe Rogan’s show and talking about a rights movement for “high testosterone males.” Yes, Zuckerberg got into MMA before the so-called “vibe shift.” But not in this politics-inflected way. We’ve seen countless examples of this in so many different contexts, starting with that unforgettable inauguration image where the seats of greatest distinction were reserved for the centi-billionaire tech titans. Government of, by and for them.

I’m not usually one for rubber-necking a celebrity death or commenting on it here. I feel I need to say something about Rob Reiner. It’s hard for me to think about someone in public life whose contributions were so weighted in the direction of humor and joy and whose final fate was so much one of horror and heartbreak. When I put together the pieces of that collision last night I couldn’t quite process it.

TPM has spent the past two months documenting the front lines of mass deportation in New York City. In courthouses, in churches, outside community gatherings and through an extensive digital network, we started to get a feel for and gain access to what we’re calling the “Undocumented Underground“: a volunteer army helping immigrants to stay in the country, even in the face of the Trump administration’s onslaught and some of its uniquely New York features, such as violent arrests in the halls of immigration court.

We published our first two installments in the series last week. The third — on legal clinics for immigrants facing deportation — is up this morning. Lou, a self-described “ex-finance guy” who is now “deeply involved” with one of these organizations says he started volunteering because of the hardships faced by migrants he’s met. 

“They literally have nothing,” Lou tells reporter Hunter Walker. “All they have is their character and their story.” 

Read Hunter’s latest here, and keep an eye out for several more installments this week.

series intro | first piece | second piece | third piece

I got a fascinating array of responses to my Tuesday post about the 21st century nabobs, striding over politics and society with their unheard of wealth and indifference to the rules we once imagined bound us. One of the big questions was, What happened to the original nabobs? Were they brought to heel? And several of you asked, Okay, so what are we going to do about this? I wanted to discuss these and other topics.

A lot has been flying around today in some of the key mass deportation/rule of law cases, but I want to tee up for you another major clash that is brewing:

In the convoluted, never-ending saga of the wrongfully deported and then indicted Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a federal judge in Maryland this morning ordered his immediate release from ICE custody — on grounds that are tinged with the bitterest of ironies.