You’ve blessed us with a very solid start to this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. The challenging part is the second half of our way toward our goal of raising $500,000 this year. We’re currently at $287,886, so just over $12,000 from hitting the 60% benchmark. We really need your help getting to $300,000 today. If you’ve been thinking about contributing, it would be a great help if you could do it today. I get delaying, keep meaning to — that’s my main pastime. So if you could just take a moment right now and click here, we’d truly appreciate it. If you’re a member, you don’t even have to take out your wallet. Just a couple clicks. Super easy. Thank you in advance.
I saw a headline today that UnitedHealthcare has acknowledged that its Medicare business is being investigated by the Department of Justice. In the old days, which is to say basically any time before January 2025, I would have assumed that UHC had probably been guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Or let me state that more precisely: I would have assumed that there was evidence meriting an investigation, whether that was civil, criminal, perhaps over antitrust. I would assume merit. When I heard this news today my default assumption was that UHC was being punished by the Trump administration or had gotten crosswise in some way with the White House. It’s not even either/or. Let’s assume the probe starts for legitimate reasons. The fact that UHC couldn’t make an offering at the White House and have the probe killed must mean they’re on the outs, right?
It’s too much to say — I think, or I hope — that there’s no one left at the DOJ interested in simply enforcing the law. It’s also true that the gutting has been spread around unequally. Some divisions are more or less intact. But certainly the weight of crookdom and integrity has shifted significantly. Unfortunately, my shift in assumptions seems merited.
A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?
There are a few different ways to answer this. At one level, in MAGA world, Donald Trump is different. No rules apply to him. It’s good to be the king. At another level, it’s a complicated question comparing the horror of different kinds of sexual predation, or whether a person who does one is likely do do another. But there is one level of MAGA’s hyper-focus on pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy theories which needs to be emphasized. Because at a basic level, that obsession has nothing to do with pedophilia as a thing in itself — not as most of us might understand it.
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I’ve told you before about my kind of love/hate feelings about Tom Edsall, longtime reporter for The Washington Post, who more recently writes a weekly column for the New York Times. It’s not too much to say that almost regardless of the facts of the moment he’ll come up with an explanation for why those facts are terrible news for Democrats. Yesterday’s column is a kind of tour de force in this genre (“This Is a Realignment That Has Significant Staying Power.”) The column collects quotes and quick exchanges with a range of political scientists who argue that the first six months of 2025 have shown just how enduring Donald Trump’s 2024 realignment is turning out to be and quickly dismisses the views of the few observers he quotes who disagree.
As someone who tries to comment on and understand current events as best as I’m able, columns like this are kind of a warning sign of a path not to go down, that path being looking for the analyses and data points which back your preferred view of things or the one you feel reflexively must be the case. So I tried my best to not do that while thinking about this piece.
JoinIf you’ve been reading TPM for awhile, you may already know that our organization can shift on a dime. We typically have around five reporters. (A few of our editors also write.) That means, unlike larger news organizations, we don’t have people with particular beats. We don’t have people who author a particular kind of story — no one who just writes breaking news or just writes features or just does a newsletter or a podcast. Everyone, at any moment, can pitch in with anything on any topic.
Though it wasn’t always the result of a conscious decision on the part of the editors, TPM has made use of this flexibility during this unprecedented time. We’ve reinvented our approach to the news repeatedly since August 2024, when our last Journalism Fund drive concluded, with our reporters working in different modes and in different styles across a wide range of topics to contend with a historic moment in American history.
As we reflect on the many ways TPM is unique during the journalism fund drive, I thought readers might enjoy a glimpse of how we see the journey we’ve traveled over the last year — in terms of what we understood ourselves to be providing to readers, and what we understood readers to need from us.
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Every time I think Donald Trump is putting some distance between himself and the Epstein scandal he does some new thing to make it the centerpoint story in the American news ecosystem. Last night House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) decide to shut the entire House of Representatives for the rest of the summer so members don’t have to make any more painful coverup votes related to the Epstein case. Yesterday, the White House ordered the release of a vast trove of FBI files about Martin Luther King, Jr., a bizarre, pathetic, wrong and ultimately counterproductive attempt to distract from the Epstein Files.
We should start by noting that the King files were overwhelmingly the product of illegal surveillance that then FBI-director J. Edgar Hoover ordered to get blackmail information on King either to discredit him, force him out of public life, or, in specific cases, drive him to suicide. So it was anything but disinterested surveillance, and FBI agents had a huge incentive to include rumor, innuendo and more, whether it was true or not. With that said, King was also what used to be known as a womanizer. This is simply a fact of history along with King being one of the giants and heroes of the American 20th century. We know this mainly from the FBI files that were released decades ago — which is to say that we know from illegal surveillance that was conducted with the specific intent of neutralizing him as a leader of the civil rights movement.
I can only imagine that Trump ordered this with the idea that people can say “Ahha! Many prominent men had subpar sexual morality! Ahha! Ahha!” Either that, or to somehow cast Trump as another freedom fighter who the deep state is trying to bring down with sexual peccadillos. It is very important to note that I don’t think there’s ever been evidence or the suggestion that King’s paramours were anything but adult and willing. The part of this that is so wild is that I don’t think Epstein was really top of mind in the news world Monday morning, certainly not as much as was any day last week. But Trump put it right back there with the King materials. It’s the most obvious thing: releasing any trove of documents just reminds people of the trove Trump is moving heaven and earth not to release. I don’t think anything is more obvious. It’s like a quick fix that deepens the craving.
Today we learn that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will be meeting with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell looking for the “real pedophile” and presumably coordinating stories. And just this morning while meeting with the President of the Philippines, President Trump told reporters his intelligence chief has now proven that Hillary Clinton and “Barack Hussein Obama” are guilty of “treason” and they “ought to take a look at that and stop talking about” the Epstein files.
It’s really not too much to say that just as the House has been shut down to avoid more Epstein cover-up votes, the executive branch is now more or less exclusively focused on trying to shut down the Epstein story: MLK assassination documents, a meeting with Maxwell, a new Hillary/Obama treason investigation. It’s all they’re doing.
I keep thinking some new thing will happen or people will lose interest. This weekend there was an emerging conventional wisdom in the Beltway publications that Trump had flipped the script with the Wall Street Journal article, something that never made much sense. But that clearly wasn’t the case and Trump himself forced it back to the top of news attention with his flurry of new diversions.
What can possibly be in those files?
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I wanted to take a moment today to highlight something that to me, at least, is behind a certain uncanny quality to the summer of 2025. Two things, which point in two entirely different directions, are happening at the same time. Every day you can find in the news a new example of the president cutting funding (either by legal or extra-legal means) or asserting direct control over funding in order to entrench his direct personal power. This might be defunding universities, ending funding of public broadcasting, or anything in between. He’s now opened criminal probes into numerous public officials. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to expand its war not only against the undocumented and legal residents but also against self-government in major American (blue) cities. I could mention dozens of other examples but the simplest overview is that the president continues to expand and entrench his authoritarian vision of rule, in which the whole machinery of government exists to impose his will and battle his enemies, with courts that are mostly but not always compliant.
JoinI’m happy and relieved to report that early yesterday we hit the halfway point to our goal of raising $500,000 in this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re currently at $252,305. The second 50% is way harder. That’s just the logic of drives. But getting to this point in less than one week is very encouraging. As we’ve been explaining, the TPM Journalism Fund is a key part of how we keep this site alive and thriving. So if you’ve been considering making a contribution this year, please take a moment to do so now. It’s quick and easy, and every dollar helps. Just click right here.
Here’s a story a TPM Reader just flagged to me which seems somehow unremarkable in the Trump II Era but would be comical and unreal in a non-degenerate era. “A top State Department official who oversaw recent mass layoffs is now taking over as the acting head of the General Services Administration, according to an email sent to staff.” The article, which Federal News Network ran as a breaking news item with details to follow, explains that Michael Rigas, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, has personally been ordered by Donald Trump to take over as acting head of GSA, while the just-relieved acting head will remain as Rigas’ deputy acting GSA head.
You’ve no doubt seen the Wall Street Journal story on Trump’s lewd and innuendo-rich 2003 birthday card to Jeff Epstein. That speaks for itself. To me what speaks more loudly is what appears to have been an all-out war from the White House to get the Journal to kill the story. Just after 8:30 p.m. ET the President posted a jangling rant attacking Rupert Murdoch and Journal editor Emma Tucker, insisting he’ll sue, blaming Hillary and Obama. An hour and a half later, he posted a more succinct version of the same post, again claiming the letter was “FAKE”, threatening to sue, yada. In between those two posts he did yet another post clearly intended to appear to be Trump finally losing his patience and insisting that all information be made public. Only it wasn’t that at all. Trump said he was asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetrated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
There are three problems with this.
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