California Governor Gavin Newsom is plowing ahead with plans to gerrymander California’s congressional map to match the partisan gerrymander speeding to passage in Texas. He’s also been on a nonstop crusade going back a couple weeks — one half elaborate parody, one half frontal assault — using memes, all-caps, and boffo trash talk to attack Donald Trump. Not everyone likes Gavin Newsom. Personally, I’ve never been strongly in the fan or hater camp. But Newsom is doing exactly what we should be expecting of every Democratic politician today, especially those in executive office at the state level and especially those looking for promotions or to remain in office.

One benefit of what is happening in DC is that Donald Trump is giving every major city a preview of the plan, the model they want to pursue. Only in the every other major city in the country, he’ll lack a key tool: the takeover of the local police force. The courts will likely still allow deployment of National Guard and federal police organizations: ICE, CBP, DEA, FBI etc. That’s a lot. But local governments control over their police organizations and the apparatus of local government is a major difference. Every state and major municipal government needs to be stepping forward now with what their plan is. There’s no excuse for being caught off guard or unprepared.

UPDATE: As of 6pm, we’ve only got 8 tickets remaining. If you cannot get tickets, please add your name to the waitlist in case more come available

TPM is shipping up to Boston! For our final on-the-road event of 2025, we’re joining our friends at STAT News for an evening of conversation and drinks at Lamplighter Brewing Cambridge Crossing on September 25th. The night will begin with a discussion between TPM Founder Josh Marshall and STAT News co-founder Rick Berke. After that, there will be an open bar and a chance to chat with staff from both TPM and STAT. We hope you’ll join us! Capacity is limited so, if you’re interested, please get your tickets here as soon as possible!

Date 
September 25th, 2025 Time 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. EDT
Discussion will begin at 6:45
Open bar all night. Behave yourselves. 

Location 
Lamplighter Brewing Co. – CX110 North First Street Cambridge, MA 02141 

Ticket Information
$28.52 (inclusive of tax and fees)

I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’re getting set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of TPM, what with all the site signage and so forth. I’m not going to get into the precise details because they’re still being ironed out. And our team is putting a lot of time into what we have planned and I don’t want to get ahead of their formal roll out. But we’ve got some fun things in the works for later in the year. There are two parts of it that I wanted to mention to you. First, this fall we’re going to host a two-day celebration of TPM’s anniversary in New York City. It won’t quite be a New Yorker Festival type thing, but it will be a lot more than a panel discussion or a live podcast. Think of it as maybe a micro-festival. The TPM 25th Anniversary micro-festival. So that’s coming up. As I said, details will be announced in the not-too-distant future, including how to by tickets and so forth.

There’s another part of it that I’m really excited about. As part of the 25th Anniversary celebration we’ve commissioned 25 essays on a range of topics tied to the evolution of digital news media since the year 2000, which is mostly, but not all, the history of the digital news. I’ve seen the list of contributors and it’s a really cool group of people, people who’ve been involved in that story in different ways over the years in all different parts of it. When I recently saw the finalized list, I was going through the names and topics and, with almost every one, I’d think, “wow, so cool we got that person to write a piece.”

If you’re in or near Boston I hope you’ll join us on September 25th for a Happy Hour we’re hosting at the Lamplighter Brewing Co in Cambridge. We’re cohosting it with STAT News, the medical news website. STAT co-founder Rick Berke and I will have a quick discussion about the news of the day and then it’s drinking and chatting. I’ll be there and a bunch of other TPMers will be there. We’ve done these in New York and DC for the last handful and this is our first outside of our two home cities. Only a couple dozen tickets are left. So if you’re interested the details are here.

With one half of them beaming in from occupied D.C., Kate and Josh are back on the regular schedule to talk the capital takeover, budding Democratic resistance and Trump’s candid election rigging.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

I’d heard reports that the Pentagon was sending out official emails to Pentagon employees telling them about the great new opportunities available working for ICE and the CBP. Then I was told about this new listing at USAJobs — the official jobs board for the U.S. government. It says the Department of Homeland Security is creating something called the ICE/CBP “Volunteer Force” which is open to all civilian DOD employees.

The listing reads …

Last night I got an email from TPM reader LE. She started by explaining that she’s been reading TPM for at least a couple decades, going back to earlier early adulthood phases of her life, and is now a state legislator in a midwestern state. So the idea that state governments are central to the current moment is of great interest and resonated with her. (A side note: this introduction warmed my heart on many levels.) But she asked, more as a rhetorical question, than as a question to me: what specifically? Yes, state power is clearly critical but just what elements of state power should we be focusing on, where are the specific resistance points?

I had perhaps an over-convenient answer: I’m focused on the big picture. The small picture, well, good question …

But it did make me start thinking: If the concept is right, operationally what’s first? If state officials are saying what should we be doing, what should people advise?

This got me to thinking and I thought of various ideas and various ways of answering the question. So let me share a few of those, not in any comprehensive way but as a way of starting a conversation.

Yesterday (in this post which didn’t go up as a BackChannel) I discussed the idea of “strategic depth” as a way of thinking about the sovereignty of the states in the battle against Trumpism. I want to expand on that. Because it’s become pretty central to my thinking about how the United States is going to survive the next three and a half years and begin the process of battling back. “Strategic depth” is primarily a concept for military studies. It refers to the shape and arrangement of the physical territory a country controls and how close its borders, which may be vulnerable to military attack, are to its concentrations of population, political and industrial centers. If all a country’s key stuff is right near a vulnerable border that’s a big problem. But in addition to where its key stuff is, does it have a lot of territory to fall back on if it suffers early defeats?

President Trump has a new post up on Truth Social today in which he claims that states only run elections and count ballots as agents acting at his direction as president of the United States. The key lines are “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tell them …” He claims he’s going to issue an executive order to ban voting by mail and any voting machines he doesn’t like.

Put simply, this is total bullshit.