When I was a little boy in the Southern California school system in the 70s and 80s, there were separate holidays for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. Or at least this was my recollection. Both were celebrated. Then Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986. I thought at time and for many years after that Presidents Day was created out of a consolidation of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays in order to make room for Martin Luther King Day, on the reasoning that there’s a limit on the number of federal holidays. A number of years ago I looked into this and it turned out that this wasn’t true. I can’t remember the exact details. Lincoln’s birthday was never a federal holiday but it was celebrated in California. There was also a shift beginning around the same time to rebrand Washington’s birthday as Presidents Day. (Officially, it’s still Washington’s Birthday.)

In any case, my interest in this is that Abraham Lincoln should really have a national holiday. Some of this is a matter of him just really being a great president quite apart from the revolution brought about by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. Sometimes great iconic figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But the twin presidencies of Washington and Lincoln are if anything more powerful and important on close examination than they seem, though Washington’s role isn’t limited to his presidency. You have to see it in the context of his military and de facto political leadership during the Revolutionary War and his role in the period between the Revolution and his presidency, including his role at the constitutional convention. In any case, point being Washington and Lincoln are both critical figures in our national history. The holiday problem is that we have a logjam of birthdays, with King’s in January and both Washington’s and Lincoln’s falling in February. I guess there’s some reason why we can’t have that many national holidays right after each other. Fine. I don’t make the rules.

Yesterday, one of ICE’s and the White House’s prize ICE-as-victim cases blew up. We’ve seen a version of this happen before. The story is pushed on Fox. Charges follow. But as it begins to make its way through the courts, it falls apart and the charges are more or less quietly dropped. We’ve seen so, so many of these cases where it’s clear that what the ICE agents said just wasn’t true. I don’t even have to tell you about some of the more obscure ones. Though they didn’t get to charges since the purported attackers were already dead, you can see the pattern in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. First, the story was that protestors were trying to kill ICE agents and the agents barely emerged alive. Then we see the video and none of that is true. The key, though, is that in those cases where charges were filed, it’s always no harm no foul. The claims of ICE agents are shown to have been false, but it’s on to the next wilding spree. There are no consequences. Not for the original behavior. Not for lying about it.

But yesterday something different happened. The DOJ went into court and asked that a set of charges be dismissed with prejudice, i.e., they can’t be filed again. And the reason was this sentence that’s been rattling around my head for the last 24 hours. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit.”

Yesterday, we talked about the global Authoritarian Movement or Authoritarian International (with the convenient acronym “AI”). Today, I wanted to talk about something slightly more specific. It’s part of the same phenomenon, perhaps a subset of it, but it’s distinct.

Back during Trump’s first term, people in the anti-Trump world became intensely, if superficially, engaged with the inner-workings of Russia under Vladimir Putin, particularly the aggressive use of influence and disruption operations in competitor states, as well as the use of “kompromat” to maintain control over Russian oligarchs and key people — allies and enemies — abroad. One of the features of that world is that it’s really not extortion. It can be an oddly stabilizing system because everyone kind of has something on everyone else. In any case, this became a big part of the Trump opposition world during Trump’s first term. What did Putin have on Trump? What did he want? When did it start?

Day after day we’re seeing more signs of Donald Trump’s slipping grip not only on public opinion, but at the margins of the GOP itself. But I thought it was a good time to remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. Yes, there’s the GOP, which could easily dispatch him at any point if he didn’t have an iron hold over the party. There’s the 30%-40% of voters who are solidly in the MAGA camp. Without them, Trump’s nothing. I don’t mean either of those. I’m talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and governments around the world.

One issue we’ve discussed again and again during the Trump years is the purported belief as a form of performative aggression. It’s something essential to the Trumpian/MAGA world. You believe things that are, in factual terms, obviously absurd. But they’re also convenient. They create permission structures for all sorts of things they already want to do. To an important degree the absurdity of the professed belief is part of the attraction, especially since aggression is so deeply embedded in the professed belief. This issue comes up in a less extreme, though still similar, way in the various ways Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration try to justify ICE’s behavior.

Let’s start with masking.

We know their basic argument. There are legions of anti-ICE activists. If ICE agents don’t obscure their faces, they risk being “doxxed.” Set aside whether this is a justification for masking. This doesn’t seem crazy on its face. Demanding legal accountability for ICE agents is near the top of all anti-ICE activism. And the more radical activists can be quite aggressive in their tactics. So could this have happened? Of course. But what journalist Philip Bump was able to determine is that “doxxing,” the notional rationale for ICE masking has in fact never happened. Not once. It’s important to note what definition we’re using here. As Bump puts it, “At no point in time has an officer been seen conducting his work, identified and subsequently attacked. While there have been threats issued against agents and incidents of off-duty harassment, there are no known incidents in which an officer was assaulted while off-duty because he was identified as a federal agent.”

A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.

I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.

Kate and Josh discuss the latest Epstein file dump, along with headlines from the Lone Star State.

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.