Member Newsletter
Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.
Needless to say, things have played out a bit differently. But it seems even more important now. And to be clear, what I envisioned wasn’t just pulling these numbers out of the dense or un-user friendly Fed or Commerce Department websites but making the comparisons immediate, intuitive and above all shareable. We exist in many overlapping worlds of social and influencer ecosystems. Share buttons are nice. But what you really want is the ability to, with a couple clicks, create a shareable image — memes — you can push out across social ecosystems. Ideally you want different versions that use the visual idioms that are native to certain platforms — Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
I still want to create that or convince someone else to do it. Well executed, these things are vastly more powerful than things that much more money is spent on. That is especially the case when they play into or provide idea structures with which to understand things people are seeing and feeling. If people start seeing prices go up, they’ll be looking for explanations for why. We hear a lot about how the information space is heavily weighted toward the right today. And that’s true. But thinking that can also be a crutch. It’s overstated, even more it’s significance and permanence are overstated. Things can change very quickly when what people hear doesn’t match with their lived experience.
All this endless throat-clearing leads me to my new idea. You hear constantly about all the law breaking being done by DOGE and other parts of the Trump administration. It’s true. Whole departments get shut down in defiance of congressional statutes, laws about information privacy are being broken right and left. There are endless numbers of insider deals and sweetheart contracts being doled out. We see again and again where people say if there were a functioning Justice Department this or that would have triggered an investigation. But in politics, and really in all life, things that are vague are meaningless. They are too inchoate or uncertain to drive action. They can’t be pieced together with other hard facts to assemble anything of consequence. As we see them at present, they end up as little more than background noise.
Here’s what I envision — a small group of researchers and lawyers, let’s call them the DOJ in Exile. This small office I’ve created pulls together all these stories and all those to come. My team orders them into things that are awful but simply not part of the criminal law, those that could be prosecuted with creative but serious-minded uses of available statutes and those which appear to involve straightforward criminal conduct. Then they break them down into specific statutes. They name names. They can produce what amount to indictments in waiting. I could go through many more permutations here. But the concept and question is what would a real Justice Department be doing right now? Since it’s not a real Justice Department with the ability to compel testimony, make arrests and bring criminal charges, we don’t have the need for secrecy. You can discuss and publicize what you’re finding.
Needless to say, my small team would be minuscule compared to the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ. But they could do quite a lot. And, to be clear, I don’t envision going out and generating new facts. I imagine working primarily from credible published accounts of what has happened. There’s quite a lot you can learn by carefully sifting through publicly available information. A real investigation would need to validate and confirm these details in ways that would hold up in court. That’s fine. The point of the exercise is to provide an outline and a guide to probable, credible outcomes.
Now what’s the point?
Well, I think there are quite a few points.
The first is simply public illustration. Quotes from former prosecutors saying that this or that is probably illegal or would have prompted an investigation in the past is all meaningless. You need to make it concrete and specific. You put the arguments on paper in ways that can be validated or disputed by other people knowledgeable about the law. You provide details which people can use to make public arguments. As much as anything, you provide a sense of scale. Firm it all up, package it all together, make it possible for the average person to leaf through and see what’s happening — that’s profoundly important and valuable.
The second point is that it keeps some public and prosecutorial memory. This administration won’t be in power forever. Very high on the list for any successor administration will be to avoid the mistakes of the Biden administration. Lack of accountability and consequences spurs even greater levels of lawbreaking. It will be a record and a guide which future prosecutors can consult.
The third and closely related point is deterrence. People are doing anything and everything right now. They’re not necessarily the worst things but some of the clearest criminal conduct is taking place with contracting and sharing of people’s private data which the government collects for one and only one purpose. Insider trading is another massive area of possibilities.
Now, who cares if Josh’s phony DOJ says you committed a crime? That’s a good point. But I suspect if you have people who understand the law, who’ve tried cases, putting together practice prosecution memos detailing specific evidence of criminal conduct, which laws are violated … I think that will get people’s attention. Will they stop? Who knows? But I think they’ll notice. It will make it more concrete in people’s minds. These are real arguments that former and possibly future prosecutors take seriously and that judges would likely take seriously. Some statutes of limitations will have tolled. But, as we move forward, others will not have. Another area of research is what actions could be taken up by state prosecutors. The overall point here is simple: concentrate people’s minds with the very real possibility that actions today may lead to serious consequences tomorrow.
From the beginning of the DOGE story it’s been increasingly clear to me that the use of headstrong, callow yes men as the firing squads in these various departments and agencies is by design and with a particular purpose in mind. They don’t know what’s illegal and what’s not and they lack the character or brain development to think it will ever matter. Elon wants it. Trump likes it. What else matters? Look closely at the DOGE ecosystem and you’ll see very, very unmistakably that it’s virtually always guys not much older than 25 and often much younger who are actually getting their hands dirty. Yes, others are giving them marching orders. But there’s a high degree of deniability there. And DOGE seems to put very little in writing. Look at the org chart and you’ll see that people with families, people over 30, people with degrees — they’re all a few rungs up the ladder. That’s no accident. It would be very salutary to start collecting dossiers on each of these guys.
So that’s my latest idea. It’s way beyond anything TPM could afford to do and it wouldn’t be something that fits with TPM’s mission. When I find time I’ll probably be pitching other people to do it and trying to find rich people who I could connect to them to fund it. If you want, you could steal my idea right now.
[Ed. Note: To clarify, I was using a figure of speech when I spoke about “my team.” This isn’t something I plan on doing myself or leading. I’m not qualified to do this and I’ve got my hands full. But I want to see it happen. So I’m hoping to draw interest to the idea and, if it’s helpful, bring people together and help organizing such an endeavor.]