Trump Threatens Elon With Monster of His Own Making

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

After Elon Musk and Donald Trump engaged in a half-hearted public apology tour, which mostly involved the world’s richest man tweeting that he “went too far” in some of his criticisms of the President, the pair are back at it this week. Musk — as we’ll get into below — has ramped up his public criticism of the reconciliation package Senate Republicans are trying to pass through the upper chamber, primarily critiquing its huge cost and its targeting of Biden-era clean energy tax incentives.

Trump has become very interested in the amount of government subsidies Musk’s various companies receive since the billionaire left the Trump administration early last month, handing the work of ransacking the federal government over to the tech bros he’d installed in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Around midnight last night, Trump reprised his public musings about Musk’s government contracts and subsidies. In a Truth Social post, he threatened to take the DOGE monster that Musk created and train it on Musk himself.

“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump said. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”

Trump doubled down on those veiled deportation threats when asked about the re-escalating feud on Tuesday morning.

Musk, for his part, has continued railing against the legislation on X in the face of Trump’s threats, suggesting Senate Republicans who vote to pass the bill are enabling “debt slavery.”

The substance of the ongoing tensions between the two billionaires matters less than the bigger picture: sycophantic fealty is the only guaranteed protection in Trump’s White House, whether you helped him dismantle the federal government or not.

DOJ Says It Is Going to Attempt Denaturalizations

A June 11 DOJ memo made public over the weekend set denaturalizations of U.S. citizens as one of the Civil Division’s top five enforcement priorities.

“At a fundamental level, it also supports the overall integrity of the naturalization program by ensuring that those who unlawfully procured citizenship, including those who obtained it through fraud or concealment of material information, do not maintain the benefits of the unlawful procurement,” the memo stated, raising the possibility that the DOJ will lean heavily on claiming now-citizens did not disclose connections to groups the Trump administration disfavors on their citizenship applications. That’s an argument the administration has also leaned on in its attacks on visa- and green card-holding critics of Israel’s war in Gaza.

TPM’s Josh Kovensky explained how denaturalizations could work — or not work — last year. NPR has more on last month’s DOJ memo.

ICE Ices Out Elected Dems

Following recent arrests of several high-profile elected Democrats seeking to do oversight on immigration detention centers, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has officially put in place a new policy that Democratic members of Congress must provide a week’s notice before visiting facilities. The policy runs counter to federal law, which allows elected officials to visit detention centers unannounced to conduct oversight.

Some Dems are already suggesting the move may be illegal.

“No matter how you read it, D.H.S. and ICE are flagrantly violating the law,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said in a statement to the Times. “They think they are accountable to no one, but following federal law is not optional. What are they hiding from the American people?”

Big, Beautiful Bill Still Stuck

Debate on the bill continues on Tuesday as the senators trudge through the amendment vote-a-rama, the final step before passage. The drawn-out process suggests that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has not yet locked down the votes he needs.

Big, Beautiful Mystery

NBC asked a handful of Republican senators how the bill ended up, as Morning Memo noted yesterday, not only slashing the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for clean energy projects, but imposing a new excise taxes on wind and solar, leaving even some Republicans uncomfortable. No one seemed to know.

“It’s a secret, I guess,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told NBC.

It was as if the provision was “airdropped” into the bill before Saturday’s procedural vote to begin debate, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said.

Musk Steps Up His War on the Package

Elon Musk has previously cast himself as a budget hawk when railing against Trump’s signature piece of legislation, and that continues. Now, he’s mixing in a not-totally-ideologically-coherent mélange of other critiques on the bill, including criticism of its assault on clean energy. “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future,” he said Saturday about the bill’s wind and solar excise tax.

“A massive strategic error is being made right now to damage solar/battery that will leave America extremely vulnerable in the future,” he said in another tweet.

Speaking of Musk

The Washington Post:

For months, Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service plumbed the federal government’s information systems, scouring arcane internal records that the billionaire said were guiding his hunt for waste. Now that Musk has stepped away from his government role, some of that data could be valuable in another way — by giving the world’s richest man a competitive advantage over his rivals in the private sector.

A Washington Post examination found that in at least seven major departments or agencies, DOGE secured the power to view records that contain competitors’ trade secrets, nonpublic details about government contracts, and sensitive regulatory actions or other information.

Trump Drops Selzer Suit

The President has given up on his ridiculous attempt to legally punish pollster Ann Selzer for wildly underestimating his general election performance in Iowa.

Supreme Court Takes Up Significant Case for Next Term

The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to campaign finance regulations, and a Nixon-era law from which they stem, that restrict the amounts political party organizations can spend in coordination with individual candidates for office. While the case represents another chance for the high court to demolish campaign finance regulations, it could also shake up in unpredictable ways the political spending landscape that has existed since 2010’s Citizens United decision, in which Super PACs and dark money groups can dump huge sums into races. The Supreme Court’s likely demolition of the restrictions on political party spending could see that money routed back through the parties.

Republican groups filed the lawsuit in 2022 in conjunction with the campaigns of then-Senator JD Vance and another Senate candidate.

Probably an Innocent Mistake

While governor of South Dakota, now-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem significantly supplemented her income with dark money from a political nonprofit that she did not disclose. ProPublica:

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

More on Friday’s SCOTUS Ruling on National Injunctions

Law professor Steve Vladeck:

But the more that the Supreme Court in general (and this Court, specifically) does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, the more that it is betting its future legitimacy on continuing public support for being subject to its whims. That is a very different vision of judicial supremacy than the one to which I ascribe—and a vision that is not only deeply unstable in the long run, but that seems particularly ill-suited for the treacherous political and constitutional moment in which we find ourselves.

Law professor Ilya Somin:

The real heart of the matter here is not the technical debate about historical analogies, but a core principle of constitutional government: the state must not be allowed to engage in large-scale systematic violations of the Constitution, especially when it comes to basic constitutional rights, like the birthright citizenship rights at issue in this case. And courts must be able to impose the remedies necessary to prevent that. That principle is vastly more important than any historical details about the exact nature of remedies available [in] British courts in 1789.

Historian John Ganz:

I’m not a lawyer or legal scholar but what jumped out to me in Justice Jackson’s dissent was a footnote where she cited a 1941 book by Ernst Fraenkel called The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Fraenkel was a social democratic labor lawyer in Weimar Germany who was pushed out of his profession for his Jewish background after the Nazi seizure of power. In The Dual State, he provides a theory of the nature of the legal order under the Nazi regime: On the one hand, there remained a “normative state,” which would uphold every-day, procedural rule of law, and on the other hand, there was the “prerogative state,” which ruled through arbitrary violence and coercion against the state’s proscribed enemies

Remembering Bill Moyers

I (John) wrote an article yesterday reflecting on journalist Bill Moyers’ unique, urgent warnings about the democratic crisis in which we now find ourselves.

There were a bunch of other good remembrances published in recent days, too.

• Journalist Eric Alterman at the New Republic: Bill Moyers Had Three Careers and Excelled at Every One of Them
• Journalist John Nichols at the Nation: Bill Moyers Kept the Faith in Democracy. We Need His Example More Than Ever.
• Activist and journalist Bill McKibben on his Substack: A Great and Good Man
• Journalists Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope in Columbia Journalism Review: Bill Moyers Helped Break the Media’s Climate Silence

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