During the year she spent leading the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, Kristi Noem faced a torrent of criticism. Lawmakers from both parties assailed her for lying about the shooting of protestors in Minneapolis and spending millions of dollars on television commercials. Government audits concluded that she “systematically obstructed” investigations and created security risks at airports.
Sometimes I write a post where I don’t know the topic well enough to discuss it expertly but I understand it enough to point to the outlines of the debate and where to find more information. This is one of those posts. Here, I want to discuss drones and missiles deployed by Iran and the expensive, high-tech weapons the U.S. and its allies use to shoot them down. This applies right now in the Persian Gulf where Iran is using a strategy of “asymmetric attrition.” But it would apply in even more complicated and hard-to-address ways if and when the U.S. got into a major conflict with, say, China over Taiwan. It’s that basic challenge of asymmetric warfare for a Great Power like the United States: the U.S. relies on often quite effective but very expensive and hard to replace weaponry. Iran’s clunky but effective drones cost in the low five-figures to produce, while U.S. missile defense tech can costs millions for a single shot.
The Wall Street Journal over the weekend published an extensive new analysis of what it candidly called the “aggressive public-relations tactic” that the Trump administration is using against opponents of its mass deportation operation.
“Protesters, observers and passersby taken into custody by federal agents were declared terrorists and attackers in hundreds of social-media posts by U.S. officials and departments since the start of the immigration sweeps in cities,” according to the WSJ, which proceeded to analyze the social media posts and track the underlying individual cases.
It was a substantial undertaking, as the newspaper describes it: After reviewing more than 100,000 posts on X from 66 government and senior official accounts, it “identified 1,456 posts in which the government alleged an assault, impediment, attack or conspiracy or attempt to harm a federal officer.”
The bottom line: “Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.” Ten of those accused have pleaded guilty to lesser charges, the newspaper’s analysis found. Two of those accused — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot dead by federal agents.
Rinse and Repeat
Texas: Newly released video of the fatal ICE shooting of U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez raises questions about the government’s claim that he “intentionally ran over” a federal agent.
Minnesota: Federal agents lied about why they shot a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis. Their story quickly fell apart, as the Tribune reports.
Xinis Resumes Contempt of Court Inquiry
I just listened in on a conference call that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis convened this morning in the original Abrego Garcia case where she picked back up the contempt of court inquiry that has been on a back-burner for months.
It was a mostly a housekeeping exercise about setting a briefing schedule and cleaning up some long-pending motions, but make no mistake: She is returning to the issue of whether to find the Trump administration, including Trump DOJ lawyers, in contempt of court for violating her orders to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return after his wrongful deportation to El Salvador. (She’s also considering a motion for discovery sanctions against the administration.)
One bit of news: In addition to contempt under the federal rules and under her own inherent power, Xinis specifically wants briefing on the applicability of one federal law that could potentially put Trump DOJ attorneys personally on the hook for financial penalties for their alleged misconduct: “Any attorney or other person admitted to conduct cases in any court of the United States or any Territory thereof who so multiplies the proceedings in any case unreasonably and vexatiously may be required by the court to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct.”
Stay tuned.
Mass Deportation Watch
Internal government documents reviewed by the NYT show that federal agents had been tracking Nashville reporter Estefany Maria Rodriguez Florez all morning before detaining her last week, raising fears that she was targeted because she’s a journalist who had reported on immigration arrests as recently as the day before her own.
Federal judges keep ordering immigration hearings but say the results are often a sham, Politico reports.
In Minnesota, DHS has pulled back from indiscriminate street sweeps and focused on conducting more targeted enforcement operations.
ICE awards untested firms hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to oversee new warehouse detention centers.
A New Low Even for Trump
With new evidence emerging that the United States was responsible for the strike on a school in southern Iran than killed scores of children, President Trump baselessly blamed Iran for the attack:
Reporter: Did the US bomb an elementary school and kill 175 people?Trump: Based on what I’ve seen, it was done by Iran. Reporter: Is that true Mr. Hegseth?Hegseth: We’re investigating.Trump: They are very inaccurate with their munitions. It was done by Iran.
The abrupt cancellation of a planned training exercise for the 82nd Airborne Division’s headquarters element fueled internal Pentagon speculation that the division’s Immediate Response Force may be deployed to the Middle East
A classified National Intelligence Council report warned that even a large-scale U.S. assault on Iran would be unlikely to oust its entrenched military and clerical establishment.
Latest from the Middle East …
Iran selected Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as its new leader, and oil jumped to more than $100 a barrel as the flow of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz slowed to a virtual stop. Plus:
Donning a white baseball cap emblazoned with “USA” in gold, President Trump attended the ceremony in Dover for the returning remains of six U.S. service members killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. A seventh American service member died in Saudi Arabia after being injured in a March 1 retaliatory strike by Iran.
The State Department ordered American employees of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Saudi Arabia to leave the country.
In its first reported combat deaths in the Middle Eastern conflict, Israel announced that two soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon. The overall death toll in Lebanon has risen to nearly 400 people.
Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the “spectacle” of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war.
U.S. Conducts 45th Boat Strike
Six people were killed Sunday in another lawless U.S. strike against a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, raising the campaign’s death toll to at least 156.
Cuba Next?
With President Trump openly touting regime change in Cuba, the Trump DOJ has established a working group led by Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones to drum up possible federal charges against officials or entities within Cuba’s government.
Kari Lake’s Appointment Unlawful
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled over the weekend that Kari Lake’s appointment as chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. As a result, Lamberth voided many of Lake’s actions while purporting to be in the position, including mass layoffs at Voice of America.
2026 Ephemera
TX-23: Brandon Herrera, the default GOP nominee after incumbent Rep. Tony Gonzales (R) dropped his bid for re-election, can be seen bragging about his copy of “Mein Kampf” and shooting Nazi-era weapons in clips that began circulating widely late last week. Check out Josh Kovensky’s piece for more on Herrera.
CA-48: After serving in Congress for all but one term since 2001, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is retiring rather than running for re-election in a newly drawn district more favorable to Democrats.
Sign of the Times
NYT analysis: “300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.”
Florida Bar: Never Mind on Halligan
In a weird, poorly explained reversal, the Florida Bar said in statement Friday that there is no pending investigation of former U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
Early Saturday morning, while it was still dark, the long-delayed bronze plaque honoring the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 was bolted into place near an entrance on the west front of the building.
Former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted of sedition for his role in the Jan. 6 attack before being pardoned by President Trump, pals around with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the future viceroy of Cuba (both share Cuban ancestry):
With @SecRubio at the Shield of the Americas summit. By far the President Trumps choices for his cabinet.
This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
The most enduring conspiracy theories often contain kernels of truth, though it is debatable whether any popularly theorized conspiracy has later been proven as real by unassailable facts. But if one popular conspiracy theory seems to have been promoted from “theory” to fact, it would appear to be QAnon. What started as a far-right prophecy scam using codes and ciphers on 4chan to “reveal” the horrors of a pedophile cabal ruling the world has taken on a distinct tinge of truth thanks to millions of newly-released files involving fixer and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
It’s easy to look at Epstein’s communications with billionaires and royals, famous directors and scions of old money, and see the dealings of a cabal. In those countless emails, we seem to have a notorious sex offender and lover of “young women” exchanging messages with some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. Some of them appear innocuous, and some of them are deeply weird and extremely disturbing.
Like QAnon’s accusations, at least some of these messages are written in what many researchers have theorized is a code for truly unspeakable things, such as powerful people trafficking their own children, or hunting and eating human beings. And just like with QAnon, it’s fallen to “citizen researchers” to dig through the “drops” from the Department of Justice, as unpaid truth crusaders churn through millions of messages full of noise to find the bits of signal that “they” were hiding from us.
Naturally, the Epstein revelations have resulted in some QAnon believers claiming that the Epstein releases validate their years of hard work and research into the “pedo elite” running the west. It’s also resulted in a number of stories, podcasts, and social media threads essentially saying that QAnon was right this whole time. Essentially, we all thought these Q people were crazy, but there really was a pedophile cabal running things, and the Q believers knew the whole time.
Except QAnon has not been “proven true,” and it was not right. This is not because of anything to do with Epstein, but because that’s not really what QAnon was about. The idea of a dark cabal running world events and doing horrible things in the shadows is only part of QAnon — and it’s the least original part, at that.
In discussions of modern wars, Americans obsess about “exit strategies”. How do you avoid getting “bogged down?” How do you know when the mission is finished? How do you avoid “mission creep?” These are very much Great Power questions. They’re all questions you ask about what are fundamentally wars of choice. They’re framed as questions of duration and sustainability, questions a Great Power asks when there are likely multiple draws on blood or treasure in various parts of the world, fears of over-extension and over-commitment. Other countries don’t have the luxury of these kinds of questions; it’s built into the Great Power equation. Ukraine has no “exit strategy.” They’re being invaded. They’re fighting to control their own territory and sovereignty. In a way, at least if you place yourself in the world of Greater Russian nationalism where Vladimir Putin and his entourage live, Russia doesn’t have one either. They’re trying to reclaim “their” territory or something between a national and imperial possession. They’ll fight until they get it.
But talk of “exit strategies” is really a way of asking what the goals are that led you to start a war in the first place. If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a “strategy” at all. When your goals are met, you’re done and you leave. Or at least you stop using military force. If you know what your goal is, you fight until you’ve a) achieved your goal or b) realized through battlefield reverses that your goal is unattainable. If your goal is unclear, all the inherent forward momentum of superior military force drives you forward.
Even the outbreak of war can’t stop the social season at President Donald Trump’s private Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago. In fact, just before launching the wave of attacks against Iran last weekend, Trump made a cameo appearance at a gala where he hinted to guests that some very presidential activity was about to go down.
We live in a time when those who rule over us mix malevolence and absurdity. We have an example of this in this Politico article. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is telling advisors to “bring ideas to the Oval Office to lower gasoline prices in the wake of the U.S. attack on Iran.” One of the oil executive sources for this story says the White House is “looking under every rock for ideas on improving energy prices, especially gasoline prices.” Trump’s Energy and Interior Secretaries are “are getting screamed at to find some good news” on bringing down oil and gas prices.
We just crossed our first threshold in our Annual TPM Membership Drive. We got off to a slow start this week. But our pace is starting to increase. More than a hundred new members now since we kicked off. If you’re not currently a member or if your membership lapsed, please consider signing up right now. Just right this moment. I know about delaying or “I’ll do it later.” It helps so much if you take 90 seconds, click here and just join us. You’ll be so happy you did.
A short time ago I got email from a TPM reader with a version of this question: Josh, are you sure there’s going to be a November election? Because everything I’m seeing tells me they don’t think there are any consequences, even political consequences, coming from any of this. It wasn’t a challenge so much as a question: are you sure? I have no way to predict the future. But yes, I am as confident there’s going to be a November election as I’ve ever been. I’m not trying to get in an argument about that. This is my opinion. You might have another.
A couple months ago, I said that we were starting to see a pattern. As Trump grew less popular and less powerful at home, he would need to compensate to maintain his psychic equilibrium. He’d lean more and more into the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has. He’ll be increasingly aggressive and violent in those realms of power as he becomes more constrained and limited in others. In Trump’s world, there is dominating and there is being dominated. For him, the latter is a psychic death. So leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.
I found myself going from indifferent to slightly confounded by the reaction to President Trump’s firing of Kristi Noem as DHS secretary.
In the old days of a less homogenous Republican Party, a change of cabinet secretary might mark a shift toward or away from one alliance or another. It might stress an internal party tension point along regional, cultural, or ideological differences. It might usher one coalition into power and another out. It might represent a policy change or a tonal adjustment.
Even back then it wasn’t likely to matter that much, but if you were into nuance there were things to sort through. Now, with the Republican Party in lock step with a Trump White House that micromanages every department and agency, the identity of which particular reality TV cast member (literally in the case of Sean Duffy at the Transportation Department) occupies which position in the cabinet is without much real meaning.
Noem is out. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin is in. But there is an endless supply of other figureheads for Trump to name to nominally run DHS, while he and Stephen Miller via Tom Homan pull the strings from the West Wing. The mass deportation operation for which no one is more responsible than Donald Trump grinds on mercilessly and lawlessly.
Is Noem the worst DHS secretary in history? As with Pam Bondi’s historically bad run as attorney general, it feels like an inapt point. They are ciphers, meant to fill a TV role cast by Trump and to respond to his every whim and impulse, not run giant organizations or make independent decisions. Donald Trump is the worst DHS secretary in history, and worst attorney general and … you get the point.
There is a tendency in news coverage to reward Trump by covering the action — a firing — rather than his failure on every level. It results in a weird herd-like dynamic where everyone piles on to reject the obviously foolish person who was fired and thereby associate themselves with the powerful actor who did the firing. Which is, well, insane here and in the many other instances of Trump’s serial firings of officials who do exactly what he said in the way that he directed it done for the reasons he articulated.
In some ways I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a guy whose entire political persona is rooted in performative firings on a reality TV show. That formula resonates for a lot of Americans, as much as I wish it were otherwise.
The mass deportation operation is Trump’s singular political obsession for his entire time in national politics. It would have happened with or without Kristi Noem. It will continue until Trump and Trump alone decides otherwise.
The Kafkaesque Brutality
A Colombian reporter working in the United States while seeking political asylum here was detained in Nashville this week and quickly shipped off to Louisiana for allegedly missing two meetings with ICE, one of which was cancelled by the January ice storm and the other of which she claims ICE told her she didn’t have to attend.
‘Christian Nations Under God’
Addressing representatives of countries in the Western Hemisphere yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth let his white nationalist flag fly:
.@SECWAR “All the nations represented in this room are offspring of Western civilization.
Our nations are and always will be united by our heritage, history, and geography in this New World. We share the same interests, and because of this, we face an essential test.
Before we dive into the news, a reminder that Iran is much larger than most Americans realize. Comparing it to European countries as a frame of reference, only Russia and Ukraine occupy a larger land area. Iran’s population is larger than those of Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain.
U.S. military investigators “believe it is likely” that the United States was responsible for Saturday’s strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran, Reuters reports, citing two unnamed U.S. officials. The NYT’s own analysis indicates the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as U.S. attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The U.S. sinking of the IRIS Dena (an Iranian frigate, not a destroyer, as I described it earlier this week) has complicated relations with third countries. It has caused consternation in India, from where the ship was returning (unarmed, the Iranians say) after joint military exercise that included U.S. participation. Three Australian nationals were embedded with the U.S. military aboard the submarine that sank the Iranian warship.
Four Democrats joined the House GOP majority to block a war powers resolution that would have asserted some congressional independence from President Trump.
Florida Bar Investigates Lindsey Halligan
In a letter to an advocacy group that had filed a complaint against former interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, the Florida Bar said an investigation of her was already pending. The NYT first obtained the letter, which offers no details about the investigation.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
House Republicans are pressing the Trump DOJ to bring criminal charges against Trump I White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson, who became the star witness of the Jan. 6 Committee’s hearings, CNN reports. In recent days, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) made a bogus criminal referral of Hutchinson case to the Justice Department, accusing her of lying in her congressional testimony.
Virginia Democrats have passed a bill that Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) is expected to sign that would bar schools from teaching that the Jan. 6 attach was a peaceful demonstration or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election.
2026 Ephemera
TX-Sen: President Trump is poised to endorse Sen. John Cornyn (R) for re-election in the GOP primary runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
TX-23: While the dark sex scandal around Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) dragged out for weeks, the end came rather quickly. On Tuesday, he was forced into a runoff in the GOP primary. On Wednesday, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Gonzales, and he admitted to the affair with a former staffer who took her own life. On Thursday, the House GOP leadership yesterday called for him to end his re-election campaign, which he finally did late last night.
The Trump DOJ has released previously withheld FBI interviews with a woman who alleges that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s after being introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein. The woman claims she was between 13 and 15 years old when Trump hit her after she bit his penis when he attempted to force her to perform oral sex. The White House called the allegation “completely baseless” and attacked the credibility of the unnamed accuser.
‘Low Rhythm Rising’
One of the biggest surprises in writing Morning Memo has been the response I’ve gotten from occasionally dipping into music. I’ve said before, but I cannot emphasize enough, how remedial of a music fan I am. Embarrassingly so. It’s been a lifelong gap in my personal development. But summoning the courage, at the risk of public mortification, to share a little of what I like, has yielded remarkably rich interactions with MM readers.
Case in point: When I was in Nashville last week covering the Abrego Garcia case, a MM reader reached out and invited me over for a tour of the Country Music Hall of Fame’s new exhibit on Muscle Shoals. “I know you’re a music guy,” he said. Rather than raise a protest, I just let that misimpression go and dove into the experience.
The exhibit really landed with me, indulging in nostalgia as you would expect, but without flattening the complexities of that time and place. The curators collected way more memorabilia than I would have expected still existed, including the piano that was used at FAME Studios for most of the 1960s and on which Aretha Franklin famously played her first hit: “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” To set the vibe, a lot of faux wood grain is used to evoke the cheap midcentury paneling that was inside the studios.
The exhibit reaches well beyond the narrowest definitions of country music to draw out how the Muscle Shoals influence threads across musical genres, generations, and racial divides. It maps the influence like a family tree that shows the Muscle Shoals musical DNA still persisting decades after it first emerged in the northwest corner of Alabama.
If you can’t make it yourself, here’s a good peek at what you’re missing:
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