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

Who’s Conning Whom Exactly?

Before jumping ahead to the constitutionality of President Trump accepting as a “gift” from Qatar a $400 million 747 jumbo jet as short-term replacement for Air Force One and the legality of then transferring the plane to his corrupt presidential library foundation for him to use post-presidency – before ALL of that – can we discuss whether this can even be accomplished as a practical matter?

Much of the coverage treats it as a foregone conclusion that the Air Force can simply retrofit the Qatari plane and Trump can be soaring in luxury by the end of the year. It was that timeline, reported by the NYT, that caught my eye. First off, the Air Force doesn’t have this capability; it has to contract out the work.

The WSJ reported on some aspects of this a couple of weeks ago, suggesting that L3Harris had already been commissioned to retrofit a Qatari plane for use as Air Force One (but the NYT reported yesterday that no agreement on a contract has been reached yet). The plane in the WSJ story seems to be the same plane Trump is talking about now, with delivery on a similarly unrealistic timeline. “Trump wants to have the plane available for use as early as the fall,” the WSJ reported.

It’s clear though a bit buried in the reporting that retrofitting a 747 (Boeing stopped 747 production in 2022) is not some clever workaround to the challenges Boeing has faced in producing a new generation Air Force One. The array of capabilities that Air Force One currently has are the nut of the contracting problem. There’s nothing to suggest that you can solve that problem merely by starting with a lux 747. Here’s how the WSJ described it in a May 1 story:

Building out an interim airplane by the end of this year poses its own challenges. The plane might not be a true VC-25A that is as capable as the current jets. A quick turnaround would likely limit modifications, said Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s acquisition chief during the Biden administration, who wasn’t familiar with the new plans. “You could do some paint, you could do some communications upgrades, and I suspect it would be hard to do too much beyond that on that timeline,” he said. 

So the best case is that Trump would end up an Air Force One Lite?

What features and capabilities exactly would be sacrificed for an Air Force One Lite? Its complex communications systems? Its elaborate defense systems? Its intense security protections? These do not seems like the kinds of tradeoffs anyone would – or necessarily could as a practical matter – make to get a plane in service quickly, let alone to preserve continuity of government in an attack or other crisis.

“We’re talking years, not months,” an anonymous Defense Department official told the NYT.

This whole episode has all the trademarks of another Trump boondoggle. While the apparent lawlessness of such an arrangement is alarming, there’s an emperor has no clothes aspect to the whole thing. Trump wants what he wants, and no one wants to tell him no. And so everyone pretends it’s possible, even to the point of entertaining wildly corrupt scenarios to make it happen. But in the end, the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

🚨RED ALERT🚨

Every utterance by Stephen Miller needs to be caveated with “Not a lawyer; never a lawyer”:

Stephen Miller says they are “actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which is only allowed when the US has been invaded or during an insurrection, which would not allow people to challenge their incarceration in court if they are arrested and detained.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) May 9, 2025 at 3:05 PM

But CNN reports it’s not just Miller who’s toying with unlawfully suspending habeas corpus: “President Donald Trump has been personally involved in discussions inside the administration over potentially suspending habeas corpus, a legal procedure that allows people to challenge their detention in court.”

For a deeper dive on habeas corpus and why suspending it for migrants means suspending it for everyone, Steve Vladeck has you covered.

Good Read

Politico’s Kyle Cheney: Judges warn Trump’s mass deportations could lay groundwork to ensnare Americans

Ozturk Set Free And Returns To Boston

Early Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge William Sessions of Vermont ordered the immediate release of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk from federal detention while her case is pending. When the Trump administration did not immediately comply with his order – delaying her release while it fitted her with an ankle monitor – Sessions issued a follow-up order late in the afternoon that she was to be released unconditionally without any monitoring devices or travel restrictions.

House Dems Threatened With Arrest

Following the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for alleged trespassing during an ICE detention center protest in his city, the Trump administration sent not-so-subtle signals that Democratic members of Congress who were present at the protest may also face arrest.

Trump Tries To Stiff-Arm The Senate

The NYT’s Charlie Savage unpacks President Trump’s attempt to install Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for D.C. and bypass the Senate confirmation proess.

Investigating The Investigators

Jay Bratt, who as a top deputy to Special Counsel Jack Smith led the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation, appears to be the first member of Smith’s team hauled before Congress by House Republicans for a deposition, scheduled for Wednesday, The Guardian reports.

D’oh! Pam Bondi Got O’Keefe’d

The Daily Beast: Pam Bondi Spilled Epstein Secrets to Bogus ‘Nanny’ at Brunch

IMPORTANT

In perhaps the most sweeping order by any judge confronted with Trump II lawlessness, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco blocked a wide range of administration layoffs and agency dismantlings. In the case brought by labor unions, nonprofit organizations, and local governments, Illston ordered a two-week pause in the Trump administration’s rampage through the federal government.

“It is the prerogative of presidents to pursue new policy priorities and to imprint their stamp on the federal government,” Illston wrote. “But to make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his coequal branch and partner, the Congress.”

Thread Of The Day

Responding to Judge Illston’s order above, Roger Parloff explores how slowly and reluctantly most federal judges have been to confront the DOGE-driven Trump II rampage:

Will courts ever declare that Trump is unlawfully dismantling Congressionally created agencies? Or will they just treat his actions as if they were ordinary cuts & trims—albeit on an unusually large scale? Will courts ever see the forest for the trees? Thread … 1/11

— Roger Parloff (@rparloff.bsky.social) May 11, 2025 at 8:22 PM

The Purges

• CPSC: President Trump purported to fire the three Democrats on the five-member Consumer Product Safety Commission.
• U.S. Copyright Office: President Trump fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who was appointed head of the U.S. Copyright Office by the Librarian of Congress, whom Trump fired last week.

The Dumbing Down Of The U.S. Military

Most of the focus on book bans and stifled academic freedom has involved the U.S. Naval Academy, but the Pentagon is launching a broad attack against the service academies:

• AP: ” The Pentagon has ordered all military leaders and commands to pull and review all of their library books that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues by May 21, according to a memo issued to the force on Friday.”
• NYT: The Pentagon’s Culture Wars Strike West Point
• Graham Parsons, a tenured professor of philosophy at West Point who is resigning at the end of this semester in protest of the Trump-led attack on the U.S. Military Academy:

Academic freedom is important at any institution of higher learning, but it has an additional importance at a military academy. The health of our democratic system depends on the military being politically neutral. Protecting freedom of thought and speech in the academic curriculum at West Point is an important way to avoid political partisanship. By allowing the government to impose an ideological orthodoxy on its classrooms, West Point is abandoning its neutrality and jeopardizing a critical component of the very constitutional order that the military exists to protect.

David Souter, 1939-2025

On the occasion of former Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s death, Adam Liptak revives a 2012 pre-Trump warning from Souter: “I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics and American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.” A portion of his warning:

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

The Trump II Cancer Metastasizes At DOJ

I hate to break it to you, but the failure of Ed Martin’s nomination to be D.C. U.S. attorney has not produced an outcome that looks appreciably better. That’s not to say Martin’s nomination should not have been opposed or that it’s pointless to fight the good fight. It’s merely to try to preserve a little sanity by acknowledging that in the dystopian Trump II world things can always get worse and often do.

Instead of being a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, Martin will now hold three significant roles at Main Justice that don’t require Senate confirmation:

1. associate deputy attorney general;
2. U.S. pardon attorney (the previous U.S. pardon attorney was fired after refusing to go along with restoring Mel Gibson’s gun rights following a domestic violence conviction); and
3. director of the Weaponization Working Group.

Don’t let the Orwellian name of that last role, which has never existed at the Justice Department until this presidency, confuse the issue. Martin will be taking his bag of tricks as acting U.S. attorney – politicization, intimidation, and threats – to lead the weaponization of the Justice Department.

With the blessing of the President through his weaponization executive order and of Attorney General Pam Bondi through her weaponization memo executing that order, Martin will be at the epicenter of turning the Justice Department itself into a threat to the rule of the law.

Don’t Normalize Jeanine Pirro

I’m still shook by how otherwise reasonable people treated Pam Bondi’s nomination as attorney general as normal, calling her qualified and a more traditional pick for the office. That was on the basis of her having served as Florida state attorney general and, critically, her having replaced the insanely unqualified and unfit Matt Gaetz as nominee. Those two attributes alone should not have been enough to obscure all of the other ways in which Bondi was not normal, including her deeply alarming confirmation hearing, but they did.

The same dynamic is at play with Trump’s decision to replace Martin with Jeanine Pirro, the unhinged Fox News personality. This line from the WSJ story on Pirro is literally true but you can see the bar-lowering already underway: “Still, Pirro, who has experience as a prosecutor, is a more conventional choice than Martin, 54, who was a lightning rod from the outset.”

Pirro hasn’t been a prosecutor in two decades. Since then, she became a unsuccessful political candidate then a right-wing media personality whose brain has pickled in the Fox News ecosystem. Her whole TV schtick is as an over-the-top, indiscriminate bomb-thrower, and I’ll concede it may not be a schtick. These are not the attributes one looks for in a prosecutor, let alone the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital.

Fun fact: In the waning minutes of his first term, Trump pardoned Pirro’s ex-husband Albert, who had been convicted in 2000 on federal tax charges while they were still married and she was still Westchester County district attorney.

Is Pirro’s Appointment Valid?

By swapping out Martin for Pirro before the end of Martin’s 120-day maximum tenure as an acting official, President Trump appears to be taking the position that he can avoid Senate confirmation indefinitely via a rotating cast of D.C. U.S. attorneys. This is a complicated and tricky area of law, with two different authorizing statutes, so I’m not going to unpack it all here. But the NYT briefly touches on the issue and the risk it poses of criminal defendants challenging their prosecutions on the grounds that Pirro is not validly appointed.

DOJ Weaponization Fully Underway Now

New York Attorney General Letitia James appears to be the highest profile initial target of the new Trump-directed DOJ. Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into mortgage loan fraud allegations that have circulated online among Trump allies for months:

• A federal grand jury has been empaneled in the Eastern District of Virginia and begun issuing subpoenas (one of James’ properties is in Norfolk);
• FBI agents in Virginia and New York are involved in the investigation;
• To give you some sense of the tone and tenor of things, this is what U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III of the New York Northern District – whose office is not handling the case – had to say about it on the record: “Unlike Letitia James, who unethically ran around the state campaigning on getting Donald Trump … my office conducts itself in a manner that is proper and professional.”

Trump Hijacks DOJ’s Voting Rights Section

Devastating news in this Associated Press exclusive: “The Justice Department unit that ensures compliance with voting rights laws will switch its focus to investigating voter fraud and ensuring elections are not marred by ‘suspicion,’ according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.”

Quote Of The Day

For many American citizens and organizations, then, the cost of opposition has risen markedly. Although these costs are not as high as in dictatorships like Russia — where critics are routinely imprisoned, exiled or killed — America has, with stunning speed, descended into a world in which opponents of the government fear criminal investigations, lawsuits, tax audits and other punitive measures and even Republican politicians are, as one former Trump administration official put it, “scared” out of their minds “about death threats.”

–political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt

Good Read

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Inside One Venezuelan’s Last-Minute Escape From a Flight to CECOT

The Damage SCOTUS Has Done

The Supreme Court’s decision to allow President Trump’s purge of trans service members to proceed while the legal challenge is on appeal is already producing the easy-to-predict and hard-if-not-impossible-to-reverse result: “The Pentagon will immediately begin moving as many as 1,000 openly identifying transgender service members out of the military and give others 30 days to self-identify under a new directive issued Thursday.”

The Purges

• Library of Congress: President Donald Trump fired Carla Hayden as the Librarian of Congress. She was the first woman and first African American to hold the position.
• FEMA: Cameron Hamilton was fired as the acting administrator of FEMA one day after he took issue with eliminating the agency in an appearance before Congress.

A Creole Pope

Of all the deeply resonant chords struck by the elevation of the first American to lead the Roman Catholic church, none hits quite like his mother being the product of a Creole family from New Orleans:

The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.

The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.

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