The week before last, veteran GOP operative Michael Caputo was hired by one of President Trump’s most controversial nominees to advise him ahead of what is expected to be a tough confirmation fight. It was a surprising pick, in part because Caputo has a history of his own that includes years of conspiratorial rants on social media. And, even in the days since he joined the Trump administration, Caputo has made multiple posts online continuing a long-running bit in which he muses about “antifa” coming to his home to threaten him, and instead being eaten by wild animals.
Continue reading “Newly Minted DOJ Employee Michael Caputo Keeps Posting ‘Antifa’ Death Fantasies Online”Green Investments Might Not Be That Easy To Kill
In my late 2024 post-election brainstorming, another idea of mine was to create a structure for pressing Republican Reps who threatened to cancel the green energy investments in their districts under the Inflation Reduction Act. It was a matter of some consternation for Democrats at the time, but those investments were overwhelmingly in Republican districts — like something like 75% of them. There were a few explanations of that at the time, one of which was that it was focused on those areas that were in whatever way “passed over” in the city-centric prosperity of the early 21st century. But we’re seeing another one of the benefits now and it’s precisely that dynamic I was keen mobilize: it makes these investments much harder to claw back by a future Republican administration.
Continue reading “Green Investments Might Not Be That Easy To Kill”Trump Admin Ends Up In Odd Position Of Defending ACA Against Attempt To Slash Free Services
In a surreal pairing to anyone who’s been politically cognizant for the past decade, the Trump administration defended the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court Monday against a Christian-owned company seeking to end its free preventative care requirements.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Ends Up In Odd Position Of Defending ACA Against Attempt To Slash Free Services”SCOTUS Has No One To Blame But Itself For Alien Enemies Act Mess
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Wow, What A Weekend
Events have moved so quickly since the last Morning Memo on Friday that I am going to keep today’s installment at a pretty high level of summary, especially since it was a holiday weekend and many of you may only have a vague notion of what transpired.
For those of you like me who kept close tabs despite your other obligations, I’m including links out to deeper analysis and rundowns so that you don’t feel abandoned here.
Let’s get into it.
SCOTUS Blocks Alien Enemies Act Deportations
In an extraordinary order issued in the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Supreme Court intervened to block imminent deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. The order was limited to those detained in the Northern District of Texas, but it was a shot across the bow of the Trump administration about conducting more AEA deportations that don’t give sufficient notice to detainees and attempt to rush them out of the country to a prison in El Salvador.
The order was issued by a 7-2 court majority, with Justice Samuel Alito penning a dissent that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
The Supreme Court’s order came after an increasingly frenetic effort by the ACLU to block the AEA deportations Friday. Ultimately a federal judge in Texas and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant relief in the case. In a final act of desperation, the ACLU tried to revive the original AEA case it had filed in DC, but U.S. District Judge James Boasberg demurred, saying that the Supreme Court had already tied his hands in its earlier ruling in that case.
Still, Boasberg’s Friday evening hearing by telephone proved important. It put the Justice Department on record that while no flights were expected Friday evening it was reserving the right to resume flights as soon as Saturday. That admission – which Alito in his dissent mischaracterized at best and ignored at worst – confirmed the urgency of the matter and while we can’t know that it drove the Supreme Court to issue such a rare middle of the night order it’s hard to imagine it didn’t play a role.
After the Supreme Court’s late-night intervention, NBC News reported that video showed buses had already been loaded with Venezuelan detainees on Friday and were en route to the airport in Abilene when they were turned around. It’s not clear whether Boasberg’s pointed questioning (even though he declined to rule against the Trump administration) or the pending appeal to the Supreme Court or some other reason is what diverted the buses.
The Supreme Court had largely itself to blame for the flurry of activity and the need to step in after midnight on a holiday weekend. Its earlier decision in the Alien Enemies Act case that Boasberg was presiding over was vague about both the form and timing of the notice to detainees that it required before they could be legally removed. Fair-minded observers expected the Trump administration to seize on those ambiguities and it did.
The Trump administration gave notices in English only that did not explicitly tell detainees how to contest their removals or how much time they had to do so. The administration also seemed to be maneuvering around a district court order blocking AEA deportations in the Southern District of Texas by moving detainees to the Northern District of Texas, a move Boasberg derided as a sign of bad faith.
Expect further guidance from the Supreme Court this week.
Intel Community Undermines Trump’s AEA Premise
WaPo: “The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Appeals Court Pauses Boasberg’s Contempt Inquiry
A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that happens to be stacked with two Trump appointees issued an administrative stay of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s inquiry into whether the Trump administration was in criminal contempt of court for defying his order blocking Alien Enemies Act deportations on March 15. The appeals court gave the parties deadlines this week to file briefs in the case.
Pure Defiance
While discovery is scheduled to take place this week in the case of mistakenly deported and wrongfully imprisoned Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the White House tweeted its utter defiance of the courts:
Fixed it for you, @NYTimes.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 18, 2025
Oh, and by the way, @ChrisVanHollen — he’s NOT coming back. pic.twitter.com/VoAphh2ZPY
No Insurrection Act Yet?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will not recommend that President Trump invoke the Insurrection Act to control the southern border, CNN reports.
Hegseth Shared Yemen Info In Another Signal Group Chat
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared details of the planned attack in Yemen – including the flight schedules of the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis – in a Signal group chat that included his wife, brother, and personal attorney, the NYT first reported and that other outlets have since also confirmed.
Skeptical Judge Blocks CFPB Layoffs
In a bristling order, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson halted mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while she ascertains whether they violate her restraining order that blocked the dismantling of the agency.
Trump II Clown Show
- IRS: The IRS has its third acting commissioner in a week after the Gary Shapley – who made his bones in MAGA world as a “whistleblower” about the Hunter Biden tax investigation –- was canned in a dustup between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The new acting commissioner is Michael Faulkender, who is the Senate-confirmed deputy Treasury secretary.
- State Department: New reporting on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the guy who dismantled USAID, reveals Marocco learned of his termination when he returned to Foggy Bottom from a meeting at the White House and was refused entry to the building because he was no longer an employee there.
- FBI: The NYT takes a look at FBI Director Kash Patel’s jet-setting embrace of the limelight that his recent predecessors have mostly shunned.
DOGE Watch
- Wired: DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants
- WaPo: DOGE begins to freeze health-care payments for extra review
- Bloomberg: DOGE eyes D.C.’s National Gallery of Art
Pope Francis Dead At 88
Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, who served as Pope Francis from 2013-2025 and was the first pope from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, has died at 88, the day after celebrating Easter with the faithful in St. Peter’s Square.
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Repeat Offender
NYT reports a second Hegseth Signal chat in which the secretary of defense shared Houthi attack plans. This one included his wife and brother.
What Is To Be Done—The DOJ-In-Exile Edition
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.
Continue reading “What Is To Be Done—The DOJ-In-Exile Edition”Musk to Force Pentagon to Build and Then Pay Him to Use Network of Killer Satellites
This is a two day old article. But with so much else going on I hadn’t seen it. If you haven’t, you really must read it. It’s one of growing number of examples that the U.S. government is at present essentially being held hostage by the clique surrounding Elon Musk.
Donald Trump got really jazzed up about Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Based on that, he decided that the U.S. should build one as well. But the U.S. is quite a bit larger than Israel. And because of that nothing like that is really feasible at all. So the plan quickly evolved into a new version of Reagan’s SDI. All of this was contained in a late January executive order in which Trump committed the country (purportedly) to building it. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea, both destabilizing but also unfeasible. But let’s set that aside for the moment.
It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril have combined forces to build what Trump is calling “Golden Dome.” Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting, he’s essentially giving the contract to himself. Through the article, there are gently phrased characterizations of the situation like this (emphasis added).
Continue reading “Musk to Force Pentagon to Build and Then Pay Him to Use Network of Killer Satellites”Calling a Halt
New from The Miami Herald …
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has directed state law enforcement officers to stand down on enforcing a new state immigration law, guidance that came shortly after a federal judge in Miami said she was “astounded” that state authorities had continued to make arrests despite her ordering them not to.
In a hearing in Miami federal court on Friday, it was disclosed that as many as 15 arrests have been made by Florida law enforcement officers over the past two weeks in violation of an April 4 order issued by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams. One of the people arrested was a U.S. citizen born in Georgia.
SCOTUS Freezes Alien Enemy Removals In Rare, Urgent, Late-Night Order
A majority of Supreme Court justices temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing a group of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act in an order issued in the early hours of Saturday. The order came at lighting speed for the high court, and signals a staggering level of urgency as the Trump administration continues to seek to use a dubiously invoked wartime power to remove Venezuelans to an El Salvador detention camp without any semblance of due process.
Continue reading “SCOTUS Freezes Alien Enemy Removals In Rare, Urgent, Late-Night Order”Rampin’ Up, Baby! That Thiel Start Up Hunting the Motherlode Contract is Inside Treasury
One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.
The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.
Or maybe it’s a start up, which has already raised about $2 billion from the likes of Peter Thiel and the Kushner family, among others, and thus needs a pretty big exit. It all comes together quite nicely. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks once put it. And I suspect that’s just a prelude to a vastly bigger prize: contracts to manage payments of the more than $1.5 trillion that goes to Social Security recipients and likely other government programs that disperse money directly to individuals.
Continue reading “Rampin’ Up, Baby! That Thiel Start Up Hunting the Motherlode Contract is Inside Treasury”