In the past week alone, I have had two members of my conservative Christian, Trump-supporting family let me know they think the president has gone too far with this Iran business.
Continue reading “More Than a Feeling”“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
This was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s line at the end of a rant about CNN in today’s Pentagon press conference. David Ellison, of course, is the failson progeny of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who is now in the midst of building a private sector pro-Trump state media operation which brings together Paramount, CBS, (soon) CNN, HBO and much more. CNN is already a done deal, though the takeover itself is still in process. None of this is secret. But seldom do we see it spelled out quite so clearly as Hegseth did yesterday. And it brings home what we talk about here again and again: in the Trump universe, only independent media organizations can actually be … well, independent, not be puppeteered either by Trump and his stooges or big corporate owners who want to keep on Trump’s good side.
That’s where organization’s like TPM come in. We depend solely on you. More than 90% of our funding comes from TPM readers. That means that as long as you’re satisfied with us, we’re good. It doesn’t matter what Trump thinks or the CEO or Comcast or Proctor & Gamble or Paramount or anyone else. That’s why it’s so important that if you think what we do is important that you subscribe and become a TPM member. If you’re not a member please click right here and join us.
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Continue reading “Was It All About a Decapitation Strike?”As I’ve thought about the suddenness with which this war started, and the abject lack of thought that went into it, I wonder the following:
Was it the irreproducible chance at a decapitation strike that triggered this whole mess?
My thinking is this:
The US and Israel aren’t actually prepared for the war in Iran, though they are getting there. At that moment, they get an unbelievable piece of intelligence: all the top people in the Iranian government are going to get together, in person, in a non-hardened location. Clearly none of these folks saw “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” or they would have known better.
Trump’s war on Iran is illegal. Congress hasn’t authorized it; administration officials are still struggling, two weeks in, to define why they started it and what they’re hoping to achieve.
Continue reading “For Trump, Emergency Cash from Congress Means Approval for More War”I’ve written a few posts now about a simple fact that is so apparent in news coverage that it is almost hiding in plain sight: the entire discussion of President Trump’s war with Iran right now is not how close he may be to achieving whatever his war aims might be. It’s the impact of the conflict on global energy prices and how this may impact the cost of gas in the U.S. and thus Trump’s electoral fortunes in November. We now have two closely reported articles which make clear that this wasn’t even a contingency that the White House planned for.
This passage is from a new CNN article which comes after a similar one in the Times ….
Continue reading “Trump Brain Trust Figured Iran Wouldn’t Block the Strait of Hormuz. Oh Well …”“This is a case about swinging dicks,” began 9th Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke in his dissent.
Continue reading “Trump Judge Says Trans Rights Case Is About ‘Swinging Dicks,’ Berates ‘Woke’ Colleagues”In a move rich in historic irony, President Trump has temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil in a desperate effort to ease global oil prices sent skyrocketing by his poorly planned attack on Iran.
Trump’s gift to Vladimir Putin to get his own ass out of the sling is both a huge concession to Russia and an unmistakeable admission that the economic reverberations from the elective war in Iran are having acute downstream political effects on Trump and Republicans in an election year.
Trump, the gift that keeps on keeping to Putin, was first elected with extensive help from Russia, endured one Russia-related impeachment, and has virtually abandoned Ukraine in its defense of Russia’s invasion. The sanctions were originally opposed to punish Russia for the Ukraine invasion. With his strange attraction to Putin’s Russia as backdrop, Trump is lurching toward Russia anew, this time as a pressure relief valve with the Strait of Hormuz bottled up by the threat of Iranian missiles, drones, and mines.
The gambit to free up Russian oil to calm volatile crude markers, which experts say won’t necessarily be effective, came as CNN reported that the Trump administration had failed to plan for the potential closing of the Strait of Hormuz, even though the risk of such retaliation from Iran has been “a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” as one former U.S. official put it.
“Top Trump officials acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes, according to three sources familiar with the closed-door session,” according to CNN.
Administration officials “believed closing the strait would hurt Iran more than the U.S.,” CNN reported, which colored their view of the risks to world oil supplies.
Beyond the irony of freeing Russia from the doghouse of international opprobrium to save his own skin, the oil supply fiasco is another in a long line of examples of Trump simply failing to grasp — let alone care about — core U.S. national interests.
With JD Vance’s political prospects jeopardized by the Iran war, a subset of Trump White House officials let Politico know that JD Vance opposed the operation behind the scenes even though he has supported it in public: “Vance is ‘skeptical,’ is ‘worried about success’ and ‘just opposes’ the war on Iran, a senior Trump official said via text message.”
With many of President Trump’s retributive prosecutions flailing, prosecutors in Miami are under increasing pressure to make something stick against former CIA Director John Brennan in the pre-eminent investigate the investigators charade, CNN reports.
DOJ officials and U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones made a push in January to bring a case against Brennan, according to CNN, but some career prosecutors resisted the pressure. They view the case as “relatively weak” and are “struggling to delay bringing the case to a grand jury.”
In a press release yesterday, DOJ gave away the game, describing itself as “President Trump’s Justice Department,” which Chris Geidner believes is the first time DOJ has used such a headline in the Obama, Trump, or Biden administrations.
“When I read that, I think, what is this? Is this Turkey? Is this Tunisia? Is this Hungary? Is this Poland? No, it’s the United States where these impeachment calls are coming out.”—Judge M. Margaret McKeown, a senior judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, on calls by President Trump and congressional Republicans to impeach judges for their rulings
The folks at 404 Media has been going through the videos of some of the DOGE bro depositions. Here’s a pungent sample:
The Florida legislature passed and Gov. Ron DeSantis supports a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The bill would make Florida the most populous state with a proof-of-citizenship requirement, a GOP obsession that seeks to use the false claim of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens to make it harder for citizen, especially minorities, to vote.
Democrats have flipped 28 GOP-held seats in state legislatures across the country over the past 14 months, Politico reports.
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Earlier this year, President Donald Trump nominated Kara Westercamp, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, for a life-tenured judgeship on the U.S. Court of International Trade. On Truth Social, Trump called Westercamp a “very experienced Trade Lawyer” who “knows the Wisdom and Courage to protect the American People,” and “will always put America First.”
Westercamp would indeed appear to bring some practical experience to the job: Prior to joining the White House Counsel’s office, she spent a decade at the Commercial Litigation Branch of the Department of Justice, where she regularly tried cases before the Court of International Trade, according to her LinkedIn profile. The fact that Trump now hopes to place Westercamp, currently serving as one of his in-house attorneys, on a body that is deeply involved in adjudicating the legal challenges to his tariffs agenda is, I am sure, a coincidence.
Continue reading “This Trump Judicial Nominee Has a Pretty Alarming Twitter History”Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has been, for months, stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the SAVE America Act — and he’s about to get squeezed harder.
The legislation claims to address the purported problem of noncitizens voting in federal elections. It is, of course, already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence to suggest it is an actual issue.
Yet, President Donald Trump and a handful of far-right congressional Republicans are indicating this is the hill they plan to die on.
Continue reading “How Right-Wing Activists’ Seemingly Simple Trick to Pass the SAVE Act Could Prove Disastrous”A few days ago, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) told the Washington Post that his family was “split” about whether he, age 85, should run again. He said that he’d like his daughter, Jennifer Clyburn-Reed, to replace him.
But as of Thursday, it’s full steam ahead as Clyburn announced that he’d run for his 18th term. As always when it comes to congressional geriatrics — and especially Civil Rights legends like Clyburn — things get uncomfortable, as political calculus crashes headlong into the pathos of aging, mortality and irrelevance.
“It made me feel necessary,” Clyburn said of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-NY) push to get him to run again.
He added that Jeffries had offered him a leadership position should Democrats win the House majority, a particularly jarring detail as the party’s base revolts, pushing for generational change.
Elsewhere, fresh-faced insurgents are trying to force aging incumbents to pass the torch. House institution Rep. Al Green (D-TX), 78, is locked in a runoff with 37-year-old Rep. Christian Menefee (D-TX). Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson (D), 31 and one of the Tennessee three, is shooting for 76-year-old Rep. Steve Cohen’s (D-TN) longheld seat. (Not every challenge has been successful: 78-year-old Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who helped lead the Jan. 6 hearings, easily fended off his 34-year-old primary challenger last week.)
“This could very well be my last term and it could very well not be,” Clyburn said Thursday. “We’ll just see how things go.”
As much as Clyburn is a creature of the House, he’s perhaps best known for the part he’s played in shaping Democratic presidential primaries, and is vocal about his role in boosting Joe Biden to the nomination in 2020.
“If you thought Jim Clyburn was gonna retire before a wide-open prez cycle w SC again in early window, w chance to pick the nominee, you didn’t see him make every ’20 contender put on his CLYBURN t-shirts at the 2019 Clyburn Fish Fry,” quipped Politico journalist Jonathan Martin on Twitter.
On this side of his role in Biden’s ascendancy (and commitment to be “ridin’ with Biden” even when much of the party was howling for the then-president to drop out of the 2024 race), that power-brokering looks a bit more suspect.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tweeted Thursday that he is “all in” on Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) attempt to ban the abortion drug mifepristone. Hawley and other anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly frustrated with the Trump administration’s inaction on the issue, with Hawley repeatedly criticizing the FDA’s “investigation” into the drug for being too slow.
As Trump has said publicly with varying degrees of candor, he feels that he already delivered the movement its white whale in Dobbs. He’s also likely wary about triggering an electoral backlash, should the administration abandon its “leave it to the states” pretense and try more forcefully to ban the procedure nationwide.
The Senate passed a bill aimed at bringing down housing costs with 89 votes Thursday. The bill was authored by the exceedingly strange duo of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Scott (R-SC).
It will likely need White House backing to pass through the House.
One provision, requiring large institutional investors to sell rental properties after seven years, prompted pushback from the home builders’ union and some Democratic infighting, including the opposition of self-proclaimed YIMBY Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI).
Ahhhh!
“It’s deeply disappointing to see that Senator Cornyn is now willing to scrap the very rule he once praised and personally thanked me for defending,” former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) lamented in a lengthy Tweet after Cornyn’s flip-flop. “These extreme election-year politics that put party power over everything else are why Americans are sick and tired of the duopoly of the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans.”
Morning Memo: Of Course It Did: Trump Tantrum Led to Reversal on Law Firm Appeals
The Franchise: Resurrecting Arizona’s 2020 Election Denial Lunacy
The Backchannel: Do Global Oil Markets Have Trump Derangement Syndrome?
This week’s podcast: Noem More
The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga heads to Austin: Alright Alright Alright! TPM Is Heading to Austin
Kash Patel Confirms UFC Fighters Will Train FBI Agents This Week, Calling It A “Historic Opportunity” — Tom Tapp, Deadline
ICE Tried To Turn This Minneapolis Teacher Into An Informant — Spencer Ackerman, Forever Wars
The X algorithm really is trying to radicalize you—researchers just proved it — Jay Willis, Fast Company
