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

Will The Judiciary Hold?

Nothing about the last week in American politics should be sugarcoated. We are in a bad way. How bad remains to be seen.

A key marker for how bad things might get is whether the executive branch defies the judicial branch. Things are touch and go right now, and it’s too early to draw any concrete conclusions. But here’s what to watch:

Late yesterday, a DC federal judge put a firmer block on the Trump White House’s spending freeze ordered by the OMB. The extension came only after the judge expressed concern that funds were still being held up in violation of an earlier pause of the freeze that she’d ordered.

It’s not clear whether the continuing cut off of funding was intentionally in violation of the court order or could be more benignly explained by a lag or a disorganized response in a chaotic period. There are other indications, such as distributing a required notice, that the Trump administration did comply at least in part with the DC court order and a similar one issued by a federal judge in Rhode Island late last week.

Elon Musk’s DOGE Rampage

Elon Musk’s role in the opening days of the Trump II administration is going to be studied for years. It is so hard to get one’s head around this actually happening in these utterly bizarre ways:

• Wired: A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
• Politico: DOGE’s access to federal data is ‘an absolute nightmare,’ legal experts warn
• NYT: Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government
• CNN: Elon Musk is serving as a ‘special government employee,’ White House says
• HuffPost: Unions Sue Treasury Department Over ‘DOGE’ Access To Sensitive Data

USAID Under Siege

USAID’s DC headquarters is closed for a second day as President Trump continues to threaten to unlawfully eliminate it as an independent agency by folding it into the State Department:

• Bloomberg: Behind DOGE’s Standoff at USAID: Desk Searches and Elon Musk Calling
• Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) vowed to put a “blanket hold” on President Trump’s State Department nominees until USAID is restored.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he is now dual-hatting as acting administrator of USAID and notified lawmakers that he intends to work with Congress to reorganize USAID.

The Pandering To Elon Musk Knows No Limits

I’ve never seen anything like this letter from DC acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, a Missouri political hack, to Elon Mush, on DOJ letterhead no less:

Dear @elon, Please see this important letter. We will not tolerate threats against DOGE workers or law-breaking by the disgruntled. All the best. Ed Martin pic.twitter.com/jIgMPVbPT5

— Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) February 3, 2025

The implication of Martin’s letter seems to be that the USAID security officials who tried to block Musk’s team from physically accessing classified information over the weekend may be criminally investigated. It also serves as a warning to anyone else who might try to enforce the law against Musk’s rampage through the federal government.

Trump Himself Ordered Jack Smith’s Prosecutors Canned

Of course he did, via The Guardian:

After Trump instructed his advisers that he wanted the prosecutors gone, the White House presidential personnel office, led by longtime Trump ally Sergio Gor, issued a memo that directed the justice department to proceed and gave the move a degree of legal cover.

The memo was then sent to the acting attorney general’s office, which issued the actual termination notices to those still at the department. The precise number is unclear because the department did not release names, but the trial team consisted of at least 18 lawyers

Trump DOJ Is Leading The Purge Of The FBI

• The FBI general counsel concluded that bureau leaders had no legal choice but to comply with the lawful DOJ order to turn over the names of agents who worked on the Jan. 6 cases, NBC News reports.
• Prosecutors and agents caught up in the DOJ and FBI purges are preparing to file lawsuits over their unlawful terminations.

The Battle For The Soul Of The FBI

Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa:

An agency that is defined by loyalty to a person, rather than principles can neither be guided nor reined in by rules. It is built around, and driven by, contempt for them. The current Justice Department’s willingness to decimate almost half of its agent workforce without due process protections owed to those employees and despite the danger to Americans that will result from the vacuum left by agents no longer investigating and monitoring critical threats, is already signaling a step in this direction. 

The Trump II Clown Show

• Jan. 6 conspiracist Darren Beattie, who has a history of deeply racist and misogynistic social media posts, is now the State Department’s acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.
• Devin Nunes acolyte Michael Ellis is now the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio has tapped Pete Marocco, the director of foreign assistance at the State Department, to lead a review of USAID. Who is Marocco, you ask? Ummm …

In early 2023, online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021, pointing to multiple images of them on the Capitol grounds that day and CCTV video that shows the man they identified as Marocco entering the Capitol through a broken window.

Photos of the person who entered the building were a strong facial recognition match for publicly available images of Marocco, online sleuths said. Marocco, like hundreds of others whom sleuths identified as people who entered the Capitol, was not charged before Trump pardoned all Jan. 6 defendants.

Hollowing Out The Federal Government

Other departments and agencies President Trump is unlawfully attempting to cripple:

• CFPB: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau halted most of its work as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was dual-hatted as acting CFPB director.
• Department of Education: The Trump White House is seeking to unlawfully dismantle the department, in part by issuing an executive order to “shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute.”

The Anti-DEI Crusade

• TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Trump II Punishes Fed Workers For Attending Trump I Diversity Training
• A coalition of various interests filed suit in federal court in Maryland to block President Trump’s anti-DEI order.

Understanding Anti-DEI As A Cultural Code

A good thread from Nathan Ruser comparing the MAGA attack on DEI to the way anti-Semitism evolved into a cultural code in Germany that came to represent more than hatred of Jews.

Sweet Justice

The historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., has been awarded control of the Proud Boys’ name, trademark, and symbols in partial settlement of its default judgment against the right-wing extremist group that vandalized its building in December 2020.

Cry Harder, Mediocre White Boys

Crockett: I am tired of the white tears. When you compare me to Marjorie Taylor Greene or me to Lauren Boebert, there is no comparison. So the only people that are crying are the mediocre white boys that have been beaten out by people that historically have had to work so, so much harder

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 11:25 PM

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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 Calamity Is Upon Us

The lawless events of the past 72 hours accelerated what has since Trump’s second inauguration been the most rapid tear-down of the nation’s constitutional structure that Americans have ever witnessed.

And yet … there’s no reason to think that we have anywhere near a full accounting of what has transpired over the last two weeks. The free and transparent flow of government information to the public is being strangled, making any such accounting increasingly difficult. Fear and uncertainty contributed to a degraded information environment in which rumors were rampant.

At this crucial moment, it is not at all clear that there is sufficient institutional or structural might anywhere in government or the private sector to counter the Trump-Musk anti-constitutional rampage. The Republican-controlled Congress is a cipher; business and industry continues to be a Trump patsy even in the face of an unprovoked trade war that he started over the weekend with devastating tariffs against close allies Canada and Mexico; the federal courts are a question mark at best.

We might get a read as soon as today on whether President Trump will go even more renegade by defying the federal judiciary and daring it to do something about it. Early but incomplete indications are that the Trump administration is at least partly abiding by a federal court injunction blocking the unprecedented spending freeze that OMB purported to initiate a week ago. As ordered, the administration seems to have distributed notice of the injunction throughout government; but there continue to be reports on the ground that the funding spigots remain shut off, especially at USAID and for its contractors.

Priority No. 1: DOJ

Morning Memo continues to be most focused on the purges at the Justice Department, including the FBI. They are part of broader plan to neuter and then co-opt federal law enforcement and prosecutors. Without independent, non-partisan enforcement of the law (both criminal and civil), there is little possibility of accountability for all of the degradations being committed by the Trump administration in other departments and agencies and in the wider world.

Oy, When The FBI Is The Resistance

The developments Friday and into the weekend extended the most serious crisis in the history of the Justice Department:

• More than two dozen federal prosecutors in DC who worked on the Jan. 6 cases were terminated by Acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, a political hack brought in from Missouri.
• Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a member of Trump criminal defense team, ordered the sacking of career FBI agents in top leadership positions both in DC and in select field offices around the county.
• Bove also demanded a list of FBI personnel who worked on the Trump criminal cases. A questionnaire was sent out, purportedly bureau-wide, asking FBI personnel to self-report the specific roles they played in the Trump criminal cases.

The acting FBI director distinguished himself by resisting the most egregious of the moves and communicating transparently to bureau personnel. More on that in a moment.

Real World Harms: USAID

While sacking of the Justice Department is our main focus, it is not where the most immediate harm is being done to the most people. That dubious distinction goes to USAID, which funds programs that project American soft power around the world with health care, education, economic development, and civil society programs, to name just a few of the many categories of USAID work.

• USAID funding appears to be cut off either in whole or in part. Reports continue to come in that nonprofits, both at home and abroad, whose work is funded by USAID have had to not just cease providing services but begin to layoff workers due to the funding shutoff.
• USAID abruptly closed its DC headquarters today after Elon Musk announced that Trump had agreed to shutter the agency.
• President Trump is reportedly planning to exceed his lawful authority by folding USAID into the State Department, without any action from Congress approving such a move.
• Elon Musk and his DOGE minions ran amok through USAID all weekend. More on that in a moment.

Real America Harms: HHS

Like at USAID, the spending freeze at HHS is having acute real world impacts on an array of health services and the vendors that provide them. Services have been shuttered, layoffs by contractors have reportedly begun, and the time frame for when funding will resume remains uncertain. We’ll be keeping a close eye on whether the court injunction blocking the spending freeze may start to unlock funds here.

Headline I Could Not Have Imagined 6 Months Ago

Last March I wrote about the unholy alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but I can’t say that I anticipated Musk and his minions having free reign across government, including apparent access to classified and to some of the Treasury Department’s most sensitive processes and procedures. The WSJ, perhaps inadvertently captures the dynamic in a headline that feels like it came from a developing nation: “Musk Moves With Lightning Speed to Exert Control Over the Government.” It’s not that different from the spoof headline Garrett Graff came up with as he pretended to write about the weekend’s news as if it were happening abroad.

Elon Musk’s Deranged Weekend

In an unprecedented development, the world’s richest man turned the federal government into his own personal plaything. Using his perch at DOGE to target the Treasury Department’s payment processing system and to threaten to USAID with closure, Musk seemed to be taking his playbook for destroying Twitter and applying it to key components of the federal government:

• Musk and his team were given unprecedented and legally questionable access to Treasury Department payment systems, with the hare-brained notion that they could cut government spending at the payment processing level.
• Spewing disinformation, Musk falsely accused USAID of being a “criminal organization” and said it must “die,” among other things. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk bragged on X/Twitter.
• The two top security officials at USAID were put on administrative leave after trying – unsuccessfully – to block Musk’s team from accessing internal systems.
• Musk’s team has reportedly locked career staff at OPM out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.

It Takes Guts To Make A Stand

I’m not much for performative resistance, but I’m damn near weepy when people risk their own lives, careers, financial security, and reputations to do the right thing. In the coming weeks, I want to highlight these profiles in courage without mythologizing them, which tends to make it seem like a vainglorious exercise rather than a tough choice made reluctantly:

• FBI HQ: Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll sent out a message to the bureau that made clear the purge orders were coming from Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
• FBI NY: The top FBI agent in NYC, James Dennehy, vowed in an email to staff to “dig in” as he called the FBI’s acting director and acting deputy director Robert C. Kissane “warriors” for defending bureau employees. ““Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” Dennehy wrote in the email.
• USAID: Director for Security John Vorhees and Deputy Director for Security Brian McGill were both put on leave Saturday night after trying to block Musk’s team from accessing classified information in restricted areas.

So Much More …

The pace of news precludes Morning Memo from flagging every major development. It is painful to have to leave out what’s happening at the National Science Foundation, or the way transgender Americans have been singled out for particular targeting, or the way even government workers who simply attended DEI training have been swept up in the anti-DEI purge.

The Logic of Destruction

Timothy Snyder:

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

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