So I write the following with the caveat that everything in the unfolding Trump administration is cloaked in secrecy and uncertain from one moment to the next. But overnight President Trump kicked off, what can only be called both a wide-ranging constitutional crisis, and also very likely a fiscal crisis. He has unilaterally halted – as of yesterday evening, according to an executive memorandum first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas – all “grant, loan and federal assistance programs” for at least 90 days. This appears to include everything the federal government does beyond the salaries of federal employees, direct checks to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the US military. Mainstream media journalists are calling this “temporary” or a “pause.” But that’s like saying you’re “temporarily” shutting down Congress or “pausing” elections. “Temporary” isn’t a meaningful term in this case. It’s hard to think through everything affected. Already the halt to USAID budgets has cut off funding for the prison guards holding 9,500 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, according to Syria expert Charles Lister. Cancer research, major parts of every state’s budget, the grants that keep the local daycare center running. This hits basically everything.
Continue reading “Trump Sparks Constitutional Crisis, Seizing Budget Authority from Congress”Trump Takes His Corrupt Retribution Against The Justice Department
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨FIVE ALARM FIRE🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
President Trump’s corrupt retribution against the Justice Department is now fully underway, with a series of moves over the past 24 hours that in any other era would be the defining political and legal story of the age. Today, it didn’t even make the front page of the New York Times.
- Trump’s acting attorney general sacked the career prosecutors who worked on the Trump prosecutions. Among those let go were Molly Gaston, J.P. Cooney, Anne McNamara, and Mary Dohrmann, NBC News reported.
- Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., a political lackey from Missouri, launched an investigation of the prosecutors who brought the criminal charges against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters.
- DOJ’s most senior career official was sidelined by being moved to a department backwater. Separately, the DOJ official who oversaw the prosecution of public corruption, who had previously been reassigned to the same backwater, resigned rather than continue in a reduced role.
The corrupt wholesale cashiering of career prosecutors who worked on the Mar-a-Lago and Jan. 6 cases against Trump was the most egregious of the corrupt acts, in defiant violation of the civil service rules and the rule of law. But the most absurd development was acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin’s purported investigation into why DOJ had pursued obstruction charges against Jan. 6 rioters. While the Roberts Court ultimately cut prosecutors legs out from under them, the obstruction charge was ratified by multiple federal trial judges and the DC Circuit before the Supreme Court held otherwise.
If you were taking a measured approach to see how things played out once Trump took office, the waiting is over. It’s a five-alarm fire at the Justice Department. Ousting independent career prosecutors is just Step 1, a prelude to Step 2, which is using the Justice Department to protect Trump and his administration from accountability for their wrongdoing. Step 3 turns DOJ into a weapon against anyone who Trump perceives as less than fully loyal and obedient.
The retribution is being exacted precisely as promised. As Joyce Vance put it: “The real witch hunt is here.”
Jack Smith Lawyers Up
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith has retained private counsel: Peter Koski of Covington & Burling.
Stewart Rhodes Is Free To Roam The Capitol
A federal judge in DC lifted an earlier order barring Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes from coming to DC or visiting the Capitol with prior court approval, agreeing with the Justice Department that Trump’s commutation of Rhodes canceled any post-sentence supervision.
Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Killed In Police Shooting
“An Indiana man who was recently pardoned for his participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was shot and killed during a traffic stop by a sheriff’s deputy Sunday.”–NBC News
Quote Of The Day
“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government. We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”–Mark Greenblatt, the Trump-appointed inspector general for the Interior Department, on the Friday night purge of inspectors general across government, including himself
Destruction Watch
- OMB: White House pauses on all federal grants, loans and other financial-assistance programs pending further review. That last part is key: Trump is using the paralyzing freezes of various government operations to take extra-legal control of the decision-making over what is spent and how it is spent.
- USAID: “The Trump administration has cleared out much of the leadership of the U.S. Agency for International Development, placing dozens of career officials on administrative leave Monday after accusing the agency of trying to ‘circumvent’ President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing all foreign aid, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.”–WaPo
- OPM: Schedule F is back with a vengeance.
Pointless Waste And Destruction
“The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.”–NYT (emphasis added)
Sorry, It’s Time To Learn About The Impoundment Act
Let me get you started with Steve Vladeck’s latest: The Impoundment Crisis of 2025.
U.S. Gov’t Used To Perpetuate The Othering
- Transgender Americans: In a new executive order, President Trump used demeaning fundamentalist Christian-inflected language that portends a purge of transgender people from the military:
Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
- Black Americans: The Trump administration has barred the State Department from commemorating Black history month.
- Non-Confederate Americans: As he arrived at the Pentagon for his first business day on the job as defense secretary, Pete Hegseth want out of his way to revert to using the former name for the Army base in North Carolina:
Pete Hegseth, in his first remarks as defense secretary, refers to Fort Liberty as "Fort Bragg"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 27, 2025 at 9:22 AM
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Pure Chicken Shit
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) assured Pete Hegseth’s ex-sister-in-law that if she came forward with her damaging testimony against him it could convince senators to oppose his nomination, the WSJ reports. She came forward and then Tillis cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth.
They Know What It Meant
Elon Musk’s “My heart goes out to you” takes off as ironic far-right catchphrase.
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Big Picture
Going to do a post on this later this morning. But President Trump’s decision, revealed overnight, to unilaterally and illegally shut down broad swaths of the federal government is a full scale constitutional crisis. Democrats power to stop him is very limited. But there’s one cudgel on the table. Republicans have been begging for their help to raise the debt ceiling this spring. Because they can’t control their caucuses well enough to do it themselves, despite having the votes. The minimum requirement has to be: no assistance without the President’s agreement to follow the law and the Constitution.
Sen. Peters Retiring
Minor scoop here. Hearing that Sen. Gary Peters (D) of Michigan will announce his retirement this morning at 9:30 AM. That means an open seat election in 2026.
A Reoccurring Theme Of Trump II For DeSantis: Getting Humiliated
Amid the firehose of sinister Donald Trump orders and actions on the first day of Week Two, let us take a moment to revel in something less bleak: Ron DeSantis’ uninterrupted, borderline masochistic humiliation at the hands of Trump (and his friends).
Continue reading “A Reoccurring Theme Of Trump II For DeSantis: Getting Humiliated”‘Bitch Slap Politics’ and the Pre-History of Trumpism
Back in June I asked you to tell me about your favorite TPM posts. I read through your responses at the time. But the project I was investigating was soon overtaken by the rush of campaign events, particularly the aftermath of the Trump-Biden presidential debate at the end of the month. I was finally able to go through them more systematically this weekend. First, thank you for the attention and thought so many of you put into those contributions. They were gratifying and illuminating to read. My aim with this exercise was to pull together a list of posts for something kind of but not precisely like an anthology.
Continue reading “‘Bitch Slap Politics’ and the Pre-History of Trumpism”Trump Purports To Fire IGs En Masse In Friday Night Purge
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
It’s Happening
President Trump’s promise to destroy impediments to his free-wheeling abuse of power took a new twist late Friday night when he summarily fired more than a dozen inspectors general across the federal government in a purge that removed one of the front-line defenses against corruption, malfeasance, and mismanagement.
The firings were not formally announced, and the accounting for which inspectors general were removed and the total numbers involved (ranging from 12-17) continued to evolve over the weekend.
Trump disregarded some of the legal protections to insulate inspectors general from political retaliation like this. He failed, for instance, to provide the required 30-days written notice to Congress with a basis for the firings. In what is likely to become a common theme of the Trump II presidency, it is not clear what the consequences might be for violating the law or who is in a position to enforce it.
What is clear is that Trump continues to undermine if not outright tear down mechanisms and institutions designed to be a check on runaway executive power. Watchdogs like inspectors general offer a modicum of accountability that Trump simply won’t tolerate being in the hands of anyone other than loyalists and flunkies who he can control and intimidate.
Things Are Not Normal At DOJ
- “Every new administration replaces the political leadership of federal agencies and, over time, changes some of the senior career officials. But what happened in just a matter of days at [DO] is much different — sloughing off decades of apolitical expertise to new assignments widely seen in the building as punishments likely to result in resignations.”–NYT
- “Ousted career executives at DOJ are considering their options after being given vague rationale for their firings.”–Government Executive
- “A new administration always brings changes in personnel and policy. But current and former [DOJ] officials said the pace, scope and tone of Trump’s early moves in his second term are unusual and signal that a more dramatic transformation lies ahead.”–WSJ
The Cruelty Is The Point
- State Department halts global land mine-clearing programs.
- Global program to fight HIV/AIDS paused in funding freeze.
- Trump terminates Anthony Faucis’s security protection
- Air Force scraps training course that used videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female WWII pilots
Judiciary Rebuffs New Trump Mass Email Initiative
In an apparent effort to enable President Trump to directly message every federal government worker, the Office of Personnel Management sent out a test email Friday that included nearly the entire judicial branch. Let’s just say the executive branch overreach didn’t sit so well with its co-equal branch.
Trump II Clown Show
- It took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance, but Pete Hegseth was confirmed as defense secretary by the Senate late Friday. Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Mitch McConnell (KY) were the only Republican senators to vote against the nomination.
- After South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) was confirmed as DHS secretary over the weekend, she stood up Vice President Vance for her swearing-in and would up being sworn in at the home of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Jan. 6 Trials And Tribulations
The reverberations over Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons and the dismissals of the pending Jan. 6 cases continued:
- NBC News: Jan. 6 prosecutors describe “shocking,” “guttural” week after Trump’s pardons
- USA Today: Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, fresh out of prison, appears at Trump Las Vegas rally
- TPM’s Josh Kovensky: The Oath Keepers Want More From Trump
- TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Trump’s DC Prosecutor Tells Judge To Let Oath Keepers Run Free
Trump Sows Chaos Abroad
- Colombia: President Trump threatened to impose emergency tariffs on Colombia after it refused to accept U.S. deportation flights – before Colombia apparently relented.
- Mexico: America’s southern neighbor refused to accept a U.S. deportation flight
- Denmark: Donald Trump had a “fiery call” with Denmark’s prime minister over Greenland
Just Some Casual Ethnic Cleansing
Audio of Trump on Gaza: I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people. You're talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing…
— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) January 26, 2025 at 12:09 AM
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Elon Musk Watch
The world’s richest man addressed a meeting of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party Sunday, telling the audience: “ I think there’s, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents … let alone their great-grandparents, maybe even.”
Who’s Your Daddy?
Wajahat Ali: “MAGA seems to have a very weird, twisted, and violent relationship with their dads. This most likely explains why they’ve turned to Donald Trump, a vindictive sexual abuser, as their surrogate father.”
The Most Important Thing You’ll Read Today
Our ingrained sense of American exceptionalism – even in those of us who reject it – gives us a blind spot to how much of what is happening to democracy in America has already happened elsewhere and follows common pathways.
Amanda Carpenter is contributing to a new series on the “entrenchment agenda“: “Entrenchment refers to how authoritarians consolidate and leverage government power to stay in power. They use various tactics to dig in, cement power, and crush electoral competition.”
FLASHBACK: ‘America for Americans!’
I am making my way for the first time through John Ford’s classic 1939 Western, Stagecoach, the film in which John Wayne as we know him came into his own.
In a striking moment about a third of the way into the film, the villainous banker Ellsworth H. Gatewood gives a mini-screed that is remarkable not so much for how much it echoes the current moment but for how it reflects the persistence of a particular kind of scoundrel in American life.
The screenwriter Dudley Nichols put words into Gatewood’s mouth that were designed to get a knowing eye roll from a 1939 pre-war audience, as if of course this is what you would expect this caricature to say:
I have a slogan that should be placed on every newspaper in the country: America for Americans!
The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking! Over one billion dollars a year!
What this country needs is a businessman for president!
That Gatewood, played by Berton Churchill, was already a caricature by the late 1930s makes sense given the America First movement of the 1920s, but it’s still a striking reminder that the thread of American politics Trump represents weaves itself deep and consistently through the history of American public life.
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New Poll Recommends Eating the Billionaires
I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
Continue reading “New Poll Recommends Eating the Billionaires”Is The MAGA Tent Big Enough For Tulsi Gabbard?
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
After Pete Hegseth’s survival, it feels unbearably credulous to suggest that Republican senators may block any of Donald Trump’s remaining nominees.
Continue reading “Is The MAGA Tent Big Enough For Tulsi Gabbard?”Trump’s DC Prosecutor Tells Judge To Let Oath Keepers Run Free
President Trump’s handpicked acting D.C. U.S. Attorney insisted Friday afternoon that a federal judge should rescind his own order from Friday morning barring recently released Oath Keepers from going to D.C. and, specifically, the U.S. Capitol.
Continue reading “Trump’s DC Prosecutor Tells Judge To Let Oath Keepers Run Free”