I’m starting to get a strong Iraq War vibe about Greenland.
By this, I want to be clear, I don’t mean that I expect a catastrophic and ruinous U.S. invasion to take place. I’m referring to something different … but let’s just say: still not great. One of my strongest memories of those dark times 20-plus years ago was a peculiar dynamic that took hold in Washington after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The desire to invade Iraq was already a big thing in elite conservative circles in the late Clinton years. That was the origin of the “Iraq Liberation Act” of 1998. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration quickly made clear it wanted to overthrow the Iraqi regime either as retaliation for the attacks or as some sort of preemptive action to forestall future attacks. The ambiguity was of course an important tell about what and why any of this was happening.
Whether you’re a wealthy Trump fan seeking to celebrate your big guy’s return to power next week, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, a vaccine skeptic, a hyper-online nihilist or a simple country lobbyist, you have a lot of options in D.C. this weekend.
You can attend the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Ball. There’s the Crypto Ball. There’s a Coronation Ball for the alt-right and, if you want all of it together, there’s even a separate MAGA MAHA Crypto Inaugural Ball.
This article was first published by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
When President Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom last spring to face a slew of criminal charges, he was joined by a rotating cadre of lawyers, campaign aides, his family — and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton had traveled to be with Trump for what he described on social media as a “sham of a trial” and a “travesty of justice.” Trump was facing 34 counts of falsifying records in the case, which focused on hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from disclosing their sexual relationship.
“It’s just sad that we’re at this place in our country where the left uses the court system not to promote justice, not to enforce the rule of law, but to try to take out political opponents, and that’s exactly what they’re doing to him,” Paxton said on a conservative podcast at the time.
“They’ve done it to me.”
A year earlier, the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Paxton over allegations, made by senior officials in his office, that he had misused his position to help a political donor. Trump was not physically by Paxton’s side but weighed in repeatedly on social media, calling the process unfair and warning lawmakers that they would have to contend with him if they persisted.
When the Texas Senate in September 2023 acquitted Paxton of the impeachment charges against him, Trump claimed credit. “Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down at the hands of Democrats and some Republicans …” Trump posted on the social media platform he founded.
The acquittal, however, did not wholly absolve Paxton of the allegations brought by his former employees. The FBI has been investigating the same accusations since at least November 2020. And come Monday, when Trump is inaugurated for his second term, that investigation will be in the hands of his Department of Justice.
Paxton and Trump have forged a friendship over the years, one that has been cemented in their shared political and legal struggles and their willingness to come to each other’s aid at times of upheaval. Both have been the subjects of federal investigations, have been impeached by lawmakers and have faced lawsuits related to questions about their conduct.
“If there’s one thing both guys share in common, people have been after them for a while in a big way. They’ve been under the gun. They’ve shared duress in a political setting,” said Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist and Paxton friend. “They’ve both been through the wringer, if you will. And I think there’s a kinship there.”
Neither Trump nor Paxton responded to requests for comment or to written questions. Both men have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that they have been the targets of witch hunts by their political enemies, including fellow Republicans.
Their relationship is so cozy that Trump said he’d consider naming Paxton as his U.S. attorney general pick. He ultimately chose another political ally, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Although Trump did not select Paxton, the two men will get yet another opportunity to have each other’s backs now that he has returned to office, both when it comes to the federal investigation into Paxton and pushing forward the president’s agenda.
Before and during Trump’s first term, Paxton filed multiple lawsuits challenging policies passed under former President Barack Obama. He then aggressively pursued cases against President Joe Biden’s administration after Trump lost reelection. Such lawsuits included efforts to stop vaccine mandates, to expedite the deportation of migrants and to block federal protections for transgender workers.
Trump has supported Paxton over and over, not only as the Texas politician sought reelection but also as he faced various political and legal scandals. The president-elect’s promises to exert more control over the Justice Department, which has traditionally operated with greater independence from the White House, could mark an end to the long-running investigation into Paxton, several attorneys said.
Justice Department and FBI officials declined to comment on the story and the status of the investigation, but as recently as August, a former attorney general staffer testified before a grand jury about the case, Bloomberg Law reported. Paxton also referenced the FBI’s four-year investigation of him during a speech in late December without mentioning any resolution on the case. The fact that Paxton hasn’t been indicted could signal that investigators don’t have a smoking gun, one political science professor told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, but a former federal prosecutor said cases can take years and still result in charges being filed.
“As far as I’m aware, this is pretty unprecedented, this level of alliance and association between those two figures,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“Don’t Count Me Out”
In 2020, when then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr found no evidence to support Trump’s claims that voter fraud turned the election results in his opponent’s favor, Paxton emerged to take up the argument.
He became the first state attorney general to challenge Biden’s win in court, claiming in a December 2020 lawsuit that the increased use of mail ballots in four battleground states had resulted in voter fraud and cost Trump the election.
Trump eagerly supported the move on social media, writing, “We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, ruling that Texas had no legal interest in how other states conduct their elections. Trump, however, didn’t forget Paxton’s loyalty.
He offered Paxton his full-throated endorsement during the 2022 primary race for attorney general against then-Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. His decision to back Paxton, who was under federal criminal investigation at the time and had been indicted on state securities fraud charges, was a major blow to Bush, the grandson and nephew of two former Republican presidents. Bush had endorsed Trump for president even though Trump defeated his father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in the Republican primary and repeatedly disparaged his family.
Trump properties in Florida and New Jersey served as locations for at least two Paxton campaign fundraisers over the course of that campaign. And at a rally in Robstown in South Texas, Trump repeated debunked claims that the election was stolen and said he wished Paxton had been with him at the White House at the time. “He would’ve figured out that voter fraud in two minutes,” Trump said.
While Paxton pursued reelection, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an investigation into how his administration handled thousands of government documents, many of them classified. Paxton led 10 other Republican state attorneys general in intervening in court on Trump’s behalf, arguing in a legal filing that the Biden administration could not be trusted to act properly in the case.
Paxton won another term in office in November 2022, but the celebration was short-lived. Six months later, the Texas House of Representatives considered impeaching him over misconduct allegations including bribery, abuse of office and obstruction related to his dealings with Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor. Paxton has denied any wrongdoing.
Hours before the House voted on whether to impeach Paxton, Trump weighed in on social media.
“I love Texas, won it twice in landslides, and watched as many other friends, including Ken Paxton, came along with me,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Hopefully Republicans in the Texas House will agree that this is a very unfair process that should not be allowed to happen or proceed — I will fight you if it does. It is the Radical Left Democrats, RINOS, and Criminals that never stop. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Free Ken Paxton, let them wait for the next election!”
Despite Trump’s threat, the House voted 121-23 in May 2023 to impeach Paxton. The Senate then held a trial that September to determine Paxton’s fate. “Who would replace Paxton, one of the TOUGHEST & BEST Attorney Generals in the Country?” Trump posted before the Senate acquitted Paxton.
Trump is among the few people who understand what it’s like to be under the kind of scrutiny Paxton has faced and how to survive it, Miller said.
“There is that quality [they share] of, ‘Don’t count me out,’” he said. “‘If you’re counting me out, you’re making a mistake.’”
On Monday, Trump will become the first president also to be a convicted felon. A jury found Trump guilty on all counts of falsifying records in the hush money case. A judge, however, ruled that he will not serve jail time in light of his election to the nation’s highest office.
Trump has repeatedly decried the case, as well as the Justice Department’s investigations that resulted in him being charged in June 2023 with withholding classified documents and later with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election by knowingly pushing lies that the race was stolen. Jack Smith, the special counsel who led the DOJ investigations, dropped both cases after Trump’s reelection. A Justice Department policy forbids prosecutions against sitting presidents, but in a DOJ report about the 2020 election released days before the inauguration, Smith asserted that his investigators had enough evidence to convict Trump had the case gone to trial.
Not only have Paxton and Trump supported each other through turmoil that could have affected their political ambitions, they have taken similar tacks against those who have crossed them.
After surviving his impeachment trial in 2023, Paxton promised revenge against Republicans who did not stand by him. He had help from Trump, who last year endorsed a challenger to Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, calling Paxton’s impeachment “fraudulent” and an “absolute embarrassment.” Phelan, who has defended the House’s decision to impeach Paxton, won reelection but resigned from his speaker post.
For his part, Trump has tried a legal strategy that Paxton has employed many times, using consumer protection laws to go after perceived political adversaries. In October, Trump sued CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying the news organization’s edits “misled” the public. Instead of accusing CBS of defamation, which is harder to prove, his lawsuit argues that the media company violated Texas’ consumer protection act, which is supposed to protect people from fraud. The case is ongoing. In moving to dismiss the case, CBS’ attorneys have said the Texas law was designed to safeguard people from deceptive business practices, “not to police editorial decisions made by news organizations with which one disagrees.” (Marc Fuller, one of the CBS attorneys, is representing ProPublica and the Tribune in an unrelated business disparagement case.)
The move indicates a broader, more aggressive approach that the Justice Department may pursue under the Trump administration, said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University, who researches attorneys general.
“It’s a signal to me that, yes, the federal DOJ is going to follow the path of Paxton, and perhaps some other like-minded Republican AGs who have been using their office to also go after perceived enemies,” Nolette said.
Cleaning House
On Dec. 21, six weeks after Trump won reelection, Paxton stepped onstage in a Phoenix convention center at the AmericaFest conference, hosted by the conservative organization Turning Point USA.
The event followed Trump’s comeback win. It also represented a triumphant moment for Paxton: He’d not only survived impeachment, but prosecutors agreed earlier in the year to drop long-standing state securities fraud charges against him if he paid about $270,000 in restitution and performed community service.
But Paxton spent much of his 15-minute speech ticking off the grievances about what he claimed had been attacks on him throughout his career, including impeachment by “supposed Republicans” and the FBI case.
He praised Trump’s selection of Bondi to run the DOJ. It was time to clean house in a federal agency that had become focused on “political witch hunts and taking out people that they disagree with,” Paxton said.
Before taking office, Trump threatened to fire and punish those within the Justice Department who were involved in investigations that targeted him. FBI director Christopher Wray, a Republican whom Trump appointed during his first term in office, announced in December that he would resign after the president-elect signaled that he planned to fire him. After facing similar threats, Smith, the special prosecutor who led the DOJ investigations, stepped down this month.
In his speech, Paxton made no mention of the agency’s investigations into Trump, nor did he connect the DOJ to his own case. But a Justice Department that Trump oversees with a heavy-handed approach could benefit the embattled attorney general, several attorneys told ProPublica and the Tribune.
Trump could choose to pardon Paxton before the case is officially concluded. He used pardons during his first presidency, including issuing one to his longtime strategist Steve Bannon and to Charles Kushner, his son-in-law’s father. He’s been vocal about his plans to pardon many of the Jan. 6 rioters on his first day in office.
More concerning, however, is if Trump takes the unusual approach of personally intervening in the federal investigation, something presidents have historically avoided because it is not a political branch of government, said Mike Golden, who directs the Advocacy Program at the University of Texas School of Law.
Any Trump involvement would be more problematic because it would happen behind closed doors, while a pardon is public, Golden said.
“If the president pressures the Department of Justice to drop an investigation, a meritorious investigation against a political ally, that weakens the overall strength of the system of justice in the way a one-off pardon really doesn’t,” Golden said.
Michael McCrum, a former federal prosecutor in Texas who did not work on the Paxton case, said “we’d be fools to think that Mr. Paxton’s relationship with the Trump folks and Mr. Trump personally wouldn’t play some factor in it.”
“I think that the case is going to die on the vine,” McCrum said.
On the last full workday before Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, I wanted to return to our earlier discussion of the three horsemen of the Trump II apocalypse: retribution, corruption, and destruction.
As the pace of the Trump II chaos has quickened in recent days, it’s been harder to keep track of of it all, let alone make sense of it. We can wave our hands at the general chaos, but if our understanding starts to slip, we can’t triage and prioritize the various threats and transgressions. It helps to remember that the chaos isn’t the point in and of itself but is in service of the three driving motives that animate the MAGA id.
Trump’s lizard brain seeks retribution for slights real and imagined, with near perfect overlap between wounds to his ego and threats to his power. He perceives them in virtually the same way, and therein lies so much of the danger of the Trump cult. The melding of the personal and the public, of personality and power, and of loyalty to an individual and duty to the common good.
The corruption comes hand in hand with the elevation of personal loyalty over any other obligation or imperative. And it is enhanced by the destruction of institutions, power centers, enforcement mechanisms, and norms that would otherwise impose restraints.
All three impulses combine to project dominance, giving him and his backers a frisson of power as they bully, hurt, and demean for the sake of doing so.
The three motives overlap and reinforce each other, but they remain distinct from each other and help to clarify why a particular threat, scandal, conspiracy theory, elaborate charade, or transgression operates to enhance Trump’s position.
But I don’t want this framework to exist only at the level of an abstraction. This isn’t a passing parade for us to gawk at from the sidewalk. Real people – government employees; prosecutors, investigators, and judges; regulators, auditors, and watchdogs; and of course marginalized people of all stripes – are going to bear the very real and tangible burdens of being targeted, vilified, and abused under Trump II. That starts at noon ET Monday.
We owe it to them and to each other to keep clear heads about what is happening and why. Onward.
Quote Of The Day
“It is the obligation of each of us to follow our norms, not only when it is easy, but also when it is hard, especially when it is hard. It is the obligation of each of us to adhere to our norms, even when and especially when the circumstances we face are not normal.” –Attorney General Merrick Garland, in his farewell speech to the Justice Department
Trump II Clown Show
Pam Bondi‘s financial disclosure form shows she and her husband have a net worth of $12.1 million – $3.9 million of which is stock in Trump’s Truth Social platform, Business Insider reports, based on documents it obtained.
Kash Patel has vowed retribution. As FBI director, he could do it.–WaPo
Stephen Miller, Channeling Trump, Has Built More Power Than Ever–NYT
Rudy G Settles With Georgia Election Workers
After a flurry of news reports yesterday that suggested Rudy Giuliani was a no-show for scheduled court proceedings, it became clear that he and Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss have settled their disputes over executing the $148 defamation judgment they have against him.
2024 Ephemera
TPM’s Hunter Walker: One Of Ruben Gallego’s Top Strategists Explains How They Won A Senate Seat In A State That Swung Hard For Trump
NYT: How Chuck Schumer Pushed Joe Biden to Drop Out
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) picks state Attorney General Ashley Moody to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate seat.
Didn’t See This Coming
SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein has been indicted on federal tax evasion charges in Maryland … but that’s only the surface-level news. Goldstein, until 2023 a prominent Supreme Court advocate, was allegedly also a high-stakes poker player. Very high stakes. Millions of dollars in gamblings debts and winnings, allegedly. Adding to the sordid soup: allegations relating to keeping women he was involved with on his law firm payroll in fake jobs.
Welcome To The Pyrocene
One of Morning Memo’s jobs is to introduce you to expert voices you may not have heard yet. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist with a bent toward communicating the risks of climate change to a lay audience. He posted a long thread overnight on wildfire risk in a warming world. In giving a broad overview of what’s changed, why wildfire impacts are worsening, and what policy changes and mitigation efforts need to be prioritized, Swain explicitly embraces complexity and doesn’t offer silver bullet solutions or over-simplistic “fixes.” Worth a read, especially if you don’t live in the arid West.
After becoming increasingly enmeshed in the wildfire world, you start to notice things about the way we've systematically altered our relationship with the natural environment in a way that has increased the risk of destructive fires. And then you stop being able to unsee them.
Earlier this week, I was exchanging emails with TPM Reader JP, who has local-level disaster management experience. He’d written in primarily to highlight why Trump’s political attacks on California were so godawful, but he also touched on one of my perennial preoccupations: The way news coverage creates and reinforces profound misapprehensions about how disaster response works.
I’m not sure if your readers, or even your staff in general, understand that when a disaster occurs the federal and state governments don’t come swooping in. They’ll contribute money and press junkets, eventually. All the responders, which covers so much more than fire/police personnel/resources, are all local. As the disaster response expands beyond strictly local (county) capacity, the state may facilitate the transfer of other local resources, but that’s it. No President or Governor is in a secret bunker directing the response and no national base is waiting with disaster equipment and staff to dispatch overnight, like some sort of military air-drop.
As resources start pouring into the disaster response, for whatever disaster wherever it occurred, it’s all localities from across that state and across other states contributing to our shared welfare. I had municipal coworkers at my elbow who had just lost their houses and all their possessions, but knew they could still contribute to our community’s welfare by continuing to work in the response. These really are the most ‘by the people, for the people’ experiences our country has, not war, not voting, not traveling, and certainly not social media. For those involved in the response and/or affected by the disaster it becomes one of the most elevated community/emotional experiences you can have.
That a President, any President, would try to pillory a state in a time of crisis shows their true lack of character and moral ugliness. Even TX Governor Abbott, despite his political chicanery and CA scapegoating, knows that Texas and California are brethren in this cause and need to stand together. My heart goes out to those in Southern California fighting this raging storm of fire, we all stand with you in this time.
What’s Next In Los Angeles?
Susan Crawford: Why pushing to rebuild quickly in LA is both understandable and unthinkable
‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’
The aerospace industrial complex has always launched as many euphemisms as it has rockets. When Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch vehicle Starshipexploded yesterday over the Turks and Caicos islands while on a test flight, we got this oldie but goodie:
Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s…
The series of summit eruptions on Kilauea that began Dec. 23 resumed Wednesday morning and has evolved into vigorous lava fountaining from two vents at the base of the 700-foot-tall caldera wall. This is the fourth eruptive episode of the past month:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) came out swinging on Thursday in the wake of news that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had removed the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), and replaced him with a MAGA loyalist.
Democratic incumbent, and the apparent winner of the North Carolina Supreme Court race, filed a brief with the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday, laying out her argument for why a legal battle on the certification of the November race should remain in federal court.
The confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi for attorney general was more alarming and foreboding than I had expected. In advance, I thought she would mount enough of a defense of Justice Department independence and the rule of law to provide a fig leaf of cover for her true aims and those of Donald Trump, making it harder for less sophisticated observers to see through the charade. That would have been problematic in its own right, but the alternative turned out to be worse.
Instead, Bondi was brazen in offering nods to right-wing conspiracies, Fox News talking points, and Trump ego-stroking. Whatever she did to position herself as a colorable defender of the rule of law was overwhelmed by her refusal to acknowledge Trump lost in 2020, her expressed horror with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations, and her dodging of any question that would put her at odds with Trump. If she can’t create daylight between herself and Trump now in the abstract, what chance is there of her doing so when the real heat is on?
Between Bondi and GOP senators, the tone of the hearing was largely: We’re going to do exactly what we want to do and you can’t stop us.
Bondi’s Election Denialism
Nothing was quite as disturbing as Bondi’s adherence to the Big Lie because it implicates so many other rule of law issues, including her obvious willingness to consider criminal investigations of Biden DOJ figures on the basis that they had investigated Trump:
HIRONO: Who won the 2020 presidential election?
BONDI: Joe Biden is the president
HIRONO: You cannot say who won the 2020 electon
BONDI: *sits in silence*
HIRONO: It's disturbing that you can't give voice to that fact
Some of the sharper reactions to the Bondi confirmation hearing:
Dahlia Lithwick: “The main takeaway from her performance, though: If an insurrection happens in a forest, and Pam Bondi isn’t there to hear it, did it really happen?”
Benjamin Wittes: “She could not bring herself to acknowledge the possibility of having to say no to Donald Trump or to address how she would handle the very-plausible prospect of receiving an illegal order from him.”
Joyce Vance: “Bondi clumsily walking the tightrope between what she knew she had to say to get confirmed and what she knew she had to say to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces. She made it clear in the process that if she falls off, it will be in his direction.”
The sheer volume of charlatans, misfits, and miscreants that Trump has nominated requires triaging. We can’t cover them all in depth, and you can’t keep it all in your head. But I didn’t want these three to slip by without noting them:
Russell Vought, OMB director: “President-elect Trump’s selection to lead the White House’s budget told lawmakers on Wednesday he may consider withholding funds appropriated by Congress and defended the removal of civil service protections for some employees as necessary to ensure good governance,” Government Executive reported.
John Ratcliffe, CIA director: “John Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term, appeared likely to win easy confirmation after his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he found a warm reception,” the WaPo reported. “No senator disclosed plans to oppose his nomination.”
Chris Wright, secretary of energy: “[T]he confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a literal fracking executive, for Secretary of Energy proved to be relatively low-key and collegial among senators from both parties, Heatmap reported. “Wright was introduced by his fellow Coloradan, Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper, was an early strong signal that will likely pass through confirmation with ease.”
Trump II Transition Tidbits
Enemies List: President-elect Trump identified an enemies list of 11 people with whom any association he considers disqualifying to serve in his administration. They are all Republicans or former Trump I officials.
RIP Jimmy Carter: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) joined with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in directing U.S. flags at the state Capitol in Sacramento be raised to full height for Inauguration Day after Trump complained about them being lowered to honor the late President Jimmy Carter.
Biden Warns Of Rising Oligarchy In America
While he is largely sidelined and ignored, President Biden took the opportunity during his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office to warn of rising oligarchy and a “tech-industrial complex” that both threaten fundamental freedoms – an extraordinary warning from a sitting president.
Biden: Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.
NYT: Elon Musk Is Expected to Use Office Space in the White House Complex
Aileen Cannon Demands Jack Smith Report
Ahead of Friday’s hearing on whether Attorney General Merrick Garland can release to select members of Congress a redacted version of Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ordered the Justice Department to provide her with a copy of the report, not an unreasonable demand considering defense counsel have already seen it. A hearing in which everyone but the judge has seen the document in question would be off kilter.
Meanwhile, House Judiciary Democrats are calling for Garland to drop the charges against the remaining defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case so that Smith’s Volume II can be released publicly before Trump takes office and not get buried forever. Dropping viable criminal charges in return for a special counsel’s report seems like a pretty lopsided bargain, especially if it spares Trump and his new attorney general from having to follow through on their corrupt plan to drop the case.
Rudy G Back In Court
A trial gets underway today in federal court in Manhattan to determine the disposition of some of Rudy Giuliani’s most prized assets as he tries to fend off Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss from executing on their $148 million defamation judgment against him.
Still Grappling With Historic Hurricane Helene
At the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society this week in New Orleans, the director of the National Hurricane Center provided an assessment of the impacts of Hurricane Helene, which came ashore in Florida’s Big Bend and devastated portions of the Carolinas and Georgia:
NHC Director Mike Brennan: Helene the most significant mainland U.S. hurricane hit since Katrina in 2005. In addition to catastrophic rainfall flooding, Helene caused more wind fatalities than any tropical system since at least 1963. Almost all due to trees. #AMS2025
We did the TPM podcast in front of a live audience for the first time last night. Josh Marshall and Kate Riga did their thing in DC with nearly 200 TPM members and supporters looking on. It went off without a hitch, and we were super pleased with the results.
I got a chance to visit with Morning Memo readers, renew some old acquaintances, and make some new connections. It would have been a good evening regardless, but considering the circumstances – a cold January night less than a week before Trump second inaugural – it really was fantastic.
Thanks for coming out. We deeply appreciate your support. There’s no doing this without you.
I wanted to thank everyone who came out to our live audience taping of the podcast last night in DC. About 200 TPM Readers joined Kate and me in downtown DC where we discussed nomination hearings and more. We hope you had a great time. We definitely did. If you’re a regular podcast listener we’ll be posting last night’s edition, just a little later than usual. We expect to have it in your feeds sometime Friday afternoon.
This was our first time out doing one of these and we’ll be doing more of them. Later this year we’re going to try to do our first live event beyond the east coast. I know this can come off as some kind of east coast elitism. But really it’s logistical. We’re a very small organization. And we have staff in DC and New York. So we can scout out locations, set things up, have people in place to do all the little things that go into an event. Anywhere else is totally different and a different level of planning and resources. But we’re up for it. So we’ll be checking in with readers to see where the demand is — West Coast, Chicago, St. Louis, Texas or any of the gagilion other places in the USA … We have no idea. But somewhere off the eastern seaboard. So keep an eye out for that. And thank you again to everyone who came out. We truly appreciate it and we’re honored by your readership and support.
Democrats at the national level were soundly defeated in all seven presidential swing states when voters went to the polls ten weeks ago. But Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House is just one part of the story.
Down-ballot, Democratic candidates in statewide contests consistently won more votes than the top of the ticket, allowing Democrats to eke out U.S. Senate wins in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, and heralding the return of ticket-splitting, a phenomenon that had largely vanished in recent elections — until 2024.
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Lifesaving HIV treatments. Cures for hepatitis C. New tuberculosis regimens and a vaccine for RSV.
These and other major medical breakthroughs exist in large part thanks to a major division of the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet.
For decades, researchers with funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have labored quietly in red and blue states across the country, conducting experiments, developing treatments and running clinical trials. With its $6.5 billion budget, NIAID has played a vital role in discoveries that have kept the nation at the forefront of infectious disease research and saved millions of lives.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
NIAID helped lead the federal response, and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, drew fire amid school closures nationwide and recommendations to wear face masks. Lawmakers were outraged to learn that the agency had funded an institute in China that had engaged in controversial research bioengineering viruses, and questioned whether there was sufficient oversight. Republicans in Congress have led numerous hearings and investigations into NIAID’s work, flattened NIH’s budget and proposed a total overhaul of the agency.
More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has said he wants to fire and replace 600 of the agency’s 20,000 employees and shift research away from infectious diseases and vaccines, which are at the core of NIAID’s mission to understand, treat and prevent infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases. He has said that half of NIH’s budget should focus on “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” He has a particular interest in improving diets.
Even the most staunch defenders of NIH agree the agency could benefit from reforms. Some would like to see fewer institutes, while others believe there should be term limits for directors. There are important debates over whether to fund and how to oversee controversial research methods, and concerns about the way the agency has handledtransparency. Scientists inside and outside of the institute agree that work needs to be done to restore public trust in the agency.
But experts and patient advocates worry that an overhaul or dismantling of NIAID without a clear understanding of the critical work performed there could imperil not only the development of future lifesaving treatments but also the nation’s place at the helm of biomedical innovation.
“The importance of NIAID cannot be overstated,” said Greg Millett, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. “The amount of expertise, the research, the breakthroughs that have come out of NIAID — It’s just incredible.”
To understand how NIAID works and what’s at stake with the new administration, ProPublica spoke with people who have worked for NIAID, received funding from it, or served on boards or panels that advise the institute.
Decisions, Decisions
The director of NIAID is appointed by the head of the NIH, who must be approved by the Senate. Directors have broad discretion to determine what research to fund and where to award grants, although traditionally those decisions are informed by recommendations from panels of outside experts.
Fauci led NIAID for nearly 40 years. He’d navigated controversy in the past, particularly in the early years of the HIV epidemic when community activists criticized him for initially excluding them from the research agenda. But in general until the pandemic, he enjoyed relatively solid bipartisan support for his work, which included a strong focus on vaccine research and development. After he retired in 2022, he was replaced by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, an HIV researcher who was formerly the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has spent much of her time in the halls of Congress working to restore bipartisan support for the institution.
NIH directors typically span presidential administrations. But Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, and current director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli told staff this week that she would resign on Jan. 17. A Stanford professor, Bhattacharya has spent his career studying health policy issues like the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the efficacy of U.S. funding for HIV treatments internationally. He also researched the NIH, concluding that while the agency funds a lot of innovative or novel research, it should do even more.
In March 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the death toll from the pandemic would likely be far lower than predicted and called for lockdown policies to be reevaluated. That October, he helped write a declaration that recommended lifting COVID-19 restrictions for those “at minimal risk of death” until herd immunity could be reached. In an interview with the libertarian magazine Reason in June, he said he believes the COVID-19 epidemic most likely originated from a lab accident in China and that he can’t see Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed, as a total success because it was part of the same research agenda.
Bhattacharya declined an interview request from ProPublica about his priorities for the agency. A recent Wall Street Journal article said he is considering how to link “academic freedom” on college campuses to NIH grants, though it’s not clear how he would measure that or implement such a change. He’s also raised the idea of term limits for directors and said the pandemic “was just a disaster for American science and public health policy,” which is now in desperate need of reform.
Where the Money Goes
Grants from NIAID flow to nearly every state and more than half of the congressional districts across the country, supporting thousands of jobs nationwide. Last year, nearly $5 billion of NIAID’s $6.5 billion budget went to U.S. organizations outside the institute, according to a ProPublica analysis of NIH’s RePORT, an online database of its expenditures.
In 2024, Duke University in North Carolina and Washington University in Missouri were NIAID’s largest grantees, receiving more than $190 and $173 million, respectively, to study, among other things, HIV, West Nile vaccines and biodefense.
Over the past five years, $10.6 billion, or about 40% of NIAID’s budget to external U.S. institutions, went to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the analysis found. Research suggests that every dollar spent by NIH generates from $2.50 to $8 in economic activity.
That money is key to advancing medicine as well as careers in science. Most students and postdoctoral researchers rely on the funding and prestige of NIH grants to launch into the profession.
New Drugs and Global Influence
The NIH pays for most of the basic research globally into new drugs. The private sector relies on this public funding; researchers at Bentley University found that NIH money was behind every new pharmaceutical approved from 2010 through 2019.
That includes therapies for kids with RSV, COVID-19 vaccines and Ebola treatments, all of which have key patents based on NIAID-funded research.
Research from NIAID has also improved treatment for chronic diseases. New understandings of inflammation from NIAID-funded research has led to cutting-edge research into cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and a growing body of evidence shows how viruses can have long-term impacts, from multiple sclerosis to long COVID. When private companies turn that research into blockbuster drugs, the public benefits from new treatments, as well as jobs and economic growth.
The weight of NIAID’s funding also allows it to play quieter roles that have been essential to advancing science and the United States’ role in biomedicine, several people said.
The institute brings together scientists who are normally competitors to share findings and tackle big research questions. Having that neutral space is essential to pushing knowledge forward and ultimately spurring breakthroughs, said Matthew Rose of the Human Rights Campaign, who has served on multiple NIH advisory boards. “Academic bodies are very competitive with one another. Having NIH pull the grantees together is helpful to make sure they talk to one another and share research.”
NIAID also funds researchers internationally, ensuring the U.S. continues to have an influential voice in global conversations about biosecurity.
Nancy Sullivan, a former senior investigator at NIAID, said that NIAID’s power is its ability to invest in a broad understanding of human health. “It’s the basic research that allows us to develop treatments,” she said. “You never know which part of fundamental research is going to be the lynchpin for curing a disease or defining a disease so you know how to treat it,” she said.
Sullivan should know: It was her work at NIAID that led four years ago to the first approved treatment for Ebola.
