NYC Mayor Eric Adams has a line that he trots out about life. It’s a clunky bit of received wisdom: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.”
Continue reading “Eric Adams’ Table of Success”In Oregon’s 2nd district, Rep. Cliff Bentz (R) got a rude awakening in four town halls he held in this past week. At one point in his town hall in La Grande he chided the audience, saying a lot of representatives had refused to even hold town halls. So they should be grateful he decided to show up.
Note that this is an R+15 district — basically the eastern two-thirds of the state.
From the La Grande Observer …
Continue reading “Another Town Hall(s) Goes Off the Rails – Oregon 2nd District Edition”President Trump has abruptly fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charles Q. Brown Jr., and is replacing him with a retired three star general, Dan Caine. This portends a future grave crisis as the President attempts to restructure the military into one personally loyal to him. Caine has not been a service chief or held a combatant command or been the head of the air forces of a combatant command. So basically he’s held none of the assignments which normally precedes elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
I don’t know enough about the internal workings of the Joint Staff to know how big a problem that is in itself. But this is the President reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisory to the President (the Chairman’s statutory role) but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military. Given Trump’s well-known impulses and ambitions, we must be very, very wary and suspicious of what understandings Trump has or believes he has with Caine.
This one is really, really bad.
Late Update: In its own way equally ominous, Trump tonight fired the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not. If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.
Important new Times story on issue I discussed here in the Ed Blog earlier this week: how the White House is using notifications to the Federal Register as a way to get around judges’ orders unfreezing NIH grant funding.
According to Politico, the White House has a new buzzword: Precision. Gone are the days — i.e., yesterday — when DOGE indiscriminately torched the livelihoods of federal employees in the tens of thousands. Now they’re indiscriminately torching the livelihoods of tens of thousands under the new branding of “precision,” or something like that. Politico runs with the new branding but is then forced to concede that the firings continuing pretty much exactly as they have been.
Following up on my post below about the beginnings of a visible backlash against Elon Musk’s wilding spree throughout the federal government, I remain very eager to hear from you about what you might be hearing from your senators and representatives. From the beginning of the DOGE wilding spree there’s been a disconnect between what Republican members of Congress are saying in DC and what they’re telling constituents back home. As I noted in today’s Backchannel, that cleavage has expanded dramatically over the last week. They’re hearing from angry constituents in their districts. Some are telling local press that Elon is out of control. Some are saying that while they’re fully in support of President Trump’s goals, they think Elon is going about it in the wrong way. (If you haven’t read today’s Backchannel it includes a lot of important context.) It’s time to ask members of Congress whether they support DOGE or not — as close to a yes or no question as one can get it. Every response you forward to me will help me greatly in charting the evolution of the public response to the DOGE attack on the American republic.
A wild email out this afternoon from Acting NIH Director Matthew J. Memoli. On its face it’s an “upward and onward, we’ll get through this” letter. But along the way you have these notes like “when this transition is behind us, NIH may look different.” Yep, probably so.
He then explains that Bobby Kennedy Jr. believes deeply in NIH’s mission. As I told an NIH employee a short time ago, the claim that Kennedy believes deeply in NIH’s mission is probably a bigger hit to morale than saying we’ll all be out of a job in a month. But not to fear, says Memoli: “We will have many opportunities to demonstrate our value to Secretary Kennedy in the coming weeks and months.”
Continue reading “New NIH Chief Sends We Love Bobby Email to NIH Staff”To share confidential tips about events unfolding in the federal government you can contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com.
Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this week. I don’t want to overstate what it portends in the short term. Elon Musk remains firmly in the saddle. And even as many of Trump’s advisors grow concerned about the impact of Musk’s rampage, Donald Trump himself appears to be maintaining his support. The moment was captured yesterday at what are now the more or less constant CPACs where Steve Bannon tossed off a Nazi salute and Musk appeared in a “Dark MAGA” baseball cap sporting a chainsaw and basking in the adulation of the MAGA/CPAC faithful awash in the joy a certain kind of individual derives from destruction and pain. The picture itself is a key signpost in the story. Make a note of it. Musk himself posted it to Twitter, labeled with “The DogeFather” and flexing with the text: “This is a real picture.”
But there’s something else going on — not so much the tide turning as a certain battle being joined. Beginning this week, local TV stations around the country have begun running human interest stories about veterans, members of military families or Trump supporters getting fired as part of Elon’s purge. Meanwhile, we can see a growing cleavage between what congressional Republicans are saying in Washington and what they’re saying back in their districts.
Continue reading “INFLECTION: The Backlash Begins As Elon Goes Wild”A Manhattan federal judge signaled on Friday that he won’t rubber stamp the Trump DOJ’s effort to drop the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, part of an allegedly corrupt quid pro quo acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove hammered out to secure Adams’ cooperation with an immigration crackdown in the five boroughs.
Continue reading “Judge Ho Appoints Former GOP Solicitor General To Help Him Mull DOJ’s Corrupt Adams Deal”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
It goes against my basic nature to overstate things, but I don’t think it’s overdramatic to observe that the Justice Department has already been lost to the Trump II rampage. There are no guardrails, limits, or independence any longer – and it’s going to take some time for us to internalize this new reality. Days like yesterday may help hasten our acceptance of the new reality:
the CPAC crowd cheers when AG Pam Bondi is asked about prosecuting Joe Biden (i guess the immunity ruling only applies to Republican presidents … )
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2025 at 4:56 PM
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President Trump is close to crossing the line and openly defying courts in the USAID cases, but U.S. District Judge Amir Ali declined to hold the administration in contempt of court – at least for now. Within hours of that decision, the NYT reported that USAID funds remains frozen for emergency food, tuberculosis tests and HIV drugs.
President Trump is preparing to abolish the independence of the U.S. Postal Service and assert his own control over it by folding it into the Commerce Department, the WaPo reports. Unlike Trump’s other efforts to abolish agencies created by Congress via statute, this strikes directly at Congress’ explicit Article I power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
having a normal one
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2025 at 5:19 PM
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Major developments that at any other time would be top Morning Memo headlines:
Hill Republicans are beginning to make barely audible plaintive yelps about President Trump’s executive overreach:
Just before dawn, the Senate passed its narrower-than-the House’s budget bill that doesn’t attempt to tackle the extension of the Trump tax cuts. Ball now firmly in Speaker Mike Johnson’s court but who knows what he will be able to wrangle out of his conference.
The scourge of the Senate who paved the way for the Trump era and never had the courage to defy his party and rein in the reality TV star when he had the chance to do so will retire from the Senate at the end of his current term in 2027.
A Mississippi state judge ordered a local newspaper to remove an editorial from its website less than a week after the Clarksdale Board of Mayor and Commissioners sued the newspaper for defamation.
Susan Glasser compares the present moment to Putin’s initial takeover of Russia:
Washington today echoes with so many uncomfortable reminders of that transitional moment in Moscow—the sudden, fearful silence of critics who had previously spoken out, the business tycoons rushing to kiss the President’s ring, the lying and reality distortions to fit the official narrative. Trump’s consolidation of power this time has been fast and consequential.
The United States is declining to co-sponsor a pro-Ukraine UN resolution marking the third anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to try to extort Ukraine into coughing up its mineral wealth to the United States as “payback” for aiding it against Russia’s invasion – while declining to offer future security guarantees. The WSJ has cringey new details of the effort to strong-arm President Volodymyr Zelensky.
If all of that wasn’t bad enough, Axios channels a bunch of White House shit-talking about Zelensky while reporting that Trump, in a personal pique over Zelensky’s failure to submit, almost withdrew U.S. military support in recent days.
While Steve Bannon was at CPAC touting an extra-constitutional third term for Trump, the president himself toyed with the idea in a speech to Republican governors:
Trump: And they tell me I'm not allowed to run. I'm not sure. Is that true? I'm not sure pic.twitter.com/JpsdamshLE
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 21, 2025
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