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

The Best Predictor Of Trump II Is The Abuses Of Trump I

As we prepare for the very real possibility of Trump II and the abuses it would entail – as outlined in public statements by Trump himself, in Project 2025, and the fever dreams of MAGA acolytes – perhaps the best evidence of what we’re in for is what we already endured the first time around.

It remains remarkable that Trump’s abuses of the Justice Department, as serious as they were, wound up overshadowed by the two impeachments, both of which originated from his effort to cling to power, either through corruptly influencing the 2020 election (the First Impeachment) or ignoring the results altogether (the Second Impeachment). Only the Second Impeachment, in the cartoonish-yet-alarming Jeff Clark incident, touched on the myriad ways Trump weaponized the Justice Department and used its powers to target his perceived political enemies.

If you’re having trouble recalling all the ways in which DOJ’s independence, professionalism, and reputation were sullied by Trump’s depredations, the NYT offers a much-needed reminder in a tight, accessible and very on-point package it published over the weekend.

The lead story in the package, authored by reporter Michael S. Schmidt, includes new, never-before-reported details about efforts by the Trump White House Counsel’s Office to steer him away from even worse abuses of the Justice Department and to memorialize those efforts in a self-protective memo, drafts of which they reportedly snuck out of the White House for safekeeping. Your ass-covering memo doesn’t do you much good if it’s hidden away in a White House vault you can no longer access – or is simply destroyed.

A valuable sidebar to the main story is a list of some of the highest profile instances of Trump abusing DOJ to target people he considered threats. It’s a good refresher if time, ambiguity, and the sheer volume of Trump’s transgressions have overwhelmed your memory.

Finally, Schmidt runs through the key findings in a short video:

In Related News …

NYT: Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials

The Rules For 2024 Election Are Still Being Written

• Georgia: The now-notorious Georgia Election Board issued a new rule requiring election workers to hand count the total number of ballots cast statewide (machines can still tabulate individual ballots at the precinct level). The rule change was opposed by the state attorney general and secretary of state, both Republicans, and is likely to be challenged in court as exceeding the board’s legal powers. The new rule is expected to cause hours of delay in announcing the election results, which is part of a broader GOP scheme to gum up the works in key states in hopes of creating chaos that Donald Trump can exploit if he is trailing in the election.
• Nebraska: Donald Trump got personally involved in a renewed push to convince the Nebraska legislature to change the state’s Electoral College allocation to winner-take-all ahead of the November election.
• Arizona: The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that 100,000 voters for whom there is no record of having provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote will nonetheless be sent full ballots for the November election. “We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” the court held.

2024 Ephemera

• Liz Cheney suggests that the Republican Party name may not be salvageable and a new conservative party may be needed.
• NC-Guv: GOP nominee Mark Robinson is losing campaign staff in droves after last week’s CNN report, though its not clear why all his previous excesses hadn’t been sufficient reason to leave or never sign up in the first place.
• Politico: Trump Defender Mike Davis Vows a ‘Reign of Terror’ — Is It All an Act?

Trump Still Slow-Rolling The Jan. 6 Case

After initially blowing their filing deadline and having to ask for permission to file late, Trump lawyers turned a relatively routine discovery-related motion in the Jan. 6 case into an extended re-argument of why U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan should dismiss the entire superseding indictment because of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.

UPDATE: Trump Assassination Attempts

• In a new court filing, prosecutors alleged that the would-be Trump assassin in the Florida golf course incident acknowledged in a prewritten note that he had planned the attack as an assassination.
• Secret Service releases a terse five-page preliminary report about its failures in advance of the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

GOP Gov’t Shutdown Watch

Congress has reached a deal on a clean CR that would avert a government shutdown by providing funding until Dec. 20, setting up another of those lame duck, holiday season shutdown cliff hangers that have become more the norm lately.

Elon Musk Is Just A Normal Guy Doing Normal Guy Things

The New Statesman:

What really concerned Musk, however, was that people weren’t retweeting him enough. Teams of engineers were assigned to solve the problem of reduced engagement with Musk’s tweets. Matters came to a head during the 2023 Super Bowl, when he obsessed over the fact that a tweet by Joe Biden received several times as many likes as his own. Nobody dared suggest that the world just found their boss easy to ignore. Engineers were summoned from their Super Bowl parties to headquarters to fix the problem, which they did with a new line of code: “author_is_elon”, a tag that forced everyone to pay even more attention to the richest man in the world.

Climate Watch

• The tension between AI and climate goals: With the electricity demands of AI threatening to derail tech companies’ goals for reduced carbon emissions, Constellation Energy has reached a deal to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant by 2028 and sell all of its energy to Microsoft. “Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer,” WaPo reported.
• Fast is not good: A new study of Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years finds that while the planet has been dramatically warmer and cooler than it is at present, its climate has never changed with the speed of the manmade climate change we are now witnessing.
• Reuters: “Former President Donald Trump has said he would cancel all unspent funds from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law if he wins the presidential election on Nov. 5. But the vast majority of grants will be spent by the time a new president takes office in January, and targeting what remains would be a massive legal challenge, according to Biden administration officials.

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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.

What The Hell Was That?

Some days, y’all. Yesterday was one of them.

Rather than headlining any single one of the day’s weird, troubling, or strange outbursts, Morning Memo will just work through them in rough order of relative importance.

Straight-up Antisemitism

In two separate speeches in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Donald Trump laid a trap for Jewish Americans, blaming them for not supporting him in sufficient numbers given his support for the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

Trump tells a Jewish group the Jews will be to blame if he loses: "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger." pic.twitter.com/lEr0kcH5iC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2024

Ground Zero For Trump’s Hate: Springfield, Ohio

Here are the latest developments:

• The small Ohio city under siege from attacks on its Haitian immigrant community by the Trump-Vance ticket is bracing for a possible Trump visit.
• Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is from the Springfield area, penned a NYT op-ed defending the city, its Haitian immigrants, and the economic revival that they helped to fuel.
• The local health department refuted JD Vance’s race-baiting claims that the influx of Haitian immigrants has caused disease in the city to skyrocket, according to reporting by Greg Sargent.

Harris Puts Abortion Rights Front And Center

• A campaign event in Michigan hosted by Oprah Winfrey and styled like her talk show featured Kamala Harris and the mother of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old Georgia woman who died after waiting for treatment for complications from an abortion pill.
• The TV-talk-show-style event included appearances by an array of celebrities, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, and Tracee Ellis Ross.
• Harris is back in Georgia today for an event where she will again focus on abortion rights.

2024 Ephemera

• The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign 20-1 in digital advertising on Meta’s platforms in the week surrounding their debate.
• The Trump campaign is making a late push to get Nebraska to change its Electoral College vote allocation to winner-take-all, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is leading the charge.
• Kamala Harris surprises Oprah with her gun ownership:

Kamala Harris: “If somebody breaks into my house, they're getting shot. Probably should not have said that.” pic.twitter.com/hlpGKUZAik

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) September 20, 2024

I See What You Did There

Kamala Harris with a dig at Donald Trump’s “concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare:

Kamala Harris: Nobody can start a small business with $5000.

Oprah: That’s a tiny business.

Kamala Harris: A concept of a business, pic.twitter.com/ysaByBmMlh

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 20, 2024

The GOP Is Stuck With Mark Robinson

The deadline for removing Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC), the GOP nominee for governor, from the ballot passed at 12:01 a.m. ET today without any action. And so it appears that Republicans will ride this broken horse all the way to the finish line in November despite another bombshell revelation about Robinson’s conduct before entering public life.

The CNN story that had been rumored all day finally landed with enough force to sink any other candidate. But since March 2023, when TPM’s Hunter Walker first surfaced Robinson’s Facebook posts railing against gays, Blacks, and Jews, Robinson has managed to endure a series of stunning revelations without abandoning his Trump-endorsed candidacy.

By every account, the CNN story can’t quite capture how sordid the Robinson posts it uncovered actually are. Calling himself a “Black Nazi” is just a sampling. The well from which CNN drew makes NSFW look like a Disney movie.

It was almost comical when additional reporting chimed in that Robinson’s email was in the leak-and-dump Ashley Madison episode from a few years ago.

The calculus for Republicans has changed dramatically in North Carolina, where Biden’s exit from the race and Harris’ entry have put the state in play in a way that could seriously upend Trump’s path to Electoral College victory.

Curb Your Enthusiasm For The Salacious, Dear Reader

Olivia Nuzzi, the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine, is on leave after it was publicly revealed that she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his presidential campaign.

After news of the relationship broke, Nuzzi issued a statement in which she did not name RFK Jr. but conceded that “earlier this year, the nature of some communication” between herself “and a former reporting subject turned personal.” She said “[t]he relationship was never physical” but she regretted not disclosing it. A spokesperson for RFK Jr. said: “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”

TPM regulars will recall that Nuzzi, then 20, first appeared on TPM more than a decade ago, when Hunter Walker was covering Anthony Weiner’s NYC mayoral campaign, which lashed out ferociously at Nuzzi, a former intern, for going public about the inner workings of the campaign.

New Court Filing Puts Gaetz And 17-Year-Old Girl At Sex Party

NOTUS: “Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal, according to legal documents filed to a Florida federal court shortly before midnight Thursday, which cite sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies.”

Alaska Man Charged With Threatening 6 SCOTUS Justices

A 76-year-old Alaska man was indicted and arrested on charges that he allegedly sent more than 465 messages through the Supreme Court’s public website threatening to torture and assassinate six justices. The justices have not been publicly identified.

For Your Radar …

AP: “The U.S. military has moved about 130 soldiers along with mobile rocket launchers to a desolate island in the Aleutian chain of western Alaska amid a recent increase in Russian military planes and vessels approaching American territory.”

Stat Of The Day

Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health:

The statistic that gives me the deepest heartache is this: More than 230,000 Americans died unnecessarily between June 2021 and March 2022, largely because misinformation caused them to turn away from what might have saved them in the midst of a dangerous pandemic, according to an assessment from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. This death rate is the equivalent of four fully loaded 737s crashing every day.

Live Your Weekend The Way Shohei Ohtani Plays Baseball

On Thursday afternoon, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers had what is arguably the greatest regular season game in the history of major league baseball.

With the sporting world already watching because Ohtani was poised to pass a never-before reached milestone – 50 home runs and 50 steals in the same season – he proceeded to have a game for the ages, going 6-for-6 at the plate, hitting 3 home runs, stealing two bases, and generally having an otherworldly performance against the lowly Miami Marlins:

Enjoy a [lovely] weekend!

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