One of Layla A. Jones’ insights when she joined our team last year was that you could measure the destruction that DOGE wreaked on the federal workforce by looking at the D.C.-area economy, and, specifically, the housing market. Her first piece for us examined those indicators. Now, a year after Elon Musk and his youths began their slash-and-burn rampage through the executive branch, Layla finds the damage lingering — and, in some ways, worsening — with the middle class, once propped up by government workers and contractors, falling behind a growing wealthy elite. That story is here.
The Historic Self-Own of Trump’s Iran Misadventure
The Unforgiving Geopolitics of Oil and Gas
I wanted to use the occasion of the resignation of a prominent climate scientist from NASA, citing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science, to note how Trump’s foreign misadventures are inextricably intertwined with his retrograde energy policy.
In the face of overwhelming evidence of catastrophic climate change fueled by manmade carbon emissions, Trump spent the first year of his second term decimating domestic wind and solar and doubling down on hydrocarbons, making the United State more — not less — dependent on global energy markets while exacerbating carbon emissions and delaying the inevitable energy transition.
It’s no coincidence that Trump’s two decapitation strikes — Venezuela and Iran — involve countries whose geopolitical significance results almost exclusively from their status as petro-states. Trump wanted to go back to the ways of the old economy, and he got exactly what he bargained for, whether he likes it or not. It’s a reminder — one we didn’t really need — that while the abundance of oil and gas has produced amazing riches and unprecedented global economic growth and development for more than a century, it has come at an enormous price.
From a long-term perspective, the ultimate price of our oil and gas dependence will be a centuries-long rise in global temperatures that is expected to threaten the pillars of civilization and imperil human survival. Nothing major. Alternative forms of energy promised not just to wean us from our dependency but to begin to unshackle us from the unforgiving geopolitics of oil and gas.
Trumpian Chaos in Energy Markets
- WSJ: The liquid natural gas supply chain has been hit hardest by the Middle East conflict and will take much longer to recover than oil.
- Bloomberg: As part of its regular modeling of the effect of energy prices on economic growth, Trump administration officials are examining what a potential spike in oil prices to as high as $200 a barrel would mean for the economy,
- WSJ: Beginning on April 26, the U.S. Postal Service will impose an 8% surcharge on packages to cover the rising cost of fuel and transportation.
Nothing to See Here at All
Suspicious trading has been observed ahead of other big Trump policy announcements, but the anomaly was especially notable this week right before Trump backed off his threat to strike Iranian power plants:
The Latest From the Middle East …
- WaPo: The Pentagon is considering diverting Ukraine military aid to the Middle East, although a final decision to redirect the equipment has not yet been made.
- NYT: Under threat from Iranian counterattacks, many of the 40,000 American troops based in the Middle East have had to disperse to hotels and office spaces because the 13 U.S. bases in the region are “all but uninhabitable.”
- WaPo: Iraq accused the United States of killing seven members of the Iraqi military and injuring 13 others in a strike Wednesday that hit a clinic on a military base in western Anbar province. The Pentagon issued a carefully worded denial that put a lot of weight on the word “target”: “U.S. forces did not target a medical clinic in Iraq.”
The Long Tail of the Alien Enemies Act
- A Venezuelan national deported under the Alien Enemies Act has filed a new lawsuit against the United States allegeing that he was wrongly identified as a member of the Tren de Aragua gang on the basis of his tattoos and endured “physical and psychological torture, solitary confinement, inhumane living conditions, and deliberate indifference to medical care” while detained at CECOT.
- U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. dismissed a lawsuit from immigrant advocacy groups that challenged the legality of the agreement under which the United States paid for El Salvador to detain the Alien Enemies Act deportees at CECOT. In a highly technical ruling, Boasberg concluded that the groups lacked standing because even giving them what they sought would not redress the harms they continue to face:
At bottom, Plaintiffs describe real injuries stemming from an unprecedented detention arrangement between the United States and El Salvador. They have thus directed their challenge at the nonbinding diplomatic instrument that preceded the agencies’ actions. But, legally, the Agreement is not what authorized the Government to render Plaintiffs’ clients to El Salvador and to pay the Salvadoran government to detain them. Instead, that power comes from statutes that predate the Agreement and that would stay in force no matter how the Court decides this case. Even if the Court vacated the Agreement, then, the Government could keep using those same statutes to inflict the same injury on Plaintiffs. And, as a practical matter, vacating this nonbinding exchange of notes would not change the Government’s willingness or ability to do so. Because the relief Plaintiffs seek would not likely redress their injuries, the Court must dismiss their claims for lack of standing.
Trump’s Mass Detention Policy Upheld
The uber-conservative 8th Circuit Court of Appeals — which covers Minnesota — became the second appeals court to uphold the Trump administration’s ahistorical and unprecedented policy of mandatory immigration detentions without bond in the interior of the country. The two appeals court rulings (the 5th Circuit is the other) stand in contrast to the hundreds of district courts that have found the policy to be unlawful.
The unilateral policy change by the Trump administration, which flew in the face of decades of practice and was contrary to past interpretations of federal statutes, has done more than anything else to flood the federal courts with immigrant habeas cases. Minnesota federal courts have been especially hard hit because of Operation Metro Surge.
Massive DOJ Fuckup
In an extraordinary admission this week, the Trump DOJ told a federal judge it had repeatedly misrepresented the substance of an ICE memo throughout months of litigation over the arrests of migrants at immigration courts.
“We deeply regret that this error has come to light at this late stage, after the parties have expended significant resources and time to litigate this case and this court has carefully considered plaintiffs’ challenge to the 2025 ICE guidance,” the DOJ attorneys told the judge as they formally withdrew their prior arguments about a core aspect of the case.
The DOJ lawyers blamed an unnamed ICE lawyer for the error: “Based on our discussions with ICE today, this regrettable error appears to have occurred because of agency attorney error.”
The Corruption: Mike Flynn Edition
Former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election and was later pardoned by President Trump, will be paid $1.2 million in a corrupt bargain to settle his wrongful prosecution lawsuit.
The Trump I DOJ corruptly dropped the case against Flynn. Later, the DOJ under Biden successfully defended Flynn’s civil lawsuit. The Trump II DOJ — run out of the White House — is back to its old tricks. The president is looting the federal treasury to benefit his supporters, using DOJ to gussy it up with the language and procedural flourishes of a normal settlement of a legitimate legal dispute.
The Retribution: Letitia James Edition
Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte is at it again.
The Trump crony has sent two new criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James to U.S. Attorneys Jason Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida and Andrew Boutros of the Northern District of Illinois.
The new bogus allegations are adjacent to his OG mortgage fraud allegations against James, which were dismissed and which two subsequent grand juries rejected. Pulte is now accusing James of homeowners insurance fraud for allegedly misrepresenting how properties in Florida and Illinois would be used.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Congress in the Dark on Iran
We’re starting to see House Republicans complain that, even as the administration prepares to ask for huge sums to keep the war in Iran funded, it’s leaving lawmakers in the dark about what, exactly, the money is for. “We want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) told reporters yesterday. “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.”
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the vice ranking member on House Appropriations and a member of its Defense subcommittee, goes into great detail this morning with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky about how bad it really is. “I don’t think the American public appreciates it, and it’s certainly not a way to conduct your conversations with Congress,” he says. “Even in classified briefings where we don’t talk about what we learn, there’s literally no actionable intelligence that you get from him.”
DOGE Damage Drags on in DC, Where Inequality is Widening as a Result
Harrison Beacher feels a little worried for some of his clients.
The DMV-area realtor and Washington D.C. native has worked in real estate for nearly two decades, but saw his worst two months ever in January and February of this year. Housing markets can be volatile from month to month, influenced by everything from changes in interest rates to bad weather. But in the case of Beacher’s recent slow period, the cause and effect was clear: Federal job loss and uncertainty is still upending the nation’s capital one year after the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to the federal workforce, as evidenced by growing instability for middle class would-be homeowners.
“I think it was at least six contracts that we had for potential buyers that had to cancel because of job loss, job uncertainty, or job change,” Beacher told TPM. “I have not experienced that in a two month time frame in my entire 18 years in business.”
About a year after the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by Elon Musk, began hacking away at hundreds of federal government jobs, the hollowed-out DMV-area middle class has yet to recover and is contributing to a sluggish city housing market.
On a webpage touting President Donald Trump’s first-year accomplishments, the White House praised DOGE cuts for creating a “leaner, more effective government.”
“President Trump shrunk the federal bureaucracy by 10% in 2025, providing a much-need (sic) reduction in force following massive federal workforce expansion under [former President Joe] Biden,” the page boasts. “Government employment has not accounted for any job growth under President Trump, down from 25% under Biden.”
Middle Class Slowly Locked Out of D.C.’s Housing Market
Fall-through rates, which measure the number of pending sales that didn’t ultimately happen, were up slightly in the first 10 months of 2025 compared to the previous year, according to data from Bright MLS, a real estate research firm.
Real-estate agent Russell Brazil can almost guarantee those fall-throughs are because of federal reductions in force, he told TPM.
“We’ve heard all kinds of stories of people being under contract, then being part of a reduction-in-force and needing the back out of that contract,” said Brazil, who presides over the local Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors (GCAAR), which operates in D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland.
Beacher works directly with clients who are now selling — not quite under duress, he said, but with an urgency marked by a sudden, unexpected need for liquidity.
“I’ve got a bunch of folks that are save-the-world, mission-driven type people that are hurting right now,” said Beacher, “because their entire vocation and livelihood was kind of put on the chopping block in the last year. We’re seeing that, feeling that, and selling some of the properties for these folks.”
One couple in Northeast D.C., with its more affordable neighborhoods, had long-term plans to lease their condo as they worked abroad for the U.S. government, Beacher recalled. Instead, they sold last year.
“They needed the cash in their hands because their future income while they were still working abroad is uncertain, directly because of the gutting of state department programs and funding that the U.S. is spending around the world,” said Beacher, who is also president of the D.C. Association of Realtors.
Small-time property owners in the city who might own a small multi-family home, live in a unit, and lease out the rest, are being left behind more than ever, said Brazil, who owns a brokerage specializing in supporting investors. These people typically make high-five to low-six figures, can pay their bills, and craft long-term wealth-building plans on the back of moderate property ownership. And they’re hurting.
“Federal employees or state employees or public school employees, especially dual-income houses, those are exactly the kind of people I’m talking about as those small mom-and-pop investors,” Brazil said.
Housing sales data backs up the realtors’ anecdotal accounts.
Average days a home stayed on the market in D.C. and Montgomery County increased by 161% year over year according to a February market report from GCAAR. Increased housing supply signaled “more inventory and less competition in the region,” the report found, and the median sold price in D.C. was down more than 6% in February 2026 compared to February 2025.
$3.6 Billion in Lost Pay. $1 Billion in Lost Revenue. 30,000 Lost Jobs.
Federal work powers much of the I-95 corridor, employing residents in Maryland’s Calvert, Charles, Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, Montgomery and Baltimore counties, and northern Virginia counties, including Fairfax and Stafford. But it’s in D.C. that job loss has been most acute. The District logged the highest unemployment rate in the nation in 2025, according to the Economic Policy Institute, likely because of the high concentration of federal jobs there.
More than 30,000 people lost their federal jobs in D.C. according to a review by the D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis (ORA) of data from the federal Office of Personnel Management. That net loss decreases to about 22,350 after accounting for modest federal government rehiring. Those job cuts cost D.C. workers $3.66 billion in annual pay, an average of about $148,000 per job, the report found. About 2,000 likely government contractor positions dried up between September and November 2025, the D.C. ORA found, and the District experienced its lowest level of employment since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city expects to collect 11.1% less in real-estate related taxes this fiscal year compared to last according to its February 2026 revenue projections. Revenue estimates from last March projected the city would lose $1 billion in revenue over four years. Prior to the pandemic, D.C. hadn’t seen downward revenue revisions that large since the 2008 global financial crisis, Fitzroy Lee, deputy chief financial officer and chief economist for the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer, told TPM over the summer.
Projections have since been revised upward by more than $250 million over four years but still reflect lower revenues. D.C.’s GDP is expected to shrink by 2.9% this year, compared to 2.5% national GDP growth.
“D.C.’s budget is taking a significant hit, largely because federal layoffs’ impact on D.C.’s revenue,” Shira Markoff, director of economic policy at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, told TPM. “This turn has severely impacted the income supports and services that help low-income residents make ends meet.”
Maryland residents haven’t been spared. In 2025, Maryland had the widest unemployment gap between Black and white residents in the nation, likely reflective of the disproportionate rate of Black people who work for the government and have relied on federal employment for steady, middle-class jobs for generations. D.C. has the nation’s second highest Black-white unemployment ratio.
Collections estimates for taxes tied to real estate transactions are down throughout the state, too, including in Anne Arundel, Calvert, Baltimore and Howard counties, which are home to many federal workers, according to a county revenue report published by the state Office of Policy Analysis in January.
Luxury Real Estate Boom Highlights Increased Inequality
But not everyone is feeling the pain.
After what he called a dismal first two months of the year, Beacher’s brokerage is on track to have one of its best March’s on record, he said. To help explain this disparity, Beacher points to a tale of two properties targeting two different demographics with two very different outcomes.
On one side was a 2,400 square foot detached four-bedroom house in Northwest D.C. Initially listed at $950,000, the home sat on the market for two-and-a-half months before the seller dropped the price by $100,000 and eventually accepted an offer about $120,000 below the initial listing price with a ton of contingencies for the buyer, a growing family.
On the other was a larger 4-bedroom in the nearby Alexandra, Virginia burbs. Listed at just over $935,000, the home netted offers within 48 hours and came under contract to a single cash buyer who purchased the property for more than $1.1 million. It’s set to close in 10 days.
For Beacher, the tale illustrates how D.C.’s persistent inequality, which has locked lower and working-class residents out of home ownership, has now swept up a class of median income-earners who’d previously been able to access the American Dream in the city. More than ever, D.C. has become a tale of two cities. Some realtors “are having their best years ever, because they only deal in the luxury space,” said Beacher.
“For some it is actually scary,” he said. “There’s some significant dynamic changes happening in a lot of different industries … that were benchmark assumptions that made D.C. a solid investment.”
That dichotomy could be why, despite a depressed job market and economy in D.C., the metro area real-estate market is largely on track with national trends. There’s been no sign of a “localized downturn,” Lawrence Yun, the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, told TPM.
Yun acknowledged the impact federal job cuts has had on homeowners’ personal finances.
“COVID-era home-equity gains have allowed many sellers to exit via a normal sale, and early retirement payouts have helped some homeowners cover mortgage obligations while seeking new employment,” Yun said, referencing DOGE’s “early-out” retirement program.
DOGE also offered buyouts via its notorious “fork in the road” deferred resignation program.
“It really does come down to the percentage of government workers concentrated in the District versus the suburbs,” said Brazil. “That’s not the only factor, but I think it’s one of the largest factors.”
A Member of a Key House Committee Explains How Iran War Funding Has Become an Almost $1 Trillion ‘Mess’
As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) has had a front row seat to the process for funding President Donald Trump’s ongoing war in Iran.
Continue reading “A Member of a Key House Committee Explains How Iran War Funding Has Become an Almost $1 Trillion ‘Mess’”Another Top Trump Official Won’t Directly Answer the ICE-At-Polling-Places Question
Concerned About Arrest Quotas
On Tuesday’s episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, co-hosts Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff spoke with Trump administration border czar Tom Homan about their fears surrounding President Trump’s decision to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports, a move that is supposedly meant to support Transportation Security Administration staff while the Department of Homeland Security is shut down.
Continue reading “Another Top Trump Official Won’t Directly Answer the ICE-At-Polling-Places Question”Five Questions About Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s DHS-and-Reconciliation Nightmare
Negotiations to try to end the ongoing Department of Homeland Security-specific shutdown — and, critically, fund the TSA — picked up earlier this week. After supposedly convincing President Donald Trump to jump onboard during a White House meeting, Senate Republicans said they were sending a proposal to Senate Democrats that would fund all parts of DHS except ICE’s removal operations.
Republicans said they have convinced Trump to drop his demand that they pass the SAVE America Act before making any deal with Democrats on DHS. The senators present at the meeting, in part, did this, they said, by committing to passing the SAVE America Act — in addition to funding for ICE’s removal operations — later this year using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. Reconciliation allows budget-related legislation to pass with only 51 votes, meaning Republicans would not need help from Democrats.
Continue reading “Five Questions About Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s DHS-and-Reconciliation Nightmare”Not So Fast
Following up on the question we posed yesterday — will right-wingers actually buy an attempt to “pass” “the SAVE America Act” through budget reconciliation? — we are beginning to have some indications that, no, they will not.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has been on a tweeting spree, campaigning against the idea by, for example, comparing the voter suppression legislation to a fine cut of beef, urging his colleagues not to “settle for cheap imitations” of the sort necessitated by budget reconciliation. It is perhaps an imperfect metaphor.
Continue reading “Not So Fast”Minnesota Sues Feds for Evidence in Operation Metro Surge Shootings
FBI ‘Shrink-Wrapped’ Good’s Car
In what may turn into a constitutional showdown over the 10th Amendment and whether the federal government can proactively shield its officers from state prosecutions by withholding evidence, the state of Minnesota sued the Trump DOJ and DHS to get evidence in the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
State investigators have been blocked by the Trump administration from investigating the three shootings by federal officers during Operation Metro Surge. In all three cases, federal officials wildly mischaracterized and misled the public about the circumstances of the incidents and made false accusations of wrongdoing against the victims. In each case, video evidence proved the government’s accounts to either be false or deeply strained. In the case of Sosa-Celis, criminal charges against him and a friend were later dropped, and the officers involved in the shooting are under criminal investigation for possible perjury.
In addition to Minnesota, represented by Attorney General Keith Ellison, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In addition to DOJ and DHS, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security are named defendants.
The four-count lawsuit alleges that Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (Counts I-III) and the 10th Amendment (Count IV). Among the allegations:
- Good: The car which she was driving when she was shot and killed, is sitting “shrink-wrapped” in an FBI storage facility in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota and “has never been examined or processed.” On March 18, the FBI told state investigators that it has been instructed to turn over evidence in the Good killing only to the DOJ inspector general and would not be providing them with any of the evidence it had collected.
- Pretti: The feds have not provided state investigators with “the identities of the masked federal agents,” Pretti’s cellphone, “which likely captures his interactions with federal agents in the moments before his death,” or the firearm taken off of him before he was shot.
- Sosa-Celis: The feds have denied state investigators the “names and statements from involved federal officials, the gun used in the incident, and the federal vehicle used in the incident.”
The lawsuit, which was filed not in Minnesota but in D.C., alleges that the decisions to cease routine cooperation and joint investigations was made at the highest levels of the DOJ and involved senior DOJ officials, and that DHS largely deferred to DOJ on gathering and sharing evidence.
“That’s where decisions not to share evidence are being made,” Ellison said at a Tuesday press conference in explaining why the lawsuit was filed in D.C.
Mass Deportation Watch
- NPR: It is already the deadliest year for immigrants in U.S. detention in more than two decades.
- NYT: A total of 125 former U.S. service members were arrested for immigration violations over the past year, and 34 of them were put into removal proceedings.
- Politico: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins of Sacramento ordered the Trump administration to return a DACA recipient who was deported to Mexico last month.
- NYT: The newspaper reviewed confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo to get an inside look at how the Trump administration used financial pressure and political incentives to coax Cameroon into accepting third-country deportees — while looking the other way as strongman Paul Biya won a disputed election and cracked down on protestors.
Must Read
The lawless U.S. military campaign on drug cartels has moved from the high seas to the interior of Ecuador, where a coordinated joint strike scored a direct hit on a … dairy farm, the NYT reports from on the ground.
Not only does the new reporting suggest that Ecuadoran forces supported by the U.S. military hit the wrong target, but also that they staged elements of the attack for propaganda purposes:
[I]n early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador. …
Village residents said Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains. It was at that point, they said, that Ecuadorean soldiers recorded the footage that U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said captured the bombing of a traffickers’ compound.
Latest From the Middle East …
- WSJ: Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. Balk at Trump’s Peace Efforts
- WaPo: The Pentagon is deploying elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. The reported number of paratroopers involved ranges from 1,000–3,000.
- WSJ: Israel Hits Russian-Iranian Weapons Smuggling Route in the Caspian Sea
Quote of the Day
“We’ve not seen anything like this — there’s been no disruption of this scale in the past. It’s every oil analyst’s study piece or worst nightmare — one that we never thought would happen.”—Gareth Ramsay, chief economist for BP, on the Iran war’s impact on energy markets
Trump Admin Downplays Anthropic Ban
In a hearing in federal court in San Francisco on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s existential attack on Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin seemed poised to rule that banning the Pentagon from using its AI models appeared to be an effort to “punish” and “cripple” the company in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
Government lawyers made an effort to minimize Hegseth’s sweeping declaration that no company doing business with the Pentagon can also do business with Anthropic, but the judge was skeptical of the litigation tactic.
NYT Accuses Pentagon of Defying Court
In its lawsuit against the Pentagon’s press restrictions, the NYT in a new filing accused the Trump administration of “contemptuously defying” a Friday court order in the case with a new round of retaliatory restrictions on Monday.
The Retribution: John Brennan Edition
In a closed-door session reported by Punchbowl, the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines last evening to send transcripts of its interviews with former CIA Director John Brennan to the Trump DOJ for use in the mother-of-all investigation the investigators retributive prosecutions in the Southern District of Florida. Combined with the bogus investigation’s subpoena earlier this month of former FBI Director James Comey, the latest moves suggest charging decisions could be made soon, as CNN notes.
The Retribution: Federal Reserve Edition
In a sealed hearing earlier this month, a top deputy to D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged that the Trump DOJ did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its retributive criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve, the WaPo reports, after reviewing unsealed transcripts of the hearing.
G.A. Massucco-LaTaif, Pirro’s new criminal division chief, defended the office’s subpoenas of the Fed during the hearing in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ultimately quashed the subpoenas, ruling that prosecutors had provided him with “essentially zero evidence” of a crime and declined the opportunity to show him their evidence in private.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Trump Votes by Mail But He Doesn’t Want You to Be Able To
President Trump keeps casting ballots by mail in order to vote in Florida — even though he has become monomaniacally committed to passing the SAVE America Act, legislation that outlaws most reasons one might cite for acquiring a mail-in ballot.
According to the Associated Press, Trump voted by mail in order to cast a ballot in a Tuesday special election in Florida, even though he was in the state while in-person voting was happening. Here are the details and how the White House is trying to spin it, per the AP:
Palm Beach County voter records show the president voted by mail in a Tuesday special election for state legislative seats and that his ballot has been counted. Early in-person voting in the contest ran through Sunday, when Trump was still at his south Florida estate.
The White House said Tuesday that Trump’s ire is at states using universal mail-in voting, not individual instances of voters needing accommodations to vote by mail. A spokeswoman pushed back specifically at the idea that his voting practice contradicts his push for new federal voting rules.
Countless reports have shown that mail-in voting fraud is incredibly rare, including a 2025 Brookings Institute analysis that found fraud occurs in “only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes.”
Trump’s recent visit to Florida suggests that, whatever his reason for voting by mail may have been, it was not included in the SAVE America Act’s list of acceptable reasons why one might do so: illness, disability, military service or travel during Election Day. Trump called mail-in voting “corrupt as hell” just days ago.
Trump has struggled with how exactly to position himself on vote by mail ever since he spent months in the aftermath of the 2020 election railing against the practice, casting it as a sweeping mechanism for voter fraud that supposedly cost him the election. While the total segment of the electorate that voted by mail in 2020 was much higher than usual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump’s own attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, said there was no evidence that there was any widespread fraud that could have impacted the election results.
As the Republican Party tried to move away from the election denial myths, at least in the aftermath of the 2020 election, one of the areas on which it has tried to change its tune was the party’s position on voting by mail — especially after analyses suggesting that the conspiracy theories Trump embraced in the days before the election mostly suppressed turnout among Republicans, who took the president at his word that the election was hopelessly rigged.
Leading up to the 2024 election, Republican primary candidates like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley began campaigning on the idea that Republicans needed to change their tune on certain types of early voting, beyond just encouraging Republican voters to show up in-person on Election Day. Trump’s campaign tried to follow suit, but the candidate himself made it difficult.
I’ve written about the Republican Party’s struggles with mail-in voting and Trump’s bad attitude about it during this specific post-2020 moment a few times. Here’s an excerpt from a March 2024 edition of Where Things Stand:
In February 2023, the Trump campaign first signaled the Republican Party’s revised thinking on the issue of early voting with a fundraising email letting supporters know that Trump was going to start looking into “harvesting ballots in every state we can.”
Shortly after, the RNC launched a Bank Your Vote initiative, designed to encourage Republican voters to take advantage of early-voting opportunities in any state where such actions were legal. To give the new initiative some credibility, the RNC released a video in July of Trump announcing his support for such an endeavor. The hostage-style video featured a docile Trump who both demonized early voting practices as some sort of menacing threat to elections, while also encouraging Republicans to use them.
“Democrats and dangerous groups funded by the far left have simply focused on collecting ballots,” he said. “That’s all they wanted to do, collecting ballots.”
“But you know what? It turned out to be not such a bad idea,” he continued.
— Nicole LaFond
Trump Keeps Rejecting Disaster Aid to Blue States and Approving It for Red Ones
President Trump has approved only 23 percent of disaster aid requests from states that have a Democratic governor plus two senators that are Democrats since the start of his second term, according to new reporting from Politico’s E&E News. Compare that to the fact that he has approved 89 percent of the requests for similiar disaster aid when its made by a state with a Republican governor and two Republican senators.
Per Politico:
There has never been such a sharp partisan disparity in the approval of federal disaster funds since FEMA was created in 1979, according to a review of 2,500 natural disaster declarations by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The denials have blocked Democratic-led states from getting a total of $250 million in disaster aid that would have been approved by every previous president including Trump in his first term, E&E News found.
During his first term, there were no such discrepancies in the aid request approvals for Republican versus Democratic-run states.
— Nicole LaFond
Minnesota Sues Trump Admin
After the Trump administration boxed local and state investigators out of its probe of shootings by federal officers in the state — which include the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — Minnesota officials are suing the Trump administration for access to the information they need to conduct their own investigations. Per the AP:
The lawsuit claims that the federal government reneged on its promise to cooperate with state investigations after the surge of federal law enforcement in Minneapolis, and are seeking a court order demanding that the Trump administration comply.
“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters.
— Nicole LaFond
Schumer Says Dems Need ICE Reforms in Any DHS Funding Deal
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters on Tuesday that Senate Democrats continue to be united in their calls for ICE reform — which they have been calling for since before the ongoing Department of Homeland Security-specific shutdown began in February.
“We need reforms to ICE. We need to rein in the violence. We have never changed our position,” Schumer said when asked about Republicans’ latest offer to restore funding to the majority of the agencies that fall under the DHS including FEMA and TSA. “This does not have any reforms in ICE.”
A Republican offer that would reportedly fund all parts of DHS except ICE’s removal operations — which Republicans say they plan to address later with a new reconciliation bill — gained support overnight within the Republican caucus. That came shortly after a group of Senate Republicans managed to convince President Donald Trump that they can also address the SAVE America Act, which currently does not have the votes to overcome a Dem filibuster, in the same party-line reconciliation bill. Whether that will actually be possible in practice is a toss up.
“They’ve sent us an offer. We’ll be sending them an offer back, and I can assure you it’ll contain significant reform in it,” Schumer added when pressed on if the Democrats are a “no” on the GOP’s offer.
Schumer also pointed out that Senate Democrats have repeatedly tried to get Republicans on board with a bill that would fund all agencies under the DHS umbrella, except ICE and CBP, and they have refused every time. After a weekend of concerning incidents at airports across the nation, Republicans proposed the measure that, while similar to what Democrats have been trying to pass, would only carve out funding for ICE removal operations.
— Emine Yücel
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