I mentioned this in my morning post today, but one of the weirdest, Trumpiest, vehemently anti-immigrant and scandal-plagued members of Congress lost a primary yesterday. Goodbye Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN). Those seeking to pass legislation denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani or giving Trump a third term will have to find another congressional champion.
Why Republicans Just Can’t Quit 2020
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
With a potential midterm wipeout just three months away, Republicans have been recycling past conspiracy theories to an epic extent, mining the greatest hits of a decade of paranoid plots both to please the president and to invoke memories of the “good old days.”
From the Senate’s contentious hearings that saw Dr. Anthony Fauci grilled with lockdown-era conspiracy theories to President Trump’s continued evocation that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are both replaying the past and actively rewriting it, trying to distract their voters from current crises and rally them around Trump’s brand one last time.
It’s impossible to look at the run-up to the 2026 midterms without examining the repackaging and reuse of the conspiracy theories that got us here. The midterms might be the last chance we see some of them used with any real efficacy, and nobody is missing their shot.
Continue reading “Why Republicans Just Can’t Quit 2020”The Big Questions Around a Damaging Trump Administration Concession in Court
Russ Vought’s Power Play Sows Legal Chaos for Administration
Last month, the New York Times reported that the administration confessed, in federal court, to having blocked grants in October 2025 for clean energy projects in blue states simply because they voted against president Trump.
TPM discovered that the administration has in fact conceded this point in court multiple times.
Our story, by Emine Yücel and Josh Kovensky, does a few things. First, it notes that a negotiations tactic deployed by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought during the government shutdown last year — declaring that he was withholding grant funding to blue states in an effort to exert leverage over Democrats in Congress — has backfired, with the administration’s lawyers forced to make damaging admissions before judges and, in two cases, ultimately losing their case and being ordered to restore the grants.
Second, we know that the Trump administration regularly withholds funds to blue states, sometimes mustering an excuse about why it’s doing so — vague claims of “fraud,” perhaps. But while talk is cheap, our story shows that in court, DOJ lawyers were not able to muster a fig leaf for these October 2025 grant denials. They were, simply, political.
Third, our story shows that these concessions were made as part of an effort by administration lawyers to avoid discovery, which raises the question of why the administration was willing to go to these lengths to avoid discovery. What emails were sent, and what discussions were had, within the White House as these grants were withheld that lawyers hoped to keep out of the record?
There are big elements of this story still to come.
- First, the Trump administration has proposed a new rule to make it so that political appointees have final review over grants, and that grants can be more easily terminated, making standard the kind of control the administration has exercised over federal funding since the days of DOGE — and continuing through the example of the October 2025 grants that formed the core of Emine and Josh’s story. This assault on the separation of powers and federalism has led to urgent warnings, particularly from the scientific community, where researchers say it could decimate the U.S.’s advantage.
- As Emine wrote earlier this week, the Senate has for now proposed a temporary halt to this rule, which Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the appropriations committee and in a tight reelection fight in Maine, is touting as her work. Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the committee, said Republicans would not support a more fulsome ban on the rule. A fight over this legislation, which is part of a Senate effort to fund the government through December, will ensue when members return in September.
- We may also get some insight into what the administration was hiding as it sought to avoid discovery. This could come from the continuing, ongoing lawsuits in this space, from other litigation, from congressional oversight by a future Democrat-controlled legislature, or another avenue.
- In the meantime, there is a nascent effort in the House to impeach Vought over his October 2025 decision to withhold these grants.
Trump Comes for Birthright Citizenship Again
Trump is taking another run at restricting birthright citizenship through executive order.
- He signed EOs Thursday specifically targeting the children of parents deemed to be an “alien enemy” — a concept that has become a favorite of this administration — and purporting to end “birth tourism.”
- Targeting alien enemies plays on an idea that the administration has sought to get great mileage out of: that immigrants within the U.S. are actually representatives of an invading army.
- This justification was core to early administration efforts to render Venezuelan men to a Salvadoran prison camp, and to its attempts to send the National Guard and the military into American cities. Both encountered skepticism at the Supreme Court.
- The “birth tourism” thing loomed large during Supreme Court oral arguments for Trump’s last executive order on birthright citizenship. Justice Samuel Alito in particular latched onto it. Despite the insistence of right-wing media that there is a booming industry of foreigners coming to the U.S. to have their kids, the Washington Post notes data showing that “in 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”
Tabs
- Trump has ordered a leak probe into reports that munitions were running low amid the Iran War, the Wall Street Journal reports.
- Will Sommer has a fascinating look in the Bulwark at a group of right-wingers who feel burned by the Trump administration and who are mulling establishing a third party. They include Tucker Carlson, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie, and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. Carlson seems perhaps the most invested in the project, and recently gave a long speech describing the ideas such a party should push.
Man of the Hour
Anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, scandal-plagued and performative pro-Trump representative Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) lost his primary fight last night to former state agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher. Hatcher won roughly 53% of the vote.
Are We at War?
Yes. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who gets it, accused Trump in a speech yesterday of “gaslighting” Americans on this topic. “The essential gaslight,” he said, “is that the war is about to end. Don’t worry. Yet it appears that there is no end.”
Census Bureau Officials Field Questions About Politicization and Data Loss After Controversial Rule Change
Census Bureau officials last Sunday conceded that a new rule banning certain privacy protection methods will make it impossible for the agency to publish data that it has historically released, a development that could especially harm minority groups. Representatives of the bureau, however, denied that the policy change had political objectives, though experts and advocacy groups believe it does.
Continue reading “Census Bureau Officials Field Questions About Politicization and Data Loss After Controversial Rule Change”America’s Thin Social Safety Net Is ‘Communist’ Now
President Trump and other Republicans have been struggling to land on any sort of uniform messaging as they seek, ahead of the midterms, to spin their recent legislative effort as making life more affordable for working class Americans when it has, in fact, largely done the opposite. This is, in part, because Trump has forced congressional Republicans to spend time tending to his election fraud delusions rather than using their trifecta to move legislation: he refused to sign a bipartisan bill aimed at increasing housing supply as he tried to force Republicans to pass the impassable-in-the-Senate SAVE Act, for example.
Continue reading “America’s Thin Social Safety Net Is ‘Communist’ Now”Many Hats
I just finished recording an episode of The TPM Social Club with Josh Kovensky. We had an awesome conversation with Jake Bittle about the state of the Colorado River, which unfortunately is vanishing. That episode will drop tomorrow and we hope you’ll check it out.
While we were recording, I noticed a notification from Slack: We had just published a major investigation showing how the Trump administration had repeatedly admitted in court to withholding grant money from blue states simply because they voted blue — a shocking thing to put in writing in a legal dispute. The authors of that story were Emine Yücel and my trusty co-host, Josh — although that doesn’t mean I knew it was imminent.
No, Don’t ‘Go to War’ With the Progressive Left
The New York Times has a piece today with the title “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Specifically it’s about the centrist pressure group Third Way and a plan with a budget of $15 million to, as the group’s president Jonathan Cowan puts it, “prepar[e] for the next war that is coming.” I’ll note that during the first two years of the Biden administration Third Way was notably and consistently supportive of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. It was a sign of the remarkable party unity that allowed Biden to push through a remarkably progressive agenda with a tied senate. I’ll also note that you place an article like this because you want to show the people who gave you the $15 million that you mean business. So talk of “going to war” is sort of what you want to show them.
That said, this is remarkably ill-conceived and a misunderstanding of the current moment.
Continue reading “No, Don’t ‘Go to War’ With the Progressive Left”DOJ Election Monitoring In Michigan Was Uneventful — But That Doesn’t Fit Trump’s Narrative
Michigan election officials oversaw primary elections this week and also dealt with the Trump administration sending federal elections monitors to oversee polling sites in three blue municipalities — one of which Trump has repeatedly targeted with his election conspiracy theories.
While the Justice Department, under Democratic and Republican administrations, does regularly send election monitors to observe voting in Michigan and other states, the decision to send DOJ monitors to key polling sites in Michigan was suspect given this DOJ’s focus on investigating Trump’s election conspiracy theories. And, although, as election officials have noted, the presence of federal monitors in Detroit, Lansing, East Lansing, and Hamtramck was uneventful — their presence did still stir up fear and unease, election officials said.
“The fact that the DOJ felt it was necessary in the first place, it served to cast doubt,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Votebeat. “Now, tomorrow, they can speak with authority having been here — is that going to lend credit to future claims, even when they’re nonsense?”
It is, of course, no coincidence that the administration sent federal monitors to oversee elections in parts of Michigan where voters typically elect Democrats in an important battleground state that has previously been ground zero for 2020 election conspiracy theories. It’s just one of many ways that the Trump administration has tried to exert control over election administration and sow seeds of doubt in the election system.
Back in June, as my colleague Josh Kovensky reported, DOJ Voting Section Deputy Chief Timothy Mellett wrote in a letter to Detroit officials that voting monitors that were present in 2024 identified voting concerns related to allegedly long voting lines caused by a lack of provisional ballots. This is something that Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey disputes.
Mellet sent similar letters to officials in Lansing and East Lansing as well.
In response to the letter sent to Detroit, Winfrey said that the DOJ had drawn a “baseless conclusion that then becomes the pretext for additional monitoring of Detroit elections,” and that Mellet’s claims “are not a valid pretext for increasing monitoring in Detroit.”
“Michigan law provides not only a variety of ways to vote, but also plenty of opportunities to get involved in the election process,” Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel wrote in response to the DOJ’s letter last month.
“The law even provides parameters for federal and congressional poll monitors. We encourage everyone to participate and see for themselves how secure and fair our elections are – but make no mistake, my office stands ready to hold accountable those who attempt to unlawfully interfere with or intimidate Michigan election workers,” she added.
Nevertheless, the monitors were present at several polling places during Tuesday’s primary election and no issues have been reported by the DOJ thus far. But that did not stop President Trump from immediately promoting conspiracy theories about how the vote was counted in Detroit in the wake of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory.
“Wayne County (Detroit) in Michigan is one of the most corrupt voting areas in the United States, if not the World. It is strictly Third World! Miracles happen in Wayne County, including more votes being cast than there are voters, by a lot,” he wrote in a Truth Social post Wednesday.
As always, there’s lots more to unpack this week. Let’s dig in.
Two More Losses for the DOJ’s Campaign to Seize Voter Data
Yes, the DOJ has been handed two more losses in its failing campaign to seize sensitive voter data from the states. Last week, the DOJ earned its 19th loss to date (with zero wins) after a federal judge dismissed a case against Illinois with prejudice. Days later, it was handed its 20th loss after a federal judge similarly dismissed a case against Colorado.
Like the many other judges in the cases before him have concluded, U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless ruled that the federal government is simply not entitled to the state’s sensitive voter data, which includes Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
For many many months now, the DOJ has been demanding that at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. hand over sensitive voter roll data. The DOJ has been relying on provisions in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) to make its (very weak) case.
Lawless pointed out in his ruling that the CRA does not entitle the federal government to this type of information.
“…,the Court finds Title III does not provide the Attorney General with the authority to compel production of the unredacted voter registration list, and the written demand was deficient as a matter of law,” he wrote.
“Dismissal is additionally warranted because the Attorney General’s written demand did not include both a sufficient basis and legitimate purpose for requesting the unredacted voter registration list,” he added.
Then, early this week, U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer, also ruled that the state’s unredacted voter rolls are not something the federal government is entitled to and also pointed out the administration never provided a “basis” for its request.
Voters Incorrectly Flagged As Potential Noncitizens in Texas
Over 2,000 voters were recently incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens in Texas. The Secretary of State’s office is now directing election officials to reinstate the voters that it had incorrectly flagged as ineligible, Votebeat reported.
Per Votebeat, the state elections director, Christina Adkins, confirmed the citizenship status of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential being noncitizens. Adkins, however, did not confirm how many of the 2,724 voters flagged provided proof of citizenship to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Yikes. So, how does such a mistake happen?
The voters were flagged after the state put its voter rolls through the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which has recently been used by the Trump administration to purge supposed noncitizens from the voter rolls. The system, however, which was originally developed as an immigration tool to verify immigration status of people applying for certain governmental benefits, is known to be unreliable.
So, it’s no surprise that a mistake like this happened and the whole episode helps bolster the case for why the database that the Department of Homeland Security is trying to force states to run their voter rolls through is not effective.
Votebeat reported that we don’t know exactly how many voter registrations have been canceled in total. Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Official, made the following statement to Votebeat: “Counties are following appropriate list maintenance procedures under Texas law, and will ensure eligible voters whose registrations were cancelled are reinstated, and that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls.”
In Other Election News:
TPM: Missouri Republicans Count on Foot Dragging to Help Jam Through Gerrymander
NBC News: Democrats put redistricting amendment on Maryland’s midterm ballot
The New York Times: For Trump, the Year Is Always 2020
Trump Administration Has Repeatedly Confessed in Court to Withholding Money From Blue States
Late last year, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials agreed to make a surprisingly damaging but until-recently little-noticed admission in court: the Trump administration had cancelled several grants worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars largely because the money was slated to be sent to states that did not support the president in the last election.
“A primary reason” for withholding the funds in question was that “the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State,’” the DOJ wrote in a December 2025 court filing called a stipulation, an agreement entered into by the parties involved in a lawsuit agreeing to certain facts.
A review by TPM identified multiple other instances of the administration making the same concession in court. One, from July, was recently covered by the New York Times; TPM found other examples of the same concession, documenting that the administration’s lawyers have been open for several months now about having withheld money in part or entirely to punish the president’s perceived political enemies.
Continue reading “Trump Administration Has Repeatedly Confessed in Court to Withholding Money From Blue States”The Ruthless Persecution of Anthony Fauci Is the Story of Our Time
The Trump Retribution Feedback Loop
The targeting of Anthony Fauci stands as a textbook case of retribution by the Trump administration using, in tandem with Republicans on Capitol Hill, what has become a well-worn and ruthless feedback loop that has ensnared other former officials and targets of the president’s ire.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted this morning to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for having invoked his 5th Amendment rights not to testify at last week’s witch hunt of a hearing.
At least two Senate committees are actively going after Fauci.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed last night that he had obtained Fauci’s COVID-era phone from the Department of Health and Human Services, Fauci’s former government employer, which left Republicans salivating that they had another motherlode of fodder to stoke the fires against Fauci.
HHS has previously released Fauci’s diary to Congress, without having notified him. If you needed reminding, HHS is led by chronic Fauci critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote the 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
But all of that is clearly not enough piling on Fauci in the current environment.
Attorneys general in Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia seized on the Fauci diary as a pretext to launch their own investigations of him. The three red-state AGs announced yesterday that they had subpoenaed Fauci for a wide range of records tied to grant money, awards and book deals, and other evidence of what they alleged was potential self-dealing by Fauci. It was primarily an opportunity to further smear Fauci by press release and jump on the bandwagon with Republicans in Washington.
This particular pattern of retribution is chillingly familiar: The Trump administration releases government documents (and diaries and phones) to Republican allies on the Hill who in turn often leak the information to the right-wing media apparatus. The resulting MAGA firestorm leads to GOP-run hearings on the Hill, which serve as opportunities to entrap witnesses and prompt criminal referrals to the Trump DOJ.
It was puzzling to see otherwise smart and respected people dumping on Fauci last week for taking the 5th when this pattern had just played out in the House with former Special Counsel Jack Smith less than a week before. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan dragged Smith in to testify about his two historic investigations of Trump and then ginned up a bogus claim of perjury that he referred to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. James Comey and John Brennan have had their turns in the grinder, too, under similar though not identical circumstances.
Fauci has the advantage of a preemptive pardon from President Biden, which should in theory at least shield him from Trump DOJ persecution for alleged acts that predate the pardon. But testifying in a perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who chairs HSGAC, would have been post-pardon conduct and left him potentially exposed in the same way Smith is. Still, his refusal to testify sets him up for a potential contempt of Congress prosecution. No way out. Tails I win, heads you lose.
If you don’t see the broad pattern of persecution and the mechanics of the retribution feedback loop — and deeply cynical bad faith fueling it all — you can fall into precious arguments over the limits of 5th Amendment rights or the bounds of congressional power or other curiosities while entirely missing the forest for the trees.
We are witnessing a stunning abuse of power by the executive branch and a pliant legislative branch that they have together refined and systematized into a grinder that chews up and spits out Trump foes as a means of retribution and for the sheer spectacle of it. That is the real story here. Not the Wuhan lab or COVID policy or whatever other ostensible underlying issue is the pretext for feeding Trump foes into his vengeance machine.
Neutering the Watchdogs at DOJ
Within the Trump DOJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General have lost significant percentages of their staffs and seen investigations plummet under Trump II, Reuters reports.
Mass Deportation Watch
- ICE has threatened to seek criminal witness tampering charges against the elected county sheriffs in Minneapolis and Chicago for refusing to hand over inmates.
- Airlines are pushing back against ICE enforcement operations on airplanes and jet bridges.
- DOJ cites the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision to shield DOJ official Aakash Singh from scrutiny in the Broadview 6 case.
The Destruction: EPA Edition
Remember the $20 billion in grants that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze and tried to claw back in the early days of Trump II — with help from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who tried to turn it into a criminal case, prompting the resignation of a senior career prosecutor?
I know. It was a long time ago, and these things are hard to keep track of. Which is partly the point. The grant recipients have been in limbo ever since, forced in some cases to lay off workers because the EPA funds were not available, which is also part of the point.
After winning a preliminary injunction at the district court level in April 2025, the grant recipients have finally won on appeal to the full D.C. Circuit and will now be able to access the funds. The appeals court divided 6-4 in a convoluted per curiam decision that upheld the preliminary injunction.
The Corruption: WTF? Edition
Jennifer Mascott, a Trump appointee to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, continued to run the D.C. public relations firm she inherited from her late husband for at least six months after she was confirmed as a judge in October 2025, Politico reports.
Hoisted on His Own Petard
The BBC seems only too happy to use President Trump’s defamation suit against it to explore his finances — and Trump is now scrambling to avoid a court-ordered deadline of today to turn over details on his business empire to the broadcaster.
In a related move, Trump is seeking to amend his lawsuit — over how the broadcaster spliced together portions of his Jan. 6 speech on The Ellipse — to remove the language that put his finances in play in discovery in the first place.
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