A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Trump’s attempts to evade the final dregs of legal accountability, congressional Republican dysfunction and the legacy of Jimmy Carter.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Some of you will disagree with this. And perhaps the future will vindicate your criticism. But I don’t think we should be distracted by Trump’s nonsense about Greenland, the Panama Canal or bum rushing Canada into becoming a U.S. state. We’re all under the grip of that line: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” But that doesn’t always work with con men and pathological liars. None of this stuff is going to happen. At a minimum, we shouldn’t get pulled into these outrage cycles or pretending any of this is a thing until you see the U.S. deploying military assets in Central America or … Maine? (I’m not sure where your deploy military assets to menace Greenland but wherever that is, wait for that.)
I saw this CNN article about how Danish officials “fear Trump is much more serious about acquiring Greenland than in first term.” And I get it: the U.S. is a nuclear power and Trump’s a freak. I don’t begrudge them being concerned. But I restate the point. None of this stuff is going to happen. What’s possible is a bunch of bullshit followed by some negotiations in which the Kingdom of Denmark agrees to some minor changes to the existing agreement which allows the U.S. military pretty vast liberties to defend and operate in Greenland. (That’s the NAFTA model: bullshit followed by some discussions and then huge fanfare for marginal changes to existing agreements.) It is the same story that we’ve talked about in other contexts: the constant stream of threats and maybes, all of which create what in this case may not be a penumbra of fear so much as a penumbra of reaction. Absurd tempests in teapots, the effect of which is to have everyone else in a pattern of reaction. He acts — or really doesn’t act, he jabbers — and everyone else reacts. And spin maybe 12 of those things at any one time. And that’s life under Trump.
Continue reading “Greenland, Panama, Canada … None of that is Going to Happen”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
I suspect many of you are a little dazed and confused by the flurry of court filings in the waning days of the Trump transition. There’s a lot to track, and the stakes might be a little unclear to you. So let me try to break this down in a way that makes some sense of this.
Two parallel races to the courthouse are underway: (1) Trump’s mad-dash effort to stop his sentencing in New York state court tomorrow; and (2) his attempt to block the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago prosecutions.
I’ll turn to each in turn in a moment, but first a word about the stakes of these two legal skirmishes. Neither is as a high a stakes as holding Trump accountable to the rule of law was in the first place; that battle has been irretrievably lost. The Supreme Court made it impossible, first with its Disqualification Clause decision then more decisively with its presidential immunity decision.
What is at stake now is still important but on a lesser scale. As Trump prepares to take office with the mantle of nearly unfettered presidential immunity, will the courts continue to show him excessive and overweening deference, clearing the way for further abuses of power? Or will we see some lines drawn here that might offer a hint as to how the courts will attend to their own independence or register concern about preserving their own prerogatives in a Trump II era?
In that sense, it’s not so much an existential battle but a rather feeble line-drawing exercise. If the courts show some spine, it will still be a somewhat hollow victory. If they show none, well, at least we know what we’re up against.
With sentencing scheduled for tomorrow on Trump’s conviction in his hush money case, this is the most pressing of the two matters. It is taking place at the Supreme Court and in New York state court.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has a 10 a.m. ET filing deadline at the Supreme Court. Trump rushed to the Supreme Court before he had exhausted his appeals in New York state court, but he is still pressing appeals there simultaneously. Usually that would be enough for the Supreme Court to demure and wait for the lower courts to finish their work. I won’t hazard a guess here as to what the justices will do. But it’s clear what they should do: decline to get involved.
Here’s how Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck put it this morning: “To nevertheless grant a stay pending appeal in circumstances in which it is so difficult to legally justify would be an ominous portent for how the justices plan to approach the second Trump administration—and how willing they will be to bend the relevant legal rules to accommodate the personal preferences of the incoming Chief Executive.”
We could hear from the Supreme Court as early as this afternoon. Remember, all Trump needs to do is kick the can past his Jan. 20 inauguration. So substantial delays count as much as outright wins do at this point.
Trump’s effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report has been more active, taking place at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and in federal court in Florida, and involving Congress on the periphery.
Overnight, Trump filed an amicus brief with the 11th Circuit, and Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a letter to Congress saying he will abide by Cannon’s injunction against releasing Smith’s report so long as it remains in place. But otherwise Garland plans to release Volume I of Smith’s report on the Jan. 6 prosecution as soon as the injunction is lifted. He won’t release Volume II on the Mar-a-Lago prosecution until after the cases against Trump’s former co-defendants is complete. That means it may never see the light of day since those cases are likely to be corruptly ended by Trump’s DOJ.
All the filings are now submitted to the 11th Circuit so we can expect a decision at any time.
TPM has a running liveblog on both matters that will keep you up to speed throughout today.
President-elect Trump and Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito spoke by phone Tuesday about a professional reference for one of Alito’s former clerks, ABC News first reported. The phone call came the day before Trump asked the Supreme Court to block his sentencing in the hush money case.
Alito issued a statement through the Supreme Court that said in part:
We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today, and indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed. We also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the president-elect.
It’s not uncommon for justices to serve as references for clerks. But as the NYT’s Adam Liptak noted: “It was not clear, however, why Mr. Trump would make a call to check references, a task generally left to lower-level aides.”
Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer:
No president has ever attempted to do what Donald Trump now proposes to do—assemble a small team of former personal attorneys and install it at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. The president-elect first named lawyers who have represented him in recent years to the key positions of deputy attorney general, principal deputy attorney general, and solicitor general. Then, with the quick death of the Matt Gaetz nomination, he announced a new attorney-general nominee, Pam Bondi, who was a member of his legal defense team in the first impeachment.
A new fire broke out overnight in Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, forcing another wave of evacuations in the heart of Los Angeles. That fire has since been somewhat contained and the evacuation order lifted, but the larger fires in Pacific Palisades and Pasadena remain uncontained, with thousands of structures damaged and destroyed, tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders, and five people confirmed dead.
I hesitate to flag some of the right-wing nastiness being spewed about the Los Angeles fires because I can’t imagine having to see misguided vitriol like this after my home burned and my life was upended, but it’s an important marker of where we are today:
i’m kind of amazed at how this is just the crudest, most obvious n****rbaiting you can imagine. “the people you don’t like, yeah, they are responsible for everything bad.” and it works!
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) January 8, 2025 at 8:04 PM
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CNN: “President-elect Donald Trump’s team was given the questions asked by Fox News anchors at an Iowa town hall last January in advance by someone inside the network, according to a forthcoming book, in what would be a serious breach of journalism ethics.”
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has the latest on the state Supreme Court blocking the certification of the election for one of its own seats, which Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs apparently won by a few hundred votes. Her Republican opponent is trying to get the court to toss some 60,000 cast ballots.
Francisco Lobo, writing at Just Security: The Rio Treaty’s Security Pact and Unintended Consequences of Threatening Canada, Greenland, and Panama
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum jabbed back at Trump over his “Gulf of America” jingoism by joking that California and Texas can revert to be called “America Mexicana.”
Today is the culmination of the memorial ceremonies for the late President Jimmy Carter, as all four living former presidents will gather with President Biden at Washington National Cathedral for Carter’s public funeral.
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The White House put out a fact sheet today highlighting record-breaking enrollment under the Affordable Care Act during the Biden administration. During the current enrollment period, almost 24 million Americans have signed up for health insurance plans under Obamacare, meaning the number of Americans covered through the ACA has almost doubled since President Biden took office.
Continue reading “ACA Reaches Peak Enrollment Just In Time For House Republicans’ Trump II Plan: ‘No Obamacare’”Want to come join us for our first live edition of the podcast in Washington, DC? We only have thirty tickets left for our live podcast event on January 15th. So if you’re considering it please get them now before they’re all gone. Each ticket is $75. With a member discount they’re $50 each. For members, there should be an email in your inbox from earlier this week with a link that you can use the members discount. If you’re not a member, drop us a line by email for more info.
Democrats and voting rights groups are sounding the alarm after the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the state election board from certifying the Democratic winner of a Supreme Court race.
The court will decide in coming weeks whether to throw out tens of thousands of votes and thereby overturn the result of the Democratic incumbent justice’s victory.
Continue reading “North Carolina Dems Denounce ‘Astonishing’ State Supreme Court Move To Block Certification Of Dem Victory”As a follow up to my post below I want to return to a more technical point but one which is critical to understand as the baseline for any discussion about social media and “platforms.” “Network effects” are an inherent feature of the tech industry. You can go all the way back to what now seems like the quaintly primitive tech of VHS and Betamax. They are also embedded at the core of Silicon Valley/VC business culture in which 9 out of 10 investments fail but one (you hope) has staggering returns which make up for all the rest. “Hockey stick growth” is another side of this many-sided coin at the center of early 21st century capitalism. It is the hunt for a business proposition in which costs are chained to arithmetic growth and returns are exponential. If one of your ten bets holds something like that possibility, you can afford to invest in a bunch of dry holes.
Continue reading “The Economics That Define Social Media”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of the party once known as the National Front, occurs at a time when the mainstreaming of far-right politics in France seems almost complete.
Le Pen was, for most of his career, considered the devil in French politics. Yet today, his party, headed by his daughter and now called National Rally (Rassemblement National), is at the gates of power.
Le Pen became an MP in France’s national parliament in 1956, when he was just 27. He quickly became the face of the extreme right. After leaving for Algeria to fight against independence and being accused of torture during his military service there, Le Pen returned to French politics in the 1960s.
This was a time of social progress – and therefore a nadir for far-right politics.
In 1972, Le Pen was part of the group that created the National Front – essentially an attempt to unite various small extreme right organisations under one banner. He became the party’s first president as he was considered the least extreme of the contenders.
This was despite his having been found guilty of war crime apologia in 1971 for republishing a vinyl record of Nazi songs. Le Pen also routinely demonstrated a nostalgic attachment to the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime of second-world-war France.
Racism was always at the core of Le Pen’s politics. However, as his party sought mainstream acceptance, the core became thinly concealed under veneers of anti-immigration concerns, patriotic pride or even pretence of defending women and France’s system of laïcité (secularism) against Islam.
The beginnings of the National Front were slow and the party struggled to be noticed until the mid-1980s. Its first national breakthrough was greatly aided by Socialist president François Mitterrand, who had been elected in 1981 on a radical platform but quickly turned to austerity to respond to a developing financial crisis.
Mitterrand’s approval ratings took a tumble as a result and, to stem the resurgence of the more moderate right, he actively and consciously helped Le Pen’s then-struggling party. With a view to splitting the vote on the right, Mitterand lent legitimacy to Le Pen’s extreme ideas by giving him a platform on public national media in particular. Most cynical of all, Mitterand changed the electoral system to a proportional one, which gave the National Front 35 MPs and a huge boost in visibility.
Yet the real shock was to come in 2002 when Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election. Here again though, this said far more about the state of French politics and democracy than it did of the so-called “irresistible rise” of the National Front.
Le Pen’s actual vote had been stagnant since 1988. Although the Le Pen vote appeared to increase by 2.5% between 1988 and 2002, when turnout is taken into account, his share of the vote increased only by 0.19% – or less than 500,000 votes. This is certainly not negligible but far from the perceived “tidal wave”.
Instead, it was the growing unpopularity of the status quo and the major governing parties which paved the way for the earthquake. In 2002, the major centrist parties on the left and right collectively received fewer votes than the abstention rate.
Likewise, perspective is also needed on the 2007 election, which has always been depicted as Le Pen’s downfall and the triumph of the mainstream over the extremists. In reality, Nicolas Sarkozy had siphoned a significant portion of the far-right vote by openly positioning himself as direct competition to Le Pen. Sarkozy’s constant attacks against immigration and Islam earned him the nickname “Nicolas Le Pen” in the Wall Street Journal.
As Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter and – at the time – campaign director, said on the night of the first round when asked how bad a defeat this was: “This is the victory of his ideas!”
So while Jean-Marie Le Pen was seeking to render his politics more palatable by moving away from his most incendiary discourse, the mainstream parties were helping his cause by taking an ambivalent attitude towards his messaging in order to win back his voters. Le Pen also provided a welcome diversion away from the crises mainstream parties proved unable to address.
This situation continued to worsen as Marine Le Pen replaced her father as party leader in 2011. She eventually changed the name of the party to National Rally and evicted him in 2015 when she could no longer defend his comments about gas chambers being a mere “detail” of the second world war.
But by then Sarkozy had mainstreamed much of the FN’s discourse. The election of Socialist François Hollande as president did nothing to turn the tide in 2012 as he also tried to act “tough” on the far right’s pet issues, including immigration and Islam in response to a deadly wave of terrorist attacks.
Arguably no president, however, has proven as zealous as Emmanuel Macron in his attempts to defeat the far right by absorbing its discourse, while claiming to be a bulwark against it. In 2020, he appointed an interior minister who accused Le Pen of being “too soft on Islam”. This marked a new low – the mainstream was outbidding rather than mimicking Le Pen.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has benefited not only from the mainstream’s pandering to her own politics but the hype around her rival on the far right, Eric Zemmour, during the 2022 presidential election campaign. The heightened attention devoted to Zemmour effectively obscured the genuine threat posed by Le Pen and her far-right ideology, which, by comparison, appeared almost moderate and reasonable.
Now, Le Pen, despite being embroiled in a damaging trial, appears the de facto kingmaker, supplying the votes Macron’s government needs to survive in a fractured parliament.
The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen occurs therefore at a time when French politics is facing one of its worst crisis. Far from being a bulwark against the far right, Macron has paved the way for the National Rally by mainstreaming its discourse and politics.
As much of the mainstream elites seem to have accepted that the rise of the far right is irresistible, the only choice left is whether it will be the far right or mainstream politicians implementing far-right politics. These are the options: the bad and the worse. That is until France takes seriously the threat posed by the far right and the need for a radical change.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I noted yesterday how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon. He signaled this again when he announced that Meta is getting out of the content moderation business and adopting Musk-Era Twitter’s “community notes” model. He further added that he would relocate the remaining content moderation operations to Texas where people are less biased — yes, he really said that.
I want to make a broader point. The issue here is that one of the richest men in the world and one of the very most powerful has made himself and his vastly powerful tech platforms appendages of the Trump political machine and dedicated himself to flowing money to the Trump family directly. But let’s not get too upset about his “content moderation” decisions. The content moderation pivot is an example of the former decision, a carefully timed signal to curry favor. But it’s not some big disaster. The whole existence of it was just a ploy to get out from under his company’s last PR disaster back in 2017 and 2018. And on a more specific level we should be agnostic at best about whether Meta does “content moderation” at all. We should always have been highly skeptical of any corporate-backed effort at scale to determine what is and isn’t accurate information. This isn’t a new thought on my part. It goes back to what I was saying in 2018 and before.
Continue reading “Zuck’s ‘Content Moderation’ Was Always A Crock”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
President-elect Donald Trump raced to the Supreme Court this morning to try to get the high court to block his sentencing Friday in the hush money case in New York.
Trump’s latest move to avert sentencing came after he was rebuffed by an state appeals court judge Tuesday. In a 30-minute emergency hearing scheduled on a hour’s notice, Trump argued that his entire conviction was defective, that presidential immunity precluded his prosecution, and that sentencing him during the presidential transition was disruptive. TPM’s Josh Kovensky was in the courtroom for the hearing.
The prospect of the uber-conservative Supreme Court coming to Trump’s rescue from criminal accountability yet again raises the specter of an even more unbound Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20. Furthermore, it may not be the only Trump-related case the Supreme Court has to consider before inauguration. Also potentially on tap is whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report to Attorney General Merrick Garland can be made public.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon continued her series of extraordinary interventions in the Mar-a-Lago case, purporting to block the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. In an unprecedented order issued at the urging of Trump’s co-defendants, Cannon barred the Justice Department from releasing the report until three days after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals disposed of the matter.
Trump’s co-defendants had urged both Cannon and the 11th Circuit to intervene. The 11th Circuit gave Smith a deadline of this morning to respond. It’s timetable beyond that is unclear. Trump has since moved to intervene in the case himself. In an almost comic move, after the won relief from Cannon, Trump’s co-defendants reiterated to the 11th Circuit to that they prefer the appeals court let Cannon handle the matter herself. Of course.
Cannon arguably has no jurisdiction over the Mar-a-Lago case while it’s on appeal, yet she acted anyway. Still, the most alarming aspect of her ruling was that she seems to be blocking the release of Smith’s report not just as to the Mar-a-Lago, but also as to his Jan. 6 case in Washington, D.C., over which she never had any jurisdiction.
Jay Bratt, 65, a counterintelligence prosecutor and a key member of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team on the Mar-a-Lago case, retired on Friday, after 34 years with the Justice Department, the NYT reported.
Reuters: ‘Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department’s internal watchdog concluded in a new report.”
Trump held one of his rambling, untethered, make-of-it-what-you-will press conferences at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. If you’re inclined to freak out, there was plenty to freak out about. If you’re taking more of a wait-and-see-what-he-actually-does approach, there was still plenty to freak out about:
In the face of threats from the Trump and the right, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is abandoning content moderation on Facebook:
Henry Farrell, on the social media crisis:
We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation – that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.
The Forward: “The Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward.”
Mother Jones: “The Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the state election board from certifying the victory of one of the court’s own members—Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. In doing so, the state’s highest court laid the groundwork for potentially overturning the election and handing the seat to Riggs’ GOP challenger.”
TPM’s Kate Riga: Louisiana: Racism Doesn’t Exist Anymore, So Let Us Racially Gerrymander
“I think being president of a public university in a red state right now is one of the hardest jobs in higher education.”–Michael Harris, professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University
Dire warnings of an extreme wind event in Los Angeles proved prescient Tuesday with entire neighborhoods overrun by flames; cars hastily abandoned in a panicked retreat being shoved aside by a bulldozer so emergency workers could reach the fire zone; a school, a synagogue, and a landmark restaurant burned to the ground.
Three major fires were burning in Los Angeles overnight, with winds expected to ebb some later in the day but none of the fire were close to being contained yet. Casualty figures were remarkably low but it was still early and with the extent of the damage had yet been surveyed.
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