Trump’s Evangelical Leaders Are Working Overtime to Spin the Iran War

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On Easter Sunday, I received an email “alert” from the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB), an organization led by the televangelist Paula White, a longtime friend of President Trump who is also the senior advisor to the White House Faith Office. The “alert” came six hours after Trump’s Truth Social post threatening war crimes against Iran if the “crazy bastards” did not “Open the Fuckin’ Strait.” While the NFAB email delivery might have been scheduled in advance, it nonetheless was jarring in the context of Trump’s vulgar and violent morning. “Dear Faith Leader,” it read. “This sacred weekend from the greatest platform in the free world and beyond, President Trump proclaimed the Gospel to all that could hear.” The email linked to a short video, establishing that the platform in question was not Truth Social, but the Oval Office. From there, Trump robotically read (and at some points strangely shouted) an Easter message about Christ’s resurrection. At points, he sounded like someone who was hearing about John 3:16 for the very first time.

We may be increasingly mired in a war Trump started and doesn’t know how to end, but for the NFAB, which seems to exist as a communications arm of the White House, portraying Trump as a divine leader of a Christian revival is central to every missive. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants every American to pray for the troops “on bended knee” and “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and has cast Trump’s Iran war as a holy crusade. But for Trump’s evangelicals — who are more likely to adopt Jewish rituals and symbols as a sign of their supposed love for Israel than the crusader iconography favored by Hegseth — the real savior in the Iran war is Trump himself. 

Continue reading “Trump’s Evangelical Leaders Are Working Overtime to Spin the Iran War” →

New Video of ICE Shooting Undermines Agents’ Account

Posted on by David Kurtz

Charges Were Eventually Dropped

The New York Times has obtained fleeting video footage of the Jan. 14 incident in Minneapolis during which an ICE agent shot a fleeing Venezuelan immigrant and then claimed he had been attacked.

The newly surfaced video, acquired via a public records request for a city-owned camera at a intersection half a block away, offers a limited view of the incident but some of what it shows further undermines elements of the original account by the federal agents involved:

The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.

The incident led to felony charges against Julio C. Sosa-Celis, the fleeing man who was shot, and one of his housemates, Alfredo A. Aljorna. But within weeks, the Trump DOJ dropped the criminal case, the two ICE officers were suspended, and a perjury investigation was launched against them. DHS did not answer the NYT’s written question about the video.

The NYT report questions why it took so long for the Trump DOJ to drop the case. The federal government had access to the video within hours of the incident, the Minneapolis police chief said. Prosecutors did not watch the footage for nearly three weeks, a DOJ official told the NYT. Instead, for purposes of filing criminal charges, they relied on the ICE agent’s statement and an FBI agent’s affidavit describing the footage. Later, when dismissing the case, a DOJ prosecutor would refer to the video as “newly discovered evidence.”

“It sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said after reviewing the video and other evidence.

Punishment for Political Views

The arrest of pro-Palestinian mosque leader in Wisconsin came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio found him to be a threat to the U.S. foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism, the NYT reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

  • El Paso Times: ICE inspectors have found 49 standards violations at Camp East Montana, the largest detention center in the country.
  • Habeas tracker: Lawfare has compiled a database of the Trump administration’s non-compliance with court orders in some 300 habeas cases around the country.
  • Third Country Deportation Watch: A handy tracker of the Trump administration’s dramatic increase in the use of third country deportations

ICE v. US Military

Keeping in mind the recent outcry over the Marine Corps reportedly allowing ICE to check the immigration status of the family members of new recruits attending graduation ceremonies at the end of basic training, here are other recent developments along the same lines:

  • NYT: ICE entered Ft. Polk in Louisiana to detain the new wife of an Army staff sergeant as they settled into base housing.
  • AJC: Georgia Army veteran deported by ICE after 50 years in U.S.

ICYMI

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military,” NBC News reports.

Latest on the Middle East …

  • To the extent there was any “logic” to President Trump’s crazy-ass Easter Sunday tweet threatening to commit war crimes in Iran, it appears to be another example of his simplistic negotiating style of shooting for the moon, this time in back-channel ceasefire negotiations.
  • Advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are reportedly telling Trump that civilian targets like power plants and bridges are fair game in Iran, despite legal and ethical restrictions that considerably narrow the circumstances in which such infrastructure can be legitimately targeted, the WSJ reports.
  • President Trump will hold a White House press conference today at 1 p.m. ET to tout the weekend rescue of a downed U.S. airman.

Quote of the Day

Timothy Snyder on Substack:

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

Say It Ain’t So, Holocaust Museum

The Holocaust Museum in D.C. quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy,” Politico reports, in what two former employees said was a preemptive attempt to avoid Trump administration scrutiny. The museum issued a denial of the article’s claims: “The allegations made by the two former employees that we have retreated from this content are false.”

Down the Memory Hole!

The preposterous Office of Legal Counsel memo that declared the half-century-old Presidential Records Act unconstitutional is always posing real-world problems at the National Archives, according to Politico:

Archives personnel rely on the records law daily to review, redact and make public the documents and digital records of every president since Ronald Reagan. Since Office of Legal Counsel opinions are typically treated as binding throughout the executive branch, the legal framework archivists have followed for decades is now in doubt. …

The impact of the Justice Department opinion could be felt quickly by historians, scholars and journalists who regularly access presidential records and make requests for their release.

Trump DOJ Watch

In the chaos of the Trump era, thing can always get worse and often do.

It looks like Harmeet Dhillon, the utterly unqualified Trump loyalist who oversees the DOJ Civil Rights Division, is going to get bumped up to the No. 3 slot in the shakeup that cost Pam Bondi her job. That’s bad news for the current No. 3, Stan Woodward, the MAGA lawyer who repped a bunch of Jan. 6 defendants.

Substack LIVE!

Join me and my former TPM colleague Brian Beutler, now the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message, at 2 p.m. ET today for a Substack Live where we’ll chat about the news of the day and jump into some deeper questions about how we got to this point.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

TPM Live: How Did We Get Here? The Trump II Remix

Posted on by David Kurtz

Join me for a casual conversation with Brian Beutler, the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message and a former TPM colleague. Brian and I will use the news of the day as a jumping off point to chat about the Trump II era. We’ll be biting off some small topics like:

  • How did we get to this point?
  • How much worse will things get before they get better?
  • Are we still being too optimistic?
  • What does rebuilding American democracy look like?

We’ll be talking on Substack Live at 2 p.m. ET. See you then.

Your Loved One Is Stuck in Immigration Detention. It Will Cost $25,000 to Get Them Out.

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

After a run-in with the police that ended in his arrest, Andry’s husband was supposed to be released from a New York jail in November 2024. Instead, he was transferred into ICE’s custody. The couple had come to the United States 18 years ago from the Dominican Republic. Her husband was incarcerated for all of last year.

In December, Andry (who asked not to use her last name to protect her family) seemed to catch a break: an immigration judge granted her husband bond, the only way to get out of immigration detention. The decision was far from a given: the second Trump administration has tried to make broad swaths of immigrants ineligible for bond, detaining them with no ability to get released, and even those who are eligible for a bond hearing might not be granted it. But the amount Andry was told she had to pay in order to secure his freedom was $25,000. Unlike in the pretrial bail system, where defendants can usually pay a fraction of their bail to get released, immigration courts demand the entire amount. 

Andry had nothing like that kind of money sitting around. For over a year, she had been raising their two daughters alone without her husband’s income, running their remittance business while driving for Uber as much as she could in between. Beyond making $900 rent payments and covering their family’s expenses, she was using any extra funds to send her husband money so he could make calls or go to the commissary. “¿Qué voy a hacer?” she asked: What could I do?

Continue reading “Your Loved One Is Stuck in Immigration Detention. It Will Cost $25,000 to Get Them Out.” →

There’s Another Big Reason Trump Is Stuck in the Gulf

Posted on by Josh Marshall

You’ve certainly seen or heard about President Trump’s morning threat to destroy Iran’s civil energy and bridge infrastructure if the country doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday. To quote him: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” (That’s not my arch summary. That’s a direct quote.) I will set aside that these would appear to constitute war crimes as going without saying. The man is careening from one day to the next, from ‘the strait doesn’t matter,’ to (alternatively) ‘not our problem/it will open itself’ to ‘I give you two fucking days or you’ll be living in hell.’ Of course, then, he has then repeatedly “postponed” the day of destruction after encouraging talks with Iran leaders, talks which we then learn a few days later never occurred. But now he says, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” (This time I really, really mean it!)

In other words, talk like an insane person and carry a really small stick. He thinks these outbursts make him look stronger but each threat and retreat makes him look weaker and more clearly not in control of the situation. These are the words of a man who has spent a lifetime either TACOing or bullshitting his way out of messes suddenly coming up against an immovable object and at a moment when he already appears to be under some mix of extreme psychic strain and a more general senescent decompensation.

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A Case Study in How Trump Treats His Friends 

Posted on by Kate Riga

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender☕️

Learning from her predecessors, ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi was the ultimate yes man. 

Perhaps unflagging sycophancy could protect her from the fate of Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s first Attorney General back in 2017, who provoked his rage by recusing himself from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump forced him out, then put a coda on his political career by endorsing Tommy Tuberville in the 2020 Alabama Senate primary.

Continue reading “A Case Study in How Trump Treats His Friends “ →

The Inflation Surge Is Just Getting Started

Posted on by Josh Marshall

These days we often think of memes that capture a particular moment or idea. In the old days it was cartoons. There’s a classic that captures a big part of what is happening now with the stoppage of tankers (they’re not all oil or even other hydrocarbons) in the Strait of Hormuz. I think the cartoon in question is from The New Yorker. If anyone has a copy, do send it. In the cartoon a guy has jumped off a skyscraper. As he flies by the 50th floor a guy in the building asks him, “How’s it going?” The guy flying by says, “So far, so good!”

Continue reading “The Inflation Surge Is Just Getting Started” →

Come See Us in Austin, TX

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I just had two emailers in a row who I had back and forths with about the comparison between the Iran War and the Suez Crisis of 1956. And at the end of each exchange they said, hey, looking forward to the live podcast in Austin next week! (Who knows? Maybe Austin is a big Suez Crisis town.) More important, it reminded me that we’ve secured additional space and now have small additional number of tickets for next Wednesday. So if you’re in Austin or near enough that it’s convenient to get there, come see us in Austin next Wednesday night, April 8. Click here for tickets.