The Brief: Right-Wing Influencers Go to War With Each Other and Trump

Posted on by John Light

The Vibe Shifts Again

After the 2024 election, there was quite a bit of focus on the increasingly right-wing ecosystem of podcasts, streaming video and social media clips in which a vast number of Americans were stewing. But a fascinating New York Times analysis published this morning finds that world fraying, with right-wing influencers feuding with one another and audiences declining from early 2025 through today.

The article highlights the role that unpopular issues for Trump — the Iran war, the continually increasing cost of living — have played in making the whole thing less fun. Though the Times article does not go here, it strikes me too that Israel and Gaza have also confused this world, with various reactionary celebrities sorting themselves among those who are more antisemitic and those who are more Islamophobic and critiquing one another accordingly.

Much of this crew has tried to find an edge by continuing to criticize those with power — which now include many former ideological allies. Alex Jones, somewhat comically, called for Trump to be impeached over Iran this week. Tucker Carlson has been similarly critical of the war as he makes dark insinuations about Israel’s control of the U.S. government. Nick Fuentes has become deeply critical of Trump. And Candace Owens, famously, has spun up new narratives about how Charlie Kirk’s killing was an inside job orchestrated by Israel or fellow right-wing activists.

Part of what’s been hard for Democrats in recent years is the party is one supportive of institutions and, more broadly, the power of government to be a force for good. This can be a tough sell during a time when institutions racked up a long record of repeated failures and as many Americans see themselves backsliding. It’s a problem politicians from Chuck Schumer to Zohran Mamdani have had to contend with (and have done so with wildly different degrees of success).

But Trump has ironically now put right-wing podcasts in a similar position: Their guy runs the institutions, and he has used them to invade American cities and launch an unpopular and deepening quagmire in Iran. He refused to make public, and then only begrudgingly, sloppily and selectively released, the Epstein files. Podcaster-turned deputy FBI director-turned podcaster Dan Bongino illustrates this trajectory especially comically; he made his career boosting conspiracy theories, entered the government and declared many of his former ideas to be ill-founded; and now is attempting to establish himself, without much success, on the outside again. He “has seen his livestream views shrink by about half from their peak in 2024,” the Times writes.

Blanche Still Stuck

The latest development in the Blanche confirmation saga came midday yesterday, with Trump threatening to pull the nomination until after the midterms, when Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, the two Republicans who want more reassurances from Blanche, will be gone from the Senate, thanks in large part to Trump. “I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” he wrote.

  • While surely a bummer for Blanche, this whole thing remains more about how the Senate functions under Trump than the future of the DOJ: Blanche can continue to serve as acting attorney general for the duration of Trump’s term.
  • True to form, Trump’s attempt to exert leverage over the Senate isn’t all that logical. Whose to say he’ll have the votes for Blanche after the midterms, when the chamber stands at least a chance of falling under Democratic control?
  • As David Kurtz has written, Cornyn’s demands are fairly narrow: better defining Trump’s IRS immunity under his settlement agreement, and making sure that the slush fund for his allies is “dead.” The first would still seemingly grant Trump retroactive immunity, and the second would not foreclose other ways of the DOJ paying out Trump’s allies, as it continues to do. Given all this, it is telling Trump does not want to yield and provide Cornyn and Tillis an excuse to vote “yes.”
  • For procedural reasons, even if Trump does not pull the nomination, and even if Cornyn is mollified, it now looks unlikely to progress to a full Senate vote before September.

Tabs

  • Tina Peters and TPM interview subject Clay Parikh have signed a document calling on the Trump administration to transition the U.S. away from ballot marking machines toward hand-marked paper ballots and for the 2026 midterm elections to not be certified until a full hand count of ballots is completed. The push was first flagged by Media Matters. In an interview about the document noted by Media Matters, Peters also said she urged Trump to fire the heads of the Election Assistance Commission, which he did.
  • Emily Moreno filed a new request for a restraining order against former husband Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) yesterday, the Washington Post reports, alleging that Miller physically grabbed one of her attorneys during a hearing Tuesday. Miller faces multiple allegations of abuse and domestic violence. (Miller contends Moreno, who is the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), is lying and is herself dangerous.)

Man of the Hour

Whichever AI enthusiast at the State Department is behind this headline: “US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference”

From the Reuters report:

The state ‌department said it took “full responsibility” ‌for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed ‌the slide deck before the event.

Are We at War?

Still at war.

Correction: This article originally erroneously stated that Tina Peters was advocating to transition away from, not toward increased use of, paper ballots.

We’ll Be Hearing About This Michigan Senate Race for Years to Come

Posted on by Kate Riga

The increasingly acrimonious Senate primary between Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and public health official Abdul El-Sayed draws to a close next week, and with it, the biggest battle yet of the moderates versus progressives proxy war.

Continue reading “We’ll Be Hearing About This Michigan Senate Race for Years to Come” →

ABC Unleashes: Carr Wants a ‘Media Industry Too Fearful of Official Reprisal to Report the News Freely’

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Get in Line or ‘Pay the Price’

In a scathingly-written regulatory filing posted on the Federal Communications Commission’s website on Thursday, ABC’s lawyers tore into Trump administration FCC head Brendan Carr for “attempted censorship” and accused Carr of helping President Trump in his retribution campaign against media that criticizes him.

Continue reading “ABC Unleashes: Carr Wants a ‘Media Industry Too Fearful of Official Reprisal to Report the News Freely’” →

People Are Starting to Worry About Whether Kevin Warsh is a Credible Fed Chair

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

Trump’s new Federal Reserve Board Chair Kevin Warsh took two missteps in two opposite directions during and after yesterday’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) rate decision. And it wasn’t necessarily the board’s choice to hold interest rates steady — a decision that was mostly expected given current economic conditions — that most rankled markets and economists. Rather, it was both what Warsh said, and also what he didn’t say, that put a diverse set of central bank stakeholders on alert.

When the FOMC on Wednesday issued its second rate decision since Warsh began leading the agency in May, the press release repeated information from the committee’s mid-June event.

“Productivity growth and capital investment are strong.” 

But this time, there was more evidence than before that those assertions are not necessarily being borne out in the data. 

Trump has continued to cast a resilient but stagnating economy in rosy hues, and engaged more aggressive and overt tactics to influence monetary policy at the Fed as he tries to force members of the central bank to cut interest rates. In tandem, Warsh’s pared-down approach to FOMC communications and use of the word “strong” to describe economic indicators showing weakness failed to fully reflect an economic reality which led three Fed governors to dissent from the majority decision and vote in favor of higher interest rates. 

Labor productivity increased just 0.3% in the first quarter of 2026 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number was revised down by half a percentage point. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s survey of 33 economic forecasters projected U.S. gross domestic product would grow at a 2.1% annual rate in the second quarter of 2026, and revised down their growth projections for the remainder of the year, in a survey published in May. Then on Thursday, second quarter GDP came in even lower, slowing to 1.5% according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Investment growth was also lower than the BEA had previously projected.

“There is still no evidence of an AI-driven productivity boom after three consecutive quarters of weak productivity growth,” Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in a brief published Thursday. 

Baker also noted that growth in AI investment, while still strong, slowed.

“The economy is soft and vulnerable,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at economic research firm Moody’s Analytics, said on X. 

The Federal Reserve Board declined to comment on which data the FOMC relied on for its statement about strong productivity growth and investment.

“It would be concerning if factual misrepresentations are getting elevated due to political convenience,” former Fed economist Skanda Amarnath, who has accused Warsh of political puppetry in past interviews with TPM, said on X.

There are still positive aspects of the economy. Unemployment has not spiked. Forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Fed revised their annual GDP growth projections upward beginning in 2028. And investment growth still represents a positive contribution to overall GDP growth.

On Wall Street, markets responded negatively to Warsh’s refusal not only to speak about what the Fed might do in the future, but to even acknowledge what kinds of economic conditions might warrant a future rate hike. A Thursday BEA release on personal consumption expenditures, measuring the price people in the U.S. pay for things, showed price inflation well above the Fed’s 2% target and the Iran War has spiked the cost of energy, among other goods and services.

“If inflation continues to be elevated through the forecast period, interest rates could well be part of that solution, but I wouldn’t say it’s in isolation,” Warsh said during a Wednesday press conference. 

He went on to leave the door open regarding whether the Fed’s 2% inflation target will remain after January, when a series of expert-staffed committees established by Warsh to initiate his stated goal of central bank “regime change” return with their findings.

“In Warsh’s press conference, he once again failed to specify how he intended to achieve his stridently asserted inflation resolve,” Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan, reportedly said in a note.

Investor concerns about inflation sent the 30-year treasury bond to its highest yield in 19 years.

“[Warsh] also cast doubt on whether PCE inflation will remain the Fed’s inflation target in the medium run,” Feroli said in his note. “Both of these points raise questions about the new chair’s credibility in delivering lower inflation.”

Dems Are Divided on Ideology; That’s Okay

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I saw this tweet and it struck me as one of the more powerful indicators of the need to untether ideology from “fight” in intra-Democratic battles. The party is very united on fight, very divided on ideology. So you unite on “fight,” let different constituencies/states find their center of gravity on ideology.

Continue reading “Dems Are Divided on Ideology; That’s Okay” →

Plumbing the Depths of Trump’s Iran Debacle

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.

Blue States Sue DHS and FEMA Over Coercive Election Changes

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

Last week, a coalition of officials from 25 Democratic-led states and Washington D.C. filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, arguing that the administration is coercing states into complying with new unlawful election changes by withholding billions of dollars in disaster relief funding and homeland security grants if the states do not bend to President Trump’s demands around election administration. 

Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the Trump administration is coercing the states into adopting a number of new election procedures that it is trying to unconstitutionally force on state election officials. That apparently includes demands to transition to a paper ballot system and a requirement for states to run their voter rolls through an unrelated and unsecure database, the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, to check voter rolls, among other things. 

“Last year, DHS and FEMA embarked on an unprecedented campaign to leverage the billions of dollars in federal funding that they administer to coerce States into adopting the Administration’s preferred policies,” the lawsuit states.  

The SAVE system, as TPM has reported, has been co-opted by the Trump administration and used as a way to purge alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. The issue, however, is that there is evidence to suggest that the system has actually been removing eligible voters from the rolls, the states outline in their complaint.  

It’s worth noting too that the use of the SAVE system to purge voters from the rolls was blocked by a federal judge just last month.

“Congress never gave DHS or FEMA authority to rewrite state election law, require cooperation with federal immigration agents, or terminate federal funding streams at any time and for any reason,” the lawsuit says.

“The Constitution grants the States the power to administer and set the rules governing federal elections, and pursuant to that grant of authority the States have adopted a range of systems for ensuring that votes are counted fairly and accurately. Defendants, however, seek to upend those laws and policies and—using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds as a cudgel—impose the current Administration’s preferred policies in their place,” the plaintiffs argue. 

We’ll keep you updated as this challenge progresses. As always, there’s a lot more to unpack into this week, so let’s dive in.

Making Sense of the 150,000 Rejected California Mail Ballots

Close to 150,000 mail ballots were rejected in California’s primary last month — the highest number of rejected ballots in recent years. According to data from the California Secretary of State’s office, a total of 148,241 mail-in ballots were rejected, which is 1.7 percent of all the mail-in-ballots cast. 

The majority of the rejected ballots — 93,497 to be more precise — were scrapped due to reportedly not being received on time. In California, all mail-in ballots need to be postmarked on or before Election Day, and they need to be received up to seven days after Election Day in order to be counted. Another 52,000 ballots were rejected due to signature verification issues, meaning either there was no signature on the ballot or there was an issue with non-matching signatures.

“I believe we saw an increase in the number of ballots rejected for being too late to count due primarily to voters holding on to their ballots longer than they might otherwise because of the volatile nature of the race for Governor and many groups encouraging voters to wait,” Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation said in an email to TPM.

And while this is a larger number of rejected ballots than usual, “it’s a comparatively small percentage,” Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University told me.

“People keep forgetting, California is huge,” he said. 

And Levitt said the incident actually provides evidence that election integrity is alive and well in California — despite what the Trump administration and election deniers might want you to believe. 

“It, to me, is part of the evidence that California takes the integrity of its election incredibly seriously,” he said. “California puts a thumb on the scale for bending over backward in its legal rules to help ballots get counted. But if you’re outside of those legal rules, it’s not going to count the ballots.”

DOJ Uses New Jersey Noncitizen Voter Episode to Bolster Its Demand for Unredacted Voter Data

Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is pushing back on the DOJ’s demand to hand over the names of close to 6,600 noncitizens who were reportedly accidentally added to the state’s voter rolls due to a software error in the state’s automatic voter registration program in 2023 and 2024.

Last week, Sherrill announced the error which originated at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission. As a result of the glitch, 400 noncitizens voted in at least one election since 2023. And although Sherrill has said that these noncitizens were removed from the voter rolls and that these ineligible votes did not impact the results of the elections in which they participated, it’s been good news for the Trump administration’s years-long quest to find evidence of any kind to support the myth that non citizens are voting in our elections.

In response to this revelation, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, sent a letter to Sherrill last week demanding that she hand over data (including names and addresses) on all these noncitizens. Sherrill, however, is refusing to comply with this demand.

“We are not in the practice of turning over this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it, I’ve seen it personally,” she said last week. “They are working to weaponize personal data, and they don’t have a reputation for keeping it private either.”

Of course, this whole unfortunate episode is now being used by the Trump administration as a way to help bolster its failing campaign to seize sensitive voter data from the states. The DOJ has, for months now, been demanding unredacted voter files from at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. Few states have complied, and the DOJ has sued in response — and it has lost every single case that has gone to court.

On the same day that it sent the letter to Sherril, the DOJ also filed a notice of additional basis in court to help its New Jersey voter roll case, arguing that the incident is evidence that the DOJ truly does need the state’s unredacted voter rolls. 

“The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sent Defendant the Additional Basis Letter because the Civil Rights Division learned of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s announcement on X on July 21, 2026, that ‘roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024’ were in fact ‘registered … anyway’ by New Jersey election processes—and roughly 400 of those people voted,” the notice reads. 

In Other Election News

TPM: Jay Clayton Confirmed As DNI — A Position Trump Warped to Feed His Election Conspiracy Theories

Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ said some states ‘cooperated’ with voter roll grab by providing public information. It sued other states for doing the same

AP: Trump’s attacks on mail balloting and concerns over delays turn midterms spotlight on Postal Service

Kash Patel’s Ambitious Defamation Lawsuit Foiled By Basic Civil Procedure Doctrine

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Kash Patel, the conservative podcaster whom President Donald Trump appointed as the director of the FBI in 2025, is currently suing The Atlantic for $250 million over its reporting that his predilection for drinking “to the point of obvious intoxication” has been a “recurring source of concern across the government.” In a lawsuit he filed in federal court on April 20, Patel characterized the article as a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” In an interview on April 23, the writer, Sarah Fitzpatrick, said that in the days since The Atlantic published the story, she’d been “inundated” with new sources corroborating it.

Continue reading “Kash Patel’s Ambitious Defamation Lawsuit Foiled By Basic Civil Procedure Doctrine” →

PHOTOS: TPM and The Handbasket Get Together in Brooklyn

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our event at Crystal Lake bar last night in collaboration with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket! It was great to see some of you again, meet some local readers making it out to their first TPM event, and connect with readers who traveled just for this show. (Shout out to the lovely couple from Berkeley, California!)

Continue reading “PHOTOS: TPM and The Handbasket Get Together in Brooklyn” →