Back in June I asked you to tell me about your favorite TPM posts. I read through your responses at the time. But the project I was investigating was soon overtaken by the rush of campaign events, particularly the aftermath of the Trump-Biden presidential debate at the end of the month. I was finally able to go through them more systematically this weekend. First, thank you for the attention and thought so many of you put into those contributions. They were gratifying and illuminating to read. My aim with this exercise was to pull together a list of posts for something kind of but not precisely like an anthology.
Trump Purports To Fire IGs En Masse In Friday Night Purge
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
It’s Happening
President Trump’s promise to destroy impediments to his free-wheeling abuse of power took a new twist late Friday night when he summarily fired more than a dozen inspectors general across the federal government in a purge that removed one of the front-line defenses against corruption, malfeasance, and mismanagement.
The firings were not formally announced, and the accounting for which inspectors general were removed and the total numbers involved (ranging from 12-17) continued to evolve over the weekend.
Trump disregarded some of the legal protections to insulate inspectors general from political retaliation like this. He failed, for instance, to provide the required 30-days written notice to Congress with a basis for the firings. In what is likely to become a common theme of the Trump II presidency, it is not clear what the consequences might be for violating the law or who is in a position to enforce it.
What is clear is that Trump continues to undermine if not outright tear down mechanisms and institutions designed to be a check on runaway executive power. Watchdogs like inspectors general offer a modicum of accountability that Trump simply won’t tolerate being in the hands of anyone other than loyalists and flunkies who he can control and intimidate.
Things Are Not Normal At DOJ
- “Every new administration replaces the political leadership of federal agencies and, over time, changes some of the senior career officials. But what happened in just a matter of days at [DO] is much different — sloughing off decades of apolitical expertise to new assignments widely seen in the building as punishments likely to result in resignations.”–NYT
- “Ousted career executives at DOJ are considering their options after being given vague rationale for their firings.”–Government Executive
- “A new administration always brings changes in personnel and policy. But current and former [DOJ] officials said the pace, scope and tone of Trump’s early moves in his second term are unusual and signal that a more dramatic transformation lies ahead.”–WSJ
The Cruelty Is The Point
- State Department halts global land mine-clearing programs.
- Global program to fight HIV/AIDS paused in funding freeze.
- Trump terminates Anthony Faucis’s security protection
- Air Force scraps training course that used videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female WWII pilots
Judiciary Rebuffs New Trump Mass Email Initiative
In an apparent effort to enable President Trump to directly message every federal government worker, the Office of Personnel Management sent out a test email Friday that included nearly the entire judicial branch. Let’s just say the executive branch overreach didn’t sit so well with its co-equal branch.
Trump II Clown Show
- It took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance, but Pete Hegseth was confirmed as defense secretary by the Senate late Friday. Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Mitch McConnell (KY) were the only Republican senators to vote against the nomination.
- After South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) was confirmed as DHS secretary over the weekend, she stood up Vice President Vance for her swearing-in and would up being sworn in at the home of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Jan. 6 Trials And Tribulations
The reverberations over Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons and the dismissals of the pending Jan. 6 cases continued:
- NBC News: Jan. 6 prosecutors describe “shocking,” “guttural” week after Trump’s pardons
- USA Today: Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, fresh out of prison, appears at Trump Las Vegas rally
- TPM’s Josh Kovensky: The Oath Keepers Want More From Trump
- TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Trump’s DC Prosecutor Tells Judge To Let Oath Keepers Run Free
Trump Sows Chaos Abroad
- Colombia: President Trump threatened to impose emergency tariffs on Colombia after it refused to accept U.S. deportation flights – before Colombia apparently relented.
- Mexico: America’s southern neighbor refused to accept a U.S. deportation flight
- Denmark: Donald Trump had a “fiery call” with Denmark’s prime minister over Greenland
Just Some Casual Ethnic Cleansing
Audio of Trump on Gaza: I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people. You're talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing…
— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) January 26, 2025 at 12:09 AM
[image or embed]
Elon Musk Watch
The world’s richest man addressed a meeting of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party Sunday, telling the audience: “ I think there’s, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents … let alone their great-grandparents, maybe even.”
Who’s Your Daddy?
Wajahat Ali: “MAGA seems to have a very weird, twisted, and violent relationship with their dads. This most likely explains why they’ve turned to Donald Trump, a vindictive sexual abuser, as their surrogate father.”
The Most Important Thing You’ll Read Today
Our ingrained sense of American exceptionalism – even in those of us who reject it – gives us a blind spot to how much of what is happening to democracy in America has already happened elsewhere and follows common pathways.
Amanda Carpenter is contributing to a new series on the “entrenchment agenda“: “Entrenchment refers to how authoritarians consolidate and leverage government power to stay in power. They use various tactics to dig in, cement power, and crush electoral competition.”
FLASHBACK: ‘America for Americans!’
I am making my way for the first time through John Ford’s classic 1939 Western, Stagecoach, the film in which John Wayne as we know him came into his own.
In a striking moment about a third of the way into the film, the villainous banker Ellsworth H. Gatewood gives a mini-screed that is remarkable not so much for how much it echoes the current moment but for how it reflects the persistence of a particular kind of scoundrel in American life.
The screenwriter Dudley Nichols put words into Gatewood’s mouth that were designed to get a knowing eye roll from a 1939 pre-war audience, as if of course this is what you would expect this caricature to say:
I have a slogan that should be placed on every newspaper in the country: America for Americans!
The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking! Over one billion dollars a year!
What this country needs is a businessman for president!
That Gatewood, played by Berton Churchill, was already a caricature by the late 1930s makes sense given the America First movement of the 1920s, but it’s still a striking reminder that the thread of American politics Trump represents weaves itself deep and consistently through the history of American public life.
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New Poll Recommends Eating the Billionaires
I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
Continue reading “New Poll Recommends Eating the Billionaires”Is The MAGA Tent Big Enough For Tulsi Gabbard?
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
After Pete Hegseth’s survival, it feels unbearably credulous to suggest that Republican senators may block any of Donald Trump’s remaining nominees.
Continue reading “Is The MAGA Tent Big Enough For Tulsi Gabbard?”Trump’s DC Prosecutor Tells Judge To Let Oath Keepers Run Free
President Trump’s handpicked acting D.C. U.S. Attorney insisted Friday afternoon that a federal judge should rescind his own order from Friday morning barring recently released Oath Keepers from going to D.C. and, specifically, the U.S. Capitol.
Continue reading “Trump’s DC Prosecutor Tells Judge To Let Oath Keepers Run Free”Stay In Your Lane: Judiciary Rebukes Trump Admin For Email Blast To Court Employees
The administrative arm of the federal court system rebuked the Trump administration Friday for sending out an email blast to nearly the entire judiciary branch, including court employees and apparently every judge in the country.
Continue reading “Stay In Your Lane: Judiciary Rebukes Trump Admin For Email Blast To Court Employees”Medical Trial Guidance Scrubbed
Another detail out of FDA. The agency has removed pages which provide guidance to medical researchers on conducting medical trials with representative numbers of men and women and ethnic and/or racial minority groups. I think most people know this: but this isn’t a matter of symbolic diversity. Many medications and/or diseases or conditions present differently in men and woman and in people with different genetic backgrounds.
Dems Worry Sen. Whitehouse Considering Vote for RFK Jr
Wanted to share some information on the RFK Jr. nomination before the Senate.
It probably won’t surprise you that RFK Jr., along with Tulsi Gabbard, are among the few Trump nominees who might actually not get confirmed. But I’m told that one senator who Democratic senators and health care advocates have real concerns about is none other than Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). To be clear, Whitehouse isn’t confirmed as voting for Kennedy. But he appears to be actively considering it. (Ed Note: WTF?)
Continue reading “Dems Worry Sen. Whitehouse Considering Vote for RFK Jr”To Battle ‘Woke,’ DOJ ‘Suspends’ Black, Womens History Months
In order to combat the scourge of “DEI,” the DOJ yesterday indefinitely suspended observance of events like Black History Month, Women’s History Month and other long observed (and one would imagine fairly innocuous) commemorations.
The details are as follows.
Yesterday as part of the implementation of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order and the related anti-DEI guidance memorandum from the Office of Personal Management, the Executive Office of United States Attorneys immediately “suspend[ed] observance programs until further notice” and advised regional U.S. Attorneys Offices that “we believe it would also be prudent for the USAOs to suspend all observance events at this time.”
For what it’s worth, Black History Month isn’t something that BLM activists came up with. President Gerald Ford recognized February in 1976 and Congress passed a law designating February as National Black History Month in 1986.
The news was contained in a circular email sent to all U.S. Attorney’s Offices and shared with TPM.
The Trump II Destruction Is Already In Full Swing
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
It’s Easier To Break Than To Build
We talk a lot about the structural imbalances in American politics, but perhaps the most consequential disparity arises from the Trump right’s fundamental commitment to breaking shit. We’ve seen it unfold in spades this week, as promises to destroy as much as they can as quickly as they can begin to be kept.
It’s not new to Trump. It’s been an essential element of the conservative project for decades now, reflected in anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist’s famous line about shrinking the federal government until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub.
When destruction is the point and there is no responsibility or accountability for building, creating, or even administering, all manner of democratic norms and civic consensus start to fall apart. Perhaps in the long term the consequences of the destruction will exact a political price, but in the meantime, the performative transgression is its own reward.
The Trump II Destruction Continues …
Swathes of the federal government have ground to a halt in the first week of the second Trump administration:
- Disturbing: Trump moves to close Pentagon office focused on curbing civilian deaths
- Shitty: Trump DOJ rescinds job offers in its Honors Program.
- Alarming: Health researchers are reeling as Trump administration pauses travel, communications, and meetings.
Vindictive AF
After yanking special security protection from his own former national security adviser, President Trump has now done the same thing to Mike Pompeo, his own former secretary of state, and Brian Hook, his former special representative for Iran. Both men have been under threat of retaliation from Iran.
Quote Of The Day
“Patriotism is loyalty to country and loyalty to the Constitution – not loyalty to a single head of state. No stroke of a pen and no proclamation can alter the facts of what took place on January 6, 2021. When others in the public eye are not willing to risk their own power or popularity by calling out lies when they hear them, the record of the proceedings in this courthouse will be available to those who seek the truth.”
–U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, joining other federal judges in Washington, D.C. in reluctantly dismissing a case against a Jan. 6 defendant at the request of the Trump DOJ
The Other Trump Pardons
Beyond the Jan. 6 pardons, President Trump is using his first week in office to abuse the pardon power in other ways: to signal whose side he is on regardless of the law, to score political points, and to reward supporters explicitly for their political backing:
- DC police officers convicted of egregious misconduct;
- convicted abortion clinic protesters;
- a convicted online drug kingpin who was a cause célèbre for pro-Trump libertarians.
A Weird Day On The Pete Hegseth Beat
Even as defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth cleared a significant confirmation hurdle in the Senate, new allegations continued to emerge about his prior misconduct:
- In response to questions from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Hegseth revealed that he paid $50,000 to the woman who accused him of a 2017 sex assault, the AP has learned.
- Pete Hegseth’s ex-wife has given a new statement to the FBI about his alcohol use, CNN reported: “He drinks more often than he doesn’t.”
A Senate floor vote on the Hegseth nomination is expected late tonight. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) were the only two Republican no votes on yesterday’s procedural vote. Hegseth can only lose three GOP votes, so it remains close but no real sign yet that enough Republican senators will rally to stop his confirmation.
Whither Kash Patel?
The confirmation hearing for Trump FBI pick Kash Patel has been scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 30
- NYT: F.B.I. Pick Pushed False and Misleading Claims About Trump Investigations
- Bloomberg: FBI Nominee Patel’s CNN Defamation Lawsuit Fails to Advance
- NYT: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Sees ‘Deep State’ Plotters in Government, and Some Good in QAnon
The Intimidation Is The Point
As President Trump rolls back anti-discrimination rules across the federal government, including some that date back to FDR, law professor Samuel Bagenstos makes the point that the way Trump is doing it is designed to squelch pro-diversity voices in the private sector, too:
But there’s an even more pernicious aspect to the new anti-DEI EO. It will be used–and appears to have been carefully designed to be used–to intimidate and harass private institutions that are outspoken in their support for a robust vision of equity. And it will be used to encourage those institutions to silence their employees who speak out in favor of such a vision (and, on university campuses, to silence those who speak out on other matters).
‘A Blatantly Unconstitutional Order’
President Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship did not survive first contact with a federal judge.
In a court hearing to temporarily block the executive order, U.S. District John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, called it a “blatantly unconstitutional order”
I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say where were the judges, where were the lawyers?”
Coughenour savaged Trump administration lawyers for arguing otherwise. “Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” Coughenour said. “It just boggles my mind.”
He granted the temporary restraining order while the case, one of several challenging the executive order, proceeds.
Xenophobia Watch
- NYT: Trump Officials Move to Quickly Expel Migrants Biden Allowed In Temporarily
- A federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Newark, New Jersey, swept up citizens, including a U.S. military veteran, according the city’s mayor.
- WaPo: DOJ focus on ‘sanctuaries’ follows prison threats by Stephen Miller’s group
‘It’s Become Too Violent An Environment’
The current political atmosphere is prompting some churches to pull back from offering sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. Seth Kaper-Dale, a pastor at the Reformed Church of Highland Park in central New Jersey, told the WSJ: “It’s become too violent an environment, and the current president’s sort of invitation to violence makes us not want to have a label of sanctuary,” he said. “I do not need this to become the next Tree of Life synagogue.”
The Toils Of Cassidy Hutchinson
In the midst of their bogus counter-investigation last year of the Jan. 6 committee, some House Republicans got jumpy that if they subpoenaed former Trump White House aide-turned-whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson then sexually explicit texts to her from members of Congress might come out, according to a bizarro report in the WaPo:
Before that meeting, a Johnson aide told Loudermilk’s staff that multiple colleagues had raised concerns with the speaker’s office about the potential for public disclosure of “sexual texts from members who were trying to engage in sexual favors” with Hutchinson, according to correspondence produced at the time that detailed the conversation.
The exact nature, timing, and scope of the sexts remains pretty opaque in the WaPo report. In her 2023 book, Hutchinson recounted some creeptastic moments involving then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rudy Giuliani, which they each denied.
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