In the 12 hours since a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was posted on President Trump’s Truth Social account, the White House’s story has swung wildly.
Continue reading “Republicans Rouse Themselves to Denounce Trump Posting the Obamas as Apes”On Jan. 6, 2026, a group of election conspiracy theorists released a report detailing allegations that the 2020 presidential results in Georgia’s Fulton County were “falsely padded” with questionable ballots. A little over three weeks later, FBI agents raided the county’s offices and seized 700 boxes of voting records.
Continue reading “A Conspiracy Fueled Report Preceded ‘Black Pill’ Tulsi Gabbard’s Fulton County Election Raid”A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.
I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.
Continue reading “Trump’s Big Loser Energy, and Other Tales From the Annals of Political Messaging”The Star Tribune’s Jeff Day broke the news last night that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and FBI are set to announce a joint investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti, citing two anonymous sources.
No date or time has been set for any announcement as of this morning, so this appears to be still a tentative, if not contingent, agreement. But the prospect of state investigators being included after being shut out for the past two weeks would mark a breakthrough that offers a glimmer of potential for an independent investigation and some accountability.
It remains unclear, according to Day, whether the agreement on the Pretti shooting probe would include a joint investigation of the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good or otherwise make available to state investigators the evidence collected by the feds in the earlier shooting.
As Day reports:
One of the most startling aspects of the tension between the state and federal government was the decision by the Justice Department to not allow the BCA Force Investigations Unit to have access to crime scene or investigative materials that were gathered by federal agents at both crime scenes — a decision that ruptured the longstanding cooperative relationship between the two agencies.
The prospect of a joint federal-state investigation comes after CBP commander Gregory Bovino was removed from Minnesota and replaced by White House border czar Tom Homan, who despite his own bellicose track record has toned down in recent days the harshest rhetoric coming from the administration.
A federal civil rights investigation into the Pretti shooting was reluctantly announced last week by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche after days of public outrage and slippage amongst some elected Republicans in their previous unambiguous support for the administration’s brutal and lawless mass deportation operation.
Whether the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the FBI are conducting the belated investigation in accordance with past practices remains a big unknown. But it is abundantly clear that the Trump DOJ does not operate free of interference and direction from the Trump White House, which makes any federal investigation inherently suspect and the need for an independent state investigation with full access to the evidence critical.
The Trump administration is retaliating against recently freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family for becoming a poster boy for the brutality of Operation Metro Surge by seeking to end their asylum claims and expedite the deportation proceedings against them, MPR reports.
The original ambitions of the Trump’s first-term proposal for a Schedule F designation for senior government workers that makes them easier to fire seems almost quaint now, given the mass politicization of the federal workforce over the past year, but Don Moynihan explains why the Trump II version of the rule change still matters.
With the midterms elections approaching, TPM is relaunching The Franchise, a weekly newsletter on voting rights and election administration by Khaya Himmelman. If you want to closely follow Trump’s threats to voting, free and fair elections, and election officials, you can sign for free right here.
This week’s carnage at Bezo’s WaPo has been dismaying on so many levels: as a D.C. resident, a journalist, a sports fan (Chelsea Janes and Jesse Dougherty were two of the smartest people in media, not just sports media), and a sentimental fool who appreciated its few surviving anachronisms from the mid-20th century heyday of major metro daily newspapers. The best of those survivors was Martin Weil, who started at the paper in 1965. Erik Wemple has a loving tribute to the 60-year newspaperman who was laid off this week, too.
President Trump, who for months has been holding hostage federal funding for a major rail tunnel project between New York and New Jersey, has a new ransom demand: If you want the money, rename NYC’s Penn Station and Washington-Dulles International Airport after me.
On the same day it was reported that the National Park Service is editing visitor brochures to no longer label the klansman who murdered Medgar Evers a “racist,” President Trump posted a 2020 Big Lie video on social media that portrays Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
The year was 2018, and Lawrence Krauss, the prominent physicist and scholar of the cosmos, was facing a Title IX investigation at Arizona State University. BuzzFeed News had just reported on allegations of sexual misconduct against him; he denied them. In March, he contacted a lawyer experienced in higher education cases. Krauss and Justin Dillon, the lawyer, exchanged a few friendly emails before speaking on the phone.
Then, Krauss presented him with an “unusual request” — he wanted Dillon to call a disgraced financier who had, 10 years before, pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution of a minor.
“I have been advised through much of the BuzzFeed experience, both before and after, by a friend, who is also somewhat infamous. His name is Jeffrey Epstein, and you may know who he is already,” Krauss wrote.
“Bottom line is that Jeffrey is not only friends with most of the famous people from finance, to business, to Hollywood, who have either been brought down during #metoo and he also speaks regularly with people ranging from the awful white house people, who he is friends with, to ken starr etc.,” added Krauss. He later walked back his request for Dillon to speak to Epstein. But Epstein appeared none too pleased that Krauss had invoked him and his connections.
“Every email is to do with engagement/money etc. in the future please do not disclose our conversations or who I speak with!!!!!,” Epstein — who would die 16 months later, awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges — wrote to Krauss.
Continue reading “Epstein Tracked #MeToo Fallout and Advised Accused Men Behind the Scenes”In several cases across the country, judges have rejected or trimmed subpoenas from the Justice Department probing whether gender-affirming care provided to minors violates federal law.
Continue reading “Trump’s DOJ Keeps Losing in Court Over Bids to Eliminate Gender-Affirming Care”Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has refused to meet for a voluntary interview with Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host-turned-U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Continue reading “Slotkin Hits Back as Trump DOJ Pushes for Retribution”Kate and Josh discuss the latest Epstein file dump, along with headlines from the Lone Star State.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Victory and Self-Destruction in Texas”TPM is resurrecting The Franchise, a weekly newsletter that we used to send out back in the day, starting before and continuing while President Trump began spreading deranged conspiracy theories about his loss in the 2020 election. (You can sign up here!)
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election and MAGA’s various attempts to sow doubt in states’ election administration processes and spread conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud (conveniently, in locales where Democrats won or typically win elections), former TPM reporter Matt Shuham used The Franchise to meticulously track the Big Lie and all its tentacles and permutations.
With Trump’s undying fixation with the 2020 election back in the news this week — and everything else his Justice Department and White House is attempting to do to act on his fever dream to “nationalize” elections, seize voter data from states, force mid-cycle gerrymandering and, potentially, intimidate voters at the polls this fall — we figured it was an apt time to bring The Franchise back to TPM readers’ inboxes.
TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman has taken on this task. Since we first hired Khaya at TPM she has covered elections, voting rights, the conspiracy theories that festered post-2020 (and the people who perpetuated the disinfo), the ways in which election administration had to change in the wake of Trump’s attempt to subvert the vote, attacks on poll workers, the DOJ’s overreach into states’ rights to administer elections, Trump’s gerrymandering pressure campaign and more.
You can read the first issue of our relaunched Franchise on TPM here or sign up here to get it sent directly to your inbox every Thursday. Thanks for reading!
My name is Khaya Himmelman, and I’m a reporter at Talking Points Memo covering voting rights and the assault on election administration. I’m excited to announce that TPM is reviving The Franchise, our weekly newsletter on elections and voting rights in America as the Trump administration continues its assault on election administration, the franchise and democracy overall. You can sign up here.
Continue reading “The Franchise Newsletter: Welcome Back!”
