This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It is based on the podcast Landslide, which tells the story of how the 1976 primary transformed the Republican Party.
Whiplash-inducing breaks from long-held party positions have become the norm in today’s Republican Party.
Continue reading “The New New Right Is The Old New Right”Instead of campaigning on what anti-abortion activists have declared his legacy — laying the groundwork for Roe’s overturning with the appointments of three conservative SCOTUS justices — Donald Trump has been reluctant to talk about his views on abortion in any specific terms for the better part of the past year, and really, ever since the 2022 midterms.
Continue reading “With VP Pick, Trump Tries To Dull Impact Of The Abortion Problem He Created”Nicole Browne, president of the Indiana Association of County Clerks and Monroe County Clerk, has been at the forefront of pushing legislation to protect Indiana election workers against threats and violence heading into the 2024 election.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Browne heard stories about election workers getting followed to their cars and experiencing other forms of intimidation, and told TPM in an interview this week that she and her colleagues have not been immune to the new dangerous world election workers now find themselves in.
Continue reading “States Pass Protective Bills To Get Ahead Of Far-Right Threats Against Election Workers In 2024”Donald Trump and some of his co-defendants scored a win on Wednesday when a Fulton County judge dismissed six counts in the Georgia RICO case.
Continue reading “Judge Tosses Six Counts In Trump’s Georgia RICO Case”There’s a good article in Haaretz today about the limits of U.S. sway over Israel with any kind of cut-off in U.S. weapons supplies. The piece is paywalled, so you can’t read it if you don’t have a subscription. But the gist covers a lot of ground we’ve discussed. Israel can make a number of the weapons itself, just not as quickly or cheaply. Most big-ticket items either aren’t being used in Gaza or don’t need to be replaced — aircraft, for instance. What Israel really needs are various munitions. But in the absence of those it might be forced to use bigger and more lethal bombs in Gaza. There’s even the risk that it might boomerang and strengthen Netanyahu at home.
Continue reading “Biden’s Options”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
After many months of very explicit promises from Donald Trump about what a second term as president would look like, Morning Memo still encounters folks who think it will merely be a repeat of his first term. Been there, done that. If we survived it once, we can survive it again.
That is an enormous misjudgment. It misunderstands the nature of the threat. It is an error of degree in that it wildly underestimates what can happen. It’s a failure of imagination because it takes Trump I as a starting point and can’t foresee beyond it. But it’s ultimately a category error, putting Trump II in the wrong bucket.
While we see Trump I as buckling institutions and eroding norms that barely held on for four years until the threat passed, Trump himself sees those same institutions and norms as too strong; and unlike in his first term he is directly targeting any potential constraints of his power and his whims. In his first term he bumped into and often unknowingly bulldozed through guardrails; in his second term, guardrails and anyone who would impose them are the enemy.
Trump I exploited the grievances of older white Americans. Trump II will be all of Trump’s own personal grievances – for losing in 2020, for being indicted, for being humiliated by woman prosecutors, for being successfully sued multiple times, for any manner of personal slight and ego-wounding – coming home to roost in the Oval Office, with all the powers attendant to it.
Trump will see his re-election as a vindication of all of his prior grievances, a green light for all his plans and proposals, a ratification of his promise of retribution. He is putting it all out there for voters to accept or reject. If they accept it, he will be imbued with enormous powers both in his own mind and in fact.
Trump’s retribution will be mean. It will be ugly. It will be merciless. It will not just be performative in a pro wrestling way, like so much of Trump I was. Just in the past few days, we have witnessed Trump’s adoration for strong men, learned that he praised Hitler for doing “some good things,” and seen him promise to “free” the Jan. 6 defendants.
Trump is currently purging the RNC in the same way he’s promised to purge the federal government. We know Trump wants to place loyalists throughout the federal government, that he wants lawyers who will abide by his desires and not raise legal objections to his conduct, that he sees his first term as not aggressive or unconstrained enough, blocked by the Deep State, RINOs, and others with loyalties to anything other than himself.
Trump’s plans are no mystery, and they’re no secret. It’s time to wake up to the threat directly in front of us. It’s not going to be what you think it is. It will be much worse.
The testimony of Special Counsel Robert Hur yesterday on the Hill was a hard-to-watch shitshow, but it’s important to remember that while for you and me the context for it is the Mar-a-Lago classified docs case against Donald Trump, from which the Biden probe indirectly grew, for House Republicans the context is their great white whale: a Biden impeachment.
There’s some tension for the House GOP in trying to bootstrap the Hur report into their quest for evidence of Biden committing some kind of graft with his son Hunter. But that is the context in which they seized on Hur as part of the impeachment push.
The upshot, however, is that the impeachment push in the House is darn near DOA:
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, kind of gave up the game in an interview with Punchbowl: “If [impeachment] is a messaging of his wrongdoing, then let’s be honest, and say that we’re impeaching him as a message,” Issa said. “I don’t think we’ve been able to convince the other side of the aisle that as [Richard] Nixon needed to go, this man needs to go.”
In an interview with TPM’s Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen, former Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain for the first time recounts showing up early at the White House on Inauguration Day 2021 at the invitation of outgoing Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows only to find no Meadows and the office suite locked.
The sudden resignation of Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), effective at the end of next week, may be an attempt to thwart Rep. Lauren Boebert’s run for his seat.
Here’s the deal:
In the pungent words of AP reporter Nick Riccardi, this seems like a “baroque effort” by Buck to stymy Boebert.
The policymaking body of the federal court system made a big move to try to rein in the blatant judge-shopping that has given Trump judges in far-flung small divisions massive power, TPM’s Kate Riga reports.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is doing infomercial-style promos for a Texas dental practice … while serving as governor:
Donald Trump made a bid last summer to get Elon Musk to buy Truth Social, the WaPo reports.
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The Judicial Conference, the policymaking body for federal courts, announced Tuesday that it would take action against the judge-shopping that has let right-wing litigants funnel cases to friendly, often Donald Trump-appointed judges.
Continue reading “Federal Courts Crack Down On Legal Strategy That Has Given Trump Judges Massive Power”So I was very interested to see what seemed yesterday to be a promised vivisection of, well, me, after my post last week about the collapse of programmatic advertising and how it’s affected the news business. That is the post that included the chart of rapidly declining programmatic ad revenues. Gawker alum Foster Kamer linked to a promised takedown from Ben Smith in which Kamer is quoted and calls on everyone to stop “losing their minds at the death of media” because it’s a “very dumb chart.” (That’s yours truly’s chart: cue to Josh rending his garments.) But when I looked at the Ben Smith column it basically just repeated the points I made in the original post. So having been promised that I would be flayed alive, it turned out that wasn’t the case at all. Total low-energy move basically. But the comments did raise a few other issues that I thought worth mentioning.
Continue reading “Josh Replies to the Slings and Arrows of Those Claiming Digital News Advertising Is Going Great!”The White House and House Democrats both made moves Tuesday to get aid to Ukraine, a burning priority for Democrats that Republicans are blocking in the House.
Continue reading “Everybody Tries To Circumvent House Republicans And Get Aid To Ukraine”The Oscars come only once a year, so we might as well take this opportunity to feast upon the fashion that was served this past Sunday night on the red carpet.
