President Donald Trump said on Tuesday SNAP benefits will not go out to the nearly 42 million Americans who rely on the nutrition program until Democrats vote to open the federal government — despite an order from a federal judge that the administration must fund the program during the shutdown.
Continue reading “Trump Says He’ll Defy Court Order, Withhold SNAP Until Dems Drop Demands and Reopen Gov’t”What We Lost When Condé Nast Unceremoniously Shuttered Teen Vogue
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
If you just skimmed the press release, you wouldn’t really get the scale of it. On Monday, Vogue.com announced that Teen Vogue would be folded into its parent publication — part of a “transition, in which Teen Vogue will keep its unique editorial identity and mission.”
That’s Condé Nast-ese for “we’re laying off nearly the entire team and stripping the publication for parts.”
Continue reading “What We Lost When Condé Nast Unceremoniously Shuttered Teen Vogue “Pam Bondi Waves Magic Wand to Solve Her Lindsey Halligan Problem
Big Oops Energy
In a remarkable filing in both the Jim Comey and Letitia James cases, Attorney General Pam Bondi submitted a document she signed on Halloween — more than a month after Comey’s indictment — declaring that she was retroactively ratifying everything that interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had done to secure the two indictments.
The Bondi filing came in the Trump administration’s response to motions from Comey and James to dismiss their indictments on the grounds that Halligan was unlawfully appointed as U.S. attorney.
Bondi took a belt-and-suspenders approach, claiming she validly appointed Halligan as interim U.S. attorney on Sept. 22 but also purporting to give new and additional authority to Halligan: “For the avoidance of doubt as to the validity of that appointment … I hereby appoint Ms. Halligan to the additional position of Special Attorney” retroactive to the same date.
Not much doubt was avoided. In fact, it was amplified.
The fact that Bondi felt the need to do any after-the-fact cleanup of Halligan’s appointment tended to undermine the rest of the Trump DOJ brief, which attempted to argue that Halligan is a perfectly valid U.S. attorney.
All the magic-wand waving and retroactive appointments seem like a huge concession, perhaps forced by federal judges in New Jersey, Nevada, and California already having found fault with the appointments of other Trump U.S. attorneys under less unusual circumstances than Halligan’s.
Trump DOJ Throws Kitchen Sink at Comey
In a weird new filing, the Trump Justice Department defended against former FBI Director Jim Comey’s claims of vindictive and selective prosecution by dumping into the court record a bunch of tenuously-related private emails between Comey and Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman.
The NYT put it deftly: “The evidence was included in a 48-page filing that appeared to be an effort to construct a narrative that Mr. Comey had leaked information to the news media without actually tying such assertions to the allegations made in the indictment brought against him.”
At times, the filing reads like its target audience is not the judge but the man occupying the Oval Office.
The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition
House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) is “likely to issue a subpoena in the coming weeks” to former Special Counsel Jack Smith rather than accede to his demand for a public hearing, the NYT reports.
Aileen Cannon Gets Smacked by Appeals Court
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took the unusual step of telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to get moving in deciding whether to unseal Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, which deals with the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Citing “undue delay,” the appeals court gave Cannon another 60 days to rule on motions to unseal the report that have been pending since February.
The three-judge panel included Obama, Trump, and Biden appointees.
The Purges: Country Music Edition
- Bloomberg: “The FBI forced out a senior official overseeing aviation shortly after Director Kash Patel grew outraged about revelations of his publicly-available jet logs indicating he’d flown to see his musician girlfriend perform, said three people familiar with the situation.”
- Reuters: The White House ousted Joe Allen, the acting inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, whose director has been the source of the bogus mortgage fraud claims against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). This passage is of particular note in:
Allen received notice of his termination from the White House after he made efforts to provide key information to prosecutors in that office, according to four sources. The information he turned over was constitutionally required, two of them said, while a third described it as being potentially relevant in discovery.
Stay tuned to see what James’ attorney Abbe Lowell does with this juicy morsel.
Good Read
NYT: The Battle in Virginia Over an Activist Who Protested Stephen Miller
Laura Loomer, Pentagon Reporter
The Trump Pentagon has given far-wing pot-stirrer Laura Loomer press credentials to cover the Defense Department, the WaPo reports, completing the ousting of traditional new outlets and their replacement by right-wing entities.
One Year Since Trump’s Re-Election
This week mark’s one year since Donald Trump was re-elected to a nonconsecutive scond term. Thomas Zimmer assesses where we are:
An authoritarian, fascistic movement controls the government; they are trying – and to some extent succeeding – to build an authoritarian state; but they have not been able to extend authoritarian rule across society. A system that is democratic no more, but also not a consolidated autocratic regime yet.
Yet.
Dick Cheney, 1941-2025
Three initial thoughts on the death of Dick Cheney, President Ford’s White House chief of staff, member of Congress, Bush I’s secretary of defense, and Bush II’s, shall we say, viceroy:
- The Sept. 11 attack happened on his watch. Everything that came afterward —Afghanistan, Iraq, torture, surveillance, and a toxic form of patriotism — was overcompensation for his own initial failure.
- His physical resilience was remarkable. TPM doesn’t do obituaries, but he was such a dominant figure in the early TPM years that we drafted one for him … way back around 2012, when he had his heart transplant. No one expected Cheney, who had the first of his five heart attacks when he was 37, to live to the age of 84.
- Cheney is Exhibit A for why “polarization” is the wrong word to describe the state of American politics in the 21st century. As his Republican Party marched itself off a cliff, even Dick Cheney, a prior generation’s supervillain, was left behind. His full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in 2024 was a last gasp to try to save the constitutional order that he himself had made significantly more brittle during his time in office.
Future generations trying to understand the grip Cheney had on the instruments of government power in the post-9/11 years need only know this: When then-Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old Texas lawyer in a 2006 hunting accident, the victim apologized to Cheney for being shot in the face.
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Headlines About a Potential Senate Deal?
The insider DC sheets this morning all have news of a coming deal to reopen the government. The outline of that deal is an agreement to hold a future vote on Obamacare subsidies (a name we should really drop), which there’s no certainty Democrats would win, in exchange for another short or medium term continuing resolution. The catch to these reports is that, if you look closely, they seem to be overwhelmingly sourced to Republicans. That, however, doesn’t mean they’re not accurate — though you wouldn’t go too wrong being suspicious. Another dimension of this story is that the Democrats doing informal negotiations — and the potential crossover votes — are heavily stacked with soon-to-be retirees, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Gary Peters (D-MI) among others.
Continue reading “Headlines About a Potential Senate Deal?”Traditional Media Never Took the Christian Right Seriously
Back in the early 2000s, when we were outraged by the excesses of authoritarian dilettantes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a friend suggested I start a blog. I had been a lawyer, but was eager to change careers. Having studied the rise of the Christian right as a college student in the 1980s, I was now watching their aspirations unfold in real time. I wanted to investigate, expose, weigh in on all the things other people were missing. I was accustomed to writing fast. I was built to blog.
I never ended up starting my own blog, but was the very fortunate beneficiary of a serendipitous series of events that made it possible for a person with no entry point or foothold in journalism to find her way into it. Another friend told me about the group blog The Gadflyer (since, sadly, defunct), making its mark in the burgeoning progressive blogging space. They took a chance on me, and I wrote persistently about the Christian right, its assaults on secular law and governance, and the D.C. money and power politics driving it.
The revolution in digital media made my two decades of reporting on the Christian right possible. Not only because it offered expansive space beyond the coveted, exclusive pages of print magazines, but because the best digital journalism — and here I’m talking about reported, edited, fact-checked journalism, although opinion writing is also an essential part of the equation — demands a long-term commitment to the bit. It depends on a reporter consistently drilling down into an important corner of the political world, and continually exposing and contextualizing that world for readers. This type of journalism is fundamentally different from the other kind of online journalism that was born alongside it in the 2000s. Both appear in the digital form, more nimble than print, but that other kind, which still plagues us today, is the inside-the-Beltway, gossip-driven, anonymity-granting, driving-the-day coverage that thrives on access and adrenaline rather than illumination and insight.
Continue reading “Traditional Media Never Took the Christian Right Seriously”Zohran Mamdani Congratulates Cuomo on Trump Endorsement
Kiss of Death
President Trump acknowledged during his “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday that if he had to pick between the Democratic nominee in New York City’s mayoral election this week, Zohran Mamdani, and New York’s former Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, he’d go with the latter.
The shrug in Cuomo’s direction is representative of the MAGA movement and the far-right in general’s interest in casting Mamdani as a new MAGA boogeyman. He does, after all, represent a number of concepts that are in regular rotation in venues such as Fox News and Republican Party social media feeds: He’s a Democratic socialist, he’s young, he’s non-white, he will soon, quite possibly, run New York City.
The disinfo wave around Mamdani reflects a confusion in both parties about exactly how to explain the 34-year-old insurgent candidate. He’s raised funds through small dollar donations and a sophisticated but simple social media presence, putting an unwavering focus on the city’s affordability crisis. He’s been aggressively opposed by wealthy interests in the city to no noticeable effect. Some see Mamdani’s rise as a potential blueprint for the Democratic Party moving forward, a reality that, unflatteringly, has chagrined and wrong-footed that party’s leaders.
Accordingly, Trump and his allies have been trying to paint Mamdani as a “communist.” At the end of September, Trump claimed that if Mamdani won the election, he would withhold federal funding from New York City (something the Trump White House started doing just hours after the shutdown began on October 1 by freezing funding for New York’s infrastructure projects, among other things).
Perhaps encouraged by political allies and donors that they both share, Trump has for awhile been hinting that he sees his former enemy, Cuomo — whom Mamdani defeated for the Democratic nomination — as a better fit for New York. During the “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, Trump made it official, putting his weight behind Cuomo as the supposed lesser of two evils.
“It’s going to be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York. Because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said.
“So I don’t know that he’s won, and I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you,” he said.
Mamdani has jumped on the Trump remarks as a final opportunity to troll Cuomo.
“Congratulations, Andrew Cuomo. I know how hard you worked for this,” Mamdani posted on Instagram.
— Nicole LaFond
Curtis Sliwa Campaigned With A COVID Quarantine Rioter
The home stretch of New York City’s mayoral race offered us yet another example of how extremist politics have become standard fare for the GOP.
With voting set to take place on Tuesday, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa spent last Sunday morning campaigning alongside City Council candidate Heschy Tischler. Tischler, who bills himself as part of “Team Trump,” is an activist in Brooklyn’s ultraorthodox Jewish neighborhoods. Tischler gained widespread notice as a vocal part of protests against COVID quarantine measures in the community that ultimately turned violent. In 2021, he pleaded guilty to a charge of inciting a riot for his role in those demonstrations, which included an attack on a local journalist.
Sliwa’s embrace of Tischler is all the more hypocritical since the longshot mayoral hopeful first made a name for himself as a vigilante anti-crime crusader. Time and time again, MAGA Republicans are showing us their supposed concerns about law and order don’t extend to their own political allies.
— Hunter Walker
GOP Will Soon Need a New CR
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Republican leadership is discussing how to deal with the House-passed GOP continuing resolution (CR) that is set to expire on Nov. 21.
“We’re very mindful of the calendar. We’re very frustrated by that,” Johnson said during a Monday press conference, adding that GOP leaders will be discussing options.
The House, of course, has been out of session since House Republicans passed the GOP CR on Sept. 19. That was 45 days ago. Johnson will have to bring them back in order to pass any new CR.
GOP leadership is reportedly, privately discussing a new CR that would go into early 2026. Meanwhile some senators are reportedly pushing for a deal that would involve a package of appropriations bills alongside a new CR — that would reopen the government — and a vote to extend the expiring Obamacare subsidies.
Republican leadership has been insisting they won’t vote on any appropriations bills or measures to extend the subsidies without a deal to reopen the government.
— Emine Yücel
In Case You Missed It
White House Limits Media Access to West Wing Offices in Latest Indignity for the Trump Press Corps
The latest in TPM’s 25th Anniversary essay series: Early Bloggers Changed the Public’s Perception About the Iraq War
After 3-Day Trial, Trump Appointee Judge Grants Preliminary Injunction Blocking Guard from Portland
Morning Memo: Big Win For Voting Rights As Judge Blocks Trump EO
The latest from Kate Riga: Trump Admin Tells Judge It’ll Disburse Half of SNAP Benefits for Eligible Households in November, With ‘Significant’ Delays
Josh Marshall: Making Sense of That Weird Detail in the Latest Polls
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Watching the Podcast Bubble Burst From the Inside
What We Are Reading
The Fantasy of Assassination Culture
Feds Drop Case Against Man Accused of Injuring Greg Bovino’s Groin
The man who federal agents accused of dealing Greg Bovino a groin injury from which the Border Patrol commander purportedly needed two weeks to recover will no longer face charges after prosecutors on Monday moved to drop their case against him.
Continue reading “Feds Drop Case Against Man Accused of Injuring Greg Bovino’s Groin”DHS Wants States to Hand Over Driver’s License Data for Citizenship Checks
This article first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.
The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.
The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.
According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.
Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.
Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.
State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.
“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.
DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”
The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.
Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.
Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.
Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.
Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.
The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.
In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.
Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”
“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.
Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.
It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”
She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.
The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.
At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.
Making Sense of That Weird Detail in the Latest Polls
Tomorrow we’re going to get our first widespread read on what actual voters think of the Trump presidency. Of course, Trump isn’t on the ballot. Nor is it a federal election. But, more than at any other time in our lifetimes, all political questions revolve around Trump and whether you’re for or against him. We’ll get indirect reads on how perceptions of Trump are affecting voting behavior. We’ve also just gotten a series of new national polls, timed for release just before Tuesday. They show Trump almost as unpopular as he has ever been, not only during his second presidency but at the most feral and unhinged moments of his first. FiftyPlusOne shows his average approval numbers underwater by 15 points, with approval at 40.9%. If there’s anything “new” here, it’s that his high disapprovals are breaking more ground than his low approvals. He’s wringing the final undecideds or not-paying-attentions out of the electorate.
But the picture is different on the generic ballot — the standard measure of a congressional election. There, it is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. The FiftyPlusOne average here have Democrats up by 3.5 percentage points — 45.6 to 42.1. That’s okay for the Democrats but it’s far closer than you’d expect with a president this unpopular. The most recent numbers are fairly scattered. NBC and Verasight have the Democrats with an eight point advantage. CNN gives them a five point advantage. But Washington Post/ABC have it at two points. NewsNation (whose pollster I can’t identify) says it’s essentially even.
Continue reading “Making Sense of That Weird Detail in the Latest Polls”Trump Admin Tells Judge It’ll Disburse Half of SNAP Benefits for Eligible Households in November, With ‘Significant’ Delays
The Trump administration told a federal judge on Monday that it plans to use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) contingency fund to cover 50 percent of November allotments to current eligible households — but that it might take states “a few weeks to up to several months” to disburse the money.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Tells Judge It’ll Disburse Half of SNAP Benefits for Eligible Households in November, With ‘Significant’ Delays”