TPM People, thanks for getting us off to a strong start in our annual membership drive. Coming into our second day we’ve now signed up 125 new TPM Members. We want to get that number to 1,000. So still a long ways to go. But that is a very solid start.
If you’re a reader but not a member, give us a go. The price is quite low, just a few bucks a month. The direct benefits make it well worth the money and you support the really first-class, news-moving work our team is doing every day. If you need a bit more inspiration you can read this post for some examples of our big exclusives or this video of our Josh Kovensky on TV last night discussing his latest blockbuster story. Then, when you’re all pumped up, stop by our sign-up page right here.
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Would You Buy A Used Car From This Guy?
Donald Trump is a walking, talking, breathing national security risk. He can’t pass a background check. He can’t get a security clearance. He’s a risky borrower. This is a man who you wouldn’t buy a used car from.
You could scarcely invent the constellation of national security risks that Trump poses: deep financial and emotional insecurity, ongoing criminal liability, susceptible to flattery, a pathological personality. But beyond the risky personal traits, he presents an unrivaled track record of proven misconduct in the national security realm: swiping the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, casual disregard for the handling of classified information, a willing target of foreign interference and influence, an inability to distinguish the self from the state.
In any other era of American politics, the 2024 election would come down to trust. No one trusts Trump, not even many his own supporters. That’s not his appeal, for them, nor the point. But Trump is not without any precedent in our history; he is of a type.
The American myth has always been two-fold: the pastoral democracy in a New World Eden and the land of the huckster, the flimflam artist, the speculator, the boom-chaser, the booster. We have glorified both in our national story.
Trump is the latter tradition incarnate, the fast-talking, fly-by-night, always-be-closing snake oil salesman constantly reinventing himself to spring a new trap on the next easy mark.
His presidential candidacy itself is a long con. He’s running because it’s his best legal defense to the criminal liabilities he faces and a surefire way to subsidize his legal bills on the backs of contributors.
What’s different about the current era is that until now we’d largely managed to keep the worst of the hustlers out of the Oval Office.
Trump Goes All In On Immunity Argument
Donald Trump filed his brief with the Supreme Court in the Jan. 6 case, arguing for absolute immunity for the president for official acts. You know the argument well by now. Next up: Special Counsel Jack Smith’s brief.
Please Consider Becoming A TPM Member
If you’re a regular reader of Morning Memo, the single best way to keep it going is to sign up to become a TPM member. We just launched our annual membership drive, so now is a great time to show your support. Our goal is 1,000 new members. Please, do what you can to help us get there! Thanks in advance.
Inside Trump’s Full Embrace Of Jan. 6
Semafor: How Donald Trump learned to love the January 6 prisoner movement
AP: Trump is making the Jan. 6 attack a cornerstone of his bid for the White House
USA Today: Donald Trump puts Jan. 6 ‘hostages’ at center in his campaign
Quote Of The Day
When a coup against the democratic regime happens and it’s not punished, that is a very strong indicator of the end of the rule of law and the victory of that authoritarian movement.
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works.
Peter Navarro Is Now In Prison
The only higher-up imprisoned for Jan. 6 so far is Peter Navarro, whose offense was refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. Navarro reported to prison yesterday, but not before conducting a Four Seasons Landscaping-style press conference in a Miami strip mall.
The Whys And Wherefores Of Aileen Cannon
While everyone is still scratching their heads over U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s bizarro order Monday in the Mar-a-Lago case, some deeper reading on the case:
NYT: Judge in Trump Documents Case Draws Attention for Slow Pace
Roger Parloff was in Cannon’s courtroom last week for a daylong hearing in the case and files this dispatch.
Just Another Normal Day At Mar-a-Lago
TPM’s Hunter Walker: Trump Invited Boat With Massive QAnon Flag To Dock At Mar-a-Lago For ‘Refreshments’ On Sunday
To make sense of it all, I would suggest reading Texas law professor Steve Vladeck.
Sherrod Brown Gets The GOP Opponent Dems Wanted
Trump-backed businessman Bernie Moreno (R) easily won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Ohio, beating state Sen. Matt Dolan (R). Democrats had gone as far as boosting Moreno in the primary in hopes of facing off against him in the general in what will be a challenging re-election bid for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), one the Senate’s most progressive members.
2024 Ephemera
Down the memory hole: Fox News buries its own scoop on Mike Pence’s unprecedented refusal to endorse the man he served under as vice president.
The band is back: Trump is considering bringing former 2016 campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski back to help on the GOP convention alongside former 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
“Too Big To Rig”: Donald Trump is dialing up his warnings of a rigged 2024 election by unveiling a new slogan calling for a landslide victory that no amount of “election fraud” can overcome.
You might remember the candidate, Derek Myers, as the volunteer in then-Rep. George Santos’ congressional office who made a bizarre secret audio recording of internal office discussions and provided it to TPM.
Myers officially conceded hours after the mistaken concession, when he finished 11th in an 11-candidate GOP primary field in the OH-02.
For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.
Our goal for the first day of our membership drive was 100 new members. As of 10:03 PM on the east coast we’re at 99. Click here to put us over the edge.
Off to a good start, folks. We’ve signed up 70 new TPM Members so far today in the first day of our annual TPM Membership drive. We would love to get to 100 by the end of the day. If you’re not a member, please take a moment to join us. Click here to sign up! Want to know more about the drive? Click here.
On Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence made the surprise, historically unprecedented announcement that he will not be endorsing his former boss in 2024 — during an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Texas to smash through more than a century of precedent around federal supremacy over immigration law, with some members of the Court’s conservative majority citing procedural concerns to do so.
Former President Trump loves his beautiful boaters, apparently even when they are publicly expressing support for the extreme QAnon conspiracy theory. Photos posted to Facebook purportedly show Trump standing by the lawn at his private Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago on Sunday and waving over two boats, one of which was prominently decorated with a massive flag bearing his face and the well-known QAnon slogans “TRUST THE PLAN” and “WWG1WGA,” which is an acronym for “Where We Go One, We Go All.”
Folks, let me cut to the chase. Today kicks off our annual TPM membership drive. It is, as always, critical. Our team works all year producing the coverage, commentary and, we hope, insight that makes TPM a valued and trusted news source and our publishing team works just as hard fine-tuning our membership model, trying to add to our subscription numbers. But we rely on a key bump in the numbers during the annual drive. That’s what kicks off today. So if you’re a reader but not a member, please consider joining us. Or maybe you’re a former member. Can we coax you back? Think of it as fake it til you make it. Sign up for a year or even a month. See how it goes. We think you’ll want to stay.
What kind of work will you be supporting? We pride ourselves on punching way above our weight. We always have. Our membership page says, “Small Team, Big Results.” We work hard to make that true every day. But just consider some of our big exclusives since our last drive: There was our big series on The Meadows Texts. More recently we brought you our exclusive series on The Chesebro Docs and our big exclusive on the SACR Document Trove, our exposé on the secret society of White Christian men prepping a Christian nationalist government to take over after the fall of the American “regime.” Of course, everyone was on the Santos story. But TPM was the first to report the most substantial of the *alleged* (ahem) crimes that got him indicted and finally led to his expulsion from Congress. Sometimes, of course, we just love us some good old fashioned sleaze, with some sports adjacency thrown in — like our look at just who paid for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders epic six figure Super Bowl Extravaganza. (She sleazed it up bigly but good lord that was a good game!) Of course, as has always been the case at TPM, most of our best work doesn’t come in one-off big exclusives. It comes with a close, incremental, informed coverage of critical topics that often fall just below the national news radar. An ongoing example of that has been Kate Riga’s coverage of SCOTUS, the federal judiciary and particularly the tentacles the right-wing legal project has driven down into it in recent years, creating pipelines from the country’s most radical Trumpite judges right up to the high court. I even chip in myself with a few pieces.
That’s the work you’re supporting with your membership dollar. That’s the club we want you to become part of by subscribing. Some fun stats: Over 90% of our revenue comes directly from members. And the overwhelming majority of that revenue goes directly to the people who do the work. Salaries and benefits make up 74% of our expenses. It’s not going to some derivatives or debt service or into a corporate vortex that’s impossible to understand. This is a fully independent outfit. All the strategy emerges from inside the organization and that’s where all the final decisions are made too.
This is where you come in. If you’re not currently a member, please take a moment and join today. Just click right here. We want to sign up 1,000 new members during our drive. A huge number, but we think we can do it. If you’re already a member and are just really jazzed up about TPM after reading this you can always contribute to the TPM Journalism Fund. That’s really for another day and our other big annual drive. Today is about bringing more of you into the club. So what do you say? Join us!
