Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of confession. It hasn’t worked for me, and I struggle to weigh my guilt around that (should have worked harder!) against what I know is a structural problem. Patron-supported journalism (including newsletters) is both a throwback to the earliest mode of media production and, as it exists today, the newest way for capitalism to suffocate dissent.
Continue reading “Patron-Supported Journalism Can’t Be the Future of News “Oral Arguments Reveal Dangerous Haziness Around National Guard Powers
A panel of appellate judges spent considerable time Wednesday prodding at whether the National Guard troops currently deployed in American cities are subject to the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) — a worrying sign of the ambiguity around what power the Guard has.
Continue reading “Oral Arguments Reveal Dangerous Haziness Around National Guard Powers”Special Deal on Tickets to our Live Podcast Taping
If you’ve been considering joining us for the live taping of our podcast on November 6 in New York, we now have a limited number of tickets available at 50% off made possible by two new member-sponsors of the event. That’s $75 a ticket. These are for TPM members only. We know the full ticket price is a heavy lift for some TPM Readers. So if that includes you, I hope you’ll grab one while they last. Just click right here.
What Bret Stephens Is Getting Wrong About Zohran Mamdani
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens devotes his column to attacking New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for his views of Israel and the Palestinians. I don’t want to assess Mamdani’s views except to say that mine are somewhat different, but that I share his opposition to what Israel has become and what it has done to the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper. What I want to comment on is a certain kind of criticism that Stephens makes in attacking Mamdani’s views — a criticism that is sometimes made of my own views.
Stephens writes, “One of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker is that the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s; the only state among dozens of religious states whose legitimacy they challenge is Israel; the only group whose suffering they are prepared to turn into their personal crusade is that of the Palestinians. What gives?” The question is: why has Mamdani focussed so much on the plight of the Palestinians? The answer, I’d argue, is fairly obvious: Mamdani is a Muslim, and the preponderance of Israel’s victims in Gaza and the West Bank are Muslims.
Continue reading “What Bret Stephens Is Getting Wrong About Zohran Mamdani”North Carolina GOP Acts on Trump Demand, Approves New Map That Flips Dem Seat
The Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature approved a new gerrymandered congressional district map this week, making North Carolina the latest state to cave to the Trump administration’s mid-cycle redistricting pressure campaign.
Continue reading “North Carolina GOP Acts on Trump Demand, Approves New Map That Flips Dem Seat”Trump Moves Into Full Twilight Zone ‘Anthony’ Phase
Yesterday, for me, was a mixed visual and reported tableaux. There were the visuals: Donald Trump literally bulldozing about a third of the White House complex. It’s not the main house itself, which goes back more than two centuries, albeit with a rather intense renovation. It’s not the the West Wing where most of the post-war history is. But still, Good lord, he brought in a bulldozer and tore the thing down. Then I saw the news reports that Trump is demanding that his toadies at the Justice Department cut him a check for $230 million. I couldn’t tell whether this was notionally to repay his legal expenses or to compensate him for the tort of being indicted for the crimes for which the Supreme Court let him off the hook. He didn’t seem clear himself. In an impromptu press availability yesterday he said he needed the quarter of a billion for “the fraud of the 2020 election”.
Continue reading “Trump Moves Into Full Twilight Zone ‘Anthony’ Phase”How Does Mike Davis Know Who a New Federal Grand Jury Will Target?
The Retribution: Mar-a-Lago Edition?
This gets a little convoluted, but it’s potentially quite important so stick with me for a moment here.
Bloomberg News has sleuthed out a federal grand jury in Florida that could be another thread of President Trump’s wide-ranging investigate the investigators retribution scheme.
The news that a grand jury is set to probe a bogus Democratic-led “grand conspiracy” against Trump was divulged by Trump ally Mike Davis — the rabble-rousing conservative legal activist who briefly clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — during an appearance last week on the Charlie Kirk Show:
Asked by the host about next steps for an investigation into a “grand conspiracy” against Trump, Davis replied that US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones — whom he described as “my buddy” — had received court approval for a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, that “should be fully up and running by January.”
Davis said that the court order he was referring to was a “public document.”
Those comments didn’t get much attention until Davis posted them on X yesterday. That appears to have prompted Bloomberg to go search for the public document Davis referenced.
Bloomberg hit pay dirt with a court order by U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga, the chief judge of Southern District of Florida, that was filed on Sept. 26. On a motion from the Justice Department, she ordered that two grand juries be empaneled beginning on Jan. 12, 2026, one in Ft. Lauderdale and the other in Ft. Pierce. As Davis put it in his X post: “We need a special grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. That’s ground zero for the Mar-a-Lago raid.”
Davis declined to comment to Bloomberg, but in his Oct. 17 appearance on the Charlie Kirk Show, Davis warned “lawfare Democrats” that it was time to “lawyer up”:
After discussing the grand jury order, Davis spoke about the need for an investigation into whether a range of former public officials from the Biden and Obama administrations had conspired to violate Trump’s rights.
“I would say to these lawfare Democrats who waged this unprecedented, Republic-ending Russian collusion hoax conspiracy against President Trump, his top aides and his supporters over the last eight years, I would say to those lawfare Democrats to lawyer up,” Davis said.
While the court order Bloomberg found syncs up with what Davis claimed publicly, a lot remains murky and … odd, to say the least.
It’s not clear from the court order or any other publicly available information what the Ft. Pierce grand jury will be investigating. If it is slated to investigate some MAGA fever dream of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump, it’s not evident what the precise flavor of this particular conspiracizing is, although the fact that it’s in the same division as the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case might provide a clue. It’s also not immediately apparent why the Justice Department would need such a long lead time before the grand jury begins its work in January.
But most of all, it’s highly unusual for someone like Mike Davis to have information about what a yet-to-be empaneled federal grand jury is up to, including who it will target, even if he is good buddies with the U.S. attorney. Or at least it would have been extraordinarily unusual before the Justice Department began being run out of the Trump II White House.
Bloomberg puts the nascent Florida grand jury in the broader context of its own prior reporting on another federal grand jury investigation of the investigators that Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly ordered over the summer after getting a criminal referral from DNI Tulsi Gabbard with claims of “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” against Trump.
“President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump,” DNI said in a July press release. That prompted a rare public rebuke at the time from an Obama spokesperson.
Davis’ use of “lawfare” might be telling. If the earlier grand jury was being used to target the intel side of the purported Deep State conspiracy against Trump, it’s plausible that the Ft. Pierce grand jury could be the companion vehicle for retribution against prosecutors and investigators. But we – or at least those of us not named Mike Davis – don’t really know.
Last week, the day before Davis’ remarks, Trump himself stood in the Oval Office next to Bondi, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel and called for them to investigate former Special Counsel Jack Smith, former deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
“It’s time to drag every name into the light. Every last one will face justice,” Davis said on X.
The Retribution: IWWG Edition
A group of former intelligence, law enforcement and State Department officials warned that the Trump administration’s newly revealed Interagency Weaponization Working Group threatens to become “an American KGB,” Jeff Stein reports.
The Corruption: $230M Edition
President Trump has been pressing claims against the U.S. government since before he was re-elected, seeking compensation for the investigations and prosecutions he faced from the Justice Department. Now those claims — totaling some $230 million — could be paid to him by his own Justice Department, where he installed his personal lawyers as top officials.
Even Trump — not known to be sensitive to appearances — recognized the conflict of interest: “I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
The Destruction: Literally
With new photographs emerging, it became abundantly clear yesterday that President Trump has ordered the demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House to make room for construction of his ill-fitting, gaudy ballroom.
“They’re wrecking it,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist and professor emeritus at Towson University told the WaPo. “And these are changes that can’t be undone. They’re destroying that history forever.”
The Latest on Venezuela
- New Yorker: The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats
- WaPo: Trump beats the drums of war for direct action in Venezuela
- NYT: Prosecutors in Ecuador decided not to charge a man who survived a U.S. strike in the Caribbean and have already released him.
Ingrassia Is Out
After some initial confusion over whether U.S. Special Counsel-nominee Paul Ingrassia was cancelling his appearance at his confirmation hearing tomorrow or outright withdrawing his nomination, the White House confirmed it was yanking him entirely in the wake of his I-have-a-bit-of-a-Nazi-streak text.
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Federal Agents Detain Mix of Protesters and Migrants in Massive Manhattan Sweep
NEW YORK – At least five federal agencies were involved in a massive immigration raid on Canal Street in Manhattan on Tuesday. The huge, heavily armored federal law enforcement presence included masked agents who arrested a mix of migrants and protesters in what both activists and local elected officials are calling an ominous escalation.
“The coordinated effort of having federal agents en masse in New York City should worry everyone,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams (D) told TPM in an interview on Wednesday morning.
Continue reading “Federal Agents Detain Mix of Protesters and Migrants in Massive Manhattan Sweep “This Post Should Have Been Shorter
My favorite political blog post of all time was published by Jim Newell on the manic site Wonkette.com on September 12, 2008, at the height of the hope-and-change era preceding Obama’s first election. Its headline is, “Typical Florida Person Creates Year’s Best Campaign Sign.” The entire body of the post, cribbed from a long-disappeared local news story, consists of a closeup photo of a handmade plywood yard sign that reads “OBAMA HALF-BREED MUSLIN,” accompanied by two sentences of the news story: “Lacasse put the sign in his front yard four days ago. ‘If I see anybody touching that sign, I got a club sitting right over there,’ Lacasse said.”
The original story, to be sure, had the name and age of the man and relevant background facts and context. But the blog post had everything you really needed to know. He got a club sitting right over there.
When the blog era really got rolling in the late aughts, much of the traditional media dismissed bloggers as amateurish and borderline unethical pretenders to the title of “journalists.” Bloggers, the traditional wisdom went, were young, snide purveyors of dashed-off riffs on the weightier work of Real Reporters, a band of irresponsible little shits making fun of writers whose prestige they would never match.
Well. Not all of us were so young. The rest of the criticism was kind of true. Still, as the golden age of blogs recedes in the rearview mirror, one point about the editorial legacy of bloggers demands to be made. For all of the derision that traditional journalism heaped upon them, I’d argue that good bloggers have better editorial judgment than any other type of writer.
Continue reading “This Post Should Have Been Shorter”Trump Special Counsel Nominee Paul Ingrassia Withdraws After ‘Nazi’ Texts
Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew his name from consideration after texts surfaced in which he said he had a “bit of a Nazi streak.”
Continue reading “Trump Special Counsel Nominee Paul Ingrassia Withdraws After ‘Nazi’ Texts”