In less than a week, the TPM team is heading down to Austin to hang with our Texas readers and friends at the Observer. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, now is the time!
Remember, Inside members get free access to all events. And as Prime member, you get 33% off your tickets. Forgot or didn’t receive the discount code? Just email Joe Ragazzo at joe@talkingpointsmemo.com
As a reminder, the night will begin with a conversation between TPM founder and editor-in-chief Josh Marshall and Texas Observer’s politics editor, Justin Miller. They’ll be talking the Sen. John Cornyn vs. AG Ken Paxton runoff and the Trump endorsement that wasn’t; whether James Talarico can become the first Democratic senator in Texas in more than 30 years; and the state of the redistricting wars.
Then, D.C. reporter Kate Riga and Josh will record a live episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga. After the pod, there will be an audience Q&A and then we’ll wrap up the night in the bar.
News is breaking now that Trump has fired Pam Bondifrom her job as attorney general. Some reports suggest he may replace her with EPA head Lee Zeldin.
But Fox News reports that she’s actually been out of the job for the better part of a day now:
Bondi met with Trump in the Oval Office Wednesday night ahead of his speech to the nation on the war in Iran, where she reportedly was informed of her ouster, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.
One of those sources said that by the time Trump took his place behind the podium for the address, Bondi already lost her job and was on her way back to Florida.
Todd Blanche is now running DOJ as acting attorney general, NBC reports.
Every single day of the Trump II presidency is another display of performative racism, but today’s news — punctuated by last night’s address on the Iran War — is especially saturated with the casual white nationalism that has come to define the Trump era.
In his nonsensical, bellicose, we’re-almost-winning primetime appearance from the White House, Trump did notorious Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay one better. We’re not just going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age — a threat that roiled financial and commodities markets overnight — but the Stone Age is “where they belong,” Trump declared, saying loudly what has been the mostly quiet part of the last century plus of U.S. intervention abroad.
In a separate, under-the-radar foreign intervention, the U.S. has conducted 49 airstrikes on Islamic militant al-Shabab fighters in Somalia so far this year, a faster pace than last year’s record-setting 125 air strikes. Yesterday, Trump re-upped his viciously racist smears on Somalia and Somali-Americans:
Trump on Somali-Americans in Minnesota: "They're low IQ. I can generalize. They're low IQ people. They're bad people."(Note that moments later he claims Indianapolis is in Minnesota)
Trump’s racist threat against Iran came on the same day he became the first U.S. president to sit in on Supreme Court oral arguments, where he hoped to bully the conservative justices on the birthright citizenship case, itself a sour stew of xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy.
Recapping TPM’s coverage:
LIVEBLOG: The Supreme Court Decides Who Is Really American In Blockbuster Arguments
Josh Kovensky: Nativists Loom Over SCOTUS Birthright Citizenship Arguments
Kate Riga: Justices Express Skepticism Over Birthright Citizenship Case They Never Should Have Taken in the First Place
Quote of the Day
“Don’t get me wrong: I’m relieved that this case is shaping up as either 8-1 or 7-2 against the Trump executive order. But the case is a gift to the Supreme Court. By rejecting an outlandish position, it will earn credibility as apolitical, even as the Overton window moves far to the right.”—Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf, on the birthright citizenship case
Mass Deportation Watch
Birthright citizenship is the brass ring of Trump’s mass deportation operation, which licenses the racist targeting of people of color, with appalling violations of civil rights, human rights, and basic decency:
The Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death of nearly blind Rohingya refugee Nurul Amin Shah Alam, who was dumped by Border Patrol officers outside a closed Tim Hortons in Buffalo in freezing February weather, a homicide.
U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of Fresno, California, ruled that a Customs and Border Protetion operation last year in a Home Depot parking lot in Sacramento violated her ban against random immigration sweeps, which she had found were based on racial profiling.
The Corruption: DHS Edition
The virulent racism of Trump’s mass deportation operation is an opportunity to cash in, for everyone from detention center contractors to big tech to, allegedly, officials themselves.
The DHS inspector general has reportedly undertaken an “expansive inquiry” into Corey Lewandowski’s handling of contracts while serving as a special government employee under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the NYT reports. Elements of the investigation have been previously reported.
New DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin yesterday rescinded the Noem-era policy that every contract of more than $100,000 had to be approved by the secretary — which created a chokepoint for Lewandowski, according to various reports. The new threshold for secretary review is $25 million, according to CBS News.
DHS Shutdown Nears End
Earlier the morning, the Senate re-sent its DHS funding bill to the House, which is now expected to pass it eventually after a deal was struck between Senate Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson and the White House under which the House GOP and President Trump will pass the Senate version it rejected only a few days ago.
Dems Sue Over New Trump Election EO
Democrats — including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), the DNC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Governors Association — sued to block Trump’s latest executive order on elections, which is both about seizing the election administration apparatus from states and throwing up inane new procedural hurdles to voting that will disproportionately impact people of color.
Mahmoud Khalil Seeks Bove Recusal
Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, targeted by the Trump administration for removal because of his political views, is seeking the recusal of appeals court Judge Emil Bove, the former Trump DOJ official who now sits on the Third Circuit.
“Judge Bove wrote memoranda about and directed immigration enforcement investigations and decisions against student protesters on college campuses — particularly at Columbia University, where Mr. Khalil was enrolled,” Khalil’s attorneys argued in a new filing.
Trump DOJ Watch: Bondi on the Outs?
President Trump has openly talked about firing Attorney General Pam Bondi and replacing her with Lee Zeldin, the former congressman who is now the EPA administrator.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman on the Trump DOJ’s settlement with Mike Flynn: “It’s a rigged carny game, in which the marks are the American people. And Flynn won’t be the last to try his hand at it.”
In a flurry of filings — sealed and unsealed — attorneys for accused Capitol Hill pipe bomber Brian J. Cole Jr., signaled that their defense will include a counter-narrative that a former Capitol Police officer who was briefly investigated by the F.B.I. was the real culprit.
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Airports in chaos, Senate Republicans caving to Senate Democrats, House Republicans caving to Senate Republicans, a huge bill for Iran, the sweeping, voter-suppressing SAVE Act: there’s a lot that Congress is (in theory) handling right now with (in practice) limited success. TPM reporter Emine Yücel and I will try to make sense of it all at noon. Watch here.
There were two revealing moments during Donald Trump’s speech to the nation last night on the war in Iran, and another in a luncheon speech he gave earlier that day. The first was his threat to bomb Iranians “back to the Stone Age where they belong.” Trump was echoing, whether consciously or not, a comment that Air Force General Curtis LeMay had made in a 1965 book. LeMay advised that if North Vietnam didn’t bow to American aims in South Vietnam, the United States “should bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
I want to reiterate all the points I made about Trump’s speech last night. Just for the sake of his own political standing, the whole idea was a mistake. It wasn’t a good speech. It wasn’t delivered well. And it didn’t either make favorable news or actually address the issues that have the public or energy markets upset. I didn’t realize as I was watching the speech that his vague “two to three weeks” prediction of when the war will end was really just a restatement of what we might call the Trumpian Constant, the prescribed duration after Trump will, purportedly, always have gotten things worked out and awesome. The time before the Obamacare replacement plan is released, when infrastructure week will finally arrive. I mean, two weeks is genuinely a cliche with Trump or, in more modern parlance, a meme. Trump just tacked on another week. As you might have seen there are lots of charts floating around showing how the price of oil and oil futures spiked pretty dramatically during his speech.
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains.This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
On March 24, the Paris-based offices of Swiss bank Edmond de Rothschild were raided by French police. Officials were searching for evidence of wrongdoing for an investigation into possible corruption by a former UN diplomat turned employee who is mentioned dozens of times in the Jeffrey Epstein emails. Current head of the bank Arianne de Rothschild, who is also in the Epstein emails exchanging messages with Epstein himself, was present for the raid, which was part of a long-running investigation.
Yes, she is one of those Rothschilds: the 200-year old European banking dynasty claimed by conspiracy theorists to run all of the central banks in the world, hold $500 trillion in assets, and fund both sides of every war. Those Rothschilds are linked on multiple levels to Jeffrey Epstein, and in an email to fellow billionaire Peter Thiel, Epstein claimed to “represent the Rothschilds.”
Unsurprisingly, the conspiracy theory community was excited about the raid, seeing it as validation of their long-held views of the Rothschilds as part of a power elite that was no longer untouchable. A guest on Alex Jones’ show the day after the raid extolled it as “a small victory” in the fight against globalism. It would appear, then, that the idea of the Rothschilds being involved in the dark deeds of the global oligarchy is not a conspiracy theory, but just a conspiracy. It’s a vast and evil plot, carried out in secret, and only exposed by the diligence of truth-crusaders on the internet.
Or is it? What if Epstein’s link to the Rothschilds was neither a conspiracy, nor a conspiracy theory. What if it was just one of the countless connections many wealthy people have to each other, with their deeds difficult for outsiders to understand and mostly carried out through the banality of electronic communication?
The Edmond de Rothschild investigation isn’t actually about the bank, but someone who worked at the bank. And Ariane de Rothschild might be linked to Epstein, but she’s not currently under investigation for any crimes. So if there is a conspiracy, what exactly is it?
This is when the difference between “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory” becomes crucial to understand.
I think any press person who watched President Trump’s Iran cheer-up session speech on truth serum would have to concede that this was a speech he shouldn’t have given. He meandered. He looked bad and worn out. He had the requisite moments when his degenerate inner monologue creeps into the open: he said that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something for importer countries in Asia to deal with, that they should “grab and cherish” the strait, as though it were some underage beauty pageant contestant Trump was hungering to assault. What is important is that in political and public opinion terms, there was nothing new or newsworthy in this speech. They didn’t even manage to accomplish this in the narrow and cynical sense of saying anything new that could be a fresh point of public discussion. It was a rambling set of unconvincing excuses no one with any real concern or anxiety about this war (the only real audience) would find convincing. Why are you complaining, he asks? This war hasn’t gone on nearly as long as World War II! LOL.
Market watchers will note that the White House is now solidifying around the idea that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something importer countries will have to deal with, that it’s not America’s problem. That means that the economic fallout of the war will continue unabated. This is simply rebranding a massive strategic defeat as some kind of America First swagger. Of course, oil markets are global. It doesn’t really matter if the U.S. makes as much oil as it consumes. That’s not how prices work.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a sweeping new voter suppression bill into law on Wednesday that is meant to mirror the national documentary proof of citizenship legislation that, to right-wing activists’ great displeasure, is currently languishing in a Republican-controlled Congress due to the Senate’s filibuster rules.
The hard right has long wanted to end birthright citizenship in the United States. The view only came into vogue with the Republican mainstream — and entered the White House — in the last decade.
