The Federal Reserve opted to raise interest rates by one-quarter of a percent, or 25 basis points, in a unanimous vote on Wednesday. It’s the first rate hike since 2023, when the Fed was responding to pandemic and supply chain disruption.
Continue reading “Trump’s Threats to Stop Trade Couldn’t Keep the Fed from Hiking Interest Rates”Trump: If I Can’t Have the Kennedy Center, No One Can
The Grinding Long Haul of Trump II
The news this week is littered with examples indicating that accountability for the depredations of Trump II — if it ever comes — will be so slow, drawn-out, exhausting, and limited that it will never feel satisfying, complete, or just.
Part of that is the nature of the legal and political systems. Part of it is the ravages of time. But a key part of it is the unrelentingness of Trump and the people around him to keep pushing on his campaigns of retribution and corruption well after any chance of succeeding has evaporated, leaving sheer destruction as the only remaining outcome.
That’s not grudging admiration for Trump’s relentlessness. It’s clear-eyed recognition that Trump doesn’t believe in anything, not even himself. With a nihilist, there is no principal at stake, nothing that constitutes a win or a loss, no compelling self-interest or sense of self-preservation that forestalls destroying the thing he pretends to care about for a time. Trump is a hostage-taker without a conscience.
For those fighting the good fight to defend that which Trump would destroy, the battle seems never to end. He’s not chastened by setbacks or losses or adverse verdicts, but rather just adopts the next most aggressive litigation posture, no matter how much moral opprobrium and ethical revulsion has been heaped on his misconduct or litigation strategy. It’s like a Seinfeld episode: no story arc, but instead a flat line with no growth or discovery.
Trump has taken the worst features of the federal government — big, lumbering, inexorable, and indiscriminate — and weaponized them against individuals and institutions. Political foes, arts venues, undocumented immigrants, and a host of other Trump targets may weather the initial storm, but they are ground down under the continuous onslaught.
In many cases, by the time accountability comes, public interest has long since waned because the slow pace of the fight exceeds our cognitive ability to track all the details, the twists and turns, and what the fight was about in the first place.
The Destruction: Kennedy Center Edition
Trump’s months-long attack on the Kennedy Center is this week’s best example of “Wait, didn’t Trump already lose on this?”
Ordered by a federal court to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center facade, the board grudgingly obliged but since then has kept the restored marble sans Trump’s name under cover of a tarp and then voted to put his name back on the building — in two different ways — and name the site for Trump, too.
A judge yesterday handed Trump yet another loss, ruling that this new renaming scheme would violate his original injunction and ordering it stopped again. The administration immediately appealed that ruling, too.
Meanwhile, the board was already plotting to just shut the whole thing down, which it voted to do yesterday and then actually did do late in the day. It’s ostensibly closing for “the Reconstruction and the Renovation,” as Trump put it, on the pretext that the building is on the verge of collapse. “Reconstruction” implies deconstruction, so we may get a literal tearing down of parts of the existing Kennedy Center, not just the figurative collapse of the first-rate venue that Trump has already precipitated.
The cycle is so clear: Attack, attack, attack — even if it means destroying the thing you purport to covet. If I can’t have the Kennedy Center, then no one can.
Up against this relentless onslaught is Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio board member not captive to Trump, who never in her wildest dreams imagined that she would spend her seventh term in Congress fighting in court to save the Kennedy Center.
The power imbalance is a critical element of many of the Trump II legal fights. The full weight of the federal government, being flagrantly abused by Trump, versus cobbled-together-on-the-fly plaintiffs and attorneys, assembled sometimes by happenstance and the need to thread the needle of having legal standing to sue in the first place.
The Retribution: James Comey Edition
Here’s another good example of the never-ending Trump fights. Since former FBI Director James Comey handed the Trump DOJ a humiliating defeat in his first indictment, the Justice Department has appealed that ruling and then indicted him a second time.
You can be forgiven for losing the thread. What started as a well-lawyered legal attack on Trump’s vindictive prosecutions of his political foes morphed into an attack on Trump’s corruption of the Justice Department, specifically his scheme to install loyalists as U.S. attorneys in blue states.
Perhaps the most egregious episode of the scheme was firing the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and replacing him with White House aide Lindsey Halligan, who had zero experience as a prosecutor, just in time to indict Comey before the statute of limitations expired. A judge found Halligan’s appointment unlawful, making the indictments she secured void.
Halligan’s appointment — which also produced the bogus indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James — was before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond yesterday on a consolidated appeal by the Trump DOJ. The three-judge panel — two Obama appointees and a Trump appointee — seemed likely to split along partisan lines in upholding the lower court’s disqualification of Halligan and dismissal of the Comey and James indictments.
Trump DOJ Targets Reporter’s LinkedIn Account
LinkedIn has been secretly fighting a Trump DOJ subpoena for a reporter’s 1,900 interactions with six users on the social media platform in a national security leak investigation, Politico reports.
Limited details about the still-sealed case in the Eastern District of Virginia spilled out yesterday during oral arguments in front of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. It’s not clear what leak is being investigated or which reporter is involved. The precise nature of the subpoena also remains unclear, but it was accompanied by a “non-disclosure order” from a federal judge prohibiting LinkedIn from alerting its users to the subpoena.
Judge Blocks ICE Warning to Critic
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras of D.C. found that ICE likely violated the First Amendment’s right to free speech when it issued a bizarre “Warning Notice” to a New York man who sent then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons a critical — but not threatening — three-paragraph email in the aftermath of the fatal ICE shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during January’s Operation Metro Surge.
Judge Contreras issued a preliminary injunction barring the Department of Homeland Security from retaking further actions against David Streever based on either the “Warning Notice” or his email to Lyons.
In an opinion that began by invoking the Declaration of Independence as itself a bill of grievances, Judge Contreras concluded, “The notice practically shouts that Mr. Streever may be prosecuted if he continues to engage in his political speech.”
The DOGE Purges: $9.5 Billion Not to Work
The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
EU Leader Embraces Canadian Proposal
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said publicly she would work to make Canada the EU’s first associate member — a goal of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as he looks for shelter from the Trump II storm.
Pentagon Hides Iran War Damage
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is not being candid with the public about the extensive damage that Iran has inflicted on U.S. facilities and military assets during the conflict.
A new Pentagon inspector general report released this week — covering only April 1-June 30, 2026 — offers a glimpse of the toll that the conflict has taken on U.S. resources in the Middle East:
- Iranian counterstrikes have “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan.”
- Dozens of U.S. aircraft have been destroyed or damaged:
Last evening, CBS News published exclusive photos provided by active duty service members of damage to U.S. assets in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The photos were undated.
“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
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Tierra Walker Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion. Her Family Is Suing Ken Paxton.
This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
The family of a woman who died after she could not get an abortion in Texas is suing doctors and state officials including Attorney General Ken Paxton. It is the first lawsuit over a death linked to an abortion ban.
Continue reading “Tierra Walker Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion. Her Family Is Suing Ken Paxton.”Trump Cooks Up New Conspiracy Theories About the Butler Assassination Attempt
Trump Asserts (Without Evidence, of Course) That the Biden Administration Tried to Murder Him
One thing I would not have expected President Donald J. Trump to be spending his time on with just weeks to go until Election Day is creating new conspiracy theories about Tom Crooks, who shot at him in the summer of 2024 from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania. But here we are.
The president yesterday asserted on Truth Social that Butler “was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed.”
That the assassination attempt was the work of Trump’s political enemies is a baseless claim that the White House has leaned into for some time. In early January, the White House published a revisionist history of Jan. 6 that, TPM’s Hunter Walker noted at the time, included the following line: “Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him … President Trump emerges triumphant.”
The website suggested, without any shred of evidence, that what happened in Butler was the work of the “Deep State” — the catch-all term for any government bureaucrat who might be behaving in a disfavored way, from slowing deregulation to, apparently, plotting a presidential candidate’s murder.
But Trump himself blaming it directly on a “Democrat Plot” takes the claim to another level. He then went on to castigate former FBI Director Chris Wray, claiming materials about the assassination were “missing, altered, corrupted or gone” and declaring Wray should “pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt.”
It’s unclear what Trump is gesturing toward here, if anything. The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” was provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.
Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.
FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Among the few things we do know about Crooks, in fact, was that his desire to create a spectacle appeared nonpartisan. He went to the gun range a lot, and didn’t talk very much. He googled the dates of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He researched school shooters, and Lee Harvey Oswald, to whom he is now often compared.
“Neither Oswald nor Crooks were the kind of people who make history, not like Kennedy and Trump,” wrote Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, around Butler’s second anniversary. “But somehow, these two losers found a way to write their names into the fabric of American lore. Something greater had to be at work. There had to be a conspiracy — who was behind it and why would have to be filled in later.”
A significant portion — 24% — of Americans now believe Butler was staged, polls suggest. An additional 32% don’t know what to think. These conspiracy theorists, however, tend not to believe it was the work of Democrats. Rather, they think it was a plot orchestrated by Trump himself.
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Bigotry and Corruption
As Republican senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents or opted not to run again, some reporters at news outlets that cover Capitol Hill closely rubbed their hands together, predicting that now Trump would really have a problem on his hands. The results have been … underwhelming. Honestly kind of lame. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) red lines are confusing, shifting, and often meaningless. Same — but even more so — for Bill Cassidy (R-LA). John Cornyn (R-TX) too.
But, despite the lack of a substantive shift in GOP legislating, it has been interesting to see these senators critique their own party with insiders’ knowledge.
- Here’s John Cornyn, speaking to veteran Hill reporter Igor Bobic about racist tweets by Texas candidate Bo French and all the Nazi staffers in the GOP: “I think too many people are tolerating conduct that in the past would have been disqualifying when it comes to politics, and what’s happened, I think people’s sort of public standards have eroded to where a lot of things that, like I said, that would not have been tolerated before, or normalized.”
- He continues: “Some of the anti-Semitism, some of the bigotry like Bo French’s comments, and some of the corruption, and I think those are those are the death knell for a political party.” Sounds right! Except for the “death knell” part — plenty of political movements worldwide (and through U.S. history) have built their ascendancy on hate.
- Josh Kovensky has a look at the imbroglio around French’s racist and anti-immigrant posts, which is somewhat confusing, as he’s been doing this for months. More broadly, the Texas GOP has built its midterm strategy around fear-mongering about Indian-Americans and Muslim immigrants.
The Epstein Reckoning Hits the Midterm Campaign Trail
This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
As Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas for their pre-midterm convention last week, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico focused on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein.
Talarico got a tour of the Reading Room, a traveling exhibit of the nearly 3 million files that the Department of Justice released from its investigation into the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender — the result of a hard-fought battle by survivors of Epstein’s abuse who are still seeking justice and transparency from a government they say repeatedly failed them.
Continue reading “The Epstein Reckoning Hits the Midterm Campaign Trail”Back Inside the Silicon Valley Class War
If you’re a subscriber to Wired.com I want to suggest that you read this piece: Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump.
It’s interesting enough that I’d suggest it would be worth whatever one month free or first month for a buck offers they might have to sign up. (Of course, I’m all for subscribing to every publication. Some of you will decide to keep it long term.) And if you can’t, it’s actually an excerpt from a book which, I think, is out today, titled: Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry.
The piece published in Wired doesn’t cover any terribly surprising new ground for people who’ve followed this story closely. But it does add new layers of detail and a more coherent narrative. In so many words the pandemic created a situation in which both the Democrats and Big Tech’s own employees turned against the owner founders. And that sent the owner founders running toward the right and Donald Trump. For a variety of reasons the tech giants went on a hiring spree during the pandemic — cheap money, Zoom life, work from home, everything bought online and delivered to your home. But then they got spooked and the markets didn’t like it. They’d overextended themselves and they decided that the problem was that they weren’t efficient enough and that their employees were lazy. The authors note a key point that layoffs went differently in tech than in traditional manufacturing, where layoffs have a direct impact on revenues, even if they may make good profit and loss sense. In tech, a lot of your value is already banked in the code. Layoffs probably won’t catch up with you for a while.
Continue reading “Back Inside the Silicon Valley Class War”Patel Won’t Rule Out FBI Agents At the Polls Because … He Got Tired of Dems Asking About It?
FBI At the Polls Bc I’m Annoyed
FBI Director Kash Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and seemed, at least initially, interested in following federal laws against deploying armed federal law enforcement to polling places this fall.
Under federal law, armed federal agents or members of the military cannot be deployed to “any place where a general or special election is held.” That’s established. The reason that Democrats are routinely pressing Patel, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, the head of the Defense Department and other Trump administration officials about whether federal law enforcement officers — whether it’s FBI agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or others — might be deployed to the polls this fall is because President Trump has been agitating around the idea for some time.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump was vocal about his interest in deploying the military domestically to seize voting machines in counties he thought he should have won. Since then, and in the wake of his second term’s nationwide immigration crackdown — the lethality of which has prompted widespread backlash and protests — his allies outside of the administration have been pushing the White House to send ICE officers to the polls in the midterms. Trump’s allies, like podcaster Steve Bannon, have promoted the line that Democrats win elections only when they cheat and have noncitizen voters cast ballots in federal elections for them. The conspiracy theory has been debunked repeatedly over the years, but Trump’s belief in it has formed the basis of most of his legislative agenda for his second term — and has animated all of his Justice Department’s efforts to seize the constitutionally-protected right to administer elections from the states.
‘Don’t Know That We Can’t Legally Do It’
While Patel initially stuck to boilerplate lines about how he has done nothing but follow the law during his tenure as FBI chief, he also suggested that he thinks it is not necessarily illegal for FBI agents to be sent to polling places. It appears he may have been arguing that agents are allowed to follow up on violations of law, a line that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has used when asked if ICE agents might be sent to the polls. (“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said earlier this month. “If we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”)
“I don’t know that we can’t legally do it,” Patel said in response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asking him to commit to not sending FBI agents to the polls in November. Patel said that he would follow the law and keep agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices in case there were any election security-related issues to address.
“The FBI will follow the law,” Patel said. “If there’s a reason to go there, because there’s been a violation of law, we will, otherwise we won’t.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) questioned him about Justice Department policy that restricts federal law enforcement activities or investigations at polling places on Election Day.
“Are you aware of the Justice Department’s long-standing guidance that states that FBI agents cannot conduct investigations inside polling places on Election Day, and that federal prosecutors have no authority to send FBI special agents or deploy U.S. Marshals to polling places?” Klobuchar asked.
“I’m aware,” Patel replied.
“Will you commit to following clear federal law and DOJ policy and not deploy federal agents to polling places?” she asked.
“We will always follow the law and the guidelines,” he said.
But when Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) began questioning Patel about the matter, Patel started wildly obfuscating.
GOP Mad at Candidate For Doing Xenophobia The Wrong Way
Bo French wasn’t always this way. When he first ran for statewide office in Texas in 2016, he was an oil industry scion who hadn’t quite found his way: a partnership with American sniper Chris Kyle had fallen apart after his death; other business ventures petered out. In an ad, French portrayed himself as a nice guy: a compassionate conservative, and a family man to boot. His wife appeared in one campaign video, describing him as a “humble” man possessed of a “servant’s heart.”
Ten years later, French portrays himself differently. He’s now openly xenophobic, an attribute that attracted national attention when, last Sunday, he posted to X that a group of nonwhite UT students celebrating at a football was “a problem” that had was “now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” It caused a firestorm, and was enough to earn condemnation from the Texas GOP; not a small feat given that Republicans in the state have spent the last year running on demonizing Muslims.
Continue reading “GOP Mad at Candidate For Doing Xenophobia The Wrong Way”Trying to Make Sense of the AI Experts When No One Knows What’s Going On
I wanted to share a few more thoughts with you about this roiling public debate about AI and the dangers of rogue, uncontrollable “agents.”
I start with the quite predictable conclusion that a lot of the contending theories we were talking about are true at the same time, at least to some degree. It is impossible not to see how a controlled deceleration of AI development serves financial purposes for the frontier AI labs. A regulatory pause sort of freezes their current lead in place, at least to a degree. It also allows them to focus on the massive returns of what we might call “meh” AI/LLMs while deprioritizing the kind of cutting edge research that costs a lot, has various risks and doesn’t have clear returns within the time horizon of your IPO. (The two top U.S. “frontier” labs are in their final preparations for going public.) It has also become increasingly clear to me that significant chunks of the AI world are in the thrall of a self-styled “rationalist” subculture which spends an inordinate amount of time postulating future human extinction events — dressed up in a lot of “rationalist” language but about which no one really has any idea — and then devising often quite sinister strategies for averting these imagined futures. (AI was a big focus of theirs before the last few years, but they have several storylines about future extinction events in the distant future.) It is finally the case that a lot of the people sounding these alarms have little acquaintance with how the world works outside of the computing domain and speak on issues of intelligence, sentience and self-awareness while knowing little or nothing about the scientific fields where these topics have been studied for decades or even centuries.
Needless to say, none of these facts inspire a lot of confidence.
Continue reading “Trying to Make Sense of the AI Experts When No One Knows What’s Going On”Samuel Alito: Disenfranchising Millions of Voters Is No Big Deal If Mister Trump Wants It
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
For months, President Donald Trump has been coping with his myriad failures and plummeting approval ratings by trying to make it harder for people to vote his party out of power in the 2026 midterms. To that end, in March, he issued an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to draft a rule that would upend vote-by-mail procedures in dozens of states, and effectively block the agency from processing ballots that do not comply with the rule’s exacting requirements. Trump did not attempt to hide his motives for doing so: Legal restrictions on mail-in voting, he told Republican lawmakers, would “guarantee the midterms” for a party that is otherwise in danger of losing them badly.
Continue reading “Samuel Alito: Disenfranchising Millions of Voters Is No Big Deal If Mister Trump Wants It”