I wanted to make sure you had a chance to read this piece TPM’s Hunter Walker published over the weekend about “challenge coins” being distributed at the mass deportation hub in Minneapolis celebrating operating “metro surge,” the ICE invasion that resulted in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in addition to longer litany of abuse, violence and general predation. As you can see, the visuals are some mix of first person shooter and Aryan Nations rally. As we note in the piece, it’s hard to know at just what level of officialdom these trinkets were produced and signed off on. But they’re artifacts of the violent and degenerate culture that spawned those two murders. If you didn’t get a chance to read it this weekend I hope you will now.
In addition, there are cases like this from ICE offices around the country. So we are looking for more examples. If you’ve been privy to similar instances — maybe you’ve seen similar challenge coins distributed around other ICE or CBP operation — please let us know. You can contact us through our normal tips line or by secure channels, all of which are described here.
It’s not hard to look around America today and see signs of decay, corruption and decline. I thought of this yesterday when I saw this Semafor article on Egypt’s ambitious push to transition its electrical grid to renewables. The gist is that Egypt is trying to move from getting 10% to 45% of it electricity from renewables in two years. That’s a mind-bogglingly ambitious goal. But it’s not based on ideology or high-minded goals about limiting climate change or the situation you have in the U.S. where renewables — wind and solar — are somehow considered “woke.” Egypt doesn’t have that luxury, notwithstanding being geo-politically aligned with the major fossil fuel exporters. Fossil fuels are not only pricey, they make especially developing economies vulnerable to constant price shocks, whether it’s the Ukraine War, Iran War or the inflation spike coming out of COVID. Egypt is focused on wind power. And there’s no way to hit that ambitious two-year schedule without China, building China’s soft power and economic reach at the same time the U.S. seems determined to throw ours away.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Last week, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the County of Washtenaw, Michigan, and several of its local officials, accusing them of illegally interfering with federal immigration law. In a press release, DOJ touted the lawsuit as just the latest in “a series of 14 other suits” targeting “illegal sanctuary policies across the country.”
“Sanctuary policies” is not a legal term, and there’s no universal definition of what it actually means. Even within the Trump administration, what constitutes a “sanctuary city”—a conservative buzzword that generally refers to state and local laws that limit whether and how the jurisdiction can cooperate with federal immigration enforcement—has been subject to some dispute. In May 2025, the Department of Homeland Security posted a list publicly identifying hundreds of municipalities as “sanctuary jurisdictions,” and pulled the list down a few days later, following backlash from Trump-supporting sheriffs across the country who were confused and offended by the inclusion of their jurisdictions.
The Trump administration went back to the drawing board. And in August, the DOJ published a new list identifying 12 states, the District of Columbia, and several cities and counties as sanctuary jurisdictions. Two of those jurisdictions later agreed to collaborate on Trump’s immigration agenda, and DOJ subsequently removed them from the list.
However, avoiding the sanctuary list doesn’t guarantee that jurisdictions get to avoid the DOJ’s sanctuary lawsuits. Washtenaw, the sixth-largest county in Michigan and home of the state’s flagship university, doesn’t appear on the list. The DOJ is suing it anyway.
The descent of the Justice Department into a crude weapon wielded by an erratic authoritarian is gathering speed and quickening the threat to America’s fraying democracy in ways that we all feared but hoped might be kept at bay for a bit longer.
The series of developments yesterday would have been, just two years ago, a near worst-case scenario:
Rather than do its duty to defend the hard-won convictions of a dozen Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders for seditious conspiracy on Jan. 6., the Trump DOJ abandoned those convictions in a new filing at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Trump DOJ prevailed at the D.C. Circuit in avoiding even an investigation by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg into the brazen contempt of court the DOJ enabled and has since defended in the original Alien Enemies Act case.
Federal prosecutors under D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro made an unannounced site visit to Federal Reserve headquarters in what was both an audacious act of intimidation divorced from proper investigatory techniques and a way for Pirro to toss an ingratiating bouquet to President Trump, who has made targeting the Fed’s independence a top priority.
The Trump DOJ released the first of its bogus “weaponization” reports, a propagandistic attack on the Justice Department under Joe Biden that is itself a political weapon.
The abandonment of the seditious conspiracy convictions stands foremost among yesterday’s parade of horribles. These were the most serious convictions to emerge from the Jan. 6 autocoup for which the Roberts Court spared Trump himself from facing criminal prosecution. We know — yet it bears repeating for ourselves and for history — that the seditionists sought to overturn the Constitution by installing Trump as president through violence despite his having lost the 2020 election. It was the first non-peaceful transfer of power in our our history and the most serious threat to the Republic other than the Civil War itself.
The abandonment of the convictions is clarifying in its own way and amounts to an admission by Trump. In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, Trump distanced himself from the seditionists, and in the years since had modulated his closeness to them, depending on what suited him politically in the moment. The Proud Boys always knew the truth and were never fooled. Not every one was as sophisticated. But now all pretenses are gone, and Trump is fully embracing the tip of the insurrectionist spear. Stand back and stand by, indeed.
A Contempt of Court Cover-up for the Ages
The second most egregious of yesterday’s indignities was the majority decision by two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit to pull the rug out from under Judge Boasberg, who has been patiently and diligently pursuing a contempt of court inquiry into the Trump administration’s defiance of his orders blocking the Alien Enemies Act deportations.
The sneering tone toward Boasberg from Judge Neomi Rao in the majority opinion reinforced how much cover the Trump appointees have been giving the president as the administration seeks to cover up the details of its complicity in defying Boasberg’s orders.
The D.C. Circuit bogged Boasberg down for seven months last year while it slow-rolled the case before eventually letting him proceed. Now it has cut him off at the knees again. It is hard to overstate the level of abdication this represents of the judiciary’s own powers under the law and its authority to enforce its orders against a renegade executive like Trump.
Still, there emerged during last year’s consideration of the contempt inquiry a clear sign that a majority of the appeals court writ large backed Boasberg’s inquiry, so while the writing was on the wall as soon as this particular three-judge panel got the case back for a second bite at the apple, the real test will be whether the full circuit takes up the case and vindicates not just the beleaguered Boasberg but the the very notion that the judiciary is a co-equal branch.
After the ruling, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took an unseemly Boasberg-bashing victory lap: “Today’s decision by the DC Circuit should finally end Judge Boasberg’s year-long campaign against the hardworking Department attorneys doing their jobs fighting illegal immigration.”
Pirro’s Pirouettes for Trump
We step back from the existential and constitutional threats to the Republic for a taste of Trump II absurdism: Pirro’s two henchman made an unannounced visit to the Feds’ headquarters ostensibly to investigate its renovation project, which is the purported basis for what is really a retributive criminal investigation to further erode Fed independence and bring it to heel under Trump.
Like Ed Martin’s Columbo-style visit last year to a Brooklyn property owned by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the site visit by Pirro’s duo smacked of intimidation and taunting — and performative derring-do to curry favor with Trump.
Departing from DOJ policies of the past, Pirro gave up the game by releasing a statement after her underlings were turned away by the Fed: “Any construction project that has cost overruns of almost 80 percent over the original construction budget deserves some serious review. And these people are in charge of monetary policy in the United States?”
The Purges: Weaponization Edition
It’s barely worth your time or brain cells to try to get your head around the DOJ “weaponization” report on the FACE Act released yesterday. If you’re a glutton for punishment, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance takes a close look at and contextualizes the report. Just know that this is what the work by the DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group” is going to look like.
The more important development than the report itself is that four career prosecutors involved in FACE Act prosecutions in the Biden era were unlawfully fired this week ahead of the report’s release, including two Detroit assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted abortion clinic protestors, one of whom is now speaking out.
Only the Best People Watch
Harmeet Dhillon: The Atlantic has a fine profile of the head of the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division who is jockeying for a promotion in the wake of Pam Bondi’s ouster as attorney general.
Leonard Leo: The conservative legal major domo is rebranding.
Sebastian Gorka: The right-wing Trump aide who is currently the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council is aiming to fill the slot of director of the National Counterterrorism Center that Joe Kent resigned in protest over the Iran conflict.
More Troops to Middle East
The Trump administration is sending thousands of additional troops to the Middle East in a deployment which seems timed to put additional pressure on the Iranians in three-way peace talks, the WaPo reports.
Pace of Lawless Boat Strikes Quickens
The Trump administration’s unlawful campaign of boat strikes appears to have picked up again since the Iran ceasefire. The second attack in two days (and third since Saturday) killed four people in the Eastern Pacific, bringing the campaign’s death toll to at least 174.
Swalwell Officially Out
Rep. Eric Swalwell’s resignation from Congress became effective at 2 p.m. Tuesday, less than two hours after another accuser came forward in an emotionally searing press conference.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Each December, the New York Young Republican Club’s gala offers a preview of the next season’s conservative provocations. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at the gala near the peak of her stardom in 2021; in the audience was another up-and-coming shit-stirrer, the newly elected, pre-scandal George Santos.
At the club’s most recent gala, however, elected officials were notably absent. Making headlines instead were an assortment of controversial livestreamers who roamed the event reciting inflammatory remarks into cameras.
After Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, commentators opined on influencers’ role in shaping new voters. As the 2026 midterms approach and Gen Z ages into power, those figures are increasingly becoming the party itself: Republican campaigns and org charts are increasingly populated by figures from the world of political streaming. At the NYYRC gala, on the campaign trail of a Florida gubernatorial candidate, and in national youth Republican offices, streamers and their strategies are shaping the way the Grand Old Party speaks and the policies it promotes.
It’s been reported that former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired because, although she spent much of her time as AG trying to carry out President Trump’s retribution agenda, she was not successful enough — both in speed and outcome — at investigating and prosecuting his political opponents. There were also reports that Bondi gave Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) some sort of advance notice about the potential release of investigative files on a past FBI inquiry into his relationship with a Chinese spy 10 years ago. In light of recent events … who knows what was going on there.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Major League Baseball (MLB) likes to congratulate itself for being a civil rights trailblazer. Jackie Robinson Day celebrations are held at every ballpark on April 15, the date Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Since 2009, all players, managers, coaches, and umpires wear Robinson’s iconic number 42 to commemorate his impact on the game and society. At every game played that day, teams feature on-the-field ceremonies and show clips of Robinson. Winners of the Jackie Robinson Foundation’s college scholarship program show up to discuss how his legacy changed their lives. It is a feel-good day for sport.
Though Robinson was a fierce competitor and an outstanding athlete, the aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over on Jackie Robinson Day is that he was also a radical.
Baseball has had its share of iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks who defied baseball’s and society’s establishment. But none took as many risks — and had as big an impact — as Robinson.
The celebrations of Jackie Robinson Day downplay his activism during and after his playing career. They don’t delve into the forces arrayed against Robinson — the players, fans, reporters, politicians and baseball executives who scorned his presence in a major league uniform and outspoken views on racial segregation. (In 1946, at least 14 of the 16 major league owners opposed ending baseball’s apartheid).
As soon as the Supreme Court struck down many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs in February, his administration imposed a new, sweeping 10% tariff on a broad swath of products and countries under a different law, called Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The Trump administration is being saved again from its flagrant contempt of court in the original Alien Enemies Act case, this time by two Trump-appointed judges on the DC Circuit.
In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections.
The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.”
That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control.
In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base.
Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away.
The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid.
Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return.
The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.
It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom.
Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about.
The Economic Warning Signs
The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook.
The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession.
Latest on the Middle East Conflict …
Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon.
Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports.
House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran.
Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170
The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports.
Must Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory.
Thread of the Day
Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has drastically cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend. www.cato.org/blog/trump-h…
Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment.
American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent.
Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign
In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House.
Two Big Wins
In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again.
The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.”
Good Read
Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion
Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb
The senior senator from Ohio:
Bernie Moreno on Trump’s comments about the Pope: “I was incensed to watch the Pope's comments. I think what the Pope is doing is a disgrace.”“It's a shame that the Pope has made the Catholic Church political. Thank God my mom’s not alive to watch that.”
