Since right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered at a Turning Point USA event in Utah last month, the vice president has filled in some on Kirk’s podcast — a production that Kirk’s friends and allies have kept up and running.
Continue reading “Charlie Kirk’s Show Is Now the Trump Admin’s Forum for Detailing How It Wants To Target the Left”The Age of Monsters, Part 2
I titled a recent Editors’ Blog post The Age of Monsters. I’ve been thinking about that post and theme again because I keep seeing more confirmation, more evidence of this dimension of the world we are currently living in. I stress again that the idea here is not that these “monsters” are bad people, though I would say that most of them are in varying degrees. The issue is their gigantism. They are so much more powerful than ordinary people, mostly but not in every case because of wealth, that they distort the whole fabric of society and politics. They are like big, clumsy and lumbering oafs who nonetheless have power that make if not the whole game than all the center of gravity be about them.
Continue reading “The Age of Monsters, Part 2”In Supreme Court Land, Fixing Discrimination Against Black Voters Is The Real Racism
A central grievance motivating today’s conservative legal movement — and the Republican Party more broadly — holds that any measure rectifying the country’s habitual discrimination against minorities actually discriminates against the in-group.
Continue reading “In Supreme Court Land, Fixing Discrimination Against Black Voters Is The Real Racism”Big Talk: Treasury Secretary Declares New War on Terror Against the Left
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that his department is in the process of launching a War on Terror-style campaign against progressive nonprofits.
Continue reading “Big Talk: Treasury Secretary Declares New War on Terror Against the Left”Mystery Solved: Trump US Attorney Was Forced Out For Not Investigating the Investigators
The Retribution: Russia Probe Edition
The NYT had previously hinted at the reason behind the abrupt August resignation of former Virginia Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert as interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, but now the newspaper has compiled a fuller accounting of what happened.
Gilbert was forced to resign or be fired, the NYT reports, for refusing to can the top career prosecutor in his office, who had found insufficient evidence to pursue a cockamamie theory for investigating the investigators of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
The flimsy allegation is that the investigators themselves mishandled classified documents. FBI Director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino have seized on burn bags at FBI headquarters that contained classified documents from the case as evidence that senior officials were destroying documents to cover up or protect the former investigators. The more benign and plausible explanation — that the classified materials remain stored in digital form on FBI servers and destroying paper copies is a routine security measure — has been disregarded in favor of elaborate conspiracies that salve President Trump.
The case landed in Gilbert’s office ostensibly because his district includes a FBI classified document storage facility, but that appears to be at least in part a pretext for finding a more favorable jury pool outside of DC or Northern Virginia.
Gilbert was ordered by DOJ higher-ups to open an investigation into the matter shortly after taking over the post, but he “told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation,” the NYT reports.
From there things “quickly escalated,” as Gilbert put it in a memorable social media post of a meme from Will Farrell’s Anchorman:
Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues.
Justice Department officials ordered Mr. Gilbert to replace Mr. Lee with Robert Tracci as his deputy, these people said. After Mr. Lee was demoted, senior department officials suspected Mr. Gilbert was still primarily consulting Mr. Lee, whom they came to view as a holdover from the Biden administration, though he had been hired during the George W. Bush administration and promoted during the first Trump administration, these people added. At one point, Mr. Blanche spoke directly to Mr. Gilbert and offered him more resources to pursue the case, according to one person familiar with the events.
When Gilbert still didn’t bend, he was told he’d be fired, at which point he resigned.
Tracci is now the acting U.S. attorney, and Lee has left the office, according to the NYT.
The new revelations about Gilbert’s surprisingly stiff spine — he’s a longtime GOP politician who has walked the party line, to say the least, for years — is another striking example of the weaponization of the Justice Department. It’s an especially remarkable incident because Gilbert had been nominated for the permanent position, but resisted going along to get along and was forced out after just a month on the job.
The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition
House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan on Tuesday sent a letter to former Special Counsel Jack Smith seeking his to testimony. Jordan is seizing on yet another conspiratorial pretext for investigating the investigators: The GOP-driven news that Smith obtained phone records of the calls of some GOP lawmakers around Jan. 6, 2021 as part of his investigation into the failed coup attempt.
Jordan’s move came the same day that video of some of Smith’s first public remarks about his work in the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigations — in an interview last week in London with former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann — were widely disseminated.
The Worst of the Worst: ‘I Love Hitler’
Politico has the receipts from a Telegram group chat among leaders of the Young Republicans group who exchanged racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic private messages with abandon between early January and mid-August of this year.
US Revokes Visas Over Charlie Kirk Comments
On the same day President Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Charlie Kirk at the White House, the State Department announced it had revoked the visas of six people who had posted anti-Kirk screeds on social media.
US Lawlessly Attacks 5th Caribbean Boat
President Trump announced on social media another U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat off of Venezuela, claiming the strike killed six men. Trump provided no evidence for the allegations that it was a drug-smuggling boat and very little other information about the attack. The administration continues to provide next to no legal rationale for the unprecedented series of attacks.
“Since Mr. Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, started the operation last month, a broad range of legal specialists have called the premeditated and summary extrajudicial killings illegal,” the NYT’s Charlie Savage notes. “They noted that the military cannot lawfully target civilians — even criminal suspects — who do not pose a threat in the moment and are not directly participating in hostilities.”
In related news, CNN reports on how the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has sidelined the lawyers at the Pentagon, including by applying political litmus tests to top JAG leaders, while pushing the legal limits of military action:
One recent flashpoint for the role of US military lawyers has been the series of strikes on boats in the Caribbean, with multiple current and former JAGs telling CNN that the strikes do not appear lawful. Lawyers specializing in international law within DoD’s Office of General Counsel have also raised concerns about the legality of the strikes, sources familiar with the matter said.
Responding in a statement to CNN, the Pentagon spokesperson threw down a gauntlet (emphasis mine):
The War Department categorically denies that any Pentagon lawyers with knowledge of these operations have raised concerns regarding the legality of the strikes conducted thus far because they are aware we are on firm legal ground. … “No lawyer involved has questioned the legality of the Caribbean strikes and instead advised subordinate commanders and Secretary Hegseth that the proposed actions were permissible before they commenced.
Your occasional reminder that the strikes on alleged drug cartel boats combined with the increased deployment of U.S. military assets to the region seem largely designed as a saber-rattling exercise against Venezuela.
‘Strap Up Cowboy’: A Major Scandal in Any Other Era
A state judge in Florida issued a restraining order against Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) barring him from coming within 500 feet of his former girlfriend, a state GOP committee woman who is also the reigning Miss United States. The judge in his ruling called her “a victim of dating violence.”
Lindsey Langston ended the relationship earlier this year after the married Mills was linked to the alleged assault of a third woman in Washington, D.C. Mills allegedly continued to contact her after the breakup and threatened to blackmail her with nude photos, NBC News reports:
Mills is alleged to have sent a series of harassing communications to Langston in May and June, which are cited in the judgment, including a message he wrote to Langston on May 15 that she “may want to tell every guy you date that if we run into each other at any point. Strap up cowboy[.]”
Mill did not comment on that latest developments.
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Trump’s Midcycle Gerrymandering Disease Spreads to North Carolina
The North Carolina GOP is Notorious for Ratfuckery
North Carolina’s Republican leaders in the state legislature announced on Monday that they plan to hold a vote next week on redrawing North Carolina’s district map for U.S. House seats. But in announcing their plans to act on President Trump’s pressure campaign — the White House has forced Republican state legislatures around the nation to redraw maps ahead of the midterms to help their party hold the House — North Carolina Republicans framed the move as some sort of necessary response to Democrats‘ mid-decade redistricting efforts (which, to the extent they have gotten off the ground, are a response to Republicans’ successful Texas gerrymander).
Continue reading “Trump’s Midcycle Gerrymandering Disease Spreads to North Carolina”5 Points on the Trump Admin’s Threatened—And Real—Government Shutdown Layoffs
In an effort to try and make good on their threats and to put more pressure on congressional Democrats, Trump administration departments and agencies laid off around 4,000 federal employees at the end of last week. President Donald Trump himself has threatened more layoffs to come. The Office of Management and Budget called it a “substantial” reduction of the federal workforce.
“The RIFs have begun,” OMB Director Russ Vought wrote in a social media post on Friday, immediately prompting a spate of articles speculating about how far the administration would go.
Continue reading “5 Points on the Trump Admin’s Threatened—And Real—Government Shutdown Layoffs”Louisiana v Callais: The Republicans Justices Are Getting Ready to Finish Off the Voting Rights Act
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On October 15, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, a pair of consolidated cases that threaten what little remains of the federal government’s ability to protect voters from racial gerrymandering under the Voting Rights Act.
The VRA is the 1965 federal law that finally effectuated the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that the government would not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act following years of advocacy from civil rights activists, and decades of violent repression of those rights by white supremacists. Without exaggeration, the VRA allowed the United States to make its first plausible claim to being a multiracial democracy.
Opponents of multiracial democracy, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, have fought against the VRA ever since, misconstruing the act’s substantive protections and making them impossible to enforce. Callais is the conservative legal movement’s latest vehicle to persuade the Court to render the greatest triumph of the Civil Rights Movement a nullity nationwide.
In 2022, Louisiana Republican lawmakers enacted a congressional map that “packed” Black Louisianans into one district and “cracked” them across five others. This means out of six districts, only one is majority-Black, even though 1 in 3 Louisianans are Black.
Under the Voting Rights Act, voters of color must have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. But voting in Louisiana is racially polarized, meaning that white majorities persistently vote as a bloc to defeat candidates whom Black voters prefer: To date, the state has never had a Black senator, and hasn’t elected a Black governor since Reconstruction, and no Louisiana congressional district other than the single majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. Thus, the only way Black Louisianans would have the equal opportunity the Voting Rights Act requires is if Louisiana were to create a second district in which Black Louisianans make up a majority.
Black voters in Louisiana sued, and federal courts determined that the map indeed violates Section 2 of the VRA, and ordered lawmakers to redraw the map and add a second majority-Black district. But then, a group of self-described “non-African American voters” sued to challenge that map, arguing that a map drawn to remedy an illegal racial gerrymander is itself an illegal racial gerrymander. If the Supreme Court agrees that there is no legal distinction between causing and curing race-based harm, Callais would rob actual victims of discrimination of the legal tools to do anything about it.
The Court heard oral argument in Callais for the first time in March 2025, and considered two main questions: first, whether Louisiana lawmakers let racial considerations “predominate” when they drew the second map, and if so, whether they had a good reason for doing so. Under existing law, these are easy questions to answer: Even if Louisiana lawmakers drew the second map based on race, Supreme Court precedent confirms that “courts told us to fix our illegal racist map” is a damn good reason to do so.
But the Republican justices on the Court do not like the existing law. And now, they are rehearing the cases so they can have the chance to change it. Back in June, the Supreme Court unexpectedly ended its term without deciding Callais, and instead issued an unexplained order putting the cases back on the calendar for reargument.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, but only because he didn’t want to wait any longer to hold that the VRA does not “justify” the practice of “race-based districting” under circumstances that are “utterly divorced” from “specific, identified instances of past discrimination.” Basically, in Thomas’s view, any effort to repair racial harm is impermissible unless it is neatly crafted to address a particular instance of 1960s-style racism.
As usual, Thomas was out ahead of his colleagues: On August 1, the Court directed the Callais parties to file supplemental briefing on the question of whether the intentional creation of a second majority-Black district—as Louisiana lawmakers did here, in response to a court order—violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments. Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill, a Republican, recognized this new framing for the gift that it is, and filed a brief on August 27 declining to defend the second map at all. Instead, she argued that the Voting Rights Act imposes an unconstitutional race-based mandate, and that the Constitution is “colorblind,” which apparently means “unwilling to recognize harm done to people of color.”
If the Court agrees, the result would compound the disempowerment of Black people across the country. With no check against racial gerrymandering, a system in which voters ostensibly pick their elected officials would become one in which elected officials are freer than ever to pick their voters, leaving Black voters with even fewer legal avenues to secure fair representation.
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were expressly crafted to grant Black people equal rights as citizens in a democratic society. The Court is preparing to use those very Amendments to deny those rights instead.
In the New Trump Era, the Proud Boys Are ‘Not Apologizing Anymore’
To hear him tell it, Gavin McInnes’ recent return to the site formerly known as Twitter is the result of a collaborative effort that included leading members of the British far right and Elon Musk.
Continue reading “In the New Trump Era, the Proud Boys Are ‘Not Apologizing Anymore’”The Justice Department Is the Tip of Trump’s Retribution Spear
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
It’s Only Just Begun
The politicized prosecutions by the Trump Justice Department have only just begun. We have three more years of this. The challenge in covering them will be:
- not to treat them like normal prosecutions, especially not to get lost in the usual minutiae of criminal investigations and trials;
- not to normalize political prosecutions as an authoritarian tool even as they become routinized and repetitive;
- not to let the occasional legitimate prosecution obscure or justify the indefensible politicized ones.
With that in mind, I wanted to catch you up on some of the holiday weekend developments in the three highest profile political prosecutions.
The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition
It’s still early, but a flurry of weekend filings in the political prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey suggest prosecutors are overmatched. In pre-trial procedural matters, the judge in the case twice ruled in favor of Comey, represented by former Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
It’s no surprise: U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan has never been a prosecutor before; the career prosecutors in office case declined to bring charges against Comey; and the two line prosecutors brought from North Carolina in to handle the case don’t have any experience in high-profile national cases like this.
The Retribution: Letitia James Edition
- Halligan’s politicized indictment of Letitia James somehow amazingly caught the attorney general and deputy attorney general off guard, further evidence that DOJ is really being run by the White House.
- The James indictment does not involve the Virginia property everyone expected it to, but a separate Norfolk property.
- Halligan is “likely to bring additional charges against James,” a source told the WSJ.
The Retribution: John Bolton Edition
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton could be charged as soon as this week by the acting U.S. attorney in Maryland for allegedly improper handling of classified material:
Unlike the widespread resistance career prosecutors in Virginia have shown to Trump’s pressure campaign to charge former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, career prosecutors in Maryland consider charges against Bolton to have some factual merit, the people said.
Still, the Bolton case — originally opened in Trump I, closed under Biden, and reopened under Trump II — comes after loud and direct threats from Trump himself to seek retribution against his former adviser.
Quote of the Day
“This is no longer, the Department of Justice, it’s no longer the premier prosecuting office in America. What it is now is a capo regime who goes out and executes hits when directed by the Don to do so. That’s what it is.”–former New Jersey U.S. Attorney Chris Christie
Federal Judges Warn of ‘Judicial Crisis’
A NYT survey of federal judges found widespread dismay about the Supreme Court’s use of its emergency docket.
‘Living Hell’
WSJ: “Among the last actions by former President Joe Biden before leaving the Oval Office was commuting the death sentences of 37 convicted murderers. Hours after President Trump took over, he ordered the life sentences of these men be made, in effect, a living hell.”
‘A Fully Competent, Utterly Committed Radical Ideologue’
Thomas Zimmer, on what the NYT and so many others get wrong about Trump OMB Director Russ Vought:
Key to understanding Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order – and with it the “natural” order itself – has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more. Vought certainly sees himself in the modern conservative tradition, but he also disdains the conservative establishment for their inability to understand and act upon the radical demands of the moment. Power, Vought claims, now lies with a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites who control all major institutions of American life and especially the “woke and weaponized” agencies of the state. In order to defeat them, conservatives must become “radical constitutionalists” – and take radical action.
2026 Ephemera
Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) announced she will enter the crowded Democratic primary to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R) next year.
Signs of the Times
- President Trump will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to the asssasinated Charlie Kirk.
- Hell Gate: Adams Administration Quietly Renames the Tombs for Disgraced Criminal Bernard Kerik
Thread of the Day
It’s Just a Matter of When
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller will probably get the blood in the streets they want eventually.
We don’t know when or how it will unfold, or how the public will come to perceive it. But we do know that no matter how it unfolds or is perceived, it is already their fault, and everyone who cares about the future of the country should be prepared to blame them.
Headline of the Day
MAGA Implodes Over Kristi Noem’s “Stare Down” With Man in Chicken Suit
On Bari Weiss, the Free Press and Black Rock
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