Lindsey Graham, Longtime South Carolina Senator, Dies From ‘Brief And Sudden Illness’

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died Saturday evening from a “brief and sudden illness,” according to a statement from his office. He was 71. 

“On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness,” the statement said. “Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.”

Continue reading “Lindsey Graham, Longtime South Carolina Senator, Dies From ‘Brief And Sudden Illness’”

Give This A Listen (or a View)

If you’re a podcast listener, I want you to check out The TPM Social Club, our second podcast which is hosted by reporter Josh Kovensky and publisher Joe Ragazzo. I particularly hope you check out the latest episode where Josh and Joe interview TPM’s Capitol Hill reporter Emine Yücel. They talk about covering Capitol Hill for TPM, being an international competition-level fencer and also her background as an immigrant from Turkey and reporting on Capitol Hill politics through the prism of a Turkish background and upbringing.

Continue reading “Give This A Listen (or a View)”

Conspiracy Theories Around Lawmakers’ Health Are Going to Keep Spiraling

[Essay]

The Grotesque State of Our Gerontocracy

Our gerontocracy is growing increasingly macabre. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a key architect of our current era of hyperpartisanship and shattered norms, has been unseen since his hospitalization on June 14. The “Weekend at Bernies” memes and jokes about interacting with the 83-year-old senator via Ouija board are getting louder. Prominent right-wing commentators are demanding proof of life, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear even sent a letter to McConnell’s office formally requesting information about his condition. This comes after years of news reports about McConnell injuring himself during falls and painful videos of the senator freezing up on camera.   

But it’s hardly just McConnell. “Elected official death and dementia watch” has become a game the Internet is playing far too frequently. In just the past few years, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) died in office at age 90 after losing her cognitive abilities and missing dozens of Senate votes. D.C.’s nonvoting representative for over three decades, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, finally agreed not to run for reelection at age 88 amid reports she was in the early stages of dementia. And reporters from the Dallas Express tracked then-Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) to a memory care facility where she’d been living for months after she was “found wandering, lost, and confused” in her former neighborhood. The 2024 presidential campaign was a slow-motion-trainwreck of bearing witness to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s mental decline, while Trump now frequently dozes off during Cabinet meetings and is more prone than ever to bizarre rambling and embarrassing gaffes. (“Islamic Republic of Japan,” etc. etc.)

Thanks to an unwillingness to let go of power and the assistance of enabling staffers who cover up for them, this grotesque state of affairs doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. A 2026 NBC News analysis found that a dozen of the oldest members of Congress are running for re-election.

But it is having a corrosive effect on our already deeply corroded politics. Voters from both parties are deeply put off by the lack of transparency from their elected officials, and they’re making their feelings known. Anger still burns deeply in the Democratic electorate at Biden’s small cadre of advisers for concealing his condition and risking a second Trump administration by allowing him to run for reelection when he was not equipped to do so. While GOP leaders are mostly circling the wagons around McConnell, insisting that they literally just got off the phone with the senator after spirited debates about foreign policy, Republican voters and much of MAGA World are not. 

On X, Laura Loomer ranted about a “massive coverup,” claiming that McConnell is “brain dead” and writing, “President Trump, they are trying to screw you!!!!! The RINOs want the Save America Act and our country to die alongside Mitch McConnell!” Glenn Back demanded “the truth about Mitch McConnell NOW,” calling it “unacceptable that the party who spent four years criticizing Joe Biden’s health is now silent on McConnell’s.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) mocked McConnell’s allies for their feeble attempts to demonstrate “proof of life.” 

Medical conditions are fertile ground for conspiracy theories. There are valid privacy reasons why aides might keep a close lid on things, ample opportunities for close readings of video appearances. Crucially, the recent barrage of health scandals involving some of the most powerful people in the country underline the understandable feeling people have about lacking legitimate representation and being jerked around by party leaders pulling the strings.

[Essay]

Republicans Are Being Insane About Caitlin Clark Again

The right pretends to care about women’s sports in one of two circumstances: when trans girls are involved, or when they can project their racial grievances onto Indiana Fever player Caitlin Clark.

The latter provided grist for the faux outrage mill this week, as elected Republicans caught up to a tediously long simmering kerfuffle over a foul Phoenix Mercury player Alyssa Thomas committed against Clark in late June. The two got tangled up and fell to the floor; as Thomas, who has torn labrums in both shoulders, tried to push herself up, her balled first seemed to slide onto Clark’s throat. The freeze frame makes it look like Thomas was trying to hurt Clark, though in the full clip, Thomas is already looking up towards the ball as she tries to get up. The Mercury guard was later assessed a flagrant 2 foul, a one-game suspension and a fine.

The photo quickly attracted the most loathsome elements online (yes, I mean Barstool’s Dave Portnoy) and eventually crossed the boundary from right-wing curious (male) sports commentators to, well, the president. 

“I thought your young, wonderful basketball player — Caitlin (Clark) — I thought she was treated rather rough, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters unprompted on Monday. “That was a much different kind of an event. That was a pretty bad event.”

And a group of Republican congressmen this week sent a letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, threatening prosecution by the Justice Department, the Department of Labor or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for “violations of federal civil rights laws” in the “racially motivated attacks” against Clark. Many lawmakers who shared the letter online were quick to claim that the 29-year-old league wouldn’t exist without Clark’s participation. 

This exact media cycle has played out at least three times since Clark entered the WNBA: She gets fouled by a Black player (Thomas, DiJonai Carrington, Chennedy Carter) and the right pounces, insisting that Clark — straight, white — is unsafe in a league full of thugs that want to hurt her. 

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) — why a congressman from Tennessee is involved at all is beyond me — suggested that Clark should play in Europe, where she’d be safer (presumably Burchett assumes that only white women play basketball overseas). 

“Caitlin Clark is a bball superstar who gets consistently treated unfairly on the court she gets a fist to the throat for example,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) tweeted in his usual semi-literate style. “As a fan I don’t appreciate ill treatment So refs start treating Caitlin like u do every other player. What happened last night shldnt happen again.”

And some decided to jump atop the dogpile in a milder way, as Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), a self-professed non-fan of the WNBA, critiqued the league’s lack of marketing of Clark. How someone who doesn’t follow the league has a finger on the pulse of its ad campaigns — in which Clark features heavily — is somewhat mysterious.

Thomas, a soft-spoken player who’s in a relationship with teammate DeWanna Bonner, told reporters that she and her family have received death threats. 

Every facet of this story is infuriating to real fans of the WNBA. Basketball is a physical game and hard fouls happen — but in a mostly-Black league, the only episodes that break containment always feature a Black player fouling a white one (check out this egregious play by Clark teammate Sophie Cunningham on then-Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon, which prompted no congressional inquiry). 

Clark herself — a talented, exciting, hyper-competative shit-talker — doesn’t hesitate to dish it out on the court, but can be frustratingly lukewarm in response to the right-wing media explosions. It makes her an easier avatar for these actors to project their agenda onto than, say, Paige Bueckers, another white, number-one draft pick who entered the league a year after Clark, but has been consistently outspoken about the different standards of treatment for white players versus Black ones (she is also openly gay, perhaps making her a more difficult fit for reactionaries).

It all presses on one of the W’s deepest sore spots: the league’s longtime prioritization of white players as its posterchildren over Black ones, no matter if their skill and accolades justify such all-star status. 

And it’s a hijacking of the league’s indisputable success story by figures who routinely dismiss and demean female athletes when they can’t use them as politician pawns. Clark, Bueckers, former LSU star Angel Reese and future hall-of-famer A’ja Wilson have all injected the game with excitement and drawn in thousands of new fans. The players association tirelessly fought for and won a life-changing new collective bargaining agreement, giving the players livable wages, private flights, protection from pregnancy discrimination and many other rights that are standard in even less popular men’s leagues. The league has added three new expansion teams since 2025, with teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia coming in the next three years. Broadcast networks and streaming services are jockeying to get a slice of the ever more profitable pie. 

In a time of authoritarian backsliding, a league of mostly gay, Black women is making historic progress. No wonder Republicans keep returning to this well — it’s an existential threat to the world they’re trying to impose.

[Dumb Money]

Speculating on Aliens

While the North Face vests on Wall Street pump AI stocks and the eggheads at the IMF warn of global economic slowdown thanks to the Iran War, savvy market watchers have their attention elsewhere. 

On Friday, July 10, the Department of War (referred to here for context by its new click-friendly name) declassified another round of UFO/UAP records opening the door to a potential frenzy in the prediction markets. This is the fourth set of records released since May in accordance with PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters). The decision to release the files in tranches on a rolling basis has created a great deal of intrigue around the WAR.GOV/UFO website; Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell claimed the site’s first three releases have received more than 1.7 billion hits (nice!). It has also led to speculative markets forming on platforms like Polymarket where you can bet on when the next tranche of files might drop. But in the world of financial UFO speculation, betting on the date of file dumps is small potatoes. The big money is in determining when the US government will definitively confirm alien existence. And here is where this latest dump, along with related developments, might provide an opportunity for those watching closely.

On Tuesday, July 7, UK-based filmmaker and ufologist Mark Christopher Lee told the Daily Mail he had learned from multiple sources that Trump had already written and was planning to give a speech confirming the existence of aliens — possibly as early as July 8 to coincide with the anniversary of Roswell. According to the Daily Mail, “The alleged draft of the speech is said to mention specific UFO incidents over the last 80 years, including Roswell, the US Navy’s encounter with a craft called the ‘Tic Tac’ in 2004 and multiple UFOs spotted by fighter jets along the East Coast in 2015.” Trump, of course, delivered no such speech on the 8th. But perhaps what appeared to be a slip of the tongue when he told reporters during the NATO summit in Turkey that he was “No. 1 on Tic Tac,” was in fact an accidental nod toward imminent revelations — a matter of having future speeches on the mind. And before you dismiss Mr. Lee as a crank, in January he told the Daily Mail that his inside information came from “a successful business person acting as an advisor to the Trump administration officials, who has been responsible for reviewing archive UFO evidence in preparation for [the disclosure event].” Further chin-scratching: in February, The Atlantic questioned whether a mysterious $100,000 bet made on Kalshi predicting the US would confirm alien existence by the end of 2026 might be insider trading. 

A statement from Pete Hegseth published on the DOW/UFO website includes as a reason for disclosure that, “These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation.” 

“Justified speculation” —  an interesting choice of words, wouldn’t you say?

[Programming Note]

Come Nerd Out About Politics With Us!

When news breaks — about, say, the Platner disaster or McConnell hospitalization — I always scramble to open TPM’s Slack to see what my colleagues are posting about it. They’re so quick to share the latest updates or jokes that help add some levity to a grim situation.

That’s the spirit of our upcoming event in Brooklyn on Wednesday July 29. Josh Marshall and Marisa Kabas, independent journalist and founder of The Handbasket newsletter, will weigh in on whatever hell is currently breaking loose, in a conversation moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. Marisa is a diligent chronicler of our current hellscape, who has broken stories about the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to freeze billions of dollars in federal grants and loans. (She also wrote an essay for our 25th anniversary last year about journalists becoming personal brands). So we’re thrilled to be able to bend her ear about the news of the day and making it work in independent media. 

Nicole LaFond and I will kick off the event with some politics trivia for the audience, and we’ll end the night with a happy hour, where our staff hopes to meet readers of both The Handbasket and TPM. We’d really love to see you there.

Tickets are on sale now for just $25 (or free for TPM Inside members). Get yours while they last. 

— Allegra Kirkland

[TPM Trivia]

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1) President Trump intervened to overturn the red card of this U.S. Men’s team striker before the team went on to lose to Belgium this week. 

2) Which Republican U.S. Senate candidate was spotted on a date with an alleged mistress in London over Fourth of July weekend?

3) Name at least two of the candidates under consideration to replace Graham Platner in the Maine Senate race.

4) How much will President Trump finally have to pay out to E. Jean Carroll after a court denied his appeal?

Answers below

[Good Posts]

Fair Enough!

[This Effing Guy]

Kevin McCarthy Thinks Republicans Run Unimpeachable Candidates

In a truly remarkable bit of hubris, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy claimed that Republicans have the upper hand when it comes to rejecting problematic candidates in their ranks. “One thing I know about Republicans is when we had a very bad candidate, we didn’t vote for that person. We walked away,” McCarthy said during an appearance on Fox News, responding to the implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign over sexual assault allegations. Ah yes, the GOP, famous for never backing candidates accused of rape, voter fraud, extramarital affairs with staffers or other misconduct.

[In the Cafe]

Mainstreaming White Nationalism

Christopher Mathias traces the story of how the term “remigration” — a euphemism with the clearest, most traceable of fascist lineages — traveled from the far-right fringes to the halls of power, with the Trump administration creating an Office of Remigration last year.

A key figure in all of this is Thomas Rousseau, who led his white nationalist Patriot Front brethren through the streets of Washington, D.C. over July 4th weekend. (TPM investigative reporter Hunter Walker has more reporting on Rousseau and the absurd conspiracy theories circulating about Patriot Front.)

[No Words]

State-Sanctioned Killing

Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, holds a photo of his father during a news conference about the ICE shooting death in Houston Wednesday, July 8, 2026. (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

Trivia answers: 1) Folarin Balogun 2) Ken Paxton 3) Nirav Shah, Troy Jackson, Jordan Wood, Dan Kleban, Shenna Bellows 4) $5.8 million

Grim New Details of Fatal ICE Shooting Make It Even Worse

A Case of Mistaken Identity

The ICE shooting of an unarmed immigrant in Houston — who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, raised a family, and had no known prior run-ins with the law — has turned from deeply troubling to acutely tragic as new details of the Tuesday incident have emerged.

The most dismaying new news is that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the target of the traffic stop that ended in his shooting death. There was another man in the white work van that Salgado Araujo was driving whom ICE agents thought was one of the two men they were looking for — but that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

The other news that has come out over the past 24 hours paints a picture of ICE continuing to act with the flagrant disregard for good policing practices and without fear of real accountability:

  • Despite a huge infusion of new federal funding and promises to issue body cameras, the agents involved in the incident were not wearing body cams at the time.
  • In what is hard not to see as a convenient way of covering up the details of the shooting, ICE has detained the three other men who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s brother, and is pressuring them to self deport, a representative of the men’s families told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent.
  • The three other men in the van told a lawyer that Salgado Araujo never veered toward federal agents and that a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle, the Washington Post reports. Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said he met with the three men individually while they were in detention and they separately gave similar accounts. “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra told the Post. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

While video of some portions of the incident has emerged, none of it captures the shooting itself.

The Houston district attorney, which is investigating the incident, is consulting with local prosecutors in Minneapolis about the challenges of investigating an ICE shooting without cooperation from the federal government, the AP reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

  • Chicago: A federal judge in Chicago who hauled a chastened U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutrous into court yesterday concluded that he had violated her order sealing a criminal case when he spoke publicly about it at a Main Justice press conference last week, but she concluded that he did not do so for “any nefarious purpose” and declined to impose sanctions against him.
  • D.C.: Even Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has been unfailingly solicitous of FBI Director Kash Patel until this point, has concerns about Patel’s use of an FBI plane for personal travel and the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles. Grassley quietly sent Patel a letter in May inquiring about these issues, MS Now reports — though Grassley was quick to grouch about the reports of his minimal efforts at oversight.

Trump Fires EAC Commissioners

Just Security’s Aaron Blacksberg on the practical impact of President Trump’s unprecedented firing of all the remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission, leaving it commissioner-less.

Tidbit of the Day

President Trump’s recent stock-trading frenzy was triggered by an appeal court’s August reversal of New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $500 million judgment against him. Off the hook for that penalty, Trump quickly began investing the $175 million he had sitting in a Schwab account as collateral for the appeal bond, the WSJ reports: “Within days, the Schwab account was snapping up and selling dozens of stocks as an automated trading strategy put the cash to work.” 

The Emperor’s New Airplane

President Trump is essentially flying naked when he boards his cherished new Qatari-gifted Air Force One because it “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities,” the NYT reports.

The White House and Air Force are dodging questions about Trump’s push to rush the airplane into service before it was thoroughly retrofitted for the job of protecting the nation’s head of state while he travels.

UPDATE: TPM Journalism Fund Drive

Folks, we’ve gotten off to a rip-roaring start in our annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. It launched Tuesday with a goal of $500,000, and we’ve already crested $200,000 in the first three days and change. Still a ways to go, but a fantastic way to start. Thank you!

The early success was helped by our single biggest contribution ever to the TPM Journalism Fund: $20,000. But the first three days still looked like what we have seen in past drives: broad-based support from readers giving what they can, which ranges from single-digit contributions to the occasional five-digit boost.

The sooner we can hit our mark, the quicker I can stop pitching you. So as the week ends, please consider taking just a moment to pitch in now and support our work. I and the rest of the team could not be more appreciative for your support.

Good Weekend Reads

  • TPM’s Josh Marshall: Why the Democratic Party Has No ‘Base’ and Why That Matters
  • Off Message’s Brian Beutler: How Democratic voters began to question, and ultimately lost faith in, their party’s establishment: a comprehensive history.

See Ya Monday

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

How Butler Assassination Attempt Conspiracy Theories Became the New Dallas 1963

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.

The conspiracy theories about the shooting started almost as soon as the shooting itself. 

Just days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, nearly two-thirds of respondents to one poll believed the shooting had been a plot involving multiple people, despite no public evidence. Another poll found that slightly over half of respondents believed “some group or element” was at work in the assassination attempt. The fact there was no evidence at the time did not deter these theories in the slightest.

Within months, the first articles and books alleging various conspiracies to kill Kennedy and frame Lee Harvey Oswald were published, with thousands more to follow. They spun out a mind-boggling array of plots, shooters, motives, and conspiracies. All claimed with immediate and unshakable confidence that Oswald couldn’t have acted alone. He didn’t have the training or access to make the shots that killed Kennedy. Something more had to be at work.

Despite his pop culture imprint as a loser, Oswald was a trained Marine marksman. Though not especially skilled, he could have made the three shots in eight seconds that killed Kennedy, who was left virtually unprotected in an open-topped, unarmored, and slow-moving car. Despite these facts, the number of Americans who believe in a Kennedy conspiracy is currently almost exactly the same now as it was days after the event.

Americans have always trended toward suspicion and disbelief when presented with world-shaking events that “weren’t supposed to happen.” Clearly, presidential assassinations fit the bill perfectly. There is an inherent need to assign meaning and purpose to an act that often turns out to have none.

But until July 13, 2024, there had never been such a groundswell of paranoid accusations about an attempted assassination of a president. 

Continue reading “How Butler Assassination Attempt Conspiracy Theories Became the New Dallas 1963”

The Brief: Trump Seizes on SCOTUS Decision to Mess With the Midterms

Trump Fires Three EAC Commissioners

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court handed down a pair of decisions finding that 1. Trump could exert tremendous control over independent executive branch agencies, including firing their commissioners and 2. the Fed, also an independent agency, was different. Since then, the question of where Trump would strike first has lingered.

Now we know. Last night, Trump forced out all remaining commissioners atop the Election Assistance Commission — two Democrats and a Republican — just months before the midterms. In a statement to ProPublica, an unnamed White House official gestured toward the same logic the Supreme Court used, saying that Trump “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”

The agency largely does the fairly anodyne work of providing election security support for states and distributing funding. But it has figured prominently in Trump’s attempt at a federal takeover of voting.

In a sweeping 2025 executive order, Trump directed the EAC to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to voter registration forms. He also ordered the agency to use its power to distribute funds to pressures states to require that all ballots be received by Election Day, not simply mailed to officials by Election Day.

That executive order and another 2026 order on elections have largely been blocked by the courts.

The question, writes election law scholar Rick Hasen, “is what Trump might try to do with the EAC without commissioners. Most boldly (and I would argue illegally) Trump could try to direct the commissioner-less EAC to do his bidding, for example by stating that the EAC must amend the federal voter registration form that states must accept for federal elections to include documentary proof of citizenship.”

“If he tries anything like this, it will be high profile and very important litigation that will end up at the Supreme Court on the emergency docket over the summer,” Hasen added.

Allies (Accidentally?) Call Trump Administration’s Bluff on ‘Antifa’

David Kurtz already noted this story in his Morning Memo yesterday, but I wanted to draw attention to a darkly comedic section of the Washington Post report about an effort by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to get foreign nations to attend a conference on far-left groups, an initiative that seems to be the brainchild of counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka. 

Specifically, diplomats for the nations who were invited are confused because “Antifa” and left-wing violence are not major problems in their countries.

Some said, too, they were unsure why they had been invited. “We don’t have antifa,” said one European diplomat.

“I don’t think we can find any reason why we would be interested in attending such an event,” said another.

“Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country,” said a third.

The fact that the administration has cast “antifa” as a well-organized and powerful threat with extensive foreign ties — bemusing allies — goes to the core of what is really going on here. As the Post report makes clear, the administration theorizes that if international left-wing groups can be designated foreign terrorist groups, it will open up new avenues and tolls for cracking down on dissent in the U.S. It will be interesting to see which foreign nations, if any, cooperate with these machinations.

We’ve already seen some efforts in this direction, which TPM’s Josh Kovensky covered last year.

Tabs

  • When federal agents killed a man in Houston during a traffic stop this week, they were searching for a completely different person, the New York Times reports. Passengers in the vehicle dispute the government’s claims that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo tried to use the vehicle as a weapon, the Washington Post reports, and no other evidence has emerged to support that claim.

Man of the Hour

It’s Victor Marx, a ministry leader who works to free people from demons, asserts that he goes on high-risk missions around the globe to save women and children, claims to be the fastest gun disarmer in the world, and said he killed a person as a child. (When asked by Denver’s 9News how many people he’d killed as an adult, he replied, “Does it matter?”) Last night, he won the Republican primary to become Colorado’s governor. Congrats, Victor.

Trump Pushes Out Remaining Members of Bipartisan Election Commission Ahead of Midterms

This article first appeared at ProPublica.

President Donald Trump has pushed out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the bipartisan agency in limbo as he rushes to remake how elections are run before this year’s midterms.

Trump fired Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks, the Democrats on the commission, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ProPublica, which was the first to report the actions on its social media accounts. Christy McCormick, the Republican, was allowed to resign, the sources said.

The commission’s unprecedented dismantling alarmed voter advocacy groups and Democratic state election officials, who called the move “reckless and irresponsible.”

“The EAC plays a critical role in supporting state and local election officials,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement, “and it will again fall on Secretaries of State and other election administrators to fill the gap.”

A White House official wouldn’t confirm the specific actions taken but said in a statement to ProPublica that the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”

“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the official said.

Hicks and McCormick did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Hovland declined to comment on his firing.

The commission was established in 2003 to set standards for state voting systems and to provide funding for upgrades.

Its four-member board is designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, all nominated by the president at the recommendation of congressional leadership and confirmed by the Senate. The fourth commissioner, Don Palmer, a Republican, resigned in April. By dismissing the commission’s remaining members, Trump can try to put forward replacements who may be more amenable to his demands.

In March 2025, Trump issued a sweeping executive order that directed the EAC to change the national voter registration form — which serves as the template for the forms in each state — to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Currently, voters in almost all states attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, but they are not required to provide proof.

The Trump-aligned law firm America First Legal had petitioned the EAC to change the form. The EAC posted a notice seeking comments, receiving hundreds of thousands of them in response, but had not yet held a vote.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that advocates on election issues, said the departures are a “significant loss for one of the federal government’s few institutions explicitly designed around bipartisan governance.”

The commission has been plagued by partisan infighting and ineffectiveness, as well as chronic vacancies and a lack of funding. It’s made some progress in recent years, however, passing new standards for voting machines and creating new resources and recommendations for election officials. Often, the commission’s decisions were unanimous despite its partisan split.

Why the Democratic Party Has No ‘Base’ and Why That Matters

We’re now in the midst of one of these now and again collective Democratic meltdowns, filled with dooming laments, drama, intra-party attacks and insults, rending of clothes, “reckonings” and more. But there’s a fact, little discussed and under-appreciated, that is nestled in these collective freak-outs. This may sound nonsensical or perhaps a semantic point with no real meaning. But it’s foundational to how the Democratic Party functions and why it functions differently and often disappointingly compared to the GOP.

We hear lots of arguments in Democratic politics that the party’s base is its left wing. There’s a certain logic to that. It’s a center-left party so it’s left wing is its base and it’s filled out by more fair-weather voters or less ideological ones. In a sense it’s really their party or they’re the legitimate owners of it as soon as corporate interests and softies and other interlopers can be kicked to the curb. But it’s not. The most obvious reason is that are just too few of them. But they are also very different, sociologically, ideologically, demographically from the rest of the party. This isn’t just a dig on the left. The same applies to white liberals. There are dramatically more of them. But they are still really, really different from much of the rest of the party.

A Big Milestone Is In Sight

We’re looking good to hit $200,000 by the close of day tomorrow in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We can’t thank you enough. Truly. If you’d like to join us and make a contribution just click right here. We run these drives in waves. $200,000 is the first big milestone, then $250,000. When we hit $400,000 the goal is in sight and then the momentum picks up again. We go in waves of going full time in drive mode, ease up, before pushing again. We appreciate both your generosity as well as your patience as we work through this critical part of our enterprise, our business model, how we make all of this work. Thanks.

Stop What You’re Doing!

We’re now more than a third of the way toward our goal of raising $500,000 in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. It’s sounds repetitive or cliche. But thank you so much. Your commitment to having our back means so much to our operation. We need to get to $200,000 by the end of Friday to stay on track toward this critical goal. If you haven’t taken a moment yet to contribute, I get it. I’m constantly putting stuff like this off. You’ve got to stop what you’re doing, probably in the middle of the work day. Please take that moment right now, just 90 seconds. We’ve set it up to be super easy. You don’t even have to take out your wallet. Take a moment, literally right now, this moment, and join us. Click right here. We’ll put the money to really good use.