U.S District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, was brimming with skepticism Friday as she pressed on the administration’s rationale for its imminent deployment of the National Guard to Portland.
Continue reading “‘That’s Enough To Call Up The National Guard?’ Trump-Appointed Judge Skeptical Of Portland Occupation”DHS Includes White Supremacist Meme in Video Promoting Deportation Blitz
A video posted on X by the Department of Homeland Security included a brief flash of a character who has become associated with violent racist and neo-Nazi content online.
The clip, which was published on Thursday evening, features text that says “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED” and “the future is bright” alongside a quick succession of vintage shots of activities, President Trump as a younger man, and famous movies including “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Predator,” and “The Breakfast Club.” About 15 seconds into the montage, “Mac Tonight” makes an appearance.
“Mac Tonight,” also known as the “Moon Man,” was used in a McDonald’s marketing and commercial campaign in the 1980’s. The character’s most prominent feature is a crescent moon-shaped head and sunglasses. A 1987 article in the Pensacola News Journal described him as a “cool guy with a lounge-lizard voice and shades worn even at night.” The campaign, which included animatronics, was meant to promote evening dining at the fast food chain. It was discontinued due, in part, to legal drama.
More recently, the “Mac Tonight” character became popular with far-right activists and neo-Nazis online. In 2019, the Anti Defamation League added “Mac Tonight” to its database of “hate symbols” that the organization said are among the “most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as well as some other types of hate groups. In its entry on the character, the ADL said that internet users began to display it alongside “violent or racist rap songs” in the 2000s and that, by 2015, it was firmly “associated with alt right language and imagery, including explicit white supremacist imagery.”
The Trump administration and its allies have both taken issue with the ADL in recent weeks because the group tracked racist and extremist statements associated with the late activist Charlie Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA. After he was shot and killed last month, Kirk has become a martyr in MAGA circles and, on Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel dramatically cut ties with the ADL, a Jewish organization that had provided the bureau with research and data on hate groups for decades.
However, the researchers at the ADL are not the only ones who have documented the notable association between “Mac Tonight,” violently racist memes, and neo-Nazis. Earlier this year, a group of academics in Florida published an article that documented the “Moon Man” on 99 “white power music album covers.” They reported the figure often appeared “along with depictions of firearms, Nazi symbolism, and pro-Confederate images as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Black imagery and examples of political violence.” Know Your Meme also has an entry on the McDonald’s mascot noting it is frequently used in “racist parodies of various rap songs” and “often depicted as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who advocates using violence against non-white minorities.” Within hours of the video being posted by DHS, the “Eyes on the Right” account on Bluesky pointed out the “Mac Tonight” cameo.
Since Trump took office earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security’s social media output has attracted notice by mocking the targets of his mass deportation drive and publishing what CNN described as imagery that is “alarmingly nationalist — and fraught with appeals to a specifically White and Christian national identity.” The memes and racially charged content come as DHS is conducting a “Defend The Homeland” drive to recruit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to participate in raids. While the Trump administration — including in the “Mac Tonight” video — has said its deportation push is focused on criminals, non-criminals and even U.S. citizens have been caught up in the crosshairs. On Tuesday, ICE agents made headlines with a nighttime raid where they busted down doors in a Chicago apartment building detained multiple citizens for hours and removed residents, including children, some of whom were reportedly naked, from their homes.
TPM reached out to DHS to ask why “Mac Tonight” was included in the video, how it related to the idea of “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED,” and whether the agency was aware of the symbol’s racist associations. We received a response from an unnamed DHS spokesperson who said, “Loving hot, tasty, McDonald’s does not make you a Nazi.”
They also included the following variation on a popular meme implying that, despite the well-documented usage of “Mac Tonight” by white supremacists, it is conspiratorial to associate the fast food restaurant campaign with racism:
In some settings the Moon Man can indeed be innocuous. The ADL’s writeup of “Mac Tonight” noted that “because of the Moon Man’s mundane and non-racist origins … care must be taken to judge a Moon Man image only in context.” However, far right meme culture often exploits these grey areas. Neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes has discussed how “irony is so important for giving a lot of cover” to extremist views.
Having some degree of plausible deniability is one reason memes and cartoon imagery have gained traction in white supremacist circles. And now, some of those same memes and images are popular on the Trump administration’s social media.
Come See Our First Live Podcast in New York City
We’ve done two live editions of our podcast (The Josh Marshall Podcast Featuring Kate Riga) so far this year, one in DC in January and then a second in Chicago in May. And now we’re bringing the show to New York City on Nov. 6. If you’d like to see Kate and me live in person for the recording of the podcast, along with a Q&A and open bar happy hour to follow (get me drunk, I’m more fun), you can buy tickets now. Just click here.
If you’re not in New York we’re planning to come to the West Coast soon and … well, even other parts of the country that aren’t DC, Chicago, New York or Seattle. Also, don’t @ me. I’m from St Louis.
We can’t wait to see you. Get your tickets here.
Listen To This: Let The Shutdown Begin
Kate and Josh take stock on day one of the government shutdown.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Let The Shutdown Begin”Day by Day, Trump Brings DOJ More Fully Under His Thumb
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Purges: DOJ Edition
The hits just keep coming at the Justice Department, including the FBI:
- The firing of a second prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia has come to light. In addition to Michael Ben’Ary, career prosecutor Maya Song was terminated since Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan became the new U.S. attorney. Song has been the top deputy to previous U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, who was forced out by President Trump. Song had agreed to a demotion to a line prosecutor role, but was subsequently terminated anyway.
- Amid speculation that the firing were related to internal resistance within the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the WaPo notes a common thread connecting Ben’Ary and Song: They has worked as senior advisers to then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco during the Biden administration. Monaco, as the No. 2 at DOJ, oversaw the prosecutions of Trump, who last week demanded that Microsoft fire her as its president of global affairs.
- FBI Director Kash Patel fired a new agent trainee at Quantico for having displayed a gay pride flag on his desk last year during a previous assignment as a FBI support staffer — before Trump became president. Patel called it “an inappropriate display of political signage in your work area,” in the email firing the trainee and ending his FBI career.
Patel Shuts Down FBI’s Anti-Extremism Project With ADL
In a bombastic social media post, Patel this week ended a training and intelligence-sharing partnership with the Anti-Defamation League. In the process, he smeared the ADL and former FBI Director James Comey, claiming “James Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them – a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans,” Patel posted. “That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”
Unpacking the Threat of Trump’s Domestic Terrorism Memo
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck explains how President Trump’s executive action on domestic terrorism is both a stunt and a threat to constitutionally protected speech and political activity: “That’s why it’s so important for the groups the government targets … to fight back—and to not simply quietly acquiesce and cease engaging in constitutionally protected activity out of fear that they’ll be punished for doing so. And that’s why it’s so important to understand just how little [it] actually does to change the potential legal consequences those groups face.”
Clarification: The Trump executive action came via a presidential memo, not an executive order, as I originally wrote.
A Warning From Chris Murphy
In a podcast interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) warns that we are fast approaching the point where the space for meaningful political opposition to President Trump is constrained by authoritarian restrictions:
My belief has never been that he’s going to cancel the election in 2026 or 2028—he’s not going to do that. Turkey still has elections, Hungary still has elections, Russia still has elections. The leaders in those countries just constrain that space the opposition can operate in, such that they never have enough room to win a national election. If we are not already there, we are really, really close. Which is why the only way out of that is to make them pay a political price every time they ratchet up pressure on the opposition.
Mass Deportations Civil Rights Violations Watch
- Evidence produced at a trial that ended this week showed that a transnational crime unit at DHS secretly targeted campus protesters, including Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was swept off a city street outside her Massachusetts home in March, an incident captured on video. The bench trial in front of U.S. District Judge William Young, which ended with his memorable ruling against the government, also revealed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller spoke with senior officials at the State Department and DHS more than a dozen times in March to discuss student visa revocations, the WaPo reports.
- Under intense pressure from the Trump administration, Apple has removed ICE tracking apps from its app store, including ICEBlock.
- Chris Hayes went deep on “Kavanaugh stops” last night:
Will Universities Hang Together or Hang Separately?
The nine universities offered President Trump’s unlawful “compact” to secure federal funding in return for Trump-friendly policies are being closely watched ahead of the Oct. 20 deadline to accept it to see how they respond. In a bad sign, the chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents hailed the offer as an “honor.”
The rest of the nine schools are:
- Brown
- Dartmouth
- MIT
- Penn
- UVa
- Vanderbilt
- Arizona
- USC
Quote of the Day
“This is extortion, plain and simple.”–Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, on President Trump’s proposed “compact” with universities
NIH Whistleblower Fired
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was put on administrative leave in March along with two other institute directors. Marrazzo filed a whistleblower complaint three weeks before the date of her termination letter, and her lawyer is arguing the firing was retaliatory. The other two directors have since been terminated, too.
Trump Notifies Congress of ‘War’ With Drug Cartels
The Trump administration has notified Congress that the United States is in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels, adding what the NYT called “new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale” for attacks on drug-smuggling boats on the high seas.
The legal rationale remained thin in a classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing this week by Pentagon general counsel Earl Matthews, the WSJ reports (emphasis mine):
Matthews repeatedly referred to Trump’s designation of some Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which he said granted the Defense Department unilateral authority to use military force against them, some of the people said. Matthews refused to provide a written justification for the strikes, which legal experts say is necessary for transparency and accountability.
Choice Detail on the Eisenhower Sword Fiasco
It’s still not totally clear if Todd Arrington’s refusal to break the law and hand over an Eisenhower sword for President Trump to give to King Charles was the main or even contributing factor in his firing as the director of the Eisenhower presidential library. But the way the request for the sword came to him is an eyebrow-raiser by itself:
The request for a gift for King Charles came from a State Department liaison who used the email address “giftgirl2025” and initially told the museum that they were looking for “like a sword or something,” according to a person familiar with the discussions.
I want to know more about “giftgirl2025.” My Signal information is below.
Hyper-Masculinity in the Age of Trump
NYT: “Pete Hegseth’s advocacy for service members accused of war crimes, and Trump’s pardons of them, have helped usher in an era of military aggression and disregard for the rule of law.”
Woman Named Archbishop of Canterbury for First Time
Sarah Mullally is the first woman to be named archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church worldwide.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
White House Uses Shutdown to Carry Out Trump’s Retribution Agenda
The government is shut down and the Trump administration has begun its retribution campaign against Democrats. President Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought are engaging in a blatant attempt to squeeze Democrats into helping pass a continuing resolution to reopen the government, instead of engaging with their requests to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and restore Medicaid coverage.
Follow along with our coverage here:
In Shutdown Spin, Republicans Are Pretending They Care About Mothers on WIC Now
House Republican leadership held a pretty maddening press conference Thursday morning trying to place the blame for the shutdown on Democrats.
Their spin du jour involved accusing Democrats of taking the government hostage, trying to appease the “radical left” corners of their party, and claiming that Democrats are attempting to take money from rural hospitals to give “illegal aliens” free health care. The line about Dems wanting to give undocumented immigrants free health care is spun out of Democrats’ requests to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that will expire in December and restore Medicaid coverage that was drastically cut when Republicans passed their sweeping “big, beautiful” bill this summer. And it’s simply not true.
But the most galling part of the presser was Republicans’ newfound fixation on mothers who rely on federal nutrient assistance programs like WIC to feed their children — the types of social safety net services and programs that Democrats champion and that Republicans have been hellbent on gutting for decades.
In a call with House Republicans on Wednesday, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought warned that money for WIC was about to run out due to the shutdown. The talking point clearly resonated with members of the Republican conference. At today’s press briefing, Republican leadership brought up the nutrition program for low-income moms and babies to further demonize Democrats, whose votes they need to reopen the government.
“So, I ask Democrats, are you okay with this? Are you okay with mothers unable to get milk for their children? Answer that questions, Democrats,” Chairwoman of the House Republican Conference Lisa McClain (R-MI) said. “Because with your ‘no’ vote, you are voting for mothers on WIC not to be able to feed their children.”
It’s all bluster and lies.
The original House Republican budget proposal for what would become the “big, beautiful” bill included cuts to WIC which would’ve resulted in $1.3 billion in fruit and vegetable benefits being taken from some 5.2 million women and children who participate in the program, according to an early estimate from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. While WIC was ultimately not cut in the final Senate version of Trump’s budget bill, some of the cuts to nutrition assistance and health care programs included in the legislation have made it “harder for families to access essential programs like WIC,” according to the National WIC Association, which put out a statement condemning the legislation when it passed the Senate in July.
“While WIC is not directly cut in this package, the program does not operate in a vacuum. Adjunctive eligibility for WIC is tied to participation in Medicaid and SNAP,” Georgia Machell, President and CEO of the National WIC Association said at the time. “Any policies that restrict access to those programs will, in turn, create additional barriers to WIC enrollment.”
— Nicole Lafond
Americans Blame Trump for Shutdown
The Washington Post conducted a poll on Wednesday, texting a 1,010 “nationally representative” pool of Americans to ask for their feedback on the shutdown:
The Post’s poll finds significantly more Americans blame President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats, though many say they are not sure. People express moderate concern about the shutdown’s impact at this early stage, with “somewhat concerned” the most common answer. A large majority support Democrats’ call to extend federal health insurance subsidies in general, though just under half support the party demanding this if it extends the government shutdown.
— Nicole Lafond
Movement on the National Guard Front
A few things happened Thursday in the various challenges to the National Guard occupations:
- The Trump administration used the shutdown to try to freeze D.C.’s case against the occupation. D.C. contested it, writing: “Courts in this Circuit have routinely denied the government’s requests to stay time-sensitive proceedings during prior lapses in appropriations.” Judge Jia Cobb denied the request late Thursday afternoon.
- The judge overseeing the challenge to the occupation in Portland, who is an Obama appointee, recused himself from the case at the Trump administration’s behest. Judge Michael Simon wrote that while he “does not believe that recusal is required under either federal law or the Code of Conduct for United States Judges,” focus must remain on the questions presented by the case. The administration had pointed to the comments of Simon’s wife, a Democratic representative whose seat includes parts of Portland, opposing the deployment. The case, as Trump’s luck will have it, was then randomly reassigned to a judge he appointed.
— Kate Riga
In Case You Missed It
New from Layla A. Jones: The Government Shutdown Is Helping Trump Obscure Federal Economic Data
Josh Marshall: Being Ready to Lose Well, Perseverance and How Not to Be Lost
Catch up on our coverage of the shutdown here: White House Uses Shutdown to Carry Out Trump’s Retribution Agenda
Trump Admin Tries to Use Shutdown to Pause DC’s Case Against National Guard Occupation
ICYMI this morning: Trump’s NLRB Nominees Get Grilled While Board Faces Uncertain Future
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
What We Are Reading
Bari Weiss to Lead CBS News as Part of Major Paramount Skydance Shakeup: Sources
Karoline Leavitt Says It’s OK to Target Americans Repped by Democrats
Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told
Being Ready to Lose Well, Perseverance and How Not to Be Lost
On Monday I saw a bunch of people on Bluesky mentioning and praising this essay by Andrea Pitzer. It’s quite good. I recommend reading it. It’s about the recent podcast discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. And that conversation turns a lot on the much-derided column Klein wrote about Charlie Kirk and how “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
Regular readers know that I have a number of enduring disagreements with Klein. They’re actually more and less than disagreements. They’re more like dispositional disagreements. Pitzer says up front that a lot of people are dumping on Klein now and she’s not trying to do that or at least not add to that. (And I second that for what I write below.) What she sets out to do is explain why she thinks Klein is “lost” in the present moment (a point Klein actually agrees with) and, secondarily, why Coates, whether you agree with him specifically, is not. Again, it’s worth reading Pitzer in her own lucid words rather than just my synopsis. But I would summarize it thus: Pitzer says that Klein has something called “bright-kid syndrome,” by which she means the idea that a smart and hyper-educated young(ish) person like Klein can and should come up with a prescription or fix to the ills he sees in front of him. It’s not quite like the “one weird trick” of memeland. But it’s kind of like that, inasmuch as it rests on the assumption that the intractable and overwhelming can actually be solved if you think about it hard enough, if you have enough cleverness and ingenuity.
Continue reading “Being Ready to Lose Well, Perseverance and How Not to Be Lost”The Government Shutdown Is Helping Trump Obscure Federal Economic Data
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been forced to halt the publishing of its always-anticipated monthly jobs report because of the government shutdown, making room for President Donald Trump’s administration to obscure the true state of the economy nine months into his second term.
Continue reading “The Government Shutdown Is Helping Trump Obscure Federal Economic Data”Judge Denies Trump Admin’s Attempt To Pause DC National Guard Case Due To Shutdown
D.C. District Court Judge Jia Cobb on Thursday denied the Trump’s administration’s lobbying for a freeze of Washington D.C.’s attempt to eject a couple thousand National Guard from the district.
Continue reading “Judge Denies Trump Admin’s Attempt To Pause DC National Guard Case Due To Shutdown”