From a federal employee. TPM Reader XX1, initials anonymized and portion of letter which notes government agency removed for obvious reasons …
I’m writing here to concur with your last couple blog posts on the shutdown. You put into prose accurately what I’ve been trying to get across to so many local political allies who overthink irrelevant minutia. They focus on the timing of the fight, on the details of the substance, etc. None of that matters, as has been apparent to me all along. This is, in fact, an arm-wrestling match, purely a battle over power. The Democrats’ goal should be to extract a material concession that resonates to the broad masses as a “public good,” and they are doing that with ACA subsidies. Successfully extracting a concession is a material victory that slightly restores just a little bit of balance of power, and blocks Trump’s effort at totalitarian control.
President Trump and Defense (sorry, War) Secretary Pete Hegseth each gave speeches before hundreds of unamused top U.S. military officials, who were dragged away from their work commanding the U.S. military and to Quantico, Virginia this week for, up until Tuesday, mysterious reasons.
Early this afternoon, multiple federal departments and agencies sent out an email to employees blaming the impending shutdown on the Democrats. I didn’t see one from every department and agency. (I saw with my own eyes the versions at Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice and the National Science Foundation. TPM’s Emine Yücel separately saw one from the Department of Commerce.) I saw enough to see that they were going out government-wide. They were all identical. So, unsurprisingly, they were produced at the White House or possibly the General Services Administration. It was a top-down decision. “Unfortunately,” it says, “Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the Senate due to unrelated policy demands.” The website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development currently has a pop-up message claiming that the “radical left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people …” This is hardly surprising. Legalities mean nothing to the Trump administration. So following the Hatch Act would almost be quaint.
Meanwhile, as you’ve likely seen, at the much-anticipated convocation of general officers at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Hegseth encouraged generals and admirals who don’t agree with Trump administration policy to resign. In his speech, President Trump announced that he wants to make American cities the “training ground” for the U.S. military.
We’ve had a lot of you asking if you can buy tickets for one night of our anniversary event in early November. We know a two-night commitment is a lot. So as of this morning, we’ve put those individual tickets on sale too. If you’re a member there’s an email in your inbox with a link to buy tickets for either Thursday (the big show, live podcast, etc) or the party Friday night. Or you can just click the links here. We can’t wait to see you.
The last 30 years or so have been a relative retreat from more than a century of jingoistic U.S. interference in Latin America, but it increasingly appears that the Trump administration is eager to resurrect the old U.S. playbook. If history is any guide, it’ll be a return to paternalistic interference in internal affairs, destabilizing existing regimes, and generally creating a political, economic, and social mess before washing its hands of it all and walking away … before repeating the cycle.
While the recent lawless U.S. attacks on alleged drug-running boats on the high seas have serious legal implications, I’m afraid it’s part of a larger more important story of trying to turn Venezuela into a villain country in which Trump (not unlike many American leaders before him) fancies himself as savior, local sheriff, and bad ’80s movie tough guy.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading a Trump administration push to turn Venezuela into a pariah state, including amping up military pressure to try to force out President Nicolás Maduro, the NYT reports:
The U.S. military has been planning potential military operations targeting drug trafficking suspects in Venezuela itself as a next phase, although the White House has not yet approved such a step, current and former officials say.
Those operations would be aimed at interfering with drug production and trafficking in Venezuela as well as tightening a vise around Mr. Maduro.
Two senior figures in the Venezuelan opposition movement claim there have already been talks with the Trump administration about a post-Maduro future.
A soldier stands on a Venezuelan army tank during a military exercise at a highway in Caracas on September 20, 2025. US President Donald Trump threatened Venezuela with “incalculable” consequences if it refuses to take back migrants it has “forced into the United States,” as tensions soar with Caracas after Venezuela accused the United States of waging an “undeclared war” in the Caribbean and called for a UN probe of American strikes that have killed over a dozen alleged drug traffickers on boats in recent weeks. (Photo by Pedro MATTEY / AFP) (Photo by PEDRO MATTEY/AFP via Getty Images)
Semantic games are already being played to tout the operation not as regime change but as a “counternarcotics operation.”
“The U.S. is engaged in a counterdrug-cartel operation, and any claim that we are coordinating with anyone on anything other than this targeted effort is completely false,” a State Department spokesperson told the NYT.
Not How the Chain of Command Is Supposed to Work
White House deputy chief Stephen Miller has taken a leading role in the directing the unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats off Venezuela, The Guardian reports.
The strikes have been orchestrated through the White House homeland security council. which Miller leads, according to the report.
Are Military Lawyers Being Sidelined?
Former Army JAG Dan Maurer, now a law professor, writes that the unprecedented U.S. attacks on alleged drug-running boats “raise serious questions about the availability and effectiveness of government lawyers throughout the chain of command who would have—or should have—raised red flags before this operation commenced.”
Trump Sending National Guard to Illinois Over Objections
A small contingent of 100 National Guard troops has been called up in Illinois by the federal government over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker (D).
How Fox News Used Old Portland Footage to Snooker Trump
The proximate catalyst for President Trump’s announcement that he was deploying National Guard troops to Portland appears to have been Fox News segments the day before that used B-roll footage of civil unrest there in the summer of 2020.
Good Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: DHS Had a Program to Stop Political Violence. Trump Largely Abandoned It.
DOJ Purge Totals Start To Add Up
At least a third of senior career leaders have left the Justice Department since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, at least 107 out of roughly 320 career leadership positions, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.
Trump DOJ Ratchets Up Project To Snag State Voter Rolls
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman takes a closer look at the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against eight states seeking to force them to cough up their voter rolls.
Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed: Still Gunning for Harvard
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the Trump attacks on higher education. I regret to inform you that the performative assaults, structural dismantling, and anticipatory obedience continue apace:
Harvard: The Department of Health and Human Services has informed Harvard University that it has initiated the process of “debarring” the school from receiving federal grants over the trumped up claims that it abetted anti-semitism on campus. “Debarment is the government’s formal way of blacklisting contractors,” the NYT notes.
“The White House is developing a plan that could change how universities are awarded research grants, giving a competitive advantage to schools that pledge to adhere to the values and policies of the Trump administration on admissions, hiring and other matters,” the WaPo reports.
Texas Tech: Faculty were informed Friday that they “must comply” with President Trump’s executive order recognizing only male and female genders
Painful to Read
WaPo: Children died while waiting for life-saving drugs due to Trump’s suspension of USAID foreign aid.
Trump Moves to Further Defang Inspectors General
Last week a federal judge in D.C. declined to reinstate the eight inspector generals fired by President Trump earlier this year even though she agreed the terminations were unlawful.
This week comes word that the Trump OMB is cutting off funding as of tomorrow for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, the umbrella organization for the government’s 72 inspectors general.
Judge Rips Into Kari Lake
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth temporarily blocked the layoffs of more than 500 employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, most of them from Voice of America, while warning that the Trump administration’s defiance of his orders could have been sanctionable.
Lamberth ultimately declined to pursue contempt against officials, but he ripped Kari Lake, a senior official at USAGM, writing that “her brazen disinterest in the unambiguous statutory obligations implicates her competence to implement the President’s directives in a manner consistent with fundamental tenets of administrative law.”
YouTube Kisses Trump’s Ring
YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle Donald Trump lawsuit against it for suspending his account after the 2021 coup attempt that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack.
Trump’s $22 million share of the settlement will go to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall for the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom at the White House, the WSJ reports.
Better or Worse Than You Expected?
As a thought experiment, Jonathan V. Last compares how bad he was expecting things to get back in November with how bad things have actually gotten in the first eight months of the Trump II presidency. His conclusion: We are in the worst-case scenario.
There’s now a flurry of statements from GOP congressional leadership essentially saying, Democrats need to do the right thing, act responsibly. The White House is claiming it’s about ACA for “illegals.” If anything this tends to confirm the folly of all these intricate and baroque arguments about how to win or argue or whatever else about a shutdown confrontation, whether you state explicit policy demands, or don’t state them or use subordinate clauses or the passive voice.
President Donald Trump, in his second term, has been notably fixated on his home city and its local governance. Early this year, he bought off mayor Eric Adams by making a criminal indictment hanging over his head disappear. Then, as Adams faced ghastly polling numbers and a trio of general election challengers — among them the charismatic Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani — members of Trump’s administration reportedly brainstormed various ways to induce Adams afresh, hoping to push him to drop his reelection bid and unify the anti-Mamdani vote around a single candidate. Adams did drop out on Sunday — without, at least as far as we know, cutting any deal with the Trump administration.
This is a brief update on the New York City mayoral election. There’s not a lot of good reason why this should be big news or a big story outside of the tristate area. But since politically obsessed people are pretty obsessed with it, I wanted to discuss a couple specific points about Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement that he’s leaving the race.
