A Major New Constitutional Clash Erupts in Oregon

Posted on October 6, 2025October 6, 2025 by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Administration Brazenly Defies Court Order

I went into the weekend anticipating that today’s Morning Memo would be focused on the Friday ruling by a federal judge in Tennessee that there is a “realistic likelihood” that the Trump Justice Department’s criminal prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is vindictive.

But over the weekend, the Trump administration’s attempt to deploy the National Guard in Oregon blew up into a constitutional clash as serious as any we’ve seen so far this year (including, ironically, the clash over Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation).

TPM’s Kate Riga was all over the details of the legal battle that played out over the weekend:

Friday afternoon: U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, voices extreme skepticism about whether the facts on the ground in peaceful Portland provide any reasonable basis for President Trump to deploy the Oregon National Guard.
Saturday afternoon: Judge Immergut issues a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump from deploying the Oregon National Guard. Over the next 24 hours, President Trump makes moves to deploy the California and Texas national guards to Oregon.
Sunday evening: Judge Immergut holds an emergency hearing in which she rakes the DOJ attorney over the coals and issues a second temporary restraining order blocking the deployment of any federalized national guard troops to Oregon.

For readers who were out of touch over the weekend, it’s a lot to catch up on. But I want to emphasize the significance of the administration’s brazen end-run around a Trump-appointed federal judge. As an irate Judge Immergut noted in Sunday’s hearing, the administration acted in “direct contravention” of her order. Given that nothing had changed on the ground, the legal reasoning for her initial order still applied, she said, and the administration was “simply circumventing” it.

Between Immergut issuing her two TROs, the administration filed an emergency appeal with the 9th Circuit, so this may play out pretty quickly this week, with the Supreme Court possibly getting a chance to weigh in.

Now on to the rest of the weekend news. There was a lot …

Abrego Garcia Wins Step 1 of Vindictive Prosecution Claim

In a remarkable ruling, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of Nashville has found a “realistic likelihood” that Kilmar Abego Garcia is the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump Justice Department. The ruling opens the door for Abrego Garcia to conduct discovery into the administration’s motives for prosecuting him on charges of human smuggling in a case that had been dormant since a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. The closed investigation was reopened after Abrego Garcia successfully challenged his wrongful deportation to El Salvador despite a immigration judge order that blocked his removal to his native country.

What’s especially striking about Judge Crenshaw’s ruling is that he is mostly willing to accept that the local U.S. Attorney’s Office itself did not act with malice or bad faith in bringing the case against Abrego Garcia, but he is unconvinced that higher-ups in the administration, most particularly Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, were acting in good faith.

Pointing to public statements Blanche has made about the case, Crenshaw wrote: “Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s remarkable statements could directly establish that the
motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

Barring appeals court intervention, the next step is for Abrego Garcia to conduct additional discovery into the DOJ’s motives and actions, setting up the potential for unusually revealing insights into how the White House and Main Justice under Trump are using DOJ as a political weapon.

Judge Crenshaw indicated he is going to keep the discovery inquires narrow, so this isn’t going to be a wide-ranging fishing expedition, but it’s nonetheless a remarkable turn of events. Still, I would caution that finding solid evidence of vindictive prosecution is difficult, and the legal standard that Abrego Garcia must meet remains very high. This is just a first step, but a federal judge accepting the premise that there’s plausible evidence of a vindictive prosecution in this case is a major development.

FBI Agent Suspended for Refusing to Perp Walk Comey

A FBI agent has been suspended (some reports say fired) for refusing to subject former FBI Director Jim Comey to the public spectacle of a perp walk. Comey, who was indicted on President Trump’s order, was issued a summons to appear in court, not an arrest warrant, so it wasn’t immediately clear how the FBI would expose Comey to public ridicule. But CBS News reported that an effort was still underway to do so:

The source told CBS News that leadership asked for “large, beefy” agents to conduct an arrest of Comey “in full kit,” including Kevlar vests and exterior wear emblazoned with the FBI logo. It was suggested that a supervisory special agent in the violent crimes division of the FBI’s Washington Field Office would be able to put together the kinds of agents who fit the bill, the source said.

The agent, however, refused to participate in this plan, believing it would be inappropriate and highly unusual for a white-collar defendant like Comey, according to the source. He was then suspended for insubordination.

Reacting to the news on X, FBI Director Kash Patel dismissed MSNBC as an “ass clown factory” but also seemed to confirm at least the suspension of an agent: “In this @fbi, follow the chain of command or get relieved.”

Fired DOJ Prosecutor Rallies Former Colleagues

In a farewell letter to colleagues that was taped to his office door, fired federal prosecutor Michael Ben’Ary warned that “the leadership is more concerned with punishing the President’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security.”

Ben’Ary, a top national security prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, was abruptly fired last week without cause for reasons that remain unknown.

While urging his colleagues “to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons,” Ben’Ary wrote:

I took an oath to our Constitution, as did each of you, and it remains your responsibility to uphold that oath in the work that you do. It is this oath that requires you to follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, free from fear or favor, and unhindered by political interference. In recent months, the political leadership of the Department have violated these principles, jeopardizing our national security and making American citizens less safe.

Boasberg Admonishes Prosecutors for Attacking Magistrate

In another of a string of remarkable court setbacks for the Trump administration, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg admonished hot-headed federal prosecutors for their intemperate language in challenging a decision by a magistrate judge Zia M. Faruqui in D.C. not to accept an indictment from a D.C. Superior Court grand jury.

Federal prosecutors used the unusual end-run after a district court grand jury declined to indict in an assault and weapons case. Faruqui was blunt last week about how appalled he was by the Trump DOJ maneuver and has asked for additional briefing from both sides about whether it was lawful to bring an indictment in Superior Court into federal district court.

Prosecutors filed an emergency request with Boasberg asking him to slap down Faruqui for his “inflammatory misstatements of law and improper conduct” remarks and issue a corrective to the foreman of the Superior Court grand jury who heard the magistrate’s remarks in court. “Judge Faruqui’s bloviate first and consider the law later approach is just the latest example of his demonstrated prejudice against the U.S. Attorney and the Trump administration,” the prosecutors said in unusually pointed language.

For his part, Boasberg immediately convened the hearing Friday afternoon on prosecutors’ motion and declined to rule on it until the briefing the magistrate had ordered was complete. But in doing so, Boasberg was stern with Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan R. Hornok, the relatively new chief of the criminal division in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office (the former criminal division chief was forced out by then-acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin for refusing to turn a MAGA political attack on EPA funding into a criminal case):

“It would be in everyone’s interest to turn the temperature down,” Boasberg said in court, with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro looking on from the front row of the courtroom gallery, the WaPo reported. Boasberg went on to say: “There were plenty of cases where judges ruled against me. … But I never would have filed a pleading accusing a judge of bloviating, as you have done in yours.”

Craziest Story of the Weekend

As much as there was going on from Friday through Sunday, the pièce de résistance of Trump era absurdity was a Star-Tribune story about a White House aide who was in Minnesota last week for his uncle’s funeral cavalierly using Signal to talk with other administration officials about deploying active duty military (including the 82nd Airborne!) to Portland to put down the wildly overblown threat of protestors.

Stephen Miller deputy Anthony Salisbury’s Signal use was so careless that an unidentified bystander was able to photograph his phone and passed on images of the active chat to the Star-Tribune: “Over the course of several conversations, totaling dozens of messages, Salisbury chatted candidly, and at times profanely, about a wide range of matters with [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth’s adviser Patrick Weaver and other high-ranking federal officials.”

Great Question

Techdirt: DOJ Demands Removal Of ICEBlock App; Why Are The ‘Free Speech Warriors’ Suddenly So Quiet?

On Orders From Trump, U.S. Attacks 4th Alleged Drug Boat

A fourth lawless U.S. military strike on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean on Friday killed four people.

In Trump We Trust

U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach is trumpeting the possibility of a new commemorative coin with President Trump’s image on both sides, even though U.S. law prohibits living people from appearing on currency:

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Judge Hands Down Second, Emergency Ruling Protecting Portland From National Guard Occupation

Posted on October 5, 2025October 6, 2025 by Kate Riga

A federal judge handed down a ruling from the bench Sunday night to shield Portland from additional National Guard deployments, which she said was the move of an administration “circumventing” her earlier order.

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Trump-Appointed Judge In Portland Case: Admin ‘Risks Blurring The Line Between Civil and Military Federal Power’

Posted on October 5, 2025October 5, 2025 by Kate Riga

A federal, Trump-appointed judge granted Portland’s request for temporary protection from imminent National Guard occupation Saturday night.

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The FBI: It Beats Working for a Living

Posted on October 4, 2025October 4, 2025 by Josh Kovensky

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️

One feature of MAGA authoritarian planning is its ineptitude. Think back to January 6: yes, it was a coup attempt — the violent culmination of a multi-month campaign to reverse the election result. But, it was also oddly lackadaisical: it’s still unclear if there was one plan for what to do; Trump backed off after it became clear that the rioters were being dispersed.

That’s not to diminish the seriousness so much as it is to note that it’s a feature, not a bug. Dan Bongino, the FBI’s deputy director, is a case in point.

Bongino had spent years as a podcaster and conservative influencer before Trump nominated him to the FBI this year. It was a comparatively easy job, and one that came with substantial influence: he took over Rush Limbaugh’s spot after the talk radio host’s death, and was able to make money selling merch and hold an ownership stake in conservative video platform Rumble, via his company.

The problem is, Bongino, a former Secret Service agent, doesn’t like it.

“I gave up everything for this,” Bongino complained to Fox News earlier this year, adding that he has to show up for work at 7:30 a.m. ET.

“I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife. Not divorced, but I mean separated, divorced. And it’s hard. I mean, we love each other, and it’s hard to be apart,” he added.

It’s only gotten harder to be Dan. He reportedly mulled leaving the bureau in July, over the Epstein files (sure); eventually, Trump appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to help him co-run the FBI.

Since then, he’s been oddly diminished, even as the Trump administration has tried to muscle the FBI into an era of overt politicization not seen in decades. He complained about some reporting of the Charlie Kirk murder, and made a desultory remark about the assassin being influenced by left-wing ideologies, but really? It’s been low energy. Other parts of his pre-FBI empire continue to hum on.

A company now controlled by his wife, Bongino Inc., still sells merch. Gulf of America and Alligator Alcatraz tees go for $30 each.

— Josh Kovensky

Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:

The Trump White House’s has put forward many threats about how it claims it will punish Democrats and the Americans who vote for them.
North Carolina’s Democratic governor is being vocal about his interest in attempting to oppose state Republicans’ efforts to redraw some of North Carolina’s congressional maps to help their party keep the House in the midterms. This comes after Republicans in the state legislature were successful in stripping Gov. Josh Stein of some of his authority over elections before he even came into office.
The Trump administration has chosen to use the shutdown to obscure numbers that suggest the president’s policies are crippling the U.S. economy. But ending Bureau of Labor Statistics operations during a government shutdown isn’t necessarily unique to the second Trump administration.

The Trump Admin’s Many Shutdown Threats

We are only a few days into the government shutdown. And already the Trump White House and the Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought have been broadcasting their not-so-secret plan to ransack the federal government and make this shutdown as “painful” as possible for Democrats — and the people who vote for them.

President Donald Trump and Vought have been threatening mass, permanent layoffs in federal agencies — instead of the usual furloughs we would see during a government shutdown.

Additionally, the duo are using the shutdown as an excuse to cancel billions of dollars in federal funding for energy and infrastructure projects in blue states. Vought has also announced the administration put on hold $2.1 billion in federal funding for Chicago infrastructure projects and $18 billion for two major infrastructure projects in New York City since the shutdown began on Wednesday.

“The longer this goes on, the more pain will be inflicted,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters on day one of the shutdown.

Some of this is merely threatened; some is real. But all of it — as it has been explicitly articulated by the White House, President Trump, Vought and some congressional Republicans — is designed to punish Democrats for not voting with Republicans on the GOP CR and instead requesting some health care measures be restored and extended in exchange for their votes. Democrats are also pushing for measures to be put into place so that the Trump White House stops impounding congressionally approved funds. But, as evidenced by the deployment of National Guard troops to blue cities under the guise of a crackdown on crime and various executive orders threatening to pull federal funds from blue cities that have sanctuary policies in place, the shutdown is just an excuse to make good on those ongoing threats.

“If [Democrats] don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday, as if the President of the United States only serves the people who voted for him.

If you still have any questions around how purposeful all of this is … Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was on Fox News this week laying it all out.

“They’re doing it deliberately,” Lee said. “Russ Vought, The OMB Director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing this moment, since puberty.”

But not every Republican is as giddy about the retribution rollercoaster Vought and the White House is on.

“I worry a little bit that they could be counterproductive for us politically in the long run because other things are going to require 60 votes again,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told reporters on Wednesday when asked if he is worried about Vought’s threats.

— Emine Yücel

North Carolina Dem Gov Fights Trump’s Redistricting Pressure Campaign

Democratic North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein has called out Republican-led redistricting efforts in his state — which have come about as part of the Trump administration’s larger pressure campaign on Republican-controlled state legislatures, seeking to strongarm them into engaging in mid-cycle redistricting to help the party hold the U.S. House in the midterms.

As it stands now, North Carolina’s congressional map includes four seats represented by Democrats and ten by Republicans. A redrawn map could help Republicans win in the 1st Congressional District, which is currently held by Democratic Rep. Don Davis.

According to reporting from NC Newsline, Stein described the Republican campaign to redraw the North Carolina map as “ridiculous.”

“We just redistricted for the second time last cycle. So every two years is the theory that we’re gonna redistrict, so we can maximize the political advantage to stick it to one party and enhance another party?” he said, per NC Newsline. “We cannot get into this maximalist political power worldview because it will destroy this country.”

“We have to be able to recognize, sometimes you win an election, sometimes you lose an election. When you lose, you gather your forces, you work hard, you try to convince the voters the next time,” Stein added.

It’s not the first time, even in recent memory, that Republicans in North Carolina have attempted to mess with elections in the state for political reasons. Republicans in that same state legislature attempted to strip Stein of his authority before he even came into office.

In the final days of its veto-proof supermajority, the GOP-controlled state legislature implemented legislation last year that gave the then-newly elected Republican state auditor, Dave Boliek, power over the state’s five-member state election board. This is a responsibility that is historically given to the governor, and not the state auditor.

— Khaya Himmelman

The BLS Isn’t Publishing Data During the Shutdown

It’s startling that, amid a culture within the Trump administration of manipulating data even when the government is functioning, the shutdown has brought federal data collection and publishing to a halt. At the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, Friday’s crucial monthly jobs report was not published. The Trump administration has chosen to use the shutdown to obscure numbers that suggest his economic policies are crippling the U.S. economy. But ending BLS operations during a government shutdown isn’t necessarily unique to the second Trump administration and the jobs report pause is, perhaps, not as sinister as some of the other ways in which the Trump White House is weaponizing the shutdown.

In 2013, when Obama’s BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen was in charge, the bureau stopped functioning, but “left open the possibility of publishing certain data,” a Bloomberg report from the time said. Ultimately, though, the data was held up. Wells Fargo Senior Economist Michael Pugliese wrote in a recent analysis that the monthly jobs report and the inflation reports were delayed by about two weeks. “[D]ata quality for the period reflecting the shutdown was largely unaffected,” Pugliese wrote, but fewer prices were used to calculate the CPI immediately following the shutdown.

The 2019 shutdown was different. The Bureau under Trump BLS Commissioner William Beach was able to publish data because Congress had already funded the Department of Labor with one of 12 appropriations bills.

— Layla A. Jones

‘That’s Enough To Call Up The National Guard?’ Trump-Appointed Judge Skeptical Of Portland Occupation

Posted on October 3, 2025October 3, 2025 by Kate Riga

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.

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DHS Includes White Supremacist Meme in Video Promoting Deportation Blitz

Posted on October 3, 2025October 6, 2025 by Hunter Walker

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 future is bright. pic.twitter.com/fUS9Jvfl8G
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 2, 2025

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

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Josh Marshall

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

Posted on October 3, 2025October 3, 2025 by Jackie Wilhelm

Kate and Josh take stock on day one of the government shutdown.

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Day by Day, Trump Brings DOJ More Fully Under His Thumb

Posted on October 3, 2025October 3, 2025 by David Kurtz

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

Britain’s new Archbishop of Canterbury-designate, Sarah Mullally, poses for a photograph in The Corona Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral, south east England on October 3, 2025, following the announcement of her posting. Sarah Mullally was on Friday named the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the UK government announced, becoming the first woman to lead the Church of England in its history. Her nomination by a committee tasked with finding a successor to Justin Welby, who stepped down earlier this year over an abuse scandal, has been approved by King Charles III, the government said. (Photo by Ben STANSALL / AFP) (Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

Sarah Mullally is the first woman to be named archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church worldwide.

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In Shutdown Spin, Republicans Are Pretending They Care About Mothers on WIC Now

Posted on October 2, 2025October 2, 2025 by Nicole LaFond

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