Yep, the Anti-Trump Wave Is Building

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Conventional wisdom holds that a midterm election only fully comes into focus after Labor Day. That’s when a critical slice of the electorate starts focusing on the election and the choices before them. More or less in line with that, we’ve had a spray of polls out in the last few days showing the congressional generic ballot shifting decisively in Democrats’ favor. Looking only at generic ballots fielded entirely in September by pollsters the New York Times rates as trusted we have D+7, D+9, D+9 and D+11. If that trend or average is representative, it shows Democrats opening a big lead on this measure where the earlier average had been in the 5-7 point range. As Ron Brownstein notes here, history also tells us that in the final weeks of a campaign, this generic ballot measure will bend toward the president’s approval number. That appears to be happening. One of those, from the Times itself, was released today (D+9) with an accompanying write-up which, simply because it’s the Times, will probably draw attention to this trend even though the Times poll is only one of several.

Polls and trends can of course be wrong. But these numbers are extremely bad for the GOP, and if anything in this ballpark is accurate Republicans will likely lose the Senate as well as the House. Indeed, the variability in possible outcomes may be even higher in the Senate since it’s not amenable to gerrymandering. Even the Times, usually eager to find possible downsides for Democrats, frames their poll with declarative statements like this: “Voters see Republicans broadly as more extreme, more elitist and more corrupt than Democrats, according to the poll. And while voters continue to have doubts about both parties, they aligned more with the Democratic Party on both cultural and economic matters than the Republican Party in the survey.”

Trump II Sends Democracy Worldwide Into a Tailspin

Posted on by David Kurtz

What the World Is Saying About Us

Sometimes it helps to hear what our friends are saying about us to get a better perspective on our faults, as painful as that may be.

So I want use today’s Morning Memo to highlight key excerpts from a devastatingly frank new report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

The tl;dr from the The Global State of Democracy 2026 is that the quality of democracy in the United States is at or near record lows (based on a dataset that covers 1975-2025) — and that decline is having seriously destabilizing effects on democracy around the world.

Here’s a fuller summation of the report, which is most focused on the spillover effects of the U.S. decline but includes a special case study on the United States under Trump II:

In 2025, the global challenges to democracy and the difficulty in stemming its erosion were both exemplified and compounded by political developments in the United States. There, President Donald Trump quickly amassed power in the executive branch and wielded it to further a narrow set of personal goals and pursue retaliation against perceived enemies. In that environment, which is marked by constricted space for both public expression and institutional checks on power, resistance is increasingly unsafe. The results have been far-reaching, undermining the rule of law domestically and internationally and testing long-standing alliances and multilateral cooperation.

The International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1995 and headquartered in Stockholm that focuses on developing and supporting democracy globally. Ironically, the United States withdrew as an observer member of the organization shortly after Trump took office last year, when the administration ended U.S. participation in more than 60 international organizations.

While the topics in the new report will be familiar to you, they are presented with the distance and tone of like-minded non-Americans, which makes for a bracing assessment of how far and fast civic life in America has declined.

Trump II Has Turbocharged the U.S. Decline

A significant proportion of the current instability can be traced to US President Donald Trump, whose administration has reshaped political culture in the USA, where power is now personalized and used to further narrow individual goals and pursue vendettas against those critical of the president or his policies. Comparing 2025 to 2020, the change in the quality of US democracy was entirely negative: the country experienced seven statistically significant declines across multiple measures of representative governance, civil liberties, and the rule of law. There were no corresponding advances.

Key Measures In the U.S. Are at or Near Record Lows

The USA experienced four factor-level declines, including in Free Political Parties, Effective Parliament, Access to Justice, and Judicial Independence. It also saw declines in the subfactors of Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, and Economic Equality. Except for Free Political Parties, US scores on these measures are at their lowest levels since 1975.

The USA saw seven statistically significant declines from 2020 to 2025—in Access to Justice, Economic Equality, Effective Parliament, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, Free Political Parties, and Judicial Independence—and it saw no corresponding advances beyond Basic Welfare, which is not included because the improvements were due solely to recovery from the pandemic. With the exception of Free Political Parties, these factors are now at their lowest-ever levels in the history of the GSoD dataset

The Trump II Decline Has Historical Roots

The USA is experiencing a period of marked democratic decline. While this has manifested most spectacularly during the second Trump administration, the roots of these declines reach far deeper and stem from unresolved conflicts over questions of equality, social hierarchies, and economic distribution.

While many of the USA’s problems long predate the Trump administration, this approach to government has both caused new crises and brought new life to challenges many thought to have been consigned to the ash heap of history.

The GOP Congress Drags Down the U.S. Democracy Score

The failure of Congress, controlled by a Republican Party subservient to the president to a historically anomalous degree, to assert its power and constitutional authority in the face of White House actions has led to the USA’s lowest Effective Parliament score in the history of the GSoD Indices

The U.S. Decline Is Destabilizing Democracy Globally

[T]he USA’s unique geopolitical and economic place in the world means that its ongoing crisis has had, and will continue to have, severe consequences far beyond the country’s borders.

[T]he United States has become the most prominent example and accelerator of the disturbing trend toward a belittled and diminished Rule of Law. Indeed, the negative trajectory of democracy in the United States across the board stands out as a serious concern in the global story covered in our report.

The Trump administration’s actions have not stopped at the borders of the USA. Since 2025, the US Government’s threats and actions against other countries have undermined national sovereignty as well as international law and risked provoking more widespread violent conflict … The ramifications of these actions for the future legitimacy of the democratic model are multifold, far-reaching, and difficult to overstate. 

Just as the rule of law is eroding domestically in the USA, its actions abroad undermine the principle of the peaceful settlement of disputes and the multilateral institutions that uphold the international rule of law. This weakens democratic governance globally by diminishing people’s ability to exercise meaningful control over their political futures: national outcomes risk being shaped less by popular will than by external coercive pressure.

The new report reflects the growing sense of alarm in Canada, Europe, and among erstwhile U.S. allies everywhere. In the span of 22 month since the 2024 election, it’s gone from “Are you gonna be okay?” to “Are you okay?” to “You’re not okay.”

SCOTUS Nixes Trump’s Insane USPS Plan

In a crucial decision, the Supreme Court on an emergency basis blocked President Trump’s plan to use the Postal Service to throttle mail-in ballots and unleash chaos in the midterms. Most importantly, a majority of the Roberts Court signaled its view that the administration will likely eventually lose on the merits, meaning that even if it continues to litigate the changes to USPS rules after the midterms, it’s unlikely to prevail.

Ooops …

A whistleblower claims that DHS agent may have broken state laws in their election year hunt for elusive voter fraud by noncitizens.

TPM Exclusive

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: FBI Builds Out National NSPM-7 Center to Track Dissent, FOIA’ed Documents Show

Mass Deportation Watch

  • AP: Detainees at the now-closed “Alligator Alcatraz” were held for up to two hours in small metal cages described as “calming areas,” a practice that “does not meet standards for humane treatment,” according to a new report by the DHS inspector general.
  • NYT: “Immigrants seeking documents from the government to prove that they are in the country legally are being rebuffed or provided paperwork that is heavily redacted.”

Quote of the Day

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman, on the mother-of-all retributive “investigate the investigator” cases being pursued at President Trump’s behest, in south Florida:

“Grand Conspiracy” is not a concept in federal law. There is no statute, no charge, nothing in the United States Code by that name. It is not a legal theory at all. It is a MAGA wet dream, a holy grail cherished by the most fevered corner of Trumpworld, with no possible purchase in an actual courtroom.

Public Service Journalism …

404 Media: Hundreds of human contractors are reading a massive stream of ChatGPT prompts from actual users — which includes their sensitive, personal information — to improve OpenAI’s models, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

The New Frontier in Warfare

The United States for the first time confirmed that it has deployed military weaponry in space. The news came in an Air Force press release quoting Secretary Troy Meink: “[T]he United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.”

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

TPM Live: Chris Mathias on the Charlottesville Marcher Poised to Take Office in Florida

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

ICYMI, TPM’s new reporter Chris Mathias just published a new investigation revealing that the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Chris joined TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube live this afternoon to talk about his piece, the modern GOP’s “never punch right attitude,” and “the screaming emergency” of having Charlottesville marchers take elected office.

Today is also Chris’ first official day on staff! So please follow him on Bluesky and X and welcome him to the TPM community.

Two Votes for Midterm Chaos on the Supreme Court

Posted on by John Light

One Crisis Averted

Kate Riga has the details here, but a moment we’ve long been anticipating arrived last night: The Supreme Court ruled on Trump’s mail-in voting executive order. It blocked it, at least for now. That likely settles it — at least for this election. “The ruling is a titanic one before the midterms,” Kate writes, “and a major loss for the Trump administration as it seeks to influence the election by attacking absentee voting.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested he might support the dramatic scheme the Postal Service had cooked up to comply with Trump’s executive order — but not so close to the midterms. “There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority,” he wrote. But “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

There were two justices who wanted the rule to go forward: Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas. In a dissent authored by Alito and joined by Thomas, they argued that the Postal Service had the authority to promulgate and implement the rule, and that that was the end of the story.

It’s hard to overstate the dramatic nature of what the Postal Service was up to; it prompted alarm from election workers and whistleblowers within the USPS itself. The new system featured multiple ways in which not just a single mail ballot but whole reams of ballots could be rejected based on, simply, an error on one. Setting that aside, it created a scenario in which, election experts calculated, ballots would take weeks or even years to be processed. It raises questions about “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” lawyers for the Postal Service whistleblower wrote.

Election law scholar Rick Hasen noted that Alito’s dissent made no mention of what the rule would do to the midterms. “The voters make no appearance whatsoever in Justice Alito’s reasoning,” Hasen wrote. “He, like the government, does not dispute that using the rule in 2026 would disenfranchise millions of our most vulnerable people. He doesn’t care. It’s despicable and antidemocratic.””

Whistleblower Details DHS’ ‘Voter Fraud’ Push

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is seen speaking through the viewfinder of a camera during a press conference at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) NY field office on September 01, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

As part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (so far, it seems, not very successful) effort to scrounge up some instances of voter fraud that the administration can tout ahead of the midterms, officers have been scouring states’ voter rolls, and plugging individual voters’ names and other information into states’ public-facing voter websites, which are meant to be used by the voter themselves to check their registration.

As part of this push, a whistleblower alleges, agents may be breaking the law.

  • According to the whistleblower, officers received little training — just an instructional video, some links to states’ voter registration websites, and a power point presentation.
  • With that preparation, they are expected to comb through “the personal information of tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout all 50 states, including US citizens,” according to lawyers for the whistleblower. “Officers are supposed to review and determine if the information belongs to an ‘unlawful voter’ and were given a quota of at least five subjects to be reviewed per hour.”
  • In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) demanded answers to a list of questions, including one noting that the slipshod investigation, as described, could lead to baseless criminal investigations. “It equates to approximately 12 minutes per subject – a completely inadequate timeline for investigating and reconciling multiple Alien Registration Numbers mistakenly or inadvertently issued to an individual, increasing the likelihood of error,” the senators wrote. “Individual cases identified by this initiative can then be taken up by HSI for further action, including criminal investigations.”
  • The whistleblower also expressed concern that by effectively posing as a voter to plug identifying info into these state websites, officers were breaking the law. Training materials asserted that officers were “not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented,” suggesting DHS was, in fact, aware of that issue.
Continue reading “Two Votes for Midterm Chaos on the Supreme Court” →

Exclusive: FBI Builds Out National NSPM-7 Center to Track Dissent, Docs Show

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

The FBI has tapped employees from across federal law enforcement to crack down on dissent, including agents and analysts with the Internal Revenue Service, documents shared with TPM show.

Continue reading “Exclusive: FBI Builds Out National NSPM-7 Center to Track Dissent, Docs Show” →

Foreign Companies Have Netted Millions in Tariff Refunds. Taxpayers Foot Part of the Bill

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

International companies are getting tariff refunds — with added, taxpayer-funded interest. People in America who have paid higher prices as a result of President Donald Trump’s relentless tariff maneuvering are stuck footing the bill.

Continue reading “Foreign Companies Have Netted Millions in Tariff Refunds. Taxpayers Foot Part of the Bill” →

Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Effort to Break Vote-By-Mail Before Midterms

Posted on by Kate Riga

The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to take unprecedented control over federal elections Monday, a massive development ahead of the midterms. 

Continue reading “Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Effort to Break Vote-By-Mail Before Midterms” →

SCOTUS Shuts Down Trump Mail Takeover Plan

Posted on by Josh Marshall

In a brief order, the Supreme Court appears to have shut down the Trump White House’s plan to take over and drastically complicate voting by mail for the November midterms. Only the two most corrupt Justices, Alito and Thomas, dissented from the opinion. Kavanaugh meanwhile noted that a major part of his reasoning wasn’t so much the merits but how little time there is before the midterms and the difficulty of implementing any changes so quickly.

For the sake of clarity, this is not a final ruling but rather the Court declining to allow the plan to move forward while the case itself is being decided. Effectively, however, that would appear to settle the matter for the November midterm.

Just my own take on this: I suspect there might be a majority or at least more than two votes to okay a plan like this. The Court is simply that corrupt and heedless of the constitution. But this implementation was likely to create massive election chaos, delays, perhaps even the impossibility of holding an election in states which vote entirely by mail. I suspect the Justices did not want to own that outcome.

Our reporter Kate Riga has the whole story here.

Trump Doubles Down on His Midterms Bribe

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

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‘The $5,000 Is Gonna Happen. 100%’

President Trump’s Republican allies in Congress and his own vice president have been spent the past week attempting to sane-wash President Trump’s midterms election bribe.

Shortly after Trump announced that he would give $5,000 checks to every American adult if enough people vote Republican in the midterms to help the party keep the House and the Senate, Vice President JD Vance went on Fox News to place some (relatively) down-to-earth guardrails on the proposal. Vance suggested that the money would come from new tariff revenue and the administration would place income barriers on who can receive it — meaning only working- and middle-class Americans would be the recipients of the political bribe. Experts have pointed out that the $1.25 trillion it would cost to give $5,000 checks to every adult American through tariff refunds is more or less the equivalent of the revenue that the new tariffs are projected to bring in over the next decade.

“What the president is talking about is ultimately a dividend for American workers. We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies but also foreign countries who have been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” Vance said, doing clean-up just moments after Trump made the remarks at the faux Republican National Convention last week in Dallas. “What the president’s just saying is, if you keep it going to the American people, if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating in the United States of America.”

Some Republicans in Congress like Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) are really taking Trump’s promise and running with it. Other Republicans in Congress were reportedly caught off guard by Trump’s cash pledge, specifically because he tied the payout to the election results. It’s not as if Trump has not promised checks to Americans before. During the height of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage through the federal government, Trump and Musk promised they’d cut checks to Americans once all the awesome, epic slashing was over. That not happen, and DOGE end up cutting more than $110 billion in federal spending — a far cry from $2 trillion in cuts Musk promised.

Nevertheless, Trump doubled down while speaking to reporters in Ireland on Monday.

“The $5,000 is gonna happen. 100%. And the reason is because our country has taken in trillions and trillions of dollars,” he said. “And it’s gonna happen. And the people deserve it, they’ve been treated so badly by the Democrats and by Biden.”

— Nicole LaFond

Dem Has Questions About Russian Oligarch Paying for Don Jr. Wedding

The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee is sounding the alarm about the new report in ProPublica you may have seen today, that found that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev funded a portion of Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in May. Kremlev has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

AI Frontier Labs and the Loving Hand of Product Liability

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As you’ve likely seen, a strange and perhaps positive chain of events unfolded over the weekend in the world of AI and what we might call human extinction discourse. Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, posted an essay calling for a global slow-down in AI development to allow more time to prioritize safety and what the industry calls “alignment” and pledging that Anthropic would take a series of steps in that direction unilaterally. Somewhat surprisingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and archvillain Elon Musk stepped forward and said they agreed and appeared to agree to join Anthropic in the proposed slowdown.

Regardless of what one thinks of AI and its possible dangers — existential or otherwise — it’s hard not to see this as at least a somewhat good development. And I say that with full cognizance of the various arguments about financial overextension or heading off sterner regulation that may make these moves self-interested. (AI critic Gary Marcus gives it a qualified endorsement along with a good cross-section of responses.) But I wanted to step back for a moment and talk more generally about the question of “externalities” which has always been the problem lurking in the background of Big Tech’s road to national and global domination.